‘Internationalizing’ : Japan--New Waves Lap at Insularity

A middle-level executive of Fuji Xerox, a joint-venture subsidiary of Xerox Corp., recently approached Naomi Horoiwa, who is in charge of the firm’s training and development, with a complaint about studying English.

It was not the difficulty of the language that bothered him, Horoiwa said, but that he feared “the loss of his identity as a Japanese.”

She said he told her, “I feel less Japanese as I become more fluent in English.”

The businessman’s complaint, related at a recent symposium here, is symptomatic of a subject much on the minds of Japanese today--the internationalization of their country.

Now Political Necessity

Politicians, businessmen, bureaucrats, educators and the news media have all addressed the issue, largely out of the widespread recognition that a better balance in economic dealings with the rest of the world, a more global approach, is now a political necessity.

One upshot has been a kind of national confession that Japan, for all its success as a world trader, for all the travel undertaken by Japanese tourists, remains an unusually insular nation.

Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone is a prime mover in the internationalization movement. He told Parliament last Jan. 27 that “the very structure of our economy” must be internationalized so that Japan can “maintain harmony within the world economy.”

For many years, according to Jiro Tokuyama, an adviser to the Mitsui Research Institute, anything Japan did was “virtually meaningless to the United States and Europe.” This was when Japan accounted for only 1% or 2% of the world’s production.

‘A Private Club’

“Japan,” Tokuyama said, “created a private club, with its own rules and regulations and its membership limited to Japanese.”

But now, he said, with Japan’s gross national product accounting for 11% of world production, “Europe, Asia and the United States are all complaining about the ‘private club’ and demanding that it be opened up.”

Nakasone and others have made it clear that they are talking about more than just opening markets. Indeed, internationalization has become a sort of buzzword for advocates of all kinds of reform, from shortening the Japanese work-week to restructuring the entire Japanese economy--even changing Japan’s traditional ways of thinking.

Shintaro Abe, a former foreign minister who is now a leading candidate to succeed Nakasone, told Parliament last January: “I must emphasize anew the need to radically revise our thinking.”

The Ministry of International Trade and Industry and the Economic Planning Agency have prepared special reports on internationalization, and a broad series of steps are being taken, among them:

--The Ministry of Education has set guidelines for reforming the educational system “to encourage development of an international perspective . . . and promote education in a way conducive to Japan’s contribution to the international community.”

--The ministry announced plans to increase to 1,000--four times the current number--the number of native English speakers hired to teach English in junior and senior high schools next year and then triple that number within 10 years. The ministry also plans to increase the number of foreign students in Japan to 100,000 by the year 2000; there are now 15,000.

--Prefectural (state) governments, which once resisted foreign investments, are now trying to attract them.

--Even the Construction Ministry has gotten into the act, by announcing plans to modify more than 400,000 road signs throughout the country to help foreign drivers who cannot read Japanese.

--The business community is joining in, and large corporations are beginning to hire foreigners to work at their headquarters in Japan. “Internationalization training,” aimed at changing the attitudes of Japanese employees, has been undertaken by department stores and trading and manufacturing firms. Even IBM Japan, a company that one would think would be international by definition, has such a program.

--Safety and product standards enforced by a variety of government ministries are being revised to bring them into line with international norms.

Openings of the Past

The current push for internationalization is not the first for Japan. Way back in the 7th Century, Japan sent “cultural missions” to China that brought back artisans and knowledge of everything from writing to city planning.

There was another surge of internationalization in the mid-19th Century, when Japan ended nearly 300 years of voluntary isolation from the rest of the world. At that time, modernization was the goal.

A third round began after World War II, forced in large measure by American occupation authorities.

Today, in some ways, Japan is more international than the United States. Few countries have been more receptive than Japan has to foreign ideas and foreign technologies.

World history is taught here with more balance than in American classrooms, where Asia is usually given short shrift. More books are translated from foreign languages than in the United States, which has twice the population: 1,968 compared with 1,892, according to the latest U.N. figures.

Foreign singers who do not perform in the Japanese language often achieve massive popularity here, as do foreign movies that require subtitles.

Interested in Foreign News

Eighty percent of the Japanese polled by the Economic Planning Agency said they are interested in foreign news, and the press gives them far more of it than Americans get. For example, the Kochi Shimbun, a newspaper published in a remote city with a population of only 302,000 on the island of Shikoku, devotes 13.9% of its news space to foreign news, compared with 9% for the Los Angeles Times, according to a survey by the Institute of the Japan Newspaper Publishers Assn.

Still, according to Tokuyama, the Mitsui Research Institute man, all this leaves the Japanese a long way from being internationalized.

