Japan On-line: Can the Japanese Adapt to a Gaijin Community?
by Richard Thieme
In Japanese, the concept of "on" encompasses both "benefit" and "obligation." Participation in the Internet embraces both as well.
Doing business on the internet requires more than simply learning a new set of skills. It is a journey into a relatively new and evolving culture, one that forces us to see ourselves and our habits in a new light. The Internet is a distinct community, different from each of our native cultures, and we each bring our own strengths and weaknesses to the opportunities it presents.
The processes of "informatization" (johoka) and internationalization (kokusaika) have been inseparable and ubiquitous in Japanese thinking and behavior for several decades. They are simultaneous processes. Yet the transformation of our physical nation-state boundaries into permeable, transparent membranes calls into question -- for all of us -- the difficulties of being truly local and global in our thinking and behavior.
Antithetical world views
Americans (yes, I am one) have a conceptual framework that sees everything we encounter -- every culture, concept, people -- as available for incorporation into our "universal" schema. Our egalitarian inclusiveness is implicitly imperialistic: we experience our culture as a kind of divine elixir into which all else dissolves. That which is distinctive about another culture is turned into a simulation of itself and reconstructed through the filter of our understanding. Such is the price of an encounter with American culture.Japanese culture, on the other hand, is tightly bound by homogeneity and common history. Other cultural practices are included and integrated into the Japanese experience in a very different way. Yes, everything is welcome, everything is used -- but in a way that does not compromise the original culture. Everything is somehow turned into another aspect of being Japanese. This capacity to include and exploit other cultural practices without compromising the core of traditional culture is the Japanese way of preserving a unique identity while at the same time excluding nothing that might be useful.
This dichotomy of experience carries over to cyberculture as well. Japan will interact with the unique culture of the Internet just as Japan has interacted with all other cultures. The Internet will affect Japanese culture in subtle ways, yet Japan will not lose its core identity in cyberspace -- because Japan cannot lose it. The essence of Japanese identity is a deep commitment not to lose itself through interaction with other cultures.
If Americans believe that everyone is somehow a potential American, the Japanese deem that no outsider could ever be a potential Japanese. The progressive interaction of large numbers of Japanese citizens with netizens all over the world will reveal that which is unique and distinctive about Japan's contribution to global cyberculture. Cyberspace will
become one more outer sphere surrounding the concentric spheres of other cultures, at the core of which nevertheless remains an inviolable Japanese sensibility.
Japan on the Internet
So what are the unique strengths of culture and character that Japan will bring to doing business on the Internet? How will specific Japanese modalities -- such as the high priority on nuance, connotation, and indirect communication -- translate into the typographic world of e-mail? How will the deep subtext of haragei, or nonverbal communication, work on mailing lists and in newsgroups and chat rooms? These are questions whose answers will be revealed over time.We can see some clues in the "real world." I once worked in an organizational structure that required consultation with the Japanese patriarch of the group before important decisions were made. I always called to arrange a meeting, but while we visited, I never explicitly mentioned my reason for being there, nor did he. Yet when I left, I was confident that I knew his position, and he knew that I knew.
When e-mail is used for communication between English speakers, it is exchanged in a context of shared presuppositions. During e-mail exchanges with Japanese speakers, however, I (and they) have often been confused because the context is unclear. Doing business on the Internet is more like consensus building than direct selling. Non-native English speakers often do not share our implicit assumptions, and so we have to build an explicit context that speaks more loudly than our few typed words.
This context-building must be accomplished over time, through the deliberate construction of a shared virtual relationship. Only after that happens can we can begin to do business without misunderstanding. Because it is axiomatic to the Japanese way of doing business, the Japanese will come to excel at the painstaking construction of a comprehensive non-verbal context as the presupposition of meaningful electronic conversation.
The Internet as a mirror
The entrepreneurial spirit, the headlong rush for a new frontier, has characterized the American surge into the virtual world. The current dominance of the Internet by Americans, then, raises a question: How can it be true that Japanese culture is particularly well-suited for success on the Internet when the American style, which is so different, works so well?The answer reveals something about cyberspace itself. Cyberspace is a "space" -- a sheer potential that becomes actualized only when individuals and organizations project their psychic contents and organizational structures into it. Cyberspace looks to every netizen like an image of himself or his culture.
