Dominant Values in Japanese Culture
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While much is made of Japan's long historical tradition, including the customs and values of social hierarchies, Japan has neither escaped nor rejected the realities of modern technology and global communications media, which have exerted an impact in virtually every culture they have touched. The big picture of the consensus analysis about the influence of the West on Japan is that Japan has always made a practice of adapting to or taking up technological innovations that come from the West but that, even in the modern period and even in the wake of postwar redevelopment, it has resisted adapting its value system as well: "Throughout its history, Japan has shown a willingness to absorb and learn from technical ideas outside Japan, with a dogged rejection of any external ideology" (Young, Sadaaki, and Saba 11). That view appears to dominate the perceptions of Western business operators who experience the Japanese economy as resistant to competitive penetration on one hand, or who perceive that successful foreign-business entry into the Japanese marketplace involves careful scrutiny and understanding of what is widely reported to be Japan's distinctive value system. In that connection, Young, Sadaaki, and Saba comment that despite Japan's well-documented predisposition to learning, "Shintoism and the Emperor remain at the core of the Japanese private and public psyche. Buddhism, Christianity and Western culture gain attention, but at a distance. The core remains the same" (11)
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Godzilla, this Occidentalism does not simply imitate Anglo-American precursors but radically transforms the potentially humiliating experience of an imagined Japanese diaspora into the techno-utopian vision of an affirmative construction (Tatsumi 17).
Western pop-culture phenomena that have been taken up in Japan often undergo a reconfiguration that makes them more consistent with Japanese values. One example of this is English-style ballroom dancing, which has appeared in Japan as a fairly widespread leisure-time activity. Karatsu cites the perhaps unexpected cultural encounters implicit in the "Japanization" of English ballroom dancing, not least of which is the vigorous emotionalism of the dancing, linked with the British working class, vis-à-vis the asceticism of "passion-repressed" Japan. In Japan, ballroom dancing is perceived both positively and negatively--positively to the degree it is associated with the leisure classes at play, and negatively to the degree it is linked with the vulgar and emotionally demonstrative classes, and especially with the customary taboo against heterosexual physical contact in public (Karatsu 423). The attraction of ballroom dancing in Japan, and the content of its Japanization, is that its pr
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Japan West, Japan English, HRM Japanese, Nevertheless Japanese, Sugihara Katsurada, Furthermore Rice, Kelsky Verge, West Japan, Japan Japan, Japan Japan's, western influence, japanese culture, japanese women, popular culture, ballroom dancing, social structure, western culture, soutar grainger hedges, japanese values, contemporary japanese, soutar grainger, evidence japanese mothers, culture social praxis, business tendency japanese, western influence japanese,
Approximate Word count = 4320
Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page)
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