“Yes, Japanese do have more knowledge about the rest of the world,” he said, “but knowing facts, like being able to reply to questions on a quiz program, is different from being able to interpret what they mean.”

Internationalization means different things to different people. A Mexican student here said she thinks that “for most Japanese, to be international means to speak English and wear French clothes--that’s all.”

Two out of three Japanese polled by the Economic Planning Agency think of internationalization as developing more contacts with the United States, Europe and Australia. Only one in four thinks of other countries in Asia.

Strong, Weak Points Listed

To the huge Matsushita Electric Co., it has meant, among other things, a re-examination of the Japanese character. A team of middle-level executives set up to study internationalization--one of 15 such Matsushita teams--polled workers and neighbors and produced an unusually frank list of the strong and weak points of ordinary Japanese.

Diligence, self-sacrifice, obedience, intelligence, love of country, etiquette and flexibility were listed as strong points. The weak points: exclusivity and insularity, one-dimensional, self-centered thinking, observing others before forming one’s own opinion, lack of philosophy, making a fuss over small things, ability to act only in groups.

Nakasone said he wanted internationalization to produce “people who can contribute to the international community even as they respect the individual, preserve Japan’s cultural heritage and take pride in being Japanese.”

But that is about like asking the Japanese to split their personalities.

Takashi Hosomi, president of the Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund, once wrote in an essay: “Although we Japanese are very upright as individuals, we tend to behave egoistically once we become members of a group. When Japanese form a group, they lose their individuality.”

Lack of Contact a Factor

In values and opinions, diversity is scorned by most Japanese, Hosomi said. “Each nation,” he said, “has its own individuality or character, and Japanese must learn to respect it, or friction will not diminish.”

To some extent, Japan’s problem can be traced to a lack of contact with foreigners. Masato Sato of Sony’s personnel division attributes what he calls a “foreigner complex” to the inability of most Japanese to speak a foreign language. Hiring foreigners at Sony’s headquarters, he said, has solved the problem completely--although others might disagree.

“Japanese tend to be afraid of people who are different,” said Prof. Hideo Sato of Tsukuba University, who said he is “just now getting over the cultural shock” of returning to Japan four years ago after 14 years in the United States.

Susumu Yamagami of the Justice Ministry’s Immigration Bureau said that Japanese are “weak in trying to communicate with a person with a different nature,” adding that without ishin-denshin (Japanese-style telepathy), “we can’t discuss things easily.”

Ryozo Sunobe, a former vice foreign minister and a member of the prime minister’s educational reform commission, said: “In the Japanese way of thinking, there is a feeling that opinions must fall within a fixed standard. . . . Persons who express ideas outside that standard are made to feel uncomfortable or are excluded.”

As a result, he said, Japanese businessmen and academics fall into fixed patterns of thinking. Compositions submitted by foreign students in competitions sponsored by the Foreign Ministry are unvaryingly more interesting and show individualistic character, Sunobe said. He said that “Japanese students’ papers are boring.”

Bathing Is Ice Breaker

Japanese sometime feel genuine physical unease in the presence of foreigners, a problem that Nichimen, a large trading company, undertook to resolve last spring by including communal bathing with foreigners in a training program for new employees.

Three years ago, a group of leading Japanese businessmen grew so concerned about “developing people who will pass in international society and cultivating businessmen who can go abroad as individuals and do business” that they founded the International University to turn out people who meet these qualifications.

The reluctance to work in a non-Japanese environment is reflected in Japan’s inability to fill its quota of staff members at the United Nations and other international agencies. At the United Nations, Japan’s monetary contribution, which is second only to that of the United States, entitles it to as many as 217 staff positions, but it fills only 101.

Sato, the Tsukuba University professor, said that in order to eliminate friction with the rest of the world, Japan needs to promote the internationalization of its “industrial policy, its financial policy, its bureaucracy, its politicians, its mass media and its universities and schools.”

Back Into Old Mold

Internationalization of education “is the most lagging of all,” he said. Instead of utilizing the cultural and linguistic abilities of Japanese students who have lived abroad, he said, “the current education system seeks to force them back into the Japanese mold.” It is common, for example, for returning students to be pressured by teachers and peers to revert to the Japanized pronunciation of foreign languages.

Sunobe, the former vice foreign minister, said that because Japan has a world trade surplus expected to exceed $80 billion this year, few question the fact that Japanese manufacturers have studied the economic structure and distribution networks of foreign countries.

“The market mechanism by itself promotes the growth of goods,” he said.

What is lacking, most analysts agree, is an understanding of other people’s problems and the ability to deal with foreigners as equals--without looking up to the United States and down at Asia, as many Japanese now do.

