J a p a n e s e    C u l t u r e

People the world over, including the Japanese, believe the Japanese to be more groupist than Westerners. In my experience of living here for more than half of my life, I do not find this to be the case. Rather, while the philosophies of individualism and collectivism exist in the West and Japan, there is little difference in the actual levels of either as demonstrated for example by the experiments of Miligram, Bickman, and Berkowitz, 1969 p80 and Inaba et al. who repeated the same experiment, seeing what percentage of people would stop and stare if a group of stooges pointed upwards in a certain direction. The results show that the "drawing power" of crowds is greater in America with the blue line being generally higher than the dark line (for Japan in the day time). I think that this lower obedience/conformance in Japan is partly due to this being a visible behaviour. In Yotaro Takno's experiments demonstrating that the Japanese are no less conforming that Americans, the subjects were required to expresses their responses by moving to one or other side of the class room being used as a laboratory. If one were to ask Japanese their opinions and then tell them that their opinion is outlier (show them the verbal Nacalain transformation of someone pointing) they might change their opinion. If I were to ask a Japanese person "The capital of America is New York isn't it" in the presence of a lot of stooges saying "yes, yes, sure, yeah" then a Japanese person might not have any problem conforming.

The issue is what is considered to be "self." Westerners consider their speech to be self so they aim for and achieve consistency in their self[-narrative, and trash "mere appearance." Japanese consider their image to be self so they aim for and achieve consistency in their self-image. Conversely, image matters little to Westerners and speech matters little to Japanese.

もともとの研究(Miligram, Bickman, and Berkowitz, 1969 p80)でも、 欧米人も感染されて5人の段階では、日本人は立ち 止まらなかったが米人の１７％は立ち止まり、日本人の昼35％～朝47％は通行しながら見たが、欧米人は80％でした。両方の結果を上で合併しました。アメリカでの同調性（従順性）は青い線で、「午後」New Yorkで行われていた。日本での朝や昼の線のいずれよりも行動感染が高い。 しかし、このように、日本人の方が他人の行動に感染されないのはその行動が指差しで示されている視線の向きであって、極めて視覚的なものです。高野陽太郎(2008)の同調性の実験も、ただ単にサクラたちが言わされたら誤った回答に同調するかどうかだけではなく、被験者はその回答を、実験が行われた教室の右か左に移動することで示さなければならなかった。日本人は視覚内省力が高い（）から、視覚的に察知できる自らの行動を鮮明に意識できるし、顔や体に感情移入しているので、バカな行動をとりたくありません。もしも口頭だけで「アメリカの首都はニューヨークよね」に対して「はい」か「いいえ」で答えなければならなかったら、サクラたちに同調して「はい」と揃うのはそう辛くもないかもしれない。

Milligram http://ift.tt/1QhgujW... http://flic.kr/p/ukgUwX