I’m taking my three kids, ages 14, 12, and 10, to Japan for a couple of weeks. One reason I chose Japan is that they’re old enough to begin noticing that another successful modern society can organize everyday life around norms and assumptions quite different from the ones they know in the United States, including the kind of attentiveness to context captured by the idea of “reading the air.”
I’d be interested in any advice from Hiroko or other readers about experiences, places, or even small things to pay attention to that might help kids this age notice and engage with that aspect of Japan, without turning the trip into a forced educational exercise.
Hiroko curiously did not mention "-Do" ('Dough'), the Buddhist suffix found at the end of words like Ju-do, Bushi-do, Ken-do, etc.
Which essentially means "Striving to perfect this specific discipline." Which to my mind is the essence of Japanese culture: striving for mastery of your art/profession/discipline, so you can make an object/process/product better. Developing the capacity to take *something* and make it *better,* is arguably the core principle of Japanese-ness.
So if someone was writing a similar article about Germany (instead of Japan) and wrote "I recited the Pledge of Allegiance alongside the other students every day. But there’s no pledge of allegiance in German schools. The German flag wasn’t even displayed in any of my classrooms."...
...we would expect to see a sentence about how excessive flag waving patriotism in Germany is seen as reminiscent of the Nazis and the education system inculcates a culture of guilt and responsibility.
I don't expect to see a deep exploration of Japan's war guilt or lack thereof in this piece, but I do think the contrast with religiosity in Indiana leaves the mistaken impression that Japan never had a problem with monomaniacal devotion to something. It's like reading an article by a former heroin addict (who has been clean for decades) tut tutting someone about smoking marijuana. If they don't mention their own drug history, the article would come off as a little hypocritical.
I'm not sure monomaniacal devotion was actually widespread in Japan even during wartime. The imperial government forced a rather rigid religious structure, separating State Shintoism from Buddhism by fiat, in the late 19th century. It was not some organic evolution. For much of Japanese history, religion was a blended affair. Only when the state intervened did it become more rigid and bifurcated so that the state could co-opt religion for political ends (not just State Shinto post-Restoration but also the anti-Christian persecutions under Toyotomi and Tokugawa regimes).
Japanese soldiers would surrender at drastically reduced rates compared to others, and they had suicidal attacks as a matter of doctrine, and they fought a war that led to the deaths of over 3 million Japanese people and 25 -30 million other Asians... This is still within living memory. But thats not monomaniacal devotion because it wasn't literally everyone in the country"
There wasn’t much monomaniacal devotion in Japan, it just so happens that their troops were more bugnuts insane than the Nazis, guess just one of those weird coincidences.
My position was that it was not monomaniacal faith and religious piety that drove them. It was the longstanding fear of standing apart from the community, a sense that is still with Japanese people today. Sometimes that results in benefits such as the orderliness in the aftermath of a great disaster like Fukushima. Other times it’s conformity to the will of a genocidal government. It’s not because of religion. It’s the fear of being caught out of the community, a very real thing when you look at the history of Japan and its many famines and disasters. You clung to the community because it was necessary for survival. It was not some faith in the Emperor as god per se.
Maybe next time you stop trying to put words in people’s mouths with a “is that your position” after coming up with a very simplistic take and actually try to listen to people.
Adherence to community values is what most religious faith is and was. Very few people come into their religious beliefs because they read each of the world's holy books and then made a reasoned decision.
Most places in most times required adherence to the community for survival purposes.
Tibetan yak herders also had to be community oriented to survive, does that mean that their devotion to the Dalai Lama somehow less "religious?"
Religious belief can overlap, but is not synonymous, with communitarianism. Otherwise you’re going to stretch the meaning of religion to be meaningless. In religion there is organization, dogma, a moral code, ritual. If you’ve read Yoda-san’s book, you’d know the difference between that and what the Japanese have long had. Instead, you just insist on cramming the world into your preexisting templates of human behavior and motives. If people engage in behavior that sounds odd, irrational, and fervent, then it must be “religion” to you because you lack the self-awareness to see that not every community out there neatly falls into your motivational theory.
