In his book You Gotta Have Wa, journalist Robert Whiting considers the differences between Japan and the United States in terms of how they play baseball, a game originating in the U.S., adopted by Japan, and today a highly popular entertainment in Japan. Americans may know that baseball has become popular in Japan, but most have little idea that the game is played differently there or that there are many American players who have found second careers by playing in Japan, all of which Whiting explains. Whiting develops his discussion against the background of the concept of wa, which is a Japanese reflection of social harmony, and the differences Whiting finds between Japan and the U.S. indicate different values placed on social harmony and different ideas about public, private, group, and individual. The contrasts are developed in the book as Whiting shows how American players who continue their careers in Japan experience a form of culture shock and either adapt or find themselves socially ostracized.
America and Japan differ in their views of public and private space. In the simplest terms, private space is the space identified with the home and with the sphere of the individual and the family, while public space is the sphere identified with the community, the culture, or the society at large. Every society makes some distinction between these two spheres, but the underlying meaning of this difference and the ways in which the difference is enforced differ from one society to another. The Japanese view of public and private spheres is bound with ideas about religion, historical developments, and attitudes toward the place of the individual in society. The Japanese view also contrasts sharply with that of the Anglo-American tradition, indicating a number of differences in the way the two types of society are constructed and the ways in which the individual relates to those societies.
In Japanese society, there are ...