Social Cohesion And Alienation

Minorities In The United States And Japan

George De Vos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000311716
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An attempt at a final summary of much of my work in anthropology has been divided into two separate volumes, Status Inequality: The Self in Culture, 1990, published by Sage Publications and this present volume, Social Cohesion and Alienation: Minorities in the United States and Japan. Many of the themes touched upon in both volumes have appeared in a series of writings that stretch through a period starting in the early sixties through the late eighties. Some of these efforts resulted in books; others appeared separately as invited contributions to symposia, as special issues of journals, or as parts of edited volumes.

1
Confucian Hierarchy Versus Class Consciousness in Japan¹

Historical Patterns in Vertical Relationships

In discussing patterns of social cohesion that characterized traditional Japanese social structure, I contend that the western concept of social class cannot be directly applied without serious distortion of the social dynamics to be observed in Japanese patterns of status inequality. Indeed, Japanese are very hierarchical in their social awareness; however, the Japanese sense of self as part of a cohesive social hierarchy, existing both inside the family and in the outside community, must be understood in its own cultural-historical context, not in one that emphasizes the more conflictful class stratification that occurred in Western Europe historically.

Viewed psychoculturally, modem organizational structures cannot continue to operate effectively without some mutually reinforcing resonances originating in the personality structure of the participants (Spiro 1961). Socialization practices experienced in childhood prepare individuals to live in an adult society which reflects an ethos, or emotional climate that seems "natural" to its members. The forms of status inequality found in such a society are partially at least in tune with expectations engendered from childhood on.

To illustrate, I shall first attempt to contrast some cultural differences between the implicit attitudes of superiors and subordinates in Japanese culture influencing industrial organization with those occurring the United States. I then shall make a more general delineation of the integrative features of the "religion of the family" in Japan.

I believe that what we observed,² for example, in the underlying social attitudes embedded in the roles of apprentice and patron in Arakawa ward in Tokyo in the 1960s or in the urban and rural samples we investigated in the 1950s remains to some degree operative. They still remain relevant in the economic and cultural historical processes at work in the course of Japanese industrialization generally. One cannot prophesy how long these attitudes will be maintained in the face of countervening social forces. Suffice it to indicate that they continue to exist as influences that help set the tone of contemporary Japanese organizational behavior as well as family life.

First, Japanese traditional attitudes toward authority differed from those found operative in contemporary Western societies. Whatever the negative feelings about authority that appeared, public authority³ was generally respected and was seldom perceived as being so venal as to be thoroughly distrusted. Authority figures--administrators, company executives, police, teachers, or older family members--are, still, for the most part, granted a degree of respect increasingly rare in the United States. Authority is respected because it is still emotionally feasible for Japanese to expect dependent gratification for performing morally prescribed compliant behavior as part of a social or occupational role. Japanese attitudes toward civil authority or occupational mentorship resembled the beliefs found directed only toward God in Western religion. Moral obedience gained God's good will.⁴ In traditional Christianity there is both an awesome, fearful deity of justice and a merciful source of benevolence.

The continuing existence of a Japanese pattern of relatively non-conflictful emotional interaction in a hierarchical civil social structure is highly repellent to Western theoreticians, and to modern Japanese Marxist theorists as well. They choose to ignore the emotional operational force of hierarchy in Japanese society and use the Western model of instrumentally based conflictful class exploitation as the foundation for all social analysis. Those Japanese social historians who are influenced by Marx also emphasize rational instrumentality as a basis for social segregation and ignore the continuing force of expressive needs that permeates occupational as well as family-like hierarchical structures in Japanese social organization. Marxists often reduce social analysis to instrumental economic motives and practical reasoning. Culture becomes merely a dependent superstructure above the material-economic base of the society.

Any appraisal of Western cultural history since industrialization constrains one to perceive that the class system in many Western nations has tended to be alienating, weakening emotional ties and increasing mutual antagonism between different occupational strata of the society. Western bourgeoisie societies have not been knit together, as was Japanese society, with a mythology of quasi-parentage or extended quasi-familial vertical networks of obligations that acted as a constraint on raw exploitation. The social cleavages resulting from differential status in American and European societies are not still bridged by the particularistic familial morality that continues to permeate the Japanese social system.

The Particular vs. the Universal: A False Dichotomy

This "particularistic" quality in traditional Japanese society with its Confucian ideas is often criticized by both Western and Japanese theorists as implicitly inferior to the supposed "universalism" guiding Western societies of Christian origin that transcend national boundaries. However, on close examination, the supposed Western universalist orientation which now idealizes democratic government contains certain innate inconsistencies. There is no doubt that the evolving moral system considered by most Western thinkers to approximate the human political, economic, and social ideal has emphasized for some time principles of a broad human community transcending particularistic tribal, ethnic or "national" loyalties. In this ideal moral system, there also has been emphasis on the maximization of individualism and on personal autonomy or liberty as a goal. This secular ideal was, until the present century, counterpoised to a religious system "under God."