Sunobe said he would like to use the drive for internationalization not just to bring Japan closer to the U.S. and European ways of thinking, but “as a challenge to correct our own faults and to create a new universal set of values, a new way of living and thinking.”

An understanding of things and people of a different nature is an essential element, he said, both in terms of Japan’s comprehending the rest of the world and the rest of the world’s understanding Japan.

Heterogeneous Living

Tokuyama, the research institute man, said his definition of the internationalization Japanese need starts with “the ability to associate with any ethnic group anywhere, without either a feeling of superiority or inferiority.”

Also, he said, Japanese must develop an ability to change the values by which they make judgments, from the Japanese standard to the norm in whatever country they may be dealing with.

Add an ability in foreign languages, he said, and “with these three, one can say one has been internationalized.” This, he said, means that one has acquired, “to state it simply, the ability to live in a heterogeneous society.”

That target is far from having been met, as Nakasone himself showed last September when he said that blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans were dragging down the “intellectual level” of the United States. By way of contrast, Nakasone said, Japanese society is homogeneous.

Prof. Toru Yano of Kyoto University said in a recent article: “I see little likelihood of the tightly held nature of the Japanese sense of national identity giving way to an enthusiasm for racial mixing or multiracial and ethnic community living.”

In past efforts toward internationalization, Yano said, Japan has sought “improvement,” a strengthening rather than a reformation of its people.

People Accept Idea

Nevertheless, ordinary Japanese, hearing Nakasone and other leaders talk about internationalization, accept the idea as necessary. In the Economic Planning Agency’s survey, 53.1% of the people questioned recognized Japan as exclusivist with regard to foreigners, yet 54% considered internationalization to be desirable. Only 8% considered it undesirable, and 37% were undecided.

Tokuyama believes that the Japanese have little awareness of or true interest in becoming international. Most Japanese, he said, could not define a norm for Japanese behavior or describe the Japanese mentality.

“Japanese don’t know why we behave the way we do,” he said. “They take it for granted. It’s only people . . . who have lived abroad for a long time who are able to see the contrast.

“In addition, Japan is a comfortable place. Japanese have no motivation to think about it. It’s like the American Midwest. Those people are very insular. Even if they sell wheat to Japan, it doesn’t make an impression on them. They are comfortable. They see no reason to change their mentality.”

Specifics Often Opposed

When it comes to the specifics of internationalization, there is often opposition from the general public.

Fifty-five percent of the people surveyed by the Economic Planning Agency said they do not feel as friendly toward foreigners as they do toward other Japanese. Another poll, conducted by the prime minister’s office, asked people if they would like to have a foreign friend, and only 32.6% said yes; 49.5% said no.

The Economic Planning Agency survey found overwhelming support for the idea of accepting more foreign students, but only 50% of those questioned said they would allow a foreign student to live with them.

The Japanese school year begins in April, and, according to a poll, only 9% of the people approve of conforming with the international standard and beginning the school year in September. Seventy-seven percent were opposed because of a tradition of entering school when the cherry trees are in bloom.

“Japanese will have to endure some inconvenience for Japan really to enter international society,” said Sohei Nakayama, a leading businessman who is deputy chairman of the government’s education reform commission.

Sharing Others’ Pains

Masaya Miyoshi, senior managing director of the Keidanren, the Federation of Economic Organizations, said Japan must be prepared to share not only the world’s prosperity but also the “pains” of other peoples.

Sunobe, the former vice foreign minister, said: “So far, Japan’s only concern has been how Japan could utilize the world for Japan. Now, Japan is asked to re-examine ourselves from the viewpoint of the world. Internationalization cannot be carried out on the basis of economic rationality or in expectation of cost-benefit. We have to pay the necessary cost out of our own pocket.”

Among other things, Sunobe said, this means that Japan must start making sacrifices for the rest of the world. It also means, he said, that Japan must start trying to influence international diplomacy in fields not involving economics.

Tadashi Yamamoto, director of the International Exchange Center, said in a recent article that up to now Japan has acted without principle in diplomacy and in economics.

Japan’s diplomatic actions, he said, have been based only upon “situation ethics”--adopting only measures necessary “to avoid being isolated” or in response to criticism.

Kazuo Nukuzawa, the director of international economic affairs for the Keidanren, said: “Most Japanese are not happily looking forward to internationalization. . . . Japanese don’t want to allow diversity. But there is no doubt that corporations, systems and the government are all moving in that direction.

“From an outsider’s viewpoint, movement may appear sluggish, but, viewed from the inside, many are worried that we are going too far.”

Next: Foreigners working for Japanese companies.