The Interaction of Identity-Making and Stereotype

Not long ago I had occasion to remark the stereotype existing in many American minds of the Japanese initially, and later as nations like South Korea, Taiwan and China achieved Japan-like successes, other East Asians, as conservative, ultraconformist, overachievers--and the mixed feelings it produces in them. If they see East Asia as other and oppressive, those Americans also seem to envy that conservatism, that conformism, and very ready to chalk up that overachievement to those qualities.

In considering those images I tended to focus on one side of the matter--American misapprehension. Yet there is also, arguably, the way in which those cultures' elites tried to make their countries fit that model, and portrayed them that way to the outside world. Identity is a fundamentally conservative game, after all, and conservative elites define their countries in those terms they find desirable.* In Japan's case this was especially easy given that, in contrast with China, it never went Communist, or even had anything Westerners have been prone to recognize as a genuine bottom-up revolution. (Indeed, the highly conventional George Friedman and Meredith LeBard, in offering their analysis about Japan in Psychology Today, made much of this fact.) Thus they slight the history of dissent in Japan (a Bernd Martin in his comparison of Nazi Germany with World War II-era Japan, for example, pointedly doing so), figures like the novelist Takiji Kobayashi (tortured and killed by the country's secret police in 1933) simply not part of even relatively informed observers' image of the country.

The result is an interplay between the conservative prejudices of elites in one country, and in others.

* In considering the vision of Japanese society then prevailing in the United States it is well worth remembering that Japanese far rightist Shintaro Ishihara's book The Japan That Can Say No, which in many ways played into the prejudices discussed here (on both sides of the cultural line) was a New York Times bestseller in English translation.