Western Style Groupism in Japan

Western Style Groupism in Japan, a photo by timtak on Flickr.

It is very rare to find a Japanese student with a sweatshirt like this.
Americans have a lot of these, where as Japanese university students generally have hardly any University sweats and if they do they are more likely to have a sweat shirt advertising another (often American) university rather than their own. Americans on the other hand have on average about 6 sweatshirts proclaiming the name of their own university and are not ashamed to wear them around campus and especially to varsity (am I using this word correctly) 'football' matches where the crowd appears to be full of clones, all in the same coloured sweat shirts. Despite this fact, there is still a common misperception that it is the Japanese that are conformists. Yuuki Masaki (2003)