The purpose of this research is to examine issues surrounding Japanese and American consumers from the standpoint of human behavior and cultural differences. The plan of the research will be to set forth in general terms the background and context for considering differences in consumer behavior in the U.S. and Japan, and then to discuss how differences between the two cultures in general and consuming subcultures in particular influence buying and saving habits.
In order to understand consumer behavior, it is essential to appreciate that consumerism is at least in part a response to market behavior in general and the psychology of marketing in particular. Modern theories of marketing are grounded in appreciation of their connection to social, cultural, and political history and indeed in connection with evaluations of satisfactory social experience. This is in the background of the view that marketing is "a strategic ingredient" of the "entire industrial process" (Taylor and Shaw 4). Drawing on a variety of resources that have tracked American market behavior in the postwar era, Taylor and Shaw allude to the trade, production, and sociocultural implications of the marketing process in their definition of marketing as "the process of a society by which the demand structure or the desire for economic goods and services is anticipated or enlarged and satisfied through the conception, promotion, exchange, and physical distribution of such goods and services" (Taylor and Shaw 7). It is noteworthy that this definition encompasses not only the production of a good or service and its promotion to consumers, but also the channels of distribution that facilitate the ultimate consumption of the goods or services being marketed. Indeed, markets function optimally the more they can facilitate distribution paths from producer to consumer.
In the American free-market system, there is a presumption of the consumer's free agency. This means, for...