Anyway, you keep coming up with strawmen and don’t listen at all to what others say, so have fun!
I was talking about the pledge of allegiance in the original example. I didn't like the author's implication that Japan would never do something like that.. when we all know they did do something like that.
The pledge of allegiance is devotion to country. You took "monomaniacal devotion" to mean religion. I erred in phrasing her description of Indiana as "indiana's religiosity", and then arguing about religion as an idea.
But my point was that a Japanese person is in no position to imply that anyone's devotion to country is excessive, unless they have a caveat about their own unfortunate excessive devotion to country/emperor.
The idea that religion is about belief rather than practice is a feature of the Abrahamic faiths that didn't exist before them. The polytheistic religions that preceded Christianity and Islam in the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Middle East did not care what people believed, they were based around ritual. Shintoism is like that too.
"True Japanese person" eh? What does that even mean? Can you trace your ancestry to the 縄文 people? I sense that Yoda-san has a far greater understanding of what Japanese culture than your simple mind can encompass in a lifetime. How is accepting immigrants to "worship" them? We don't despise the people who cannot easily accept them. We despise the ignorance and thoughtless hatred that some of them spew out, just as you do here. Your arbitrarily binary view of the world into "us" vs "them" where the line is wherever some rando in an orange sash says it is. That's what is despised.
Do mixed ethnicity people don't exist to you? If a White person has grown up in Japan and married a Japanese person and is fluent and married there and die there, is that not sufficiently Japanese enough for you?
Also your wholly ignorant and simply untrue statement of people who worship immigrants and despise people in communities who do not accept them, but they themselves don't live in those communities is an entire strawman. Accepting people as equal citizens under law is not akin to worshipping them. Come on mate.
Very interesting essay on a very important topic: Identity. For the last few years, I have spent significant time in Europe (Hungary, Estonia, etc), and have been struck by the definition of identity you are exploring. In most of these countries, identity (and citizenship) is tied to language, but interestingly, the actual behavior of the young is to learn English for all the usual economic reasons. Also, the demographic challenges drive immigration and again, the local language is an obstacle. The result.. many English language Universities. Overall, one gets the sense of a losing battle on national identity (as defined by language) and a morphing to a more regional identity. Having said that, the other aspects of culture (social customs, engagement models, rule of law) ...seem to stick...which is also interesting.
I am curious if Japan is seeing a similar trend ? My background is in high-tech and I have traveled through the various centers of high-tech in the world. As of the 2000s, Japan was the only place were we could not reasonably have a conversation in English. I am curious if this is changing ?
Thank you for the interesting comments about a region I am not familiar with.
I'm not sure if more Japanese speak English than they do back when you were here in the 2000s, but one thing that has definitely changed is that the numbers of English speakers who speak Japanese has really increased. That's another facet of what I'm talking about in my essay.
Ross Douthat uses his religion to push an ultra-conservative view of America. In fact, we have long had ideas like the force of our Declaration of Independence and even our uniqueness among nations. Saying we need religious is just plain balderdash. Besides religion in American changes all the time from City on a Hill, to the Second Great Awakening to Roman Catholic ascendancy.
This comment is about America and how immigration affects us. The pursuit of wealth and opportunity, as well as freedom from oppression, have been significant drivers of the creation of American society…at least as much as, if not more, than freedom of religion. We are such a hodgepodge of different ethnicities that it’s difficult to imagine one common religion creating the sense of shared values that Douthat seems to yearns for. Now that resources are more costly and the standard of living is dropping for many native born Americans, religion and ancestry are increasingly being used as a litmus test for being American. Our identity crisis is exacerbated by the fact that we embrace a form of capitalism that requires a constant stream of hard work, risk taking, and creative thinking…the kind of thing immigrants have brought to us in abundance. This is the rub.
It's absurd to me that people like Ross Douthat and others are so obsessed with having a nation based around religion, but specifically a brand of Christianity that they ascribe to. Just because religion informs so much in their lives, they think it should be like that everyone. To say the constitution and loving standard American values isn't enough for us to have a society that is strong for a long time ignores the American experiment of the last 250 years. It's like they'd be happy if people didn't believe but just did performative church attendance. It's so reductive and simply minded.
