It is quite common in Japan for people to control their own behavior after considering its possible effect on their peers, or their juniors. If the student applying for employment at the bank had not controlled himself, the interviewer would no doubt have come to the conclusion that all the graduates of X high school were as inferior as he suspected. In Japan the members of a group are strung together like the beads of a rosary, and in most cases individual responsibility becomes collective responsibility. This collective self, made up of a string of individuals, and the collective responsibility they share, is a major feature of civilian society in Japan.
The first group that a child becomes a member of is the ie (family, house). From the earliest moment of awareness, the child is taught to behave in a way that will not injure the family's reputation: "You'll be laughed at if you do that." "We want you to study hard and be the best—do you understand?" These are just two examples of the admonitions that soon become familiar to the child. For the sake of the family's reputation, all sorts of expectations and pressures are heaped on this small "self."
In Japan it is not unusual for collective responsibility to continue long after the child has become an adult. If, for example, the son of a certain family were to rob a bank, all the members of his family would be held responsible by the society for the son's violation of its rules. This is not, of course, a legal responsibility; rather, it is a social responsibility that falls on all members of the ie. In the West, provided that his family were not accomplices, the bank robber and the bank robber alone would be ostracized by society and punished by law.
The "rosary" of collective responsibility sometimes extends beyond the family chain. For example, district and municipal police chiefs often resign from their posts when one of their underlings commits a crime, even if it is strictly of an individual nature. The executive director mentioned previously, while saying "It wasn't me," committed suicide because he was so entangled in the web of collective responsibility of his company. The proud, almost self-righteous "Nothing I did was for personal gain" before the committee and the self-effacing "I thought of all the future graduates" at the job interview may have different results, but they derive fundamentally from the same impulse. They are the cries of an individual straining under the burden of collective responsibility, a burden which is often too heavy for the individual to bear.
Osusowake (Sharing)
In Japan a person who monopolizes his crops in a group is the object of intense criticism, just as a person who monopolizes a public gain receives his share of angry stares and cold looks. Even someone who attempts to monopolize a private achievement within a group receives this treatment. In Japanese society the credit for private ownership of anything of value usually belongs to the group.
If, for example, a student attempts to take personal credit for words of praise from his teacher or refuses to share the glory of some academic achievement, he will almost certainly be treated coldly by his fellow students. In a Japanese business company, there is no star. Companies don't make stars. The semiannual company bonus is, in principle, evenly distributed among all employees in proportion to their rank in the hierarchy. Employees are not considered members of a baseball team, where some might be stars and others "utility players." Rather, they are members of a tug-of-war—each has an equal weight to pull.
A better example: A company worker in Nagano prefecture drew the winning ticket in a lottery totaling ¥ 10,000,000 (about $43,500). He was so excited over his good fortune that he talked about it to his fellow workers. That was his undoing. From then on his relationship with his co-workers deteriorated, and an underlying current of hostility made it very difficult for him to work with them as he had before. What did he do? He stood up in |wit of the entire office staff, raised the ticket above his head, and waved it in the air so that all eyes were glued to the winning stub. Then he set it on fire with his cigarette lighter and reduced it to ashes, totally ignoring his fellow workers who cried out, "Hey, wait! Stop that! Don't be a fool!" He sacrificed the prize in a grand appeal to win back the favor of his cold-hearted co-workers and reestablish his original relationship with the group.
If, when he announced his luck to his fellows, he had offered to treat them all to an appropriately splendid meal, or even announced his decision to buy uniforms or some equipment for the company baseball team, perhaps there would have been no need for this drastic measure. But he did not know that he was not permitted to monopolize any fortune that came his way unexpectedly. The custom of osusowake (sharing; literally, "giving away the hem") is deeply ingrained in the group-oriented Japanese society. In this society the self is not recognized by the group at all unless it is totally dissolved into that group. And if the self is not recognized by the group, it has no value. This is the main reason that the Western notion of self has great difficulty
gaining a foothold in Japan.
Let me give one more example of an individual "monopolizing" something from the Japanese point of view. Years ago, the wife of an American officer stationed at one of the bases of the occupation force won a ¥ 180,000 grand prize in the Officers' Club bingo game. At that time, ¥ 180,000 was equivalent to $500, a respectable sum even for an American. The family maid, who was Japanese heard of this and was eagerly expecting some sort of osusowake. One day, two days, and finally a week passed with no hint of a gift forthcoming. The officer's wife was happy to receive the windfall and went about the house in a very cheerful mood, but the maid didn't receive so much as a new blouse as her share of the prize. This bothered her immensely, and she complained to the other maids in the neighborhood: "The woman I work for is a real skinflint. She won that grand prize, but she hasn't bought me a single thing!" The maid was merely venting the frustration of her disappointed expectation, but as a matter of course her complaint traveled round and round and found its way back to her employers. She was dismissed summarily and found herself out on the doorstep with her bags in hand.
From the maid's point of view, as a member of the household she was entitled to her share of all the good fortune and happiness that came to the family. Of course, this was simply a sort of amae (dependence) on her part, owing to the traditional Japanese family system. However, the wife thought only that it was money she herself had won, and that was that. Justifying her firing of the maid, she said, "Whether it's a windfall or not, there's no reason to spend it unless we have to." In a different culture, osusowake is simply not a legitimate reason for spending money.
There may be some differences here in how Americans and Japanese view money, but basically what is operating is the difference between the Japanese and the American view of privacy. The vast majority of people in Japan think of privacy as not entering another's room uninvited, or not prying into the secrets of another. The broader meaning of privacy—as "a private sphere separated from the group" with regard to time, space, thought, belief, and fortune or misfortune—is alien to the Japanese. The people have always lacked any concept of privacy as something that attaches value to the individual identity. The reason, once again, is that at the bottom of their hearts the Japanese believe the self is made whole by being dissolved into the group.