hree underlying factors:
2) a commitment to lifetime employment; and
3) the Japanese sense of collective responsibility.
These factors are based on Confucian thought (Dollinger, 1988, 575-584).
The society as well is built on these conceptions of the long-term over the short, a sense of lifetime commitment, and a sense of collective responsibility. The social order is based on vertical groupings, and the vertical relation that results is the actuating principle in creating cohesion among group members:
Because of the overwhelming ascendancy of this vertical orientation, even a set of individuals sharing identical qualifications tend to create a difference among themselves. As this is reinforced, an amazingly delicate and intricate system of ranking takes shape (Nakane, 1970, 25).
Such rankings can take place along a variety of lines, with age being the first and with others being used for purposes of making distinctions as needed, such as date of employment, ranks in the military, ranks assigned in job titles, and the differentiations made between senior and junior people in a business.
A Japanese person lives in a world that is divided into three clear categories--sempai (seniors), kohai (juniors), and doryo, meaning "one's colleagues, referring only to those with the same rank and not to all who do the same type of work. Even among doryo, distinctions are made because of differences in age, year of entry or of graduation from school or college, and so on. In other societies, these three categories would be subsumed under the single term "colleagues." This ranking categorization has implications for the methods of addressing a second or third person in discourse. There are three ways of addressing a person--with the suffix "san," the suffix "kun," or without a suffix at all. "San" is used for sempai, "kun" is used for kohai, and the name without a suffix is used for doryo. A person named Tanaka would t...