Apprenticeship and Paternalism[fn1]Apprenticeship and Paternalism^[1]

George A. De Vos

Organizational structures cannot continue to operate effectively without some mutually reinforcing isomorphic resonances originating in the personality structure of the participants. Such a general contention is central in a psychocultural approach to a study of any society. To illustrate, I shall attempt to compare and delineate some cultural differences between the implicit attitudes of superiors and subordinates in Japanese industrial organization and those of their counterparts in the United States. The firsthand empirical evidence and the experience indirectly brought to bear on the subject is that obtained by Hiroshi Wagatsuma and myself in the course of our research among the merchants and artisans of Arakawa Ward in Tokyo.^[2] However, the reports and writings of others as well as the plots of films and literary works give credence to the wider social application of the generalizations partially derived from our empirical research.^[3] We believe that what we observed as underlying social attitudes embedded in the roles of apprentice and patron in Arakawa is also operative more generally in the economic and cultural historical processes at work in the course of Japanese industrialization. We

[1] This paper is adapted and modified from parts of vol. 1, chap. 22 ("Conclusions and Implications") in George De Vos and Hiroshi Wagatsuma, The Heritage of Endurance , 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, forthcoming).

[2] Ibid., I.

[3] See, for example, J. G. Abegglen, The Japanese Factory: Aspects of Its Social Organization (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958); Chie Nakane, Japanese Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970); Ezra Vogel, Japan's New Middle Class (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963); Ronald Dore, City Japan: A Study of a Tokyo Ward (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1958); and Robert E. Cole, Japanese Blue Collar: The Changing Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971).

do not prophesy how long these attitudes will be maintained in the face of countervening sociological forces. Suffice it to indicate that their present existence as influences has helped set the tone of contemporary Japanese organizational behavior.

Psychocultural Reasons for the Relative Absence of Disruptive Industrial Strife in Japan Compared with the United States and Western Europe

In the course of the past century, at an ever-increasing rate, the Japanese population has shifted demographically from rural villages to urbanized industrialized communities. Compared with the United States, however, Japanese cities give much less evidence of social unrest or personal disruption. Why has the population migration been so relatively nontraumatic?

There are, for example, statistics on numerous mental health breakdowns attendant upon migration in the United States.^[4] Admittedly these cannot be considered symptomatic in all situations of urbanization. There are special minority status features in the United States that cause stress in urban migrants. Urbanization is apt to be relatively more traumatic when the migration takes place between rather than within cultures.^[5] One cannot conclude that the urbanization experience itself explains social disruptions when they occur. One must look to other pertinent societal factors such as the relative degree of direct impersonal exploitation of the urbanizing workers, or the degree to which urbanizing workers are constrained to accept a continuing minority social class or ethnic status within an urban community. Such conditions can lead not only to social unrest but personal emotional breakdown. In the United States, the reported high rates of mental ill health among both European immigrants and black migrants from the rural South must be considered a symptom of cultural dislocations and social discrimination rather than a symptom of the urbanizing process per se.

Social conditions aside, there are also cultural factors. Contrary to the experience of some migrating groups, Japanese who move both within Japan as well as externally to North or South America generally maintain

[4] B. Malzburg and E. S. Lee, Migration and Mental Disease; a study of First Admissions to Hospitals for Mental Disease (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1956). also Benjamin Malzberg, "Are Immigrants Psychologically Disturbed?" in S. Plog and Robert Edgerton, eds., Changing Perspectives in Mental Illness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969).

[5] George A. De Vos, ed., "Response to Change," unpublished. Anthropologists studying urbanization in a number of different cultural settings, such as Edward Bruner in Sumatra and Alex Inkeles in his well-controlled comparative survey of six highly different cultures in the process of urbanization, would indicate that urban immigration within a given culture need not lead to interpersonal or social disruption.

integrative family and community life and manifest no forms of increased crime or delinquency that could be attributed to either urbanization or migration per se. There are obviously strong socially integrative cultural traditions at work, which can overcome even the severe social discrimination that occurred in the United States. One must consider, therefore, that in some situations, at least, cultural patterns may overcome social conditions.

Labor conflict is another possible disruption attendant upon industrialization, and more a symptom of social rather than personal ill health. Compared with the history of labor grievances and labor unrest in the United States, one finds the history of the Japanese labor movement relatively nontraumatic. One can question whether this is due simply to a relative lack of social exploitation in Japan, or again, to the countervening force of cultural patterns. I believe the latter is the case.

Several of the economic disruptions experienced in Japan from the beginning of industrialization until World War II have been cushioned by a culturally available pattern that encouraged the family's reabsorption of displaced or unemployed workers back into the rural areas. Japan has also been able newly to reemphasize some practices and attitudes derived from the premodern cultural past to establish job security for most workers.

