Ever since Ruth Benedict first distinguished two principal cultural patterns based respectively on the sense of guilt and the sense of shame and cited Japanese culture as the typical example of the latter, most foreign students of Japan seem, despite a certain amount of criticism from Japanese scholars, to have accepted her theory. I myself am on the whole disposed to side with her, but more for what we have learned through the sensitivity of her feeling for the Japanese psychology than from any desire to swallow her theories whole. They raise, in fact, a considerable number of questions, not the least of which is the fact that she allows value judgments to creep into her ideas. Specifically, it is evident that when she states that the culture of guilt places emphasis on inner standards of conduct whereas the culture of shame places emphasis on outward standards of conduct she has the feeling that the former is superior to the latter.
A second difficulty is that she seems to postulate guilt and shame as entirely unrelated to each other, which is obviously contrary to the facts. One and the same person very often experiences these two emotions at the same time, and they would seem to have a very close relationship; the person who has committed a sin is very frequently ashamed of what he has done. Nevertheless, the impression still remains that in characterizing Japans culture as a culture of shame she has pointed out something extremely important, and in what follows I shall examining this point in greater detail.
The Essay on THE CULTURE OF JAPANESE MANAGEMENT
The culture of Japanese management so famous in the West is generally limited to Japan's large corporations. These flagships of the Japanese economy provide their workers with excellent salaries and working conditions and secure employment. These companies and their employees are the business elite of Japan. A career with such a company was the dream of many young people in Japan, but only a ...
Let us first examine the fact that in Western eyes the Japanese sense of guilt appears to be rather sluggish. The reason is probably that where the Westerner tends to think of the sense of guilt as an inner problem for the individual, the Japanese has no such idea. It would be foolish, of course, to assume that the Japanese have no sense of guilt. What is characteristic about the Japanese sense of guilt, though, is that it shows itself most sharply when the individual suspects that his action will result in betraying the group to which he belongs.
Even with the Western sense of guilt on might, in fact postulate a deep-lying psychology of betrayal, but the Westerner is not normally conscious of it. What probably happened is that in the course of centuries of exposure to Christian teachings, the group which almost certainly played an important part in his moral outlook at first, was gradually replaced by God, who in turn faded away with the advent of the modern age, leaving the individual awareness to carry on by itself. Since psychoanalytic opinion holds that the Western sense of guilt arises as a result of going against a super-ego, that forms the inner mind, the element of betrayal would seem not to have disappeared entirely. However, although his super-ego, being defined as a function of the inner mind, may well include individual personal elements such as influences from the parents, its nature is even so essentially impersonal. In the Western sense of guilt the sense of betrayal remain only as a trace and is no longer experienced strongly as such.
With the Japanese, on the other hand, the sense of guilt is most strongly aroused when, as we have seen, the individual betrays the trust of the members of his own group. One could express this differently by saying that the sense of guilt is a function of human relations. For example, in the case of relatives who are most close to him, and parents in particular, the individual does not usually have much sense of guilt; presumably because both sides are so close that amae gives confidence of any sin being forgiven. What does often happen though is that the sense of guilt hitherto suppressed is felt following a parent’s death.
Generally speaking, the Japanese experience a sense of guilt most frequently in the type of relationship where giri is a t work. Although the sense of guilt as such begins, one might say, when one has done something that one should not, the general view is that there is no admission of one’s guilt unless the misdeed is accompanied by a feeling of sumanai. The sense of guilt summed up in the word sumanai naturally connects up directly with the actual act of apology. The Japanese sense of guilt, thus, shows a very clear-cut structure, commencing as it does with betrayal and ending in apology; it represents, in fact the prototype of the sense of guilt, and Benedict’s failure to see this can only be attributed to her cultural prejudice.
The Business plan on Cross Cultural Communication Between Japanese And Western Businessmen
What are the most important communication differences to be aware of in order to carry out successful business with the Japanese?IntroductionCross cultural communication can be defined as a “process of sending and receiving messages between people who are in different cultural contexts”. It is a difficult task to deal with business counterparts across cultures considering the different ...