Social Hazard

The category of this hazard has much to do with the social characteristic of Japan, which is based on the general behavior of the Japanese people. You may think that this is one of the most interesting points in understanding Japan. There are a lot of books on the social sides of Japan on the bookstore’s shelves today. I want to leave detailed explanations and elaborate analyses to such special books. Even on the pages of travel guide books, you can read this type of topics. As a role of this book, to write about the Japanese social characteristic from the viewpoint of risk, social differences are also influential to people’s behavior. They could sometimes put strangers in big troubles.

As it’s often pointed out, one of the most outstanding features in the Japanese society is group-oriented behaviors. This seemingly comes from its homogenous nation. The social behavior reflects the Japanese features in many fields. There was once a catchword going around created by a pair of comedians “Not be afraid of crossing a road against the red traffic light if doing together”.

Companies are also the places where this phenomenon of the group-oriented behavior is well expressed. In decision-making process, for example, there is a popular system that employees participate in decision-making process with all consents called “Ringi”. When a project is proposed by an employee or top manager, the draft that contains the plan’s scheme and profitability analysis is circulated from the employees in charge of the project to top managers so that everybody involved agrees on the decision. As a sign of agreements, they usually stamp Hanko(name stump) on the paper of Ringi. In a positive way, it aims to make the project work well under the open system with agreements. But in a negative way, this is the system that no one take responsibilities for just in the case of failure.

Turning to the streets, you can sometimes witness the strange phenomena in youngster’s fashion. Leg warmer, for example, is one of them. Almost every school girls wore leg warmers on their legs for a period. Some have stopped that partly because of school’s restrictions not to let them wear, partly because of the disgusting feeling about the same long-lasting fashion with many other girls. The fashion, however, had been a big boom to become one of the social phenomena in Japan. This is a symbolical one to explain the social characteristics of the Japanese people. Once the fashion was introduce in media such as female magazines, young women jump on the fashion. And then, not to be delayed for the new fashion, they started doing the same fashion. As here is an important point, the actual fact is that they do so not because they think themselves it’s fashionable but because they don’t want be different from other school girls (superficially). They even fear the scenario that they are bullied at school. This sentiment exists deeply in the minds of even the adults. Many Japanese still believe that “a sticking stake is hit”.

You might be perplexed not only by the behaviors of the Japanese people but also by the ways of expressing oneself. There is an unique manner of conveying the meanings to others. It’s “Tatemae and Honne”. "Tatemae" is a stated reason to keep one’s public position. Contrarily "Honne" is a true intention. The Japanese people often communicate with others by using both of the expressions. To keep their own positions in the public, they express something different from the true intentions. This communication style is not a lie but the reluctant tendency of the Japanese people to reveal true intention in public.

Related to Tatemae and Honne, there is inside and outside mentality in the minds. The Japanese tend to differentiate mostly in the parts of Honne between the people in the same group and the others. Once a person belongs to a group, he or she becomes open-heart to the colleagues. To the people in the other groups, on the other hand, they tend to change the attitudes. This mentality is often seen in the politics. The long ruling political party, the Liberal Democratic Party has several factions while each politician gathers in principal under the same policies for the party. They usually do political activities by the groups. The posts as ministers are doled out in accordance with the number of the groups. A large faction has a big influence to the LDP or cabinet. So it's no exaggeration that the political fate of the Japanese politicians depends on which faction they belong to. Furthermore, if a politician wants to become the Prime Minister, it depends on how many colleagues the person gathers. These group activities are also seen in the opposition parties. Despite the system seems to be collapsing since Japan welcomed a reformer or Junichiro Koizumi as the Prime Minister, it still exists in the political world and in any organization in Japan.

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