In the course of Japanese industrialization, former merchants, artisans, and farmers have been recruited into the cadres of industrial workers, who have been either hired in the large, modern, industrial plants or apprenticed in the small, urban-house factories that remain as part of Japan's dual economic structure.^[6] Yet from what we witnessed in the microcosm of the Arakawa area of Tokyo, urban migration has been neither personally alienating nor socially disruptive. We found no evidence of any form of general disaffection or of anomic disorganization in the more newly formed urban communities. We did find evidence of how the newly constituted communities functioned to integrate the individual and his family into more or less encompassing, if not entirely satisfying, larger units of social organization. In Arakawa one can document the pattern by which the so-called shitamachi (downtown)-traditional-townsman culture of northwest Tokyo had moved steadily into the newly settled areas of northern Tokyo; as it moved, it maintained considerable organizational force, which encompassed the new recruits from the countryside enough to counter the possibly disruptive processes generated by the large-scale industrial movements of people.

Even granting the integrative force of the community-organizational features of Japanese local neighborhoods, one must still turn to the cultural features that influence experience within the work situation itself to explain the relative lack of alienation experienced by Japanese workers. There are mutually complimentary attitudes between subordinates and

[6] De Vos and Wagatsuma, Heritage of Endurance , I, chaps. 1, 3, and 4.

superiors in Japanese hierarchical social organizations; these extend through social class barriers and are a strong force against the development of the type of class alienation that Marx predicted so well for Europe in his analysis of the development of industrial society. Marx's predictions do not seem to work for Japan. Why is this so?

The Expressive Functions of Japanese Paternalism

In Arakawa Ward at least (perhaps to an embarrassing extent for Japanese Marxist theorists), one does not find the kind of social alienation or class consciousness among Japanese industrial workers that one quickly recognizes in contact with Italian or French workers;^[7] nor does one find the less ideologically tinged but equally strong hatred of management that is characteristic for American industrial workers. The reasons for this difference between the Japanese industrial situation and that of Western Europe and the United States can be found in the cultural, historical continuities of Japanese social organization. Especially pertinent is the way individuals within Japanese families are socialized to fit into the pervasive, usually hierarchically structured social networks within which they spend their later lives. Reasons are also found in the consequent expressive satisfactions of Japanese paternalism—both in the way one plays the superordinate role as a boss, or the subordinate role as either an apprentice or a long-term, faithful, factory employee. One has to examine more carefully, therefore, the cultural forms of secondary socialization into occupational roles, which follow upon the primary socialization occurring within the family.

In the traditional Japanese social system, a youth was usually introduced into a network of occupational expectations around the time of puberty as an apprentice who would be taught a particular skill. The apprentice role was defined in quasi-familial terms and became part of a network of mutual expectations—both instrumental and expressive in nature. Since some of the apprentice's expectations could be actualized only in the distant future as part of his work role, he was also being trained to develop a future-time orientation. He had to maintain sufficient faith in his future gain to forego immediate material or emotional payment. He was resigned to what an outsider might consider harsh, exploitative treatment for the sake of the future promise of continuing paternalistic support. This sense of reciprocity through time was reinforced generally by the social attitudes of his own family and others.

In Japan today this type of apprenticeship role is being redefined as the social atmosphere affords less reinforcement for the sanctions that maintain the individual in his subordinate role. Youth are increasingly

[7] Cole, Japanese Blue Collar .

more apt to quit than to put up with constrictions of sustained discipline. We found in Arakawa Ward, however, that the external social sanctions of the society were still applied in the person of the police and with general social approval. One of the police functions in Arakawa was to arrest apprentices who had absented themselves from work. The apprentice role, therefore, was socially defined in terms similar to that of a student in school. The police, in both instances, were expected to enforce required attendance.

By degrees the individual is expected to gain a sense of pleasure from his increasing competence, as he gradually internalizes the standards of excellence related to his craft. Ideally, he would also be increasingly rewarded with signs of appreciation for his growing skill. Hence, there is a gradual socialization of inner satisfactions to be gained by approximating the standards of skill set by the master or teacher within any given tradition.

In this secondary period of occupational socialization, socially expected attitudes of gratitude and repayment were turned from the parents onto occupational mentors in the quasi-familial master-apprentice situation. The boss or master was not free to ignore the dependent expectations of his former apprentice. His own sense of actualizing his master's status derived from a capacity to meet some of these expectations and to do well for those who had been depending on him.