Oh I agree. People like Douthat engage argue in bad faith. There are so many communities in America with low crime, lots of active civic service and shared values that aren't super religious communities.
I just don't like the pseudo intellectualism of their movement, willful ignorance of US History, and world history and frankly ignoring of reality. There have been many a mono culture around the world historically that shared the same values and were way worse than America. Likewise there are currently way less religious countries with shared values and strong communities.
There is also this weird type of gate keeping they engage in, like you can't be a proper American or have strong morals unless you are a specific type of Christian. It's as absurd as saying you can't be a real gamer, movie watcher, athlete unless you only play a certain sport, watch certain movies or only play certain video games. It all goes back to their obsession with having societal hierarchies and obviously making women and other people second class citizens. Like the whole idea that you cannot enjoy or properly engage in Yoga or Christianity if you don't do it 100% their way is just a rejection of how humans work and just so ignorant.
Perhaps it is overly simplistic of me, but to me to be japanese or American or whatever is simply to be considered Japanese or American by law.
Certainly there is a shared culture on average, but at least in the usa, one can be deported despite growing up here and knowing all the cultural quirks and, similerly, one can violate all the cultural norms, remember nothing of the culture and be a citizen.
Though, when it comes to modern nation states I can't help but think back to whenever they were first created, and how shaky the moral logic (if there even was any) was that created them.
It's strange to think of someone feeling pride for a country that their ancestors might have fought tooth and nail against! When I see native americans in the usa serving in the military at the highest rate of any ethnic group for example, I generally find one part sad one part comical.
To put it bluntly, give me a monopoly of the education system for a generation and I will give you a nation or at least a people who want one.
I think Benedict Anderson put it best when he said communities were imagined.
I think the big debate, though, is surrounding citizenship vs. national identity. The law dictates the former, while people's "gut feelings" seem to prevail more with the latter. The latter can then influence the former and result in the person who was raised their entire lifetime in America, doing all the American things, to be deported because of their ancestry. I don't think the education system itself is sufficient. After all, I grew up with education talking about America as a melting pot or salad bowl or whatever, and that has gone on for several generations. And yet we still see ethnonationalists running about America today, including in Gen Z.
This would seem to create a chicken and egg problem. Japanese people are willing to allow people who are fluent in Japanese context to immigrate, but acquiring such fluency before immigration is likely difficult.
Where is there a reservoir of such immigrants in the world?
“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” / John Adams
That survey about how accepting Japanese respondents would be of folks from other countries depending on their level of Japanese language fluency is very interesting. Unlike what you might expect from ethnonationalists, the Japanese people seem as accepting of people from “the West” as well as other parts of Asia like India, Vietnam, but not as much when it comes to China. South Korea, which seems the most culturally similar to Japan (and with which the imperial family has a connection), does better than China but not as well as other Asian countries.
Despite the rowdiness from Sanseito and their frequent throwbacks to history, is it that the Japanese aren’t looking back as much to some ancient past as current diplomatic and cultural relations? If relations are good with certain societies, then they will be accepted as long as they also know how to navigate Japanese society and all its unspoken, unwritten rules (seriously, does any single person in Japan know all of them?). This could be a manifestation of the Japanese value of harmony (和）which gives rise to hope that people of foreign ancestry can be accepted as long as they “don’t cause trouble.” The country that celebrated the Englishman William Adams as not fully Japanese but nonetheless a full member of Japanese society back in the 17th century may in fact be more capable of acceptance than nationalists would prefer.
What do you think is going on *mechanically* in terms of how either a) religion or b) this sort of linguistic-cultural ‘reading of the air’ fosters harmony/unity and occupies load-bearing provision of meaning and/or purpose and/or belonging? Like I think it’s somewhat straightforward to construct counterfactuals where these factors present but are inadequate (and one might argue such is the case in at least the U.S. right now). What do you think is going on at the ‘gears level’ to cause this kind of stuff to achieve an end?
