brand

brand name

bullying

consumerism

exhaustion

hard work

Japan

Japanese culture

overtime

overwork

overworking

resistance

work

, in Japan, serves as an opportunity to deny one's personality and take on someone else's; it's an opportunity to reflect not your own personality, but that of the brand.

People think that by buying up designer purses they are somehow asserting their own style, he said, laughing. 'But if you slavishly buy a brand product, you can deny your personality and take on someone else's. Eventually it's not any reflection of your own personality, but of the brand's.

, in Japan, is not just a problem among children. It is actively condoned even in adult Japanese society as a means to modify behavior and as a tool for forcing the individual to accept the logic of the group.

In his book Straightjacket Society, the psychiatrist Masao Miyamoto describes the various methods his colleagues used to hound and punish him for refusing to toe the group's line when he worked in the Health Ministry. Bullying, he concludes, is actively condoned even in adult Japanese society as a means to modify behavior, 'a tool for forcing the individual to accept the logic of the group.' This represents a 'major difference from the situation in Western countries,' where bullying tends to be associated with young children, and where adults who bully others are considered abnormal, or even sadistic.9

, in Japan, is consciously engineered into the system to displace or discourage resistance.

Miyamoto traces the history of Japan's 'overwork psychosis' to the Tokugawa period, when each provincial warlord was commanded to appear in Edo, the capital, every second year, along with a vast entourage of advisers, samurai, horsemen, and other members of his court. The grandiose yet obsessively precise protocols surrounding these official pilgrimages demanded that officials visit other lords along their route, present each vassal with elaborate gifts, attend formal banquets, and perform other ceremonial duties. Provincial leaders competed with one another in order to display their wealth and lordly authority. Yet preparing for and then completing these arduous biennial expeditions became so time-consuming that potential rivals never had sufficient energy to plot a coup.

Masao MiyamotoThinkers

Masao Miyamoto