In sum, the Japanese were socialized to gain certain reciprocal expressive satisfactions on all levels of dependency or interdependency. Such gratifications act as a counterforce against the potentials for alienation in an industrial society. One finds evidence that this attitude of mentorship on the part of older men toward younger workers continues even in industrial units. The Japanese working in modern industry still seek out relationships with some nurturing paternal figure with seniority. The bonding together of nonage-graded "brothers" in labor organizations does not seem to satisfy many Japanese the way it does workers elsewhere.

One reliable index of social alienation is delinquency among youth. After a fifteen-year postwar surge in youthful delinquency among lower-class youth in Japan, the overall rates are going down rather than up.^[8] Instead of finding restive alienation among the lower-class youth in Japan today, one finds that it is the youth from relatively higher-status backgrounds in the universities who express more social criticism and feelings of social alienation. There is an obviously increased malise about the impersonal, albeit vastly expanded, system of advanced formal education. College students are exhibiting more signs of personal social

[8] George A. De Vos, Socialization for Achievement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), especially chaps. 13 and 14.

stress than the youth who go to work in either large- or small-scale industries. The students from middle-class families seem to lack integrating personal interaction with occupational mentors. The teacher's role has become not only distant but much more impersonal than in the past. In contrast, industrial workers, or college youth after they enter business concerns, quickly become part of an organization and take on a sense of personal belonging.

In contrast to the American society with its more stringent forms of age segmentation and peer-group orientation, and its high rate of unemployment among all youth but especially minority youth, the more hierarchically organized Japanese society still, to some degree, bridges the generation gap induced by rapid social change. It is the Japanese upper-middle-class youth, during their time spent as noncommitted students, that manifests crises related to occupational choice. The period of worker apprenticeship, whatever its hardships and strain for the individual, is not a period of protest or alienation for most. In brief, to the degree that it is still maintained in Japan, the apprenticeship system remains a force for maintaining social cohesion in modern Japanese society. The same cannot be said for the university.

Let us consider certain organizational and psychological features of Japanese culture in turn. They are inseparable aspects of observed social behavior. Nakane Chie in her recent volume, Japanese Society , distinguishes between two types of belonging: "attribute" and "frame."^[9] Attribute groups include both those entered by ascription through birth and those entered by acquiring an occupational specialization. In the first instance, the groups may take the form of clans or kinship lineages; in the second instance, the individual enters a group designated by class position or some given occupational definition such as plumber, carpenter, or professor. In contrast to all such attribute groups is the second major type of group of identity produced by "frame." For Nakane, a frame is a situational-historical definition of belonging such as what happens to you when you join the Ford Motor Company or become a member of the New York Times staff, regardless of the actual position. In this sense, partially at least, the U.S. labor movement might serve as an illustration: the CIO organized industrial unions on the basis of frame, whereas the AFL organized workers on the basis of attribute.

The strongest sense of occupational commitment or loyalty found in Japan is in a frame group. One joins such a group for life. Within a frame organization of one kind or another, Japanese subjectively experience working together on common objectives as satisfying to their own inner sense of purpose. These groups, by definition, are internally cooperative; no overt displays of competition are permitted. Any existing competitive-

[9] Chie Nakane, Japanese Society .

ness, such as seeking some special recognition or advancement, must be disguised in terms of overall group objectives. Fixed ranking is used to minimize competition, and the principle of seniority is often exercised as the major criterion of precedence. Nakane's principal contention about Japanese social organization, past as well as present, is that frame interpersonal organizations have been more important within Japanese culture than attribute organizations such as kinship structures. This is despite the fact that kinship terminology is used to indicate the familylike atmosphere that is supposed to unite groups. In fact, individual Japanese do characteristically identify themselves as a permanent member of some group like the "Asahi family" rather than as a janitor or newsman who happens to be working for the Asahi press. A sense of belonging with other members of the Asahi is more important than maintaining some formal occupational-class cohesion with other janitors or reporters working elsewhere. Nakane further cogently analyzes how cooperation is emphasized in team efforts shared by all members in a hierarchically defined frame cluster such as a manufacturing company, or even the university, which tends to function in direct competitition with other similarly constituted social units.

From a psychocultural standpoint, I contend that the propensity to join a frame organization, whatever its compelling organizational features, is integral with Japanese socialization experiences that continually emphasize the interdependency of individuals within the primary family. The family is also organized around a sense of precedence in time by seniority among branches and within sibling relationships. The sense of order in precedence or seniority learned within familial relationships is transmuted into one's occupational role.

The traditional sense of tragedy in Japan involves conflicts of loyalty between that accorded one's occupational status and that felt toward the primary family. The acceptable moral resolution of this quandary has usually been structured in favor of the occupational role. In this respect, too, Nakane's analysis makes good sense.

