ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters have touched upon the strong commitment of many Japanese to the achievement of their own personal goals, the developed sense of privacy, the importance attached to contractual relationships and the preference for written records. It was suggested that social exchange based upon the calculated maximization of self-interest was an important element in the interpersonal relations of many Japanese. One key to understanding these views of interpersonal relationships is the idea of scarcity. Those in countries with low population densities and an abundance of resources, like America or Australia, have tended to view their lives as a series of opportunities and their societies as having frontiers. In more recent years, however, the attention given to endemic poverty in the land of hope and to diminishing resources on a global scale has tended to foster even in those societies the notion that life is part of a zero-sum game played with others living in the same world. However, the Japanese have long held this view which has, as part of a cultural tradition, been encapsulated in the notion of higaisha ishiki (a kind of persecution complex) which emphasizes that Japan is a small island country with no resources, surrounded by a number of fairly hostile, or at least aggrandizing, other nations to which Japan must react as an integrated whole if it is to survive. Given these perceptions, Japanese leaders have cultivated a neo-Confucian or functional view
of the world which has emphasized a positivistic, logical-empiricist framework for manipulating not only the environment in which Japan finds itself, but Japanese society as well. This view, then, is linked with a highly developed ability to deal in abstracts.
