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Perceived as somehow different, Japan has long seemed to require interpretation. It is assumed that the country and its culture is not to be comprehended without some sort of mediation, that before the place can be properly understood a theoretical toolkit is needed—models, metaphors, paradigms.

This seems strange. Few other places are thought to need such explication. Yet, one still hears about mysterious, enigmatic Japan though few have ever referred to, say, mysterious, enigmatic Luxembourg.

There are, to be sure, reasons for this, among these that Japan only relatively recently—some century and a half ago—joined what is sometimes called “the family of nations.” Before that it was a hermit empire, closed and by nature unknown. It was perceived as different because it was not a family member. Another reason, however, is that Japan itself early learned to value its singularity; being unique, being difficult to understand—these are qualities of which much can be made during “family” squabbles.

Due to the perceptions of those outside the country and the inclinations of those inside it, there is now an accumulation of well over a century’s worth of interpretations—a whole chronology of attempts. A short perusal of these strata indicates some of the shapes that Japan has assumed in the eyes of others and of itself, those levels of “appreciation” upon which apprehension is even now based.

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A major assumption has always been that each approach presumes a nearer accuracy even though these various interpretations overlap. At the same time prudence is advised. Lafcadio Hearn’s early endeavor is cautiously titled Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation. Perhaps this initial discretion—an attempt rather than a certainty—is the result of even earlier explanations having been so reckless.

One of the first was discovered after Commodore Perry had “opened up” the country. The contents were carelessly examined and the first paradigm was minted. Japan was to be seen as the opposite to the West. The country was what one of the earlier writers called a topsy-turvy land, one in which everything was upside down, a state to be found either disconcerting or delightful. Here is Mark Twain on the subject: “Their coin is square instead of round; their workmen pull the saw and plane, instead of pushing; they begin dinner with tea and confections and close with the heavy work; they love turnips and disallow potatoes.”

In his Things Japanese, one of the first serious attempts to describe Japan to the West, Basil Hall Chamberlain has a whole section on “Topsy-turvydom” in which he lists examples and then says, “It was only the other day that a Tokyo lady asked the present writer why foreigners did so many things topsy-turvy, instead of doing them naturally, after the manner of her country-people.”

If we see others as upside down then, perforce, we see ourselves as right side up. The ascribed abnormality of others serves to reinforce the idea of our own normality. As Ian Littlewood has reminded us, “Without East there is no West, without natives there are no sahibs.” This could, of course, cut two ways. Mark Twain could be affirmed in his assumptions and Chamberlain’s Tokyo lady could be affirmed in hers.

Further dualistic anomalies were sought for and found. Japan was shortly discovered to be paradoxical, a country which was a contradiction in terms. The people were quaint, childlike, and polite on one hand, but militaristic, cruel, and treacherous on the other; they were artistic but they were also the yellow peril.

Sir Rutherford Alcock, an early diplomat and theorizer, could summarize his account with “Japan is essentially a country of paradoxes and anomalies. There all—even familiar things—put on new faces and are curiously reversed.”

Fifty years later this early attempt at interpretation was still around. Ruth Benedict in her 1946 Chrysanthemum and the Sword (a dualistic title) says that “The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite.” One hears echoes even later. Peter Tasker in 1987 was writing, “They are the hardest-working hedonists, the lewdest prudes, the most courteous and cruelest and kindest of people.”

The success of this particular model was that it was based upon an unquestioned assumption: the duality of all reality, the necessity of “either/or” above “both.” This is how most Westerners structure their lives and it is therefore often the paradigm of choice whether it actually fits its subject or not.

That it does not became apparent as later generations of foreign observers looked more closely. Or rather, it fits us all too well. We are, every one of us, creatures of paradox and it is only wishful thinking that finds us consistent. And so, just as Japan was not really to be fully described in presuming to find it upside down, so it was eventually seen as something more than an illustration of rampant paradox.

Yet one paradigm does not succeed another. All the earlier models continue to exist and the new is simply added to the pile. Ruth Benedict offers a sample of this strata, and even an attempt as structurally sophisticated as Roland Barthe’s Empire of Signs held that contrary to Japan with its elegant suimono, “for us in France, clear soup is poor soup.”

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A further refinement came with the next model—one we might place as encountered during the first half of the twentieth century. This retained duality but the emphasis was different. Japan was now Land of Contrasts, a place that naturally, even intentionally, found room for paradox. Old Japan and New Japan were thus harmonized. As I myself described it elsewhere: Old Shinto shrines on the top of new high-rises, white-robed acolytes on motorbikes, and ancient zaibatsu executives reclined in their new steel-and-glass headquarters.

Unlike the primitive topsy-turvy paradigm, this one was initially convincing since each part of it was apparent. There really were towering skyscrapers, there actually were cherry-blossomed temples. Further, it was somewhat more benign in intent than had been the insulting topsy-turvy construct. Japan had commanded world respect by winning its war with Russia. This was reflected in admitting difference and refusing to consign blame. However, by focusing our attention solely on these extremes (New and Old), this model left out what was in between, which is most of Japan.

It also taught us to look only for stereotypes. Through these it could then suggest that Japan was a hybrid—interesting perhaps and certainly good at winning wars but not sensible, solid-all-the-way-through, like, say, England or the United States. That there is something dodgy about hybrids is a common Western assumption, be it mixed blood or mixed cultures. They seem to threaten our invented boundaries and hence our definition of ourselves.

One is familiar with this way of thinking, particularly in regards to Asia. It is our aged friend, Orientalism. Edward Said has noted that this construction insists that in order for the West to see itself as rational, humane, superior, it is necessary to create an East that is irrational, undeveloped, inferior. If this cannot be made to entirely apply (as it cannot in the case of Japan), then this part of the East is seen in terms of being upside down, reversed, bifurcated, or shaped in other forms of opposition.