Nakane's description of the vertical structures in Japanese social organizations helps spell out why there is so little evidence of class alienation in Japan compared with Western and even Soviet industrial societies. It is my contention, however, that this cohesiveness must be further explained in the special features of Japanese paternalism as it is experienced in an emotionally satisfying way by Japanese. The expressive satisfaction to be gained sets behavioral limits on the superordinate role. It mitigates against the more widespread appearance in Japan of alienating and exploitative abuses of workers as impersonal objects; workers in the West can deal with such abuses only through the formation of conflicting organizations, which exercise a protective power reinforced by legal contracts.

Nurturance, an Expressive Need:
Actuality and Illusion in Japan

Central to a psychocultural analysis is a thorough consideration of the nature of the subjective experience of exploitation from an expressive as well as an instrumental standpoint. One has to examine, for example, how particular emotionally satisfying or expressive features of a subordinate role can conflict, in the inner experience of the Japanese employer, with the instrumental advantages to be gained by uninhibited economic exploitation of subordinates. Conversely, one has to examine how the exercise of culturally patterned dependent expectations on the part of subordinates can, in certain instances, distort perception of the actual situation so that they hide from themselves the degree to which they may have been victims of exploitation on the part of their superiors.

One can make the extreme contention, for example, that instrumental or economic exploitation does not exist as a social problem until it is consciously perceived and defined as such by the individual subjected to it. This lack of readiness for the Japanese worker generally to perceive himself as exploited is a point of considerable frustration to the leftist political parties in Japan. One may generalize that the majority of Japanese workers choose to continue to think in positive personal terms about their superiors rather than to perceive themselves as used impersonally by them simply as a means toward economic gain.

One is constrained, therefore, to consider the fact that in Japan a Western type of alienating class consciousness is countered by a type of economic and social paternalism that is still experienced as relatively satisfying by both those in the subordinate as well as those in superordinate positions. Such an expressively satisfying paternalism can offset the alienating processes involved in more directly impersonal instrumental situations of class exploitation. From a psychological-motivational point of view paralleling Nakane's structural analysis, the paternalism in Japan works because there is a reciprocal, personal, psychological identification between subordinate and superordinate individuals. Status differentials in Japan do not completely impersonalize or distantiate, causing a lack of emotional concern between those on different levels of Japanese status hierarchy. Therefore, there is possible an emotional interchange of a type that is very rarely experienced between present-day superiors and subordinates in Western economic settings.

One has to examine whether the Western manager or owner has learned to think so completely impersonally about his work force as a consequence of his social history or as a consequence of his trained capacity to think in impersonal abstract terms. Impersonal abstract thinking is notably lacking in the Japanese tradition. Western economic theory is, by and large, impersonal. The operative forces are economic forces. Decision is "rational." Personal, emotional concerns and what are

defined in Western economics as irrational considerations are handled with difficulty in economic formulae. The presence or absence of paternal attitudes, therefore, has only a secondary role, if any, in economic theory. The laws of supply and demand are impersonal, mechanical forces; human decison-making starts with the assumption that man given the opportunity will maximize his material benefits rather than impose irrationally based constraints on himself.

An examination of Japanese legal structure demonstrates how the subordinate has been in effect at the mercy of the superior. What is imperfectly understood even by the Japanese themselves in examining social science theory is the degree to which there remain implicit, legally unenforced constraints that limit the decision-making of the superior. These constraints are not established in law, but enforced simply by Japanese psychology.

Paternalism in Japan is real. Those in the oyabun (parent role) positions do indeed relate very often to their subordinates as if they were charges. They are not simply dealing with impersonally conceived contract labor from whom one seeks to obtain maximum productive output. The subordinate is not depersonalized or treated as a machine. Even in Western capitalism there is now some knowledge of the fact that one has to oil the morale of one's workers at least as well as one's machines to maintain proper functioning without too much disruption or need for constant, costly replacement.

The master who takes on an apprentice might be seen from outside the system as one who economically exploits the labor of the young by paying them pitiful salaries under the pretext that they need years of training in order to learn a skill well enough to function independently. The same behavior perceived internally and subjectively may be phrased quite differently by the participants; this internal cultural perception at times demands the capacity for considerable denial or distortion away from the raw objective fact of exploitation. In their mutual internal perceptions, the Japanese see the apprenticeship situation as a reciprocal payment of present labor for future-oriented training in a skill. Although apprentices are paid poorly, if at all, the apprentice is learning a necessary trade through which he will later realize himself and earn his own living. Indeed, very frequently an apprentice inherits his master's job, even his family. This is not to gainsay that in many occupational situations in Japan there is a lifelong perpetuation of kobun (child status), where the individuals remain subadult and maintain an emotional and financial dependency on an oyakata (parent figure) who periodically rewards his followers by symbols of appreciation or nurturance. Such ties remain highly emotional, internally reinforced by potential guilt should the subordinate not repay his benefactor. And what is often missed by the Westerner and even by modern Japanese is the fact that guilt arises on

the part of the benefactor should he fail to give proper care to his subordinates.

