The fundamental group unit in Japan is the family. All other groups mimic the family and incorporate its cohesion, exclusiveness, and hierarchical structure. These groups also take on a psychological version of the "blood ties" that unite a family. All institutions—offices, schools, and others—extend these psychological blood ties over their members, binding them together, helping them, relating them to each other, and finally, delimiting them. All these relationships take on kinship-like ninjo (human feeling) along with giri. At times this feeling for other people gets out of hand and becomes meddling in the affairs of others. Then the "ties of giri and ninjo" sometimes become a burden that weighs doubly on the individual.
However, a nationwide survey in 1981 showed that 69 percent of the Japanese people still considered giri and ninjo the most important factors in human relations, while 22 percent held "personal creed and belief" to be more important. The remaining 9 percent had no opinion. Giri-ninjo is an unwritten law which ensures the harmonious functioning of individuals in a group. It is sort of social contract modeled after the family.
In the West, contracts are often used to prevent interference between individuals, but in Japan giri-ninjo acts as the link between the self and others, a concept entirely appropriate to a homogeneous people organized along family lines. Giri-ninjo is the "natural contract" that the Japanese have lived by for centuries. The rules have never been committed to writing. To this day, few companies bind their employees with written contracts. The words and actions of employees are governed less by written regulations than by giri-ninjo, which each takes as his unspoken guide. For this reason I would like to describe Japan as the "on-tract" society—in contrast to the "contract" society of the West. People are governed by the spirit of on, the sense of social obligation which usually interrelates giri and ninjo.
For example, according to company rules and regulations, every worker has the right to take a certain number of paid vacation days. But if a certain worker were to use up all his allotted days for his own pleasure, he would acquire an unfavorable reputation in the company. Those who use up their entire paid leave, without considering that their fellow workers are still busily at work, come to be known as ingrates. Giri-ninjo governs the workers more than the formal rules and regulations of the company.
In contrast, when dealing with outsiders, the Japanese will apply contracts and regulations with a cold efficiency. Even so, if a familiarity gradually develops between the two parties, giri-ninjo will begin to replace contractual arrangements. For example, once a relationship has been established, there may no longer be a need for a formal contract between an author and his publisher. Or, as often happens in Japan, a contract may be canceled when both parties feel they can ignore the rules and defer to giri-ninjo in certain decisions. The nonlogical society has operated for hundreds of years by these principles. Even today, giri-ninjo guides and binds the Japanese with great strength.
Giri-ninjo also influences Japan's economic sector. The main reason for the present trade imbalance between Japan and the West is that it is extremely difficult for foreign traders to gain a foothold in the Japanese market, especially in the distribution sector. As pointed out earlier, exclusivity is a characteristic of all Japanese society, but wholesale distributors are even more exclusive than most Japanese groups. If you are an unknown face, you have almost no chance of finding a way in, no matter how long you talk about prices and goods. The distributors have this attitude toward other Japanese as well. If other traders try to enter their territory "from the side," there will be a long and bitter battle. Totally rejecting and repelling outsiders—whether from another country or another "fief"—is an old trait inherited from the mura (enclosed village society), where it was the main means of self-defense. Even today, if you enter a farming village, you will feel the full force of this utter exclusivity in operation.
The distribution sector of the economy is not unlike the farming village—it is the symbolic village of the enclosed merchant class. The merchants' cold rejection of those who try to cut in from the side (that is, as equal but unknown outsiders) is the often discussed "non-tariff barrier." Any independent operator who tries to enter another group from the side will run smack into this non-tariff barrier. Such a person must be sure to carry along a letter of introduction from a kao-yaku (person with social influence), or have a "fixer" arrange the meeting for him. Without this form of giri-ninjo, the effort is almost sure to end in failure, or at best to take an unbelievably long time. For this reason, the distribution sector in Japan is extremely inefficient compared with the highly efficient production sector.
Figure 4 summarizes the trade picture between Japan and the USA and between Japan and the European Economic Community (EEC).
As the arrows show, exports from America or the EEC have to make inroads into the inefficient distribution sector of Japan, while the efficient production sector of Japan is connected with the efficient distributors in the USA and the EEC. The consequences for the balance of trade are obvious.
The Double-Structured Self
Primitive societies lacked organized means of transportation and depended mainly on cattle and horses. Because mobility was so restricted, the largest groups they could form were limited to a few hundred, all related by blood ties. We can imagine that in such kinship groups individual egoism was a near impossibility and probably did not exist. Survival in primitive society depended on absolute loyalty to the group, a concept that was no doubt encouraged and strengthened by the society's leaders. While loyalty within the group was emphasized, animosity toward all other groups was the rule. This anti-outsider sentiment may have been the first sort of egoism—a group egoism, to be sure, but egoism nonetheless.
As society progressed and spread and the blood ties weakened, individual egoism began to develop. In the West individuals were permitted to express themselves within the group, and contracts and rules were developed to control this social interaction and to prevent conflict among various individual egos. In contrast, in Japan conflict was avoided by the abandonment of individualism and the dissolution of the self into the group—that is, the encouragement of wa, or harmonious concord. Social progress was achieved through the ties of the group. Nevertheless, group-consciousness can never completely eliminate the individual ego. The primeval group egoism and the individual egoism that came after it exist together even in Japan. Each individual ego is at times under the sway of the group ego, and at other times acts on its own commands. Thus each self has a double nature, a two-layered structure. The one is tatemae (public front) and the other honne (private intention).
In most cases, the group ego and the individual ego run along the same track. Problems arise when a person tries to fulfill his private desires under the guise of the group will. This we may call "the double structure of the self" which is partly exposed in the "group-directed individualism" described in Chapter 1. Let us continue investigating this double nature with some examples.