It's All One Thing

I keep borrowing the title of Will Shetterly's blog, but that's only because it's true. Barbara O'Brien has an admirable post on the differences between Western and Chinese views of social patterns which strikes me as being right on target. Read it.

It resonates with me to some extent because, believe it or not, I've been reading a lot of manga this summer and find it very interesting that, in spite of the Western cast of the visuals in terms of facial features, coloring and the like (which is, of course, subject to wide variation), it is Japanese culture that filters through, and a large part of what O'Brien notes about the Chinese worldview is also apparent in the Japanese worldview. I think it's this sense of interconnectedness that lies at the root of Japanese formality: it's an indication of respect, a realization that what we do necessarily impinges on others, and a recognition of the need to recognize the boundaries between our spheres of action and those of others. Not so surprising in cultures that are much more communally-oriented than ours, and have historically been much more crowded than ours. It's a finely developed sense of the necessary balance between the individual and the group.

In those areas where we've adopted the Japanese model, we've manage to adopt those aspects that I can't consider all that positive. This is reflected most in our changing corporate culture: the tendency to bow to authority, the commitment to the company at the expense of one's own best interests (as an American would see them), the tendency to submerge our own identities in that of the team. (The context of Yukimura's Love Song for the Miserable, which will be the subject of an upcoming Review in Brief, is illustrative: Asada is terribly frustrated in his job, and when he does get into the division he wants, it's only as a temporary position until the division is outsourced. An American would bail; Asada sticks it out because it's his company, and they will decide where to use him. Makes me shudder.)

Food for thought.