Some Western observers might concede that an apprenticeship situation can be tolerable when one can identify with the future privileges to be reached by seniority. This is probably more quickly understandable to some than situations of satisfying lifelong dependency. Those espousing modern Western concepts that all individuals in a society should strive for a sense of independent adulthood are disturbed by the readiness in some cultures to espouse the permanently dependent role as a positive feature of a society. Western theorists do not like to consider the fact that Japanese paternalism also gratifies an expressive need for dependency on the part of many. Such gratification is considered irrational in both impersonal and economic terms.

Interdependency

The propensity to continue dependent gratification is related emotionally to the way many Japanese are socialized in their early primary family experiences. William Caudill and others who have studied Japanese socialization in considerable detail find that a primary feature of Japanese socialization is the manner in which strong dependency needs are developed and sustained by culturally typical patterns of maternal nurturance directed toward the young.^[10] This early childhood pattern is reinforced in later secondary occupational socialization by the manner in which passive compliance is periodically rewarded. The individual learns to seek continuing gratification in this manner. He not only learns to expect it, but learns to some degree to distort his perception so that he will achieve fancied gratification from those in superior positions to him.

This latter observation of how Japanese characteristically distort toward the experience of fancied care and gratification from others is well brought out in descriptions of Naikan therapy very often practiced with delinquent youth.^[11] The individual sits and contemplates or meditates on how he has been ungrateful in the face of the supposed benefices given by his or her parents, mother-in-law, or other parental authority who are culturally expected to gratify the individual's need for nurturance.

This is a highly complex process to be further explored psychologically and culturally. Japanese characteristically seek to quell internal resent-

[10] William Caudill and Helen Weinstein, "Maternal Care and Infant Behavior in Japanese and American Middle-Class Families," in René König and Reubin Hill, eds., Yearbook of International Sociological Association (Switzerland: Broz, 1966).

[11] For an English summary, see I. Kitsuse, "A Method of Reform in Japanese Prisons," Orient/West 7.11:17–22. In Japanese, see I. Yoshimoto, Naikan yonjunen^[*] [Naikan-forty years] (Tokyo: Shunjusha^[*] , 1965); R. Ishida, Naikan bunseki ryoho^[*] [The naikan method analysis], Seishin Igaku 10(1968):478–484. See also Takie Lebra's perceptive analysis of naikan in relation to guilt in Japanese culture, "The Social Mechanism of Guilt and Shame: The Japanese Case," Anthropological Quarterly 44.4 (October 1971).

ments by distorting toward a not infrequently illusory perception of gratification within the family; in like situations in the West, the individual might more candidly observe a non-nurturant family environment and turn outside the family to religious beliefs. He is taught not to expect nurturance from those who cannot give it, but to overcome resentment by turning to a universal source. In fact, the seeking after dependent nurturance only within the family is culturally discouraged. Individuals are supposed to learn to be less emotionally dependent, less "hung up" about what to expect from others. We cannot overemphasize this cultural historical difference in ways of achieving emotional security as it relates to religious belief systems. One central function of Christian beliefs is to give the individual the assurance that there is someone who cares for him and will take care of him; someone who recognizes his deepest needs, understands, and accepts. This person is not a real figure in the actual social environment but either the Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ. God the Father for many is too aloof an authority figure to concern himself individually, but his compassionate son or the mother of his son are considered approachable figures, from whom to receive a sense of care and concern. In turn, one "gives" himself over to Jesus. One finds a release from the petty resentments of life and can then experience a flow of love. The Japanese generally have no such religious recourse to a Jesus figure, although some have found emotional satisfaction in reliance on figures such as Kannon, an oriental goddess of mercy.

In most instances, however, Japanese are constrained to find the illusion, if not the reality, of "giving" within the primary family or in some occupational transmutation of the primary-family relationship, so that individuals in parentlike roles tend to be imbued with capacities and desires to give what they may not actually possess. Japanese are wont, therefore, to feel gratification from individuals who have in actuality done very little to deserve such attachment. It is often curious to Westerners when they find Japanese expressing gratitude for behavior that they themselves had given little thought to. They do not well understand the Japanese need to feel that someone has cared, has given special attention—has indeed inspired him, released his energies productively, and freed him from the necessity of feeling resentful toward an impersonal ungiving world.