It's difficult to separate mechanisms from cultural norms. If one said very reductively that Japanese people glorify "going with the flow" and consensus while Americans glorify asserting and challenging others, I'd call those expressions of cultural values.
But where do those values come from, is what you're really asking. And I don't think anyone really knows (though many, like Ruth Benedict, have tried.) Hiroko touches on a linguistic mechanism in her essay: when you frequently have to intuit subjects from the context is it like a training ground for "reading the air?" On the other hand, the fact this idiom exists at all means there are Japanese who don't or can't do it.
I say lovingly and tolerantly that at least in the recent past one of the core principles of Reform Judaism was that each individual could pick the things they liked and not care about the things they didn't. I think what Derek Thompson is getting at is that even the things that are supposed to be about spirituality are really about self and don't require the kind of spiritual life that would require bonds with others or even going outside and seeing what others are doing and thinking.
Brooks & Dunn's "Only In America" deserves every single time it has been played at a political convention but makes no specific reference to religion only "Where we dream as big as we want to". The language of religion and covenant works in American [political] culture to say that we have to have been here for some transcendent purpose and how American culture would work if most citizens/elites soured on that transcendent purpose is TBA.
Being part of American culture is more understanding how religions become Americanized once they are here than personal faith which almost certainly will not survive a second generation in America in the same way
I’m taking my three kids, ages 14, 12, and 10, to Japan for a couple of weeks. One reason I chose Japan is that they’re old enough to begin noticing that another successful modern society can organize everyday life around norms and assumptions quite different from the ones they know in the United States, including the kind of attentiveness to context captured by the idea of “reading the air.”
I’d be interested in any advice from Hiroko or other readers about experiences, places, or even small things to pay attention to that might help kids this age notice and engage with that aspect of Japan, without turning the trip into a forced educational exercise.
Hiroko curiously did not mention "-Do" ('Dough'), the Buddhist suffix found at the end of words like Ju-do, Bushi-do, Ken-do, etc.
Which essentially means "Striving to perfect this specific discipline." Which to my mind is the essence of Japanese culture: striving for mastery of your art/profession/discipline, so you can make an object/process/product better. Developing the capacity to take *something* and make it *better,* is arguably the core principle of Japanese-ness.
This seems to have a gap in there.
So if someone was writing a similar article about Germany (instead of Japan) and wrote "I recited the Pledge of Allegiance alongside the other students every day. But there’s no pledge of allegiance in German schools. The German flag wasn’t even displayed in any of my classrooms."...
...we would expect to see a sentence about how excessive flag waving patriotism in Germany is seen as reminiscent of the Nazis and the education system inculcates a culture of guilt and responsibility.
I don't expect to see a deep exploration of Japan's war guilt or lack thereof in this piece, but I do think the contrast with religiosity in Indiana leaves the mistaken impression that Japan never had a problem with monomaniacal devotion to something. It's like reading an article by a former heroin addict (who has been clean for decades) tut tutting someone about smoking marijuana. If they don't mention their own drug history, the article would come off as a little hypocritical.
I'm not sure monomaniacal devotion was actually widespread in Japan even during wartime. The imperial government forced a rather rigid religious structure, separating State Shintoism from Buddhism by fiat, in the late 19th century. It was not some organic evolution. For much of Japanese history, religion was a blended affair. Only when the state intervened did it become more rigid and bifurcated so that the state could co-opt religion for political ends (not just State Shinto post-Restoration but also the anti-Christian persecutions under Toyotomi and Tokugawa regimes).
What a weirdly simplistic take.
Japanese soldiers would surrender at drastically reduced rates compared to others, and they had suicidal attacks as a matter of doctrine, and they fought a war that led to the deaths of over 3 million Japanese people and 25 -30 million other Asians... This is still within living memory. But thats not monomaniacal devotion because it wasn't literally everyone in the country"
Is that your position?
Maybe it wasn't religion but hierarchy and respect for bosses or even the threat of physical harm.
