the erosion of character

The important sense of character. Until recently people had character, and you felt that very strongly. . . . Their word is a commitment and a pledge, that you don't just drop when it becomes advantageous to yourself to do so. When they pledge their word they keep it. So I began to think that when people have nothing to identify themselves with they have character. This is a way poor people have a noble character. . . . A kind of inner strength, integrity. . . . There is a sense of character in people who have no other way in which to construct an identity. It seems to me now in our consumer culture we construct our identity with things. We construct our identity with collections, with garb, you know with little things we have in our home, our jazz collection or collection of cars or whatever.

--Alphonso Lingis, 'Foreign Bodies: Interview with Alphonso Lingis' (1996) in Encounters with Alphonso Lingis, eds. Alexander E. Hooke and Wolfgang W. Fuchs (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington, 2003), pp. 94-95.

*       *       *

I  have been thinking about this at length ever since I set my feet here, in the attempt to make sense of spineless, mindless behaviours whose recurrence and pervasiveness puzzle and, increasingly, depress me. And the more I get to know, in the skin and the bone, the workings of this society, the more I become convinced that there must be something in it that is set up to systematically nip in the bud any manifestation of character or integrity.

The education -- or perhaps I should say indoctrination -- system may partly account for the phenomenon, but it does not explain everything, since foreigners who have never been exposed to it all too often develop the very same two-facedness once they acquire a stake in Japan and become intent on surviving here, at whatever cost. A cynical adaptation strategy, no doubt.

A friend who was born here but spent many years abroad once told me that this insidious spiritlessness among so many younger generations (that is, those who did not experience the War and its hardships, having grown up in an affluent Japan) may be due to the fact that acquisitiveness and mass consumerism have taken the place of once time-honoured spiritual and personal values, leaving nothing but an appalling emptiness in their wake.

While I tend to be wary of over-simplifying and nostalgic explanations, there is indeed something -- a complex array of factors -- that is eroding this society at its very core and making any meaningful, trustworthy human relationships simply impossible here.

Unbreathable.

Japan is certainly not alone in this disturbing tendency, but is well ahead of most other societies in this respect. They will catch up, for sure, but where will Japan and the Japanese be then...?



NOTE (23:30): After reading the text above, a Japanese friend, one of those rare souls who has the capacity to look at his own culture with a critical eye and who doesn't take criticism personally, warns me that I need to be careful about my moral assumptions. That is to say, I cannot take for granted concepts such as character or integrity, because, he tells me, they simply do not exist, or at least have wholly distinct connotations, in a culture that does not value (and actually represses and frowns upon) 個性, individuality, the very core of Western moral philosophy (or, as Donald Richie once put it, 'Western man's pride and pain'). Even words such as 人格 (personality) and 尊厳 (dignity) are fairly recent in Japanese vocabulary, or so it seems.

And here we go again: how is it possible to find any common ground and establish long-lasting, satisfactory friendships here when what 'we', stuffy old Westerners, consider essential, integral (and therefore non-negotiable) parts of the concept of friendship -- character, trust, candour, constancy, generosity, loyalty e.g. -- just do not seem to exist in this culture?

.