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Hello all, I’m back to actually write about something, but first just so you all know, I’m going to announce the advent of the dancing monkey in Johnny’s links section. I will also explain the significance behind him because right now Johnny is the only one who knows why he has put a dancing monkey on the web page.

At my current job, as a project coordinator for an English domain name registration website that was spawned from a Japanese domain name registration website, I am responsible for everything from graphic and web design to marketing and public relations.

My boss at the company, has never been outside of Japan and has no business or marketing skills (he even displays an astounding lack of understanding of the business he is in); but because he started at a time when domain name service in Japanese was not available, and there was a rush for domain names because of the Internet boom, he was extreme confidence in his abilities and decision making skills. A while ago he came up with the idea of putting a cartoon monkey on the website as a sort of a mascot, and he was not to be deterred. I fought with him for about three hours about it, telling him that we cannot run a professional looking website with cartoon monkeys dancing around the page, and almost had to quit the job to convince him.

The idea was not a bad one … for Japan, where business to business company’s don’t hesitate to label their products with characters like Hello Kitty; but was a terrible idea for an English website. Everyone I tell the story to finds it amazing, but for me it’s not much different from other days. Johnny seems to have been particularly taken by the story, and has decided to put the dancing monkey on our page, because it will surely increase site traffic. Do you think it is a good strategy? Vote with the comment feature below this link.

Now we move on to the real subject of this post, my observations on modern Japanese culture. The Japanese have always been viewed as a culture that values the group over the individual, while the U.S. is said to value the individual over the group. When discussing differences between the U.S. and Japan this difference often comes up, but I don’t think it really matters. In a group oriented society, members work for the benefit of the group, thereby increasing the safety and security of most of the group. In an individual oriented society, members of a group look out for their own interests, which often means helping, whether directly or indirectly, the group. These differences do exist although I don’t think that they are as clearly defined as most people writing about Japan would like to believe.

I am interested in examining the group oriented society in Japan, not in how it compares to the U.S., but rather how modern group culture in Japan, compares to historical group culture in Japan. Consider a group as an organism with a developed nervous system, and the members as limbs of the organism. In any organism with an advanced nervous system, there are safety features built in that do not require the brain (the leaders of the group, or in many cases a consensus of the members) to order an emergency action for it to take place.

As an example, if you put your hand on a hot stove, the nerves on the surface of your hand are the first parts of your body to receive the warning that the stove is hot. When the nerves in your hand receive the message that you are touching something hot, they trigger you to jerk your hand back, a signal is then sent to the brain letting it now what happened. This is how group oriented culture seems to have worked in Japan during the samurai times. Members of the group thought for themselves, and made decisions with the good of the group in mind. Having the good of the group in mind did not mean that they asked the groups leadership what to do at every turn.

If you put your hand on a hot stove, and then waited for a signal to reach your brain, a decision to be made, and a signal to be sent back to your hand, you would have already been burned. This is how modern group culture in Japan seems to work, and is partially responsible, in my humble opinion, for Japan not having produced a single successful multinational corporation in the past ten years (with the possible exception of NTT Docomo whose success remains to be seen). Japanese students are taught to memorize from an early age, history classes consist of a series of names and dates to be remembered. There is no room for questions like – “What events do YOU THINK caused some event in history?” in a Japanese history class. Requests for further information about a subject are often discouraged. The entire goal of each stage of the education system is to be admitted to a high level school in the next stage. This culminates with the entrance exam for Universities. Being a university student is the time for relaxing and enjoying life. Very little studying takes place. Just getting into a good university is enough to get a good job. You are not expected to learn anything valuable at the university, as everything will be taught to you at the company.

This lack of critical thinking creates the situation I see in Japanese companies today. Employees seek approval for everything, and are expected to do so. There are people whose only job is to carry approval requests around to be stamped. Nothing can be decided without the approval of many, and no one wants or is expected to take responsibility for their decisions. This system makes it impossible for Japanese companies to react to anything quickly, and is, I think, one of the major problems with Japan today.

My message to Japan – LEARN TO THINK FOR YOURSELVES! This doesn’t mean that you have to be an individual. The nail that sticks up gets pounded down, but exercising a bit of common sense never hurt anybody.