When these nurturant expectations are not fulfilled, the Japanese have a cultural reluctance to place blame or resentment on external society or on particular individuals; under duress, their only object of blame readily available tends to be the person's own body.^[12] This psychological pattern makes resentful social protest or persecutory personal paranoia culturally less frequent. Japanese paranoid individuals in my experience, for example, more characteristically exhibit delusions of grandeur than of

[12] See De Vos, Socialization for Achievement , chap 4.

persecution. There are in any Japanese population a number of benignly paranoid individuals whose delusionary system includes some beneficial act, which he is bestowing upon the entire world, such as the creation of new inventions or the writing of some book that will unite conflicting societies. In effect, these are grandiose delusions of bestowing benefits upon a needing world that blot out the hard fact of being ignored or forgotten as an individual. Japanese would rather distort reality in a direction of experiencing gratification from understanding superiors than distort in the direction of experiencing themselves subject to a melevolent, impersonal, exploitative social system in which they are being used, broken, and cast away as rubbish. Such a view of life for many a Japanese would elicit an unmanageable sense of irreparable outrage.

Seeking to continue dependent gratification in the adult occupational role is related emotionally to the way that many Japanese are socialized in early primary-family experiences. A primary feature of Japanese socialization is the manner in which strong dependency needs are developed and sustained by the culturally typical patterns of maternal nurturance directed toward the young. This nurturance pattern is reinforced in later, secondary, occupational socialization in a sufficient number of instances to make it a culturally prevalent belief system. Passive compliance is rewarded in emotional currency.

Not every individual has to have these learning experiences in his childhood and reinforcement of them in his later adulthood for the cultural belief system to persist. In a culture that puts heavy emphasis on a nurturant mother, some individuals may not experience such a nurturant mother; but since it is a shared belief transmitted in interpersonal communication that one is to expect a nurturant mother, one will tend to distort one's own experiences toward the maintenance of the belief that he too experiences the type of giving for which he should feel grateful. In the West, the figure of Jesus or Mary as a giver of care and concern is used symbolically in the religious system; in Japan, the mother, or parents, or later the boss is perceived as a potential source of nurturance. If the wish is not reinforced by the immediate experience, it is reinforced by the communication of a social belief in which the particular individual participates.

Endurance

This emphasis on dependency and interdependency is related psychodynamically to a second feature of Japanese socialization—the capacity to sustain oneself through present adversity toward the realization of a future goal. The virtue of endurance is recognized in Japanese culture and expressed through a number of terms with various shades of meaning in given circumstances. Endurance is a continual test of a capacity to win out in the end. "Succeed" is an English word that still carries both senses of its

meaning in Japanese. That is, to succeed is both to accomplish and to inherit—usually on the part of someone who has played an inferior role for a long time in anticipation. For a Japanese there is nothing personally demeaning in being a pupil for a long time or in submitting oneself in a seemingly passive way to the active dominance of someone playing the master's role. There is the balancing anticipation that by submitting one will eventually learn the necessary secrets of power and mastery. So too, as a nation Japan could learn from the West because there was no sense of pride being permanently wounded by taking in knowledge when one knew it was for the purpose of future mastery, independence, and perhaps, dominance.

Vicarious Identification

A third feature typical of Japanese socialization is how the development of empathic capacities for vicarious identification is crucial for the exercise of paternalism. I have elsewhere noted the psychological identification of a mother with the success of her male child, or with the success of the lineage into which she has been adopted by marriage.^[13] There is the same capacity for vicarious identification on the part of an inferior with the behavior of the individual in a superior role. It is less frequently noted but true, however, that the individual in the superior role identifies in some ways covertly, if not overtly, with the person in the inferior role. This last type of identification is usually on the part of older men toward younger men, since men are less permitted to cross the barrier of sexual roles and identify with women in their subordinate status. Men can be rather unsympathetic or unconcerned with the feelings of women or even their own children while quickly sensitive to the feelings of male subordinates outside their own family. Nevertheless, although it is generally disguised, there is a potential for guilt on the part of males toward their long-suffering mothers, if not their wives. As a consequence, potential for guilt on the part of superiors toward inferiors becomes a deeply internalized part of a Japanese sense of status responsibility.

It is necessary to take into consideration such patterns of vicarious identification that are emphasized in Japanese socialization; one cannot explain simply from a social structural point of view why the Japanese society is so well knit together in vertical structures by expressive affectional ties instead of by the externally visible instrumental contractual bonds required in the West.

