Young Culture In Japan example essay topic

The Role Change of Japan's Culture My experiences in Japan have been surreal in that the cultural behaviors are nearly an exact opposite to those with which I had grown up. The order of daily life is solely dependent on the roles and duties of each individual. When people begin to go against the regular flow of the excepted norms, great controversy is created. Japanese culture patterns follow a specific code that is rarely altered.

When they are disturbed, there is panic caused by the insecurities of change. The identity of Japanese culture is collectivism. Japan's culture is dependent on the community of the people. The Japanese do not strive for individual success, but rather for group accomplishment. It is better for the group as a whole to be healthy than for one person to achieve higher status. The Japanese do not believe in leaving one person behind, they would rather slow the entire group down until that person can catch up.

In addition, the person who is slowing the group down will feel shame because he has hurt his 'family'. For example, I volunteered in a Kindergarten in Shinagawa the last four months, and one day there was a little boy who was moving his chair into the group much more slowly than the other students. The other students sat quietly watching him. When he finally put his chair down and the teacher was ready to begin, the student did not have his materials ready and had to go back to the closet to get things. The teacher became agitated and went after the boy.

She pointed to the clock and spoke to him sternly. Then she looked at the students and held him so they could all look at him as she reprimanded him. The child did not scream or cry for his mother as I expected. Instead he looked down as tears flowed down his cheeks. The other students went back to looking at the teacher's chair and she returned and did the lesson without the boy. The boy continued to stand still until the group finished and then he rejoined them.

I had seen the students hitting each other and misbehaving many times, but I never saw a student get punished by a teacher until this day. This boy, at four years old, was feeling Haji (shame). He had hurt the group by cutting their time short. When a student causes problems that do not affect the group, they are not punished; they are only reprimanded when they hurt the collective group. Japanese culture encourages silence over individual thinking. When a person is unsure of how to do something, he should either refuse to do it or follow the crowd as carefully as possible.

Because Japan is a collectivist society, the Japanese are afraid to do something individual so if they are not sure of the right answer, they avoid the question. When I taught the game "Duck, Duck, Goose" to a group of 4 year olds, the teacher chose a little girl to go first. She stood up paralyzed. When the teacher asked if she understood the game the child nodded and began to walk around the circle. She apparently did not understand the game because she was not touching the other children's' heads. The teacher asked if the child needed help.

The little girl began to cry stifled tears just as the little boy who was punished in the other class. I was amazed to see a child so afraid to ask a question. Another example of this is when you go to the Buddhist temple. At the Buddhist temple you are supposed to through money into the well and pray without clapping. However, at the Shinto shrine you clap before you pray. It is taboo to clap at a Buddhist temple.

When I have visited them though, I have seen young people clap. After one person claps, many times the people around them will look around nervously and also clap quietly. They prefer to follow others rather than risk being wrong even though they may have been taught not to clap. Japan's team player attitude leaves little room for distance of power between people. You can recognize how this developed when you consider that for more than a hundred years Japan was closed off from the rest of the world.

This helped them become very dependent on being a family-like community. In a Japanese company, you will see the sha cho, the company president, though he is the head of the company, will not make a company decision without getting the input of the entire company. The company has hierarchy but is still considered a family. There are regular social outings and all employees started in the same position. A person earns their salary by the number of years they have worked with the company. Though I did not get much of a chance to observe the sha cho at my job placement, I did get to observe the teachers deciding which game the children would play.

Rather than two teachers taking initiative and starting a game with the children, they would speak to each teacher before a consensus was formed. I witnessed group decisions often amongst the teachers. In Japan, the male is the provider and the female serves him. Though females can work, they do not hold equal positions to males and it is assumed they will leave their job to get married and have children. Most men go out drinking after work while the women, who spent all day taking care of the house and preparing dinner, will spend the evening taking care of the children and waiting for their husbands return.

Also, there are many forms of entertainment targeted at men. They are considered hard workers and family providers, so they have many rewards. If we examine the kanji character for male it is the kanji for field (meaning farmer or work in the olden days), above the symbol for power. You only see male train drivers, police officers, and salary workers. By looking at all the various kinds of entertainment provided for men, various 'massage parlors' and 'hostess bars'. Few things of this sort are provided for women.

Also, this is defined when you consider gender-oriented holidays. March 3 is girls' day, . The symbol for this day is a doll wearing a kimono. On this day the family must display these dolls or there is a superstition that the girls in the house will not find husbands. Peach blossoms are also displayed on this day symbolizing marriage. This represents that parents want their girls to grow up to be beautiful wives.

Contrary to their hopes for their daughters, boys are hoped to grow up to be strong and successful. The symbols for boys' day are a hat of armor and a ko i, which is a fish that rises to the top of the stream when swimming. I could see these genders -roles forming at my job placement. There were little girls making pies while boys were building rivers and bridges in the sand. I never saw the teachers encourage the girls to play house and the boys to play guns, however, the boys were less likely to get in trouble for being noisy where as girls were immediately reprimanded. The gender values in this culture are that women remain quite and polite while the men are excused for their loudness because they are men.

The Japanese think of things in long-term. I doubt carp diem is a phrase they would often use. Perhaps, because Japan had to rely on itself for crops for so long, they learned to base decisions on the way it will affect the future. They had to consider what would happen if they do not fertilize the ground, or if they destroy certain elements of nature, etc. You can see in a Japanese company how important life long employment is. The best example I have is about my friend, Hide.

He is an international student in the United States. While he is away from Japan, he does not call, e-mail, or write his friends in Japan. However, when he comes home for 2 months each summer he somehow manages to visit each one of the people he has remained in contact with since he was child. One example is, last week he went to dinner in a group of 11 with the people he was a friend with in elementary school. His father passed away 3 years ago and all 70 people that he speaks to only once a year came to the funeral and gave the money family! In Japan friendship is considered life long and requires little work.

People rely on the long-term as if time will last forever. Recently, in Japan a lot of change has been taking place and insecurities that never existed are beginning to appear. Perhaps, the main problem presently is the new trend of individualism playing into young peoples lives'. Many young people are becoming interested in the western cultural idea of individualism and self-success. Due to this, Japan has many young people entering companies without the sense of life-long commitment. There are young people who are earning higher titles by studying harder in college, or being more aggressive and succeeding without accomplishing the appropriate age for the 'title' they earn.

The older people in companies are losing their confidence when they see the younger people moving into their companies without earning their position through the group norms. In addition to the suffering economy, the sen pai are not always being taken care of as family anymore. These problems in business are stemming from young people's individualism. When you put individualist ideas into a collectivist society, you lose a lot of security. First, the outspokenness of an individualist is stronger than that of a collectivist. This can cause fear to a group of people that have never been in a position to speak their minds.

Individualists are worried about bettering themselves and therefore may not consult others when making a decision. Gender roles are also beginning to change due to individualist thought. And of course individualism takes away the security of long-term orientation. For the older generation this shock is difficult for them to handle. The suicide rate of the salary man has increased, as he feels shame for his family, in the past few years. Naturally, the economy is causing many of these problems, but you have to wonder if the upset in the culture change is related to the problems in the economy.

It is safe to assume that the young culture in Japan is going through an identity crisis!