CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
How Westernized Are the Japanese?
“I DETEST THE NEPOTISM THAT pervades Japanese academic life,” says the distinguished historian. “Young scholars should make their careers on their merits and not on their family ties. That’s why I married my four daughters to the ablest and brightest of my doctoral students. This way I could do what Japanese tradition expects and place my sons-in-law into the best of professorships—and I could do it with a good conscience for I know they deserve it.”
“We are completely Western in this outfit,” says the successful independent movie producer in his modernistic Tokyo studio. “We even have a woman vice president in charge of finance and administration. But, Professor Drucker, could you act as her go-between and find a husband for her in the United States? She is thirty now and should be married soon.”
“It would be wonderful if you’d find an American husband for me and arrange the marriage,” chimes in the attractive woman VP. “No Japanese will marry a women’s libber like myself, who is a professional and executive.” “Does it have to be an arranged marriage?” I ask. “Definitely,” answers the women’s libber, “the other way is much too risky.”
“Young Ohira will be the chief executive of this company in ten to fifteen years,” I had been told repeatedly by the chairman of one of the leading high-technology firms. But when I inquire about Ohira on my latest Japanese trip, there is embarrassed silence. “We had to let him go,” the chairman says. “He is an oldest son and his father, who owns a small wholesale business in Kobe, demanded that he take over the family company. We tried to talk the old man out of it, but he is stubborn and so we had to let Ohira go.”
“Did he want to leave?” I ask. “Of course not, but he had no choice. He could never have been promoted if he had stayed. Executives, after all, have to set an example—and in Japan an oldest son is still expected to follow his father in his business.”
The young woman who interpreted for me at a press conference asks whether she and her biochemist husband might come and get my advice. Their problem? Interpreters are very well paid and so the young woman makes more than her husband, who, under Japanese seniority rules, won’t be a full professor for six more years. Then their positions will be reversed. He’ll make about three times what he makes now; and she plans to take time out to have children. But in the meantime both his and her family disapprove and nag.
“Does it bother you that the wife has the larger income?” I ask. “Not in the least,” they both answer. “Then why do you have to tell your families?” I say. They beam, tell me I’ve saved their marriage, and thank me profusely. “Did you really need me to tell you that?” I ask. “Of course not,” they say, “but this is Japan; to do anything unconventional you have to have a sensei [master] tell you so—and we were pretty sure what you’d tell us when we came for your advice.”
There is thus a good deal to support the “old Japan hands” in their contention that the Japanese are Westernized “from nine to five” only. It is certainly a much safer assumption in dealing with Japanese than the advice I heard a Swiss banker give to his successor as the bank’s representative in Tokyo: “Treat them as if they were American MBAs with German-sized attaché cases,” let alone the wondrous description by a group of European Common Market economists that is quoted up and down Japan with mixed amusement and indignation: “The Japanese are economic animals who live in rabbit hutches.”
“For twenty years,” says an experienced executive recruiter, “I have placed Japanese executives with Western companies. The fi rms that have been successful in attracting and holding truly able Japanese are the ones who know that they’ll behave like Japanese no matter how impeccable their English or how much they prefer whiskey to sake.”
Indeed the Japanese—except “from nine to five”—may well have become more “Japanese” and less “Western” these last few years.
Ten or fifteen years ago, for instance, performances of the Noh—the traditional and stylized dance-opera—played to empty houses, with the few spectators mainly elderly men who came in, one suspected, because the place was air-conditioned. When I went to a Noh performance in June of 1980 it was sold out, with every seat taken, mostly by professionals or young executives by their looks.
But things are rarely that simple—and never in Japan. Consider, for instance:
The twenty-year-old daughter of old friends—we have known her since she was a toddler—tells us that she is majoring in philosophy. “Last term I took a nifty seminar reading Plato,” she says. “Do you have good translations of Plato into Japanese?” I ask. “We don’t read translations,” she answers, quite indignant. “We read Plato in Greek. And this term we are reading Kant and Schopenhauer, in German. And I am also taking a very interesting course in Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Symbolic Logic, in English, of course.”
“And what are you doing for fun?” I ask. “But this is the fun,” she answers. “Of course I also have to prepare myself for a job and for earning a living, and so I am doing judo. I got the Black Belt eighteen months ago and am now studying for the instructor’s exam. I am already adviser to the judo club at my university and hope the university will hire me as a judo teacher when I graduate next year. Don’t smirk,” she cries. “I am in dead earnest. Japanese girls are now studying medicine and accounting and even engineering. But these are all imports from the West. To be accepted as equals our women will have to make it in something purely Japanese—and what could be more Japanese than judo?”
Miyeko, whom we first knew as a college sophomore who interpreted for us on a hiking and camping trip, visits us with her six-year-old daughter and her husband, a middle-level executive in a big trading company. She confides that they both very much want to have another child but have decided against it.
“It might be a boy and, of course, that’s what we’d hope for,” Miyeko says. “And then the firm would not send us overseas or would demand that I stay in Japan with the children and send him alone. You know that a Japanese boy has to grow up in Japan ever to be accepted as a Japanese. And my husband is in line, just now, for New York or Los Angeles.” “Why do you want so badly to go abroad?” I ask. “Are the career opportunities better?”
“On the contrary,” answers her husband. “If I stay in the home office I have a good chance to be in top management in ten years; if I go overseas I’ll be tagged as a foreign specialist and never make it. But that’s a cheap price to pay for the freedom one has outside of Japan. I can’t tell you how much Miyeko and I enjoyed the seven years I was posted to Dusseldorf when we could go together in the evening to concerts or to the theater and could go hiking and camping on weekends. Now Japanese convention demands that we live with Miyeko’s parents and they expect us to look after them on weekends. And I never see my wife and daughter. I have to sit and drink in a Ginza bar every night till eleven during the week, either with my bosses or with my subordinates. You can’t imagine how sick and tired Miyeko and I are of all this never-ending Japanese togetherness. And all my colleagues who have served overseas feel the same way.”
There is a revival under way of the old and charming Japanese custom of having one really good and expensive piece of art serve as the sole decoration of the small and bare Japanese apartment. But what the young couples now buy when they start out in their own home is rarely Japanese art; they buy a Picasso etching or pre-Columbian pottery from Mexico or Peru, or a miniature from Moghul India, or a terra-cotta figurine supposedly found in an Etruscan tomb.
When, on a hot June Sunday, I made my way through a traffic jam of strollers on the beaches south of Tokyo, there were, it seemed, the same young families—father, mother, and two children—that had been there twenty years earlier. Twenty years ago the father strode ahead, carrying nothing; the mother followed, dragging one infant, carrying the other, and weighted down with paraphernalia. Now it was the young woman who walked ahead holding the older child by the hand, with the husband following, carrying the baby, the portable TV, the ice bucket, the sand pails and spades, the lunch boxes, the balloons, and the blow-up animals. Up and down the beach road, cutting in and out of the stalled traffic, roared young men on motorcycles picking up single girls. But lo and behold, there suddenly appeared a brigade of young women on motorbikes looking for young men to pick up.
According to Japanese folklore one is reborn on one’s sixtieth birthday and starts life all over again as a baby. What then did the Empress of Japan choose as most appropriate to this uniquely Japanese tradition when she picked a gift for her husband, the Emperor, on his eightieth (i.e., second twentieth) birthday last spring: an electric razor!
(1980)