The Unlonely Japanese Crowd
KIRK, DONALD
The Unlonely Japanese Crowd Japan: The Fragile Superpower By Frank Gibney Norton. 347 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Donald Kirk New York Bureau Chief, Chicago "Tribune"; former Far East...
...The American first demands efficiency of a business...
...One feels, in the end, that Gibney, like so many others who have lived in Japan, does not wholly "understand" the country either, that he has been obliged to reach for cliches in order to conclude his book...
...In the course of discussing Japanese commercial psychology, Gibney criticizes the U.S...
...former Far East correspondent The title of Frank Gibney's Japan: The Fragile Superpower is intended not merely to encapsulate the hypothesis that Japan, though large, is vulnerable, but also to echo and refute another book on the subject, Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Fragile Blossom: Crisis and Change in Japan...
...This theme of communality pervades the book's subsequent treatment of such varied topics as home-life, the influence of women, business strategies, politics, and journalism...
...If the gods have fled from this country, leaving a question mark in the place of ultimate purposes or final destinies, "Japanism" nevertheless remains "capable of dignifying the simplest acts of daily living with a ritual that helps justify them...
...Elsewhere in Japan: The Fragile Superpower we see schoolchildren madly learning books by rote...
...It is a mark of this collectivistic society that most of its members expect to be in some way taken care of...
...His measure is the security and growth of his company...
...Japan's committee approach to business-posited on the inherent interdependency between all layers of society-often frustrates and enrages Americans...
...The Japanese wants permanence...
...Yet if he doesn't have all the answers, Gibney still manages to say a lot more, and in much better English, than have most of the experts on whose works we are too often forced to rely in our efforts to probe the mysterious essence of Japanese civilization...
...The amae syndrome,' Gibney says, "is pervasive in Japan...
...we hear "mandarin" experts evincing a common body of views on television...
...Always, as Gibney shows in pulling these diverse elements together, there is the uncanny and ubiquitous Japanese tendency for unity...
...we watch students engaging in violent demonstrations one moment and preparing for conventional careers the next...
...predilection for viewing private enterprise as "a numbers game, in the worst sense of the word," a system that subordinates "production and productivity" to the proverbial "bottom line...
...Gibney explains that "to the Japanese, traditionally, it has not been a matter of God seeing you, but of your society and, most especially, your particular group, seeing you...
...Writing about the economic crisis of 1973-74, he tells us the Japanese were again reminded that "their nation's only resources were people" and their "only equivalent to the deposits of oil or iron or granaries of wheat was their own unity of heart, head and hand...
...In a practical sense, the chapters on commerce and government are the most illuminating...
...In the opening chapters Gibney explains, more skillfully than anyone else I have heard or read, the peculiar "Japaneseness" of the Japanese...
...and with his facile writing style and refined sense of the ambiguities of the Japanese mind, Gibney has produced a highly readable introduction to a land about which most Americans, even well informed ones, continue to be woefully and dangerously ignorant...
...The majority in the unlonely crowd find their group existence not at all disturbing," he writes...
...Here are the old bromides, and they are too easy, too simplistic...
...Whatever its failings, their society has a unique cushion for coping with the practical problems of this era...
...Whereas Brzezinski, after a relatively brief stay, produced an abstract synthesis of what the nation is all about, Gibney, a long-time resident both as a Time correspondent and a businessman, emphasizes the concreteness of history and custom...
...But as Gibney points out, profits are not the "only yardstick of achievement" for the Japanese executive...
...Gibney seems to falter when he tries to relate customs and lifestyles to current events...
...Thus, "the impulse to goodness is the same among Japanese as others, but it is founded on the sanction and the approval of this group.' The concept of amae, a difficult-to-define term implying both love and dependency, is the name for the Japanese union of spiritualism and groupiness...
Vol. 58 • July 1975 • No. 15