In Japanese society, the capacities to endure in order to succeed and to identify vicariously with one's superior reach their apotheosis in the role of married women. Women identify readily with males carrying out their

[13] Ibid.

expected roles. This identification is an essential part of the woman's capacity for a deep sense of accomplishment as a mother; and her capacity for endurance permits her to go through what seems to be almost incredible acts of metamorphoses in the later stages of her life cycle. The meek bride is, in effect, the pupal stage of the later horrendous mother-in-law, just as the eager male apprentice is the larval stage of a potentially dominant master in the future. Many males, of course, carry on a continuing larval existence as more or less well-cared-for drones. The fact that the final stages of metamorphoses do not occur for all in the same way does not negate a Japanese cultural climate of relatively high worker morale.

Psychologically at least, if not in actuality, it is as if Japanese are in various stages of "becoming" during their life cycle. This gives them a sense of forward thrust into an optimistically conceived future. If the subsequent stages of metamorphoses do not occur during one's own life, there is the hope that they will see realization in one's children. While looking forward, one remains at the same time in a dependent position within hierarchical relationships. Premature assertion of independence would be disruptive. The individual would be destroyed and, therefore, would never reach the final stages of development, which require waiting and patience. Better to wait for an opportunity than to destroy one's chances by a premature assertion of independence that will not be sanctioned by the existing social reality.

The Western image of paternalism connotes an instrumental-exploitative use of a dependent labor force with whom there is no sense of personal involvement or belonging. The Japanese, in contrast, tend toward strong belief in political and social myths about their nation, company, group, or family collectivity. The boss or oyakata is supposed to have parentlike feelings. Indeed, the social expectations of his role often cause him to manifest overt behavior suggesting such feelings whether they are present or not. The good parent is assumed by the group or the community to provide for his dependent children—no matter what internal emotional reality is experienced. There are positive fantasies of protective consideration directed toward such superiors as bosses or company presidents that reinforce an internalized sense of responsibility on their part. They are not psychologically free to dehumanize their employees into numbers or abstractions of statistical tables giving projections of maximal efficiency. Many Japanese industrial leaders as well as the small-scale entrepreneurs we have researched are caught with an inner necessity to play out the benevolent aspects of an idealized wise company president spontaneously concerned with the welfare of his workers.

Some of these individuals who have succeeded from humble origins in the expanding national economy of Japan can hearken back in their imagination to their own previous status as young apprentices. They take

pride in their rise through adversity, and maintain within themselves a personalistic capacity to identify with an eager younger man who seems dependent on an older leader. On a deep psychodynamic level, one finds in Japanese an age-status network of affection binding persons of sharply different status into relations with one another. This sense of expressive rapport transcends status differences that more characteristically alienate individualistic Westerners from one another. The Western identification is more easily directed horizontally, whereas the Japanese sense of identification extends itself up and down in vertical relationships—characteristically defined as age-graded patterns—in which the individual has earlier experienced the lower stages and anticipates his experience of higher stages with succeeding age.

Since the subordinates have no instrumental power in the Japanese status hierarchy, they can only hope to induce kindness in their superiors by invoking potential feelings of nurturance and appreciation from them. This capacity, which is called amaeru in Japanese, has been very simply and cogently discussed by Takeo Doi.^[14] If fate puts one in the hands of a harsh authority, one has no recourse but to endure and to hope for change in the future. Japanese must depend on the positive expressive aspects of their dominant-subordinate relationships to be rewarding, since they have only recently begun to create in their social institutions the instrumental guarantees that ensure or secure what Westerners consider rights or justice for the weak.

It is often difficult for modern Western observers to consider a combination of nurturance and control that works both ways: not only is nurturance used to control, but control sometimes is a means to the bestowal of nurturance. The fact that he had early gratification of his own dependent needs constrains many a Japanese boss to find social means to bestow on others what a Westerner would view as almost maternallike nurturance. Such constraint comprises a profoundly significant part of Japanese social consciousness and sense of social responsibility. Wagatsuma and I have described the not unique incidence of a company president of a tiny five-man factory who turned back his extra income to his workers, realizing for himself his idealization of being a warm, paternal figure.^[15] Robert Bellah has provocatively contended in a cogent argument that the traditional image of the emperor contained maternal attributes.^[16] While agreeing with the essential arguments forwarded by Bellah, I would put it that what one calls maternal in Western parental role concepts can be readily fantasied as part of paternal authority behavior by Japanese. It is indeed true that the experience of such nurturance is derived from the mother-child experience; nevertheless, one frequently finds Japanese

[14] Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence (Tokyo: Kodansha^[*] , 1973).

[15] De Vos and Wagatsuma, Heritage of Endurance , I.