There wasn’t much monomaniacal devotion in Japan, it just so happens that their troops were more bugnuts insane than the Nazis, guess just one of those weird coincidences.
Why do you online warriors like Romans so much?
My position was that it was not monomaniacal faith and religious piety that drove them. It was the longstanding fear of standing apart from the community, a sense that is still with Japanese people today. Sometimes that results in benefits such as the orderliness in the aftermath of a great disaster like Fukushima. Other times it’s conformity to the will of a genocidal government. It’s not because of religion. It’s the fear of being caught out of the community, a very real thing when you look at the history of Japan and its many famines and disasters. You clung to the community because it was necessary for survival. It was not some faith in the Emperor as god per se.
Maybe next time you stop trying to put words in people’s mouths with a “is that your position” after coming up with a very simplistic take and actually try to listen to people.
Adherence to community values is what most religious faith is and was. Very few people come into their religious beliefs because they read each of the world's holy books and then made a reasoned decision.
Most places in most times required adherence to the community for survival purposes.
Tibetan yak herders also had to be community oriented to survive, does that mean that their devotion to the Dalai Lama somehow less "religious?"
Religious belief can overlap, but is not synonymous, with communitarianism. Otherwise you’re going to stretch the meaning of religion to be meaningless. In religion there is organization, dogma, a moral code, ritual. If you’ve read Yoda-san’s book, you’d know the difference between that and what the Japanese have long had. Instead, you just insist on cramming the world into your preexisting templates of human behavior and motives. If people engage in behavior that sounds odd, irrational, and fervent, then it must be “religion” to you because you lack the self-awareness to see that not every community out there neatly falls into your motivational theory.
Anyway, you keep coming up with strawmen and don’t listen at all to what others say, so have fun!
I was talking about the pledge of allegiance in the original example. I didn't like the author's implication that Japan would never do something like that.. when we all know they did do something like that.
The pledge of allegiance is devotion to country. You took "monomaniacal devotion" to mean religion. I erred in phrasing her description of Indiana as "indiana's religiosity", and then arguing about religion as an idea.
But my point was that a Japanese person is in no position to imply that anyone's devotion to country is excessive, unless they have a caveat about their own unfortunate excessive devotion to country/emperor.
Reading what you wrote about Japanese religion reminded me of a blog post series that Bret Devereaux wrote about polytheism: https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/
The idea that religion is about belief rather than practice is a feature of the Abrahamic faiths that didn't exist before them. The polytheistic religions that preceded Christianity and Islam in the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Middle East did not care what people believed, they were based around ritual. Shintoism is like that too.
Only the last two paragraphs say anything substantial.
However, this text offers a good insight into the commonalities of liberalism across borders.
They worship immigrants and despise people in communities that cannot easily accept them,
but they themselves don't live in those communities...
These kinds of people always say the same thing:
"What is a 'Japanese'? Define it!"
In their minds, if you can't define it, then accept immigrants.
As a true Japanese person, I can only say one thing:
Shut up, Japanese people are at least a type of East Asian.
Black and white people are not Japanese.
"True Japanese person" eh? What does that even mean? Can you trace your ancestry to the 縄文 people? I sense that Yoda-san has a far greater understanding of what Japanese culture than your simple mind can encompass in a lifetime. How is accepting immigrants to "worship" them? We don't despise the people who cannot easily accept them. We despise the ignorance and thoughtless hatred that some of them spew out, just as you do here. Your arbitrarily binary view of the world into "us" vs "them" where the line is wherever some rando in an orange sash says it is. That's what is despised.
What a statement...
> "Black and white people are not Japanese."
Do mixed ethnicity people don't exist to you? If a White person has grown up in Japan and married a Japanese person and is fluent and married there and die there, is that not sufficiently Japanese enough for you?
Also your wholly ignorant and simply untrue statement of people who worship immigrants and despise people in communities who do not accept them, but they themselves don't live in those communities is an entire strawman. Accepting people as equal citizens under law is not akin to worshipping them. Come on mate.
"Reading the air", I sense trolling.
