The empire of Japan, located in the Northern Pacific Ocean off the coast of China, consists of four large islands—Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku—and innumerable smaller islands, many of which are inhabited. The total area is 377, 835 square kilometres; the present population is more than 120 million. The majority lives on the largest island, Honshu, which also provides the location of such important and well-known cities as Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Nagoya, Kyoto, Sendai, Niigata and Hiroshima. With more than 80 per cent of Japanese territory consisting of uninhabitable, mostly forest-covered mountains, the inhabited area—with ten cities of more than a million inhabitants—is among the most densely populated in the world. Land is either used very intensively, for terrace agriculture, infrastructure, industry or residential building, or left in its primary vegetative state, with, generally, very clearly defined local boundaries between the two categories.
The Japanese speak just one, very distinctive language, and enjoy a remarkably uniform culture. For such a large population, ethnic minorities are few in number, and are denied any chance of real integration. Members of the quite sizeable Korean minority (mainly concentrated in Osaka) are still not allowed to adopt Japanese names. Such marginalization is shared with an important autochthonous group, that of the two million odd ‘eta’, or ‘special status people’, historically consigned to ‘defiling’ occupations, associated with culturally defined dirt (Ohnuki-Tierney 1987:91). A much smaller number of Ainu, representing an earlier population once spread over the whole of Japan, still survive in Hokkaido maintaining something of their original culture.
Extreme attitudes of national self-consciousness, known as ‘nihonjinron’ (‘discussions of the Japanese’), are the subject of many recent publications, such as Yoshino (1992). With a national holiday, ‘bunka no hi’ (‘day of culture’) to commemorate their own traditions, Japanese are positively encouraged to esteem their own culture. Carried to excess, this esteem characterizes countless small *nationalist groups whose political influence is quite disproportionate to the number of members. In fact many so-called traditions hardly reach back to the restoration of the power of the Emperor in 1868 which, with the opening of Japan to the outside world, marks the beginning of modern Japanese history. This event, in the first year of the Emperor Meiji (whose great grandson now sits on the Chrysanthemum throne) encouraged a parallel discourse, about the socalled ‘tennôsei’, relating to both the political, and the religious status of the Emperor (Crump 1991:94). Furthermore, the trauma of the Pacific War (1941–5), followed by six years of Allied occupation, required the reformulation of many basic traditions—an historical process now underplayed by many influential Japanese.
One problem facing contemporary Japanese, in relation to their own culture, and the social organization which it supports, is that their roots are to be found in a rural society with an economy based on intensive wet-rice cultivation. Although government policy still pays excessive regard to the cultivation of rice, the traditional village *household, or ie, which was always its focus, now defines the lifestyle of only a small minority. The ie is, however, still central in any anthropology of Japan. It is an enduring corporate unit, centred on the household, seen both as an economic and a social unit, with a prescribed rule of succession to headship. Because of the dominant principle of †patrilineal descent, the ie essentially provides the topos of the Japanese family from one generation to another.
The essential continuity of the ie is enhanced by the worship of former members, as *ancestors, at the household altar. Although this commonly takes the form of a butsudan (‘Buddha shelf), reflecting the fact that mortuary rites in Japan are the primary responsibility of *Buddhism (Reader 1991:77); a Shinto alternative, the kamidana, is not unusual. The problem with religion, in this form, is that it is difficult to place in the context of a young family, living in a modern city apartment and separated from its historic rural background. The result is that while a colourful ritual cycle appears to flourish at countless local temples and shrines, there is little religious observance in the modern Japanese home. Some new sects, such as the rapidly expanding Agonshû, described by Reader (1991:219) as ‘user-friendly’, use the media to reach within the modern home, deprived of spirituality, but for the most part Japanese are content to visit religious centres, to pray for riyaku. These ‘blessings’ may be anything from peace of mind to examination success (Reader 1991:33).
Japan pays inordinate attention at every level to *literacy and *education. The idiosyncratic form of written Japanese, with its thousands of characters borrowed from Chinese, defines the main focus of primary education. In science and mathematics, little concession is made to oriental tradition, so that the notation used, together with the specific subjects taught, is truly international; and so that, for instance, modern computer science relies on standard computer languages originating in the West. None the less, traditional crafts, in fields such as pottery and wood-carving, are still widely taught and practised, providing employment for countless Japanese.
In modern Japan, any international orientation conflicts with the sharp distinction made between ‘inside’ (uchi) and ‘outside’ (soto). For the individual the contrast is expressed in terms of tatemae, behaviour expected by the outside world, and honne, true feelings, suppressed in actual behaviour. A well-known proverb condemns those who draw too much attention to themselves. Not surprisingly, then, soto connotes not only foreigners (gaijiri), but also deviance within Japanese society, as already illustrated by the cases of ethnic Koreans and the eta. None the less, other deviant characters as wandering players, acrobats and jugglers, and even the criminal fraternity of the yakuza, do have a place in Japanese culture, as if their presence were needed to counteract the dominance of uchi in the life of the average citizen.