However, such true individual secular social autonomy is seldom realized. More often there is, psychologically, the malaise of anomy, experienced as alienation. In the thinking of some writers, being "impersonal" is too quickly equated with attaining individuality or universality. Certainly, as I shall discuss, the West in its social class relationships historically became more "instrumental" or impersonal, while relationships in a Confucian society have remained more "expressive" or interpersonal.

From the standpoint of social cohesion, Western societies in theory, as Hobbes and others more cynically inclined have analyzed it, can be perceived as binding potentially antagonistic individuals and groups together by impersonal instrumental contractual bonds enforced, in the end, by raw power. In such a system, one cannot depend on positive expressive needs to maintain patterns of acceptable reciprocity. Western societies have, indeed, gone far from the particularistic social reciprocities of European feudalism toward a more impersonal sense of formalized contract relationships depending upon a mutual protection of "rights." Emotional feelings, whether positive or negative, are perceived as a hindrance to the development of a system of law based on an abstract universalized sense of impersonal justice.

In actuality, however, it has been, and continues to be, very difficult for Western society to overcome the particularism of various ethnically conceived nation-states, and to achieve recognition of mutually beneficial contracts binding groups together beyond their national boundaries. This universalist ideal, even today, comes into serious conflict with the basically particularistic concept of "national" sovereignty. Despite growing universalist ideals, the actual history of Europe is one of chauvinistic loyalty and the ethnic particularisms of individual Western national states as political entities. Moreover, Western cultures, including those of Latin America, have been prone to dictatorships or oligarchies of a venal privileged class.

The Western 'left' is also vulnerable to totalitarian political organization. Both Europe and the various countries of the Americas remain prone to the development of severe alienating, exploitative class cleavages in economic organization. One sees today, a communist ideology of an ideal socially cohesive pan-national society in disarray and in retreat from the continuing dismembering force of ethnic traditions.

A common Christian religious tradition has not resulted in similar social structures in countries with disparate political-cultural histories. The states of Europe and the "new world" of North and South America, although similarly oriented historically toward universalistic Christian religious ideals, are highly divergent from one another in their degree of adherence to universalist percepts in the adequate exercise of law.

On the other hand, particularistic contentions about Asian societies may be exaggerated. Societies of Asia influenced by Confucianism--China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam--have some common features, even though they too are far from resembling each other historically in actual social organization. Here also, similar religious traditions per se do not necessarily create similarity of social organization. A comparison of ideological traditions or past political history alone gives us no direct picture of basic differences or similarities in social organization, nor of the expressive forces binding individuals together socially.

Confucianist China developed far differently from supposedly equally Confucianist-oriented Tokugawa Japan. Seen psycho-culturally, China did not develop internalized patterns of commitment and loyalty toward vertically organized extrafamilial groups such as occurred in Japan. Hence, simply contrasting "particularism" in Asia with "universalism" in the West may be a most misleading way to attempt to conceptualize differences in psychological motivation or social structure, either between any given Western nation and a nation of Asia, or among the states of either region. In some considerations, Europe has been as particularistic as Asia.

Feudal Similarities and Differences: East and West

On the other hand, there are some historical parallels to be observed in a broad comparison between the peculiar premodern patterns of Japan and of Northwestern Europe. At one period, both could be termed "feudal" in structure. Medieval Europe had vertically structured social organizational patterns based on manorial units with vast status disparities between the governing nobility and the subordinate serfs. As an intermediate social class, there were also status differentials by age and seniority observed within the merchant and artisan guilds. These guilds actualized increasing political power as they developed around commercial activities in the towns and cities.

What came to be a historical determinant of difference between forms of feudalism in Europe and Japan was the fact that particularistic interpersonal systems in European feudalism woe eventually supplanted by a mote impersonal form of "bourgeois" mercantilism that "rationalized" human relationships and controlled the means of production within the state. Overseas mercantile pursuits gradually developed European countries into colonial empires. In their colonial conquests they readily came to deal with foreigners or "natives" by economic exploitation according to systems of impersonally reckoned gain and loss. Impersonality also marked the developing distance between the bourgeoisie and a laboring class at home in developing industrial towns and cities which differed somewhat from the ties that existed previously with local artisans, or with rural labor.

