I agree with much of the criticism of a cultural interpretation of Japan's lack of preparedness before the Tohoku tsunami disaster. But not all of it.

1. Not all cultural interpretations embrace the romantic nonsense of nihonjinron. I suspect that Mr.
Kurokawa had some very specific matters in mind when he made his comments. Let's not toss aside his remarks until we learn more about what he has to say.

2. The fact that this or that Japanese individual did not behave according to a cultural stereotype is irrelevant to the validity of cultural explanations.
The solitary individual is never the unit of analysis in culture studies, and no one to my knowledge has ever claimed that every person in any large group of people shares identical cultural values.

3. The fact that examples of corporate irresponsibility can be found in all societies does not signify that culture is irrelevant to their analysis. In some cases, culture may not matter, but in others, it may matter a great deal, though perhaps in different ways from one culture to another.

4. In some social arenas, a stronger sense of corporate or group solidarity seems to prevail in Japan than in most other industrialized societies. Admittedly, the use of culture to explain a particular event like the TEPCO disaster does not seem very useful - to repeat, cultural studies are meant to explain patterns of behavior, not individual instances. Nonetheless, if one reflects upon the importance of social networks in the explanation of voting behavior in Japan, or the way in which protest movements organize primarily around local communities there rather than national interest groups, there do seem to be some patterns of behavior that support the standard cultural portrait. Kurokawa is not the first person to suggest that certain aspects of the government-business relationship might fit that portrait as well.

We all constantly warn our students to avoid cultural stereotypes. In particular, I urge them not to assume that culture necessarily provides the real insider's understanding of social phenomena, as many of them seem to think. If we want to know why a certain pattern of public policy took root, for instance, we should ask the policymakers what they were thinking, not assume that they acted upon some generic understanding of Japanese culture. But I also advise that if those policymakers themselves respond that cultural values have shaped a particular pattern of policymaking, then a cultural reading may be in order. After all, if the authoritative decision-makers claim that they have acted according to certain cultural expectations, culture in that area may indeed be the inside story.

Rather than condemn Mr. Kurokawa for embracing a cultural reading of the TEPCO catastrophe, might it not be more interesting to find out precisely what he had in mind, and to find out how many of Japan's top bureaucrats, politicians, and business people share his cultural reading of things? Their answers might constitute an interesting cultural fact in itself.

Granted, to impose a cultural stereotype upon a population of 130 million people in a modern society is absurd. But it seems equally absurd to assume that cultural values are distributed evenly across the world's many societies and ipso facto useless as tools of social analysis.

Greg

Prof. Gregory J. Kasza
Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures Department of Political Science Indiana University Bloomington