Very interesting essay on a very important topic: Identity. For the last few years, I have spent significant time in Europe (Hungary, Estonia, etc), and have been struck by the definition of identity you are exploring. In most of these countries, identity (and citizenship) is tied to language, but interestingly, the actual behavior of the young is to learn English for all the usual economic reasons. Also, the demographic challenges drive immigration and again, the local language is an obstacle. The result.. many English language Universities. Overall, one gets the sense of a losing battle on national identity (as defined by language) and a morphing to a more regional identity. Having said that, the other aspects of culture (social customs, engagement models, rule of law) ...seem to stick...which is also interesting.
I am curious if Japan is seeing a similar trend ? My background is in high-tech and I have traveled through the various centers of high-tech in the world. As of the 2000s, Japan was the only place were we could not reasonably have a conversation in English. I am curious if this is changing ?
Thank you for the interesting comments about a region I am not familiar with.
I'm not sure if more Japanese speak English than they do back when you were here in the 2000s, but one thing that has definitely changed is that the numbers of English speakers who speak Japanese has really increased. That's another facet of what I'm talking about in my essay.
Ross Douthat uses his religion to push an ultra-conservative view of America. In fact, we have long had ideas like the force of our Declaration of Independence and even our uniqueness among nations. Saying we need religious is just plain balderdash. Besides religion in American changes all the time from City on a Hill, to the Second Great Awakening to Roman Catholic ascendancy.
This comment is about America and how immigration affects us. The pursuit of wealth and opportunity, as well as freedom from oppression, have been significant drivers of the creation of American society…at least as much as, if not more, than freedom of religion. We are such a hodgepodge of different ethnicities that it’s difficult to imagine one common religion creating the sense of shared values that Douthat seems to yearns for. Now that resources are more costly and the standard of living is dropping for many native born Americans, religion and ancestry are increasingly being used as a litmus test for being American. Our identity crisis is exacerbated by the fact that we embrace a form of capitalism that requires a constant stream of hard work, risk taking, and creative thinking…the kind of thing immigrants have brought to us in abundance. This is the rub.
To quote the 3 character classic: 人之初，性本善。性相近，習相遠 or “no matter where people are born, their nature is the same but their habits differ”
It's absurd to me that people like Ross Douthat and others are so obsessed with having a nation based around religion, but specifically a brand of Christianity that they ascribe to. Just because religion informs so much in their lives, they think it should be like that everyone. To say the constitution and loving standard American values isn't enough for us to have a society that is strong for a long time ignores the American experiment of the last 250 years. It's like they'd be happy if people didn't believe but just did performative church attendance. It's so reductive and simply minded.
Douthat seeks to use religion as a path to a society of domination, especialy of women by men and especially by eliminating reproductive rights.
Oh I agree. People like Douthat engage argue in bad faith. There are so many communities in America with low crime, lots of active civic service and shared values that aren't super religious communities.
I just don't like the pseudo intellectualism of their movement, willful ignorance of US History, and world history and frankly ignoring of reality. There have been many a mono culture around the world historically that shared the same values and were way worse than America. Likewise there are currently way less religious countries with shared values and strong communities.
There is also this weird type of gate keeping they engage in, like you can't be a proper American or have strong morals unless you are a specific type of Christian. It's as absurd as saying you can't be a real gamer, movie watcher, athlete unless you only play a certain sport, watch certain movies or only play certain video games. It all goes back to their obsession with having societal hierarchies and obviously making women and other people second class citizens. Like the whole idea that you cannot enjoy or properly engage in Yoga or Christianity if you don't do it 100% their way is just a rejection of how humans work and just so ignorant.
Perhaps it is overly simplistic of me, but to me to be japanese or American or whatever is simply to be considered Japanese or American by law.
Certainly there is a shared culture on average, but at least in the usa, one can be deported despite growing up here and knowing all the cultural quirks and, similerly, one can violate all the cultural norms, remember nothing of the culture and be a citizen.
Though, when it comes to modern nation states I can't help but think back to whenever they were first created, and how shaky the moral logic (if there even was any) was that created them.