[16] Robert Bellah, "The Emperor as a Maternal Symbol," colloquium paper, Center for Japanese and Korean Studies University of California, Berkeley, 1967.

males behaving toward one another with maternal-like nurturance attitudes.

A system of reciprocity in expectations between superiors and subordinates only works when there is sufficient belief on the part of the subordinates that they will be rewarded if they perform properly in their subordinate position. The system therefore implies a reciprocal sensitivity to the expressive needs of subordinates on the part of superiors, not a simple exploitation of the weak on the part of the strong. In processes of socialization found frequently in Japan there is indeed a particular kind of internalization socialized into those who will later assume positions of authority. This process starts with a strong dedication on the part of the mother to her role as responsible socializer. This dedication requires considerable desexualization and the general foregoing of immediate gratification.

Public Dedication:
The Cleavage between Social Theory and Practice

It was also the expected, or at least idealized, role of the samurai bureaucrat in the premodern culture to be as truly dedicated to his job as a mother to her children. We are wont to hear more, much more, about the samurai as a swordsman, who would cut down inferiors, than about the samurai as a dedicated administrator, who was relatively uncorrupt and who would attempt to govern with an unusual degree of equity and fairness. Craig and Shively, in a number of chapters in their volume, present instances of notable samurai who performed as dedicated governors and administrators.^[17] Administrative authority may have been feared in Tokugawa Japan, but there was also an overall general respect for it. This is not to gainsay the periodic peasant rebellions against improper treatment. These were indeed symptomatic of misrule and corruption in local instances, but generally the system worked because there was enough relative honesty to keep it going. Therefore, individuals who held authority positions were generally invested with a certain moral ascendancy by their subordinates. The obvious split in the West between the idealized spiritual authority of the church and the rebellious self-righteous hatred of corrupt state power does not appear in Japan. In the West the individuals in the religious hierarchy were supposed to be more dedicated, while those in the secular hierarchy were expected to be less trustworthy. If there were any counterpart in Japan to Western religious authority, it is curiously enough found in the role of the dedicated civil bureaucrat.

Present-day police and governmental administration in Japan, compar-

[17] Albert Craig and Donald Shively, eds., Personality in Japanese History (Berkeley and Los Angeles; University of California Press, 1970).

atively speaking at least, inherit considerable public respect. Whatever the negative feelings engendered, authority is never perceived as so dishonest that it is distrusted, and for the most part it is granted a degree of respect rare in the United States. This attitude of respect is more feasible for Japanese emotionally. It is mobilized as an implicit expectation that gratification will be awarded for compliant behavior. The Western sense that moral obedience gains God's reward of nurturance is seldom extended to civil authorities; in Japan it is indeed toward the civil not the religious authority that one traditionally directs respectful obedience.

Such a pattern of emotional interaction in a hierarchical social structure is highly repellent to Western theoreticians and, of course, to modern Japanese Marxist theorists as well. They choose to ignore its operational force in present-day Japanese society or to see it as socially pathological. They choose the Western model of society as the ideal basis for social analysis. Japanese social historians, also influenced by Marx, emphasize rational instrumentality and ignore, if not abhor, the continuing force of expressive needs that permeate occupational as well as familial hierarchical structures in Japanese social organization. They do not like to see the relation between high industrial morale and what they term feudalistic social patterns. In the West, industrialization separated social classes rather than bringing them together. The lack of identity between classes in Western nations has become an alienating factor. Not only is there a lack of emotional ties, but there are direct and continual experiences of impersonal exploitation. The results are strong feelings of mutual class antagonism and a further separation between the different occupational strata of Western societies. Western nations, despite their capacity to arouse ethnic or national patriotism in wartime, are not knit together like Japan with a mythology of quasi parentage, or extended quasi-familial networks of obligations that act as nonlegally specified internal constraints against raw exploitation.

It is difficult, however, for Japanese to extend their administrative organization overseas to include non-Japanese. The implicit role patterns that allow mutual understanding of noncontractual operations within a totally Japanese social organization do not function well when members of alien cultures are involved. During their period of military expansion, the Japanese found that they could not readily identify downward with subject members of alien populations, and moreover the expected types of deference were not forthcoming from subordinates. In this situation, the Japanese potential for a racist-type of arrogance was quickly manifest, alienating even the previously subordinate populations who had initially viewed the Japanese as liberators.

Even today the implicit understanding that makes decision-making and interpersonal communication possible in Japanese occupational hierarchies cannot work with a minimum of formal legal contractual structuring

when non-Japanese are involved. The Japanese are constrained to adapt themselves in their external dealings to programs lacking the expressive aspects of psychological functioning that continue to operate peculiarly within Japanese organizational life.