To define by difference rather than similarity is common to us all. For us to become truly human in our own eyes we must have an alien against whom to measure ourselves. A late and notorious attempt to define self through the creation of just such an alien species was that of the then–French prime minister, Edith Cresson, who in 1991, comparing the Japanese to ants, went on to say that “we cannot live like that . . . we want to live like human beings, as we have always lived.”

The Japanese are thus not human beings. This indeed is one of the burdens of these various paradigms, though one not usually stated with such clarity. More subtly the proposition of Japan as a land of contrasts provides the same context—though in truth we are all lands of contrast in that none of us maintain the solid-all-the-way-through existence we think we want.

The simplicity of this paradigm and its consequent popularity soon, however, exposed its limited nature. Things were not as simple as a collage-like juxtaposition of old and new suggested. Something else was occurring. A new model had to account for this.

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Hence the fairly recent concept of continuity within change, an organic model: Japan as a place where the new and old could live equitably together; under all the modern veneer lives on this ageless core. Its appearance cannot be dated but it sounds post–WWII. Japan’s talent at winning wars had been exhibited and found wanting. One could explain away the binary model (peaceful/warlike) by situating them in temporal sequence—something the same but different.

This became for a time the standard model, let us say from 1945 until the fall of the Theory of Japan’s Uniqueness at the end of the century. It was often wheeled out, inspected, and approved. Also, it was a favorite of that group of writers now somewhat unkindly called the Chrysanthemum Club. It offered an organic recipe that made differences somehow more “natural,” a suggestion found in many volumes. One of the qualities of paradigms is that they reassure—until they reveal themselves as inadequate.

By now—let us generalize and say circa 1975—so many models had accumulated that a name for them became necessary. This the Japanese willingly provided—Nihonjin-ron, studies of the uniqueness of being Japanese. Americans wrote them, Englishmen wrote them, everyone wrote them, including of course the Japanese themselves, who had, after all, just as much interest in defining themselves through boundaries as did everyone else.

Some of these were very strange. Japan was somehow feminine, while the West somehow masculine; the Japanese had different brains, or longer intestines; the Westerner is an inventor, the Japanese merely an adapter. One still hears this latter. As Ian Littlewood says, “In our models of culture exchange, the West figures as virile originator, Japan as wily imitator.” As though such “imitation” is not general, as though this is not the way that ideas move around the world, as though it is not otherwise known as progress.

Some authors excluded almost as much as they included. Geoffrey Gorer is said to have believed that the most important and most consistent element in being Japanese was an early emphasis upon sphincter control and that this “drastic toilet training” solely lay at the bottom of the value system of Japan. Thus, he gathered, there is no concept of right and wrong, only the concept of doing the right thing at the right time.

Others followed. One (Weston La Barre) found the Japanese “the most compulsive people in the world’s ethnological museum.” Another (H. M. Spitzer) discovered that Japanese culture as a whole indicates the symptoms of obsessive/compulsive neurosis. Still another (James Clark Moloney) thought that Japanese society was “a potential incubator of paranoid schizophrenia.”

Of these and other examples scholar Hiroshi Wagatsuma has cautioned that “Most of what has been and still often is discussed as Japanese psychology or mentality, and frequently as ‘national character,’ is largely the product of impressionist description, stereotyping, or methodologically inadequate approaches.”

But foreigners were not alone in these attempts. They received support from the Japanese themselves who by this time had a Nihonjin-ron industry of their own up and running. Here there are myriad examples to choose among. As indication, I will merely mention the most translated, Dr. Takeo Doi, who explained much through such single-engine models as his study of amaeru (confident expectation of favor) as the skeleton key to Japanese culture.

There is in all of these attempts a tendency to see similar group behavior as expression of common personality structure. But such similar behavior patterns are often the result of mere conformity to social norms. If one tries to attribute group behavior to any supposed “national character,” one falls into psychological reductionism. Which is indeed just what the various Nihojin-ron do.

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Perhaps consequently, there is the need to continually update the necessary model, the permanent desire for a new and improved product. Out of the welter of the Nihonjin-ron there emerged, sure enough, a fresh model.

This was purely structural in nature, the country seen as controlled through its own agreed-upon polarities. There was uchi and omote (back and front, inside vs. outside); there was ninjo and giri (one’s own feelings vs. obligations owed to society); there was honne and tatemae (the real motive hiding between the stated reason). And there were many other, all of them moving parts in this latest definition. One of the features of this model was that it used Japanese terms to define the Japanese and was hence perceived as being somehow more “fair.”

Being structural, it fit in with its times academically (we are now in the 1970s–early 1980s) and with its quasi-scientific phraseology it was seen as intellectually respectable. That it offered the mere skeleton of a society rather than a reflection of that society itself—all bones, no muscles or skin—bothered, for a time, no one.

Eventually, however, as the Nihonjin-ron were beginning to lose their adherents, particularly those who were more able to compare real Japanese to the increasingly diagrammatic models held up to them, there rose the need for a newer, more complete model. Back to the drawing board.

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Interpretations of Japan will yet continue as the country evolves, but with the erosion of the traditional accelerating at such a rate there will eventually be little to mark the “difference” that Japan is traditionally thought to have exhibited, since the country itself will be little different.

It is problematic that any country can ever be truly “defined” by any other, since it remains true that any difference is assumed as a difference from whoever is doing the defining. I have myself in my fifty years learned that if Japan were to rid itself of all those things that are to me puzzling, illogical, distasteful, it would no longer be Japan at all. Perhaps in the future a perusal of these different models and paradigms will create emotions not only of indignation but also of nostalgia.

—2001