Some exploitative "cost accounting" was not lacking in the Japanese merchant class in considering how to work their direct subordinates. They were indeed maneuvering for economic gain, but their exploitative intent continued to be subordinated within a system of expressive as well as instrumentally determined vertical binding age graded social relationships. Between classes, systems of reciprocity were maintained as central to overall Japanese social structure. Curiously, as Nakane (1970) and others point out, interpersonal not impersonal vertical organizations in Japan has increased rather than decreased with the development of modern industry. Japan had no sustained mercantile epoch. It came to empire late.

Marx, in his vision of the history of Western culture, saw in nineteenth-century society a social system that had been governed by a corrupt and decaying, albeit personalized, feudal nobility. It was being supplanted by a system leading to the more impersonal exploitation of industrial workers by the bourgeoisie. In his view the separate national states would be overthrown by the antagonistic forces being engendered in them--principally by the general social alienation separating social classes one from another, and by the increasing alienation of the worker from any personal identification with his occupation. His is a European historical vision that remains disturbingly realistic to modern Westerner observers.

Important in this vision, and central to it, is the moral dilemma of individualism as related to maximizing personal gain, and the consequent impersonal instrumental exploitative use of man in a social structure determined by impersonal economic forces. In Marxist terms, man is conceived of as a rational animal. When he comes to live in a class society, he finds it profitable, hence satisfying economically, to exploit those beneath himself in power and status. Humans do not maintain personal identification or develop emotional compassion with those of a lower economic class. What Marx therefore deemed necessary as a palliative, rather than any system of personalized particularized hierarchical reciprocity as has held in Japan, is a spiritual breakthrough toward a universal regard for one's fellow men that goes beyond regional, ethnic, or national identities, then eventually, beyond class affiliation. The universalistic-individualistic polarities in the Marxist vision of man are seen as antagonistic to one another. On the one hand, there remains the manifest bourgeois propensity to actualize a greedy self-oriented individualism. One seeks out maximization of good for one's self by instrumental means, including necessary political-economic class alliances. On the other hand, there is the social need of a universal community to be achieved only by a proletarian revolution. The proletarian revolution is to rid society of the baleful influence of those focused only on a need for instrumental gain.

This rational-instrumental image of contemporary man in society is far different from that underlying the indigenous Japanese particularistic attempts to conceive of themselves collectively as a society based on an extended familial network. Traditional Japanese society was an attempt to place everyone somewhere within a harmonious, age-graded hierarchical status system. During their recent military phase, this pattern was dedicated to the realization of the totalitarian collective goals of a quasi-religious system under an emperor. This image is now past in Japan, but a sense of a national, ethnically unitary, collectivity remains. The Marxian Western image of humanity--caught between seeking individual economic gain as a merchant and a non economic pursuit of a moral imperative for universal commitment to an egalitarian community as a worker--is therefore vastly different from the hierarchical image presented in some of the Japanese chauvinist theories about the ideal nature of Japanese society.

Whatever the acceptance or rejection, emotional or rational, of Marxist class theory, it remains central to the Western intellectual tradition. However, Western theorists are too quick to apply ethnocentrically an instrumental theory of class exploitation to Japan, without examining the concomitant "irrational" or expressive interpersonal patterns related to social structure in either Eastern or Western cultures. What is lacking in Marxist analysts is any attention to the abiding cultural differences in the "ethos," or expressive features of any society that are operative underneath. The underlying expressive ethos of a truly segregated class-oriented Western society is very different from the ethos of a vertical reciprocal hierarchy, a social form still sufficiently operative to continue to bind Japanese together. Western theorists are apt to dismiss too quickly previous Japanese perceptions of their own society as "mythological" rather than properly "objective" or "rational." They ignore the subjective emotional power of these emic perceptions as symbolic representations of the psychologically motivated collective forces that are demonstrably operative within Japanese society.

What is overlooked in Marxist idealization of a classless society is that its human ideal is itself, basically, expressive in nature. At its base is a culturally specific, implicit expressive moral supposition that hum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables, and Chart
• Preface
• Introduction: A Comparative Approach to Social Cohesion and Minority Alienation
• 1 Confucian Hierarchy Versus Class Consciousness in Japan
• 2 Forms of Alienation: Suicide in Japan
• 3 Delinquency, Family Cohesion, and Minority Alienation
• 4 The Outcaste Tradition in Modern Japan: A Problem in Social Self-Identity
• 5 Ethnic Persistence and Role Degradation: Koreans in Japan
• 6 Social Degradation and Minority Adaptation
• 7 Selective Permeability, Field Dependence and Reference Group Sanctioning
• 8 The Passing of Passing in Contemporary Society
• About the Book and Author