J a p a n e s e    C u l t u r e

Renowned comparative agriculture historian, Francesca Bray, now retired I believe, formerly of Oxford Brookes University has stopped even mentioning her highly recommended book, "The Rice Economies," on the publications page of her website. Her monograph is fading into the history that it elucidates. From a Japanese point of view however, it is mind-blowing. 

The Japanese are taught at school from an early age that the long tradition of Japanese cooperation is rooted in the wet rice field agrarian economy, which required the use of irrigation channels which therefore required cooperation amongst Japanese agricultural villagers. This thesis is upheld by recent work in cultural psychology which argues that Japanese holism and Western analytic cognition is rooted in their agricultural traditions. Goat herding Greeks could wander down to the market and sell their meat and cheese without having to cooperate with anyone, whereas Japanese rice farmers were forced to irrigate their paddy fields using canels built with the cooperation of farms from other families. As a result, Greeks and other Europeans saw themselves and the world as being made up of individuals, persons and particles, whereas Japanese saw themselves as part of a community, and the world too as an interconnected whole. 

I do not doubt that Japanese agricultural villagers were required to cooperate with each other, but as regards to the extent of cooperation compared to other styles of agriculture, particular that pertaining in the UK, and it was for this reason that the industrial revolution occured in the UK, rather than Japan, because the cooperation required of working in factories and production lines was cultivated among British but not East Asian rice growing peasants. 

Bray argues that European farming, with its cooler climate requires the manure of cattle to provide the fertiliser to grow wheat. It is not that we are descended from roaming hunter gatherers (another romantic notion often heard in Japan) but that we needed cow dung to, to grow wheat, to make bread, to survive. This means, Bray argues that two very different types of farmer -- cattle farmers and wheat farmers had to work together using fields in crop rotation, typically one year grazing cattle, one year fallow and one year growing wheat before repeating the cycle again. Wheat farmers and cattle farmers have different skill sets so specialisation was encouraged and all the while cooperation was required. This mixture of specialisation and cooperation lead, Bray argues, to the advent of even greater specialisation and cooperation (later decried by Marx) in the Industrial Revolution in the UK. 

In East Asian however, Bray claims, the warmer climate meant that farmers needed far less in the way of fertiliser, since a fermentation process occurring in wet rice fields results in the creation of the nitrates required plants, with only the necessity to provide the manure and left over waste from the farmers own toilets and kitchens. Further, while much is made of the requirement for irrigation channels, it was only in flat regions where these were canalls supplying water from distant rivers, were required to be constructed by communities of agricultural workers. 

In the majority of cases, in the mountainous regions covering most of Japan for instance, water was not canalled from distant rivers but could be channelled from streams, or from small reservoir lakes on land owned by the rice farmer. In the latter situation especially, rice farming families were required to cooperate with no one other than their own family members, since they only needed the water from from their own reservoir and the nutrients from their own farmhouse. The were encouraged instead to become generalists, in charge of weeding, fertilising, harvesting and threshing the product of their self-sufficient and highly productive wet field rice paddies. In the absence of the cooperation required by crop rotating UK farmers, the splendid isolation of the Japanese rice farm resulted in highly individual farmers who did not think to create, nor were as suitable for working in the factories of the industrial revolution. 

I could not agree more. There are few nations as individual, and independent as the Japanese, so much so that they required the ideology of "harmony" or "peace" (wa) to prevent them from getting at each other's throats at the intersections between their independent rice farms. 

Ray, F. (1994). The Rice Economies. University of California Press (first published in 1986). 
https://www.amazon.com/Rice-Economies-Francesca-Bray/dp/0520086201

# posted by Timtak @ 10:21 AM  0 comments

Here in Japan people treat the commons, such as their roads, not as something to take advantage of in the most selfish way possible (Hardin, 1968) but as something that they work together to preserve. In the photo above are a group of my neighbours, at least one from each household, including my wife, cleaning and weeding a street on which we live. There is some social pressure to participate, but not all that much. If you don't want to participate you can pay a yearly fee of 1000 yen which goes towards giving a small reward (a bottle of tea and some rubbish bags) to those that do. It seems to me that people just want their street to look good. 

I claim that this is because the Japanese are autoscopic individualists (Takemoto & Iwaizono, 2016) by virtue of the mirror in their mind (Heine et al., 2008). When you see yourself, you are neither encouraged to compare your own utility with those of others (Hardin, 1968), as encouraged the "negativity" (De Saussure, 2011: see Maruyama, et al., 1993) of linguistic self representation and rational thought, nor is it even possible to isolate (think Photoshop) yourself out your environment. The autoscopic Japanese and their environment are one, in the "two shot" selfie (ツーショット・自撮り写真）of their mind. 

I hoping that if AI has the means and desire to kill all the people, due to their tendencies to cause "tragedies," it will spare the Japanese. 

# posted by Timtak @ 12:37 PM  0 comments