Cyberspace is a mirror of our mind, a domain of symbols of symbols of symbols. At the highest level of abstraction, those symbols become reflexive, showing us our hive mind engaged in the rising spiral of a self-conscious dialogue with itself. In this, the Internet is a world of text and images that enable us to discover and create new "typographic selves." Just as Americans define cyberspace as a new frontier, imagining virtual space in metaphors derived from US history, the Japanese experience of the Internet will look Japanese... to the Japanese.
Historical antecedents
One important antecedent for the distribution of information through networks, for example, evolved in Japan during the Edo period (17th century). The writing of Haikai (haiku), or short poems, included an activity called Renku, a cooperative effort that combined many short poems into a single chain. As the network evolved, other kinds of information, including commercial, were distributed in a similar manner. (For more on this, click on the Edo Era link of the Japanese History Project at http://ifrm.glocom.ac.jp/ifrm/ssr.jph.html).Neither Renku nor the Internet is about technology as much as it is about the generation of structures that enable people to network for mutual advantage. The Internet merely creates the "space" in which we build new opportunities to do business, thereby generating new possibilities for creativity and community.
Japanese culture during the Edo period was neither fast nor slow; it was what it was. Nor has Japan been "slow" in coming to the Internet, as some claim. Rather, Japan has been prudent, patient, and deliberate as she has felt out and engaged with a new culture. If the wholesale abandonment of the current economic system is not to happen, that pace of engagement is essential.
It just works better that way
I once visited a Zen monastery for a day of meditation and instruction. The monk greeted us with a bow, then asked if we knew why monks bow in the monastery. Various answers came forth: bowing shows respect, it acknowledges the essence of "the other," and so forth. The monk politely waited as we exhausted our guesses, then said, "We bow, because it works better when we bow."That which works on the Internet will be incorporated into Japanese business practices in ways consistent with the long-term development of trusting collaborative relationships. Organizational and national cultures have a wisdom that no individual in the system can approach. The system factors in variables over a long period of time that individuals forget. That's why natural organic growth is best for cultures intent on sustaining themselves over the long run.
The acculturation of Japan to the Internet will be done in a way that preserves the root characteristics of Japanese civilization. That civilization is permeated with the practice of on: acknowledgment and discharge of full obligation to those who have given a kindness or gift. The gift to Japan of entry into the virtual world of the Internet will be repaid by Japanese participation in that world in ways that subtly build new models of cooperation, creativity, and historical continuity. And that will benefit us all.
Richard Thieme is a business consultant and professional speaker specializing in the impact of computer technology on organizational life and the management of change and diversity. His articles on the Internet and the computer revolution have appeared in magazines on five continents. He can be e-mailed at rthieme@lifeworks.com or 73317.3035@compuserve.com.
Hierarchy within a web?
Everyone entering the culture of the Internet soon discovers that it truly is a network, a web of relationships. It may even seem as though hierarchical structures have completely disappeared. On the World Wide Web, we each experience ourselves as being at the center of the Web, yet no-one is displaced: everyone else is also at the center.Within hierarchical structures, we tend to act as if the organizational schema -- that represented on a chart as boxes and rectangles connected by straight lines -- is the real world. We sense that our presence in a box necessitates knocking someone else out of that box. We experience our organizations as win/lose games, where power is exercised in the hierarchy by dominating and controlling others.
In a web, however, power accrues from our participation and contributions. Efforts to control a web are futile, if not counterproductive, because our energy is dissipated throughout the structure.
The Japanese practice of avoiding confrontation and working by consensus, rooted in the traditional cultural web of Japanese society, is an advantage in cyberspace. Nemawashi, or "root-binding" -- the process by which all participants are consulted and patiently included before a decision is made -- can contribute a subtle but powerful energy to the building of cybercommunities. Once everyone is on board, the energy of the now-aligned individuals moves with great power.
Patiently and carefully constructing a consensus aligns the energies of every individual in a system in a single direction. Paradoxically, though, this does not mean the end of hierarchy. Recent exploration of fractals reveals that structures recreate themselves in self-similar shapes at every level of abstraction. The devolution of vertically integrated pre-war zaibatsu into the horizontal structures of post-war keiretsu may look like the transformation of a hierarchy into a web, but the hierarchy has not disappeared in practice. Hierarchical structures have a thousand lives because they are useful ways to organize human enterprise. We are destined to live always in tension between cooperative horizontal structures and command-and-control vertical structures -- even on the Internet.