ABSTRACT
Many Japan specialists and industrial relations experts tend to perceive worker-employer consensus as a positive value, without seriously acknowledging that the systematic engineering of worker satisfaction is one of many forms of legitimation of worker exploitation and alienation. In work situations, for instance, the level old worker satisfaction in Japan is not as high as the 'learn-from-Japan' advocates tend to assert. Advocates of the 'learn-from-Japan' thesis give credit for Japan's success to a concentration of men of high calibre in the central government and large corporations. In order to investigate the possibility that the so-called Japanese group orientation may be a euphemism for the Japanese method of efficient manipulation, we examine some specific forms of social control in Japanese society. One must not overlook the possibility that Japan's so-called unique groupism is part of an authoritarian political system. Systematic control by management and officialdom is a characteristic of Japanese society.
