smaller than Montana, but over 70 percent of the country is mountainous. Ever
since people began inhabiting the islands, the rugged topography has forced the
majority of the population to live communally in the narrow valleys and along
the few coastal plains, where today just over 126 million people are crowded
together.
Japanese“premodern village life was a community enterprise”^77 where the people
depended on mutual assistance to conduct labor-intensive wetland (rice) cultivation.
As Reischauer and Jansen point out,“Probably such cooperative efforts over the cen-
turies contributed to the notable Japanese penchant for group identification and
group action.”^78 Group affiliation was also inculcated by the feudal government orga-
nization and class system, discussed above, which lasted until the 1868 Meiji Restora-
tion. Group orientation continues to guide contemporary Japanese society, where
one’s status is based more on factors like schools attended, profession, or employer
than on individual achievement.
Due to the necessity of group cooperation in early Japanese village life, social
ostracism (murahachibu), or the threat thereof, became a form of punishment.
Unlike early U.S. settlers, whose lives were characterized by frontier semi-
isolation, self-reliance, and independence, Japanese farmers were heavily reliant
on other villagers. The cooperative demands of wetland cultivation made an iso-
lated existence essentially impossible. As a result, exclusion became“apowerful
sanction throughout rural [Japanese] society”^79 to maintain order and punish devi-
ance. To some degree, various forms of social exclusion remain a means of social
reprimand in modern Japan.^80
History has also shaped current Japaneseattitudes on contemporary national
security issues. Motivated by its inability to resist incursions by Western powers in
the mid-1800s, following the Meiji Restoration, Japan began instituting compre-
hensive national programs to modernize itself in the image of the United States
and European nations. Along with economic industrialization, educational restruc-
turings, and social transformation, Japanese leaders sought to build a powerful mili-
tary capable not only of defending the island nation but also of providing Tokyo a
voice in international affairs. This led to imperialistic expansion into Asia in the
1930s and ultimately entry into World War II against the Western Allied Powers.
At the end of the war, Japan lay in ruins with industrial and military capacity vir-
tually nonexistent. Almost one hundred years of modernization and industrializa-
tion efforts had been comprehensively and completely destroyed. However,
drawing on their cultural traits of discipline, the ability to endure hardship
(gaman), and a strong sense of national identity, the Japanese launched a wide-
reaching program of reconstruction, aided by Allied Occupation Forces. By the
mid-1980s Japan had become one of the world’s leading economies. The historical
memory of World War II, especially theimpact of the atomic bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and its aftermath left the Japanese with a strong feeling
of pacifism and a reluctance to engage in military operations not directly related to
national self-defense.^81
The primary significance of this summary of Japan’spastshouldbesomewhat
transparent. The historically based cultural characteristics discussed in this section,
such as group orientation, perseverance, hierarchy, social predictability, etc., have
endured in Japan for centuries. They have guided the social organization and con-
duct of the Japanese people through periods of prosperity and of devastation, and
they continue to form an integral part of Japanese cultural values.Contemporary Social Issues 179Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).