It's strange to think of someone feeling pride for a country that their ancestors might have fought tooth and nail against! When I see native americans in the usa serving in the military at the highest rate of any ethnic group for example, I generally find one part sad one part comical.
To put it bluntly, give me a monopoly of the education system for a generation and I will give you a nation or at least a people who want one.
I think Benedict Anderson put it best when he said communities were imagined.
They are what we say they are.
I think the big debate, though, is surrounding citizenship vs. national identity. The law dictates the former, while people's "gut feelings" seem to prevail more with the latter. The latter can then influence the former and result in the person who was raised their entire lifetime in America, doing all the American things, to be deported because of their ancestry. I don't think the education system itself is sufficient. After all, I grew up with education talking about America as a melting pot or salad bowl or whatever, and that has gone on for several generations. And yet we still see ethnonationalists running about America today, including in Gen Z.
People's gut feelings are just a way to sneak in bigotry. There will always be some sort of ethnonationalism, we've usually beaten them back.
The requirement that, at a minimum, immigrants be fluent in the language of the receiving country seems prudent.
This would seem to create a chicken and egg problem. Japanese people are willing to allow people who are fluent in Japanese context to immigrate, but acquiring such fluency before immigration is likely difficult.
Where is there a reservoir of such immigrants in the world?
“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” / John Adams
That survey about how accepting Japanese respondents would be of folks from other countries depending on their level of Japanese language fluency is very interesting. Unlike what you might expect from ethnonationalists, the Japanese people seem as accepting of people from “the West” as well as other parts of Asia like India, Vietnam, but not as much when it comes to China. South Korea, which seems the most culturally similar to Japan (and with which the imperial family has a connection), does better than China but not as well as other Asian countries.
Despite the rowdiness from Sanseito and their frequent throwbacks to history, is it that the Japanese aren’t looking back as much to some ancient past as current diplomatic and cultural relations? If relations are good with certain societies, then they will be accepted as long as they also know how to navigate Japanese society and all its unspoken, unwritten rules (seriously, does any single person in Japan know all of them?). This could be a manifestation of the Japanese value of harmony (和）which gives rise to hope that people of foreign ancestry can be accepted as long as they “don’t cause trouble.” The country that celebrated the Englishman William Adams as not fully Japanese but nonetheless a full member of Japanese society back in the 17th century may in fact be more capable of acceptance than nationalists would prefer.
What do you think is going on *mechanically* in terms of how either a) religion or b) this sort of linguistic-cultural ‘reading of the air’ fosters harmony/unity and occupies load-bearing provision of meaning and/or purpose and/or belonging? Like I think it’s somewhat straightforward to construct counterfactuals where these factors present but are inadequate (and one might argue such is the case in at least the U.S. right now). What do you think is going on at the ‘gears level’ to cause this kind of stuff to achieve an end?
It's difficult to separate mechanisms from cultural norms. If one said very reductively that Japanese people glorify "going with the flow" and consensus while Americans glorify asserting and challenging others, I'd call those expressions of cultural values.
But where do those values come from, is what you're really asking. And I don't think anyone really knows (though many, like Ruth Benedict, have tried.) Hiroko touches on a linguistic mechanism in her essay: when you frequently have to intuit subjects from the context is it like a training ground for "reading the air?" On the other hand, the fact this idiom exists at all means there are Japanese who don't or can't do it.
I say lovingly and tolerantly that at least in the recent past one of the core principles of Reform Judaism was that each individual could pick the things they liked and not care about the things they didn't. I think what Derek Thompson is getting at is that even the things that are supposed to be about spirituality are really about self and don't require the kind of spiritual life that would require bonds with others or even going outside and seeing what others are doing and thinking.
Brooks & Dunn's "Only In America" deserves every single time it has been played at a political convention but makes no specific reference to religion only "Where we dream as big as we want to". The language of religion and covenant works in American [political] culture to say that we have to have been here for some transcendent purpose and how American culture would work if most citizens/elites soured on that transcendent purpose is TBA.
Being part of American culture is more understanding how religions become Americanized once they are here than personal faith which almost certainly will not survive a second generation in America in the same way