ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the specific characteristics of Japan's bureau-rationalizing ethos, and offers some historical contextualization. At the most abstract level, certain phenomena in Japan highlight how the individual self, personhood, and subjectivity are configured by massive bureaucratizing structures. In Japan, the impersonal demands of rationalization slot individuals into predetermined roles and assign everyone to a group. Japan's super-rationalized education-examination system leads to excessive dramatizations of self-worth. Indeed, the self is often considered to be part of a larger unit rather than regarded as a stand-alone, freefloating unit in a field of other individuals. Japan shows how the more intense and pervasive particular conditions of postmodernity become, that is, massive bureaucratic forces and demands, the more staginess and role-playing is required to participate in the various types of exchange that constitute the very fabric of society.
