Even in their 'unpredictability' these chaps can be depressingly predictable.
It seems that friendship for them is some kind of ledger book, where favours gained and given are regularly and painstakingly tallied.
Everything is subordinated to the strictest calculations.
Anything offends their fragile egos, anything makes them change their minds and loyalties, anything un-balances their damn books.
If at least they told it loud and clear or spat it out, for God's sake. But no. These folks are so repressed that they pile up resentment and cowardly slam the door in your face when you least expect it (well, not anymore really; you become so used to their duplicity that they no longer catch you off-guard).
A gross, gross mistake then to expect things like candour, integrity or character from people who seldom look inside themselves to discern right from wrong. Individual conscience and guilt just do not seem to form part of their moral landscape. Facades are everything.
The other day an expat friend told me that their murky mindset is neither right not wrong but just not right for him, personally. Instead, I would rather conclude that our moral worlds are just way too different -- that we perceive the world in radically distinct, incommensurable ways.
With few, very few exceptions, no common ground is possible, alas. (Nor do most of them have the time or interest outside their regimented routines and habits of thought to establish any.)
Yet I cannot say I have closed the book(s) on the Japanese, because I have never kept any books from the very outset.
'Friendship' accountancy is simply not my cup of tea. I won't let go of what is for me the last stronghold of uncalculatedness, spontaneity and freedom, whatever the cost.
For the sake of sanity.
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