China Open Source Observatory

Circle Culture: The Paradox of Japanese Cohesion

China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations

January 1, 2021

圈子文化：日本凝聚力的悖论

中国现代国际关系研究院

Circle Culture: The Paradox of Japanese Cohesion圈子文化：日本凝聚力的悖论

Note: this document was translated using machine learning technology. Learn more.

Originally Written By
China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations中国现代国际关系研究院
Publisher
Current Affairs Press时事出版社

Chapter Three

第三章

Circle Culture: The Paradox of Japanese Cohesion

For a long time, Japanese society has widely regarded its own legal framework for national security as inadequate, and the public’s awareness of national security as weak. Many people—especially those on the Japanese right—have claimed that Japan lacks national security laws, making it a “paradise for spies,” and so on. In reality, however, Japan’s national security is not nearly as deficient as they suggest. Japan’s circle culture—that is, its collectivism—plays a very important role in safeguarding national security. Circle culture is a “key concept” for understanding Japanese national security for two reasons. First, circle culture permeates every aspect of Japanese politics, economics, society, culture, and ecology—it can be found virtually everywhere. Second, the social manifestation of circle culture is the circle itself: where there are circles, there are boundaries, and thus an inside and an outside. Those inside the circle “look inward,” prioritizing the interests of the group, which makes it easier to cultivate a strong internal cohesion. The principle of distinguishing between insiders and outsiders, between the close and the distant, also provides relatively favorable conditions for safeguarding Japan’s national security.

But things turn into their opposites when they reach an extreme. Circle culture is also a double-edged sword: while it safeguards Japan’s security, it has also been exploited by militarists as a tool of external aggression, bringing catastrophic disaster upon Japan’s national security.

Of course, circle culture itself is not the “root cause”—it is merely a tool. Used properly, it can provide the necessary guarantees for national security; used improperly, it may add fuel to the flames. This is the dialectical relationship between Japan’s circle culture and national security.

Circle Culture Is Everywhere

For any country, the absence of war and the absence of political, economic, and social upheaval means that country is fundamentally secure—though the degree of security may vary. Security, stability, and order are therefore all of a piece. And Japan’s circle culture happens to be highly functional precisely in maintaining stability and order.

Take, for example, the direction of public opinion, which is of enormous importance for guiding public sentiment, maintaining the authority and prestige of the government, and preserving social order. In Western political science textbooks, the media is called the “fourth estate,” playing the role of supervising government and regulating power. In Japan, however, the media does not occupy this position. Although Japan’s mainstream media also calls itself the “fourth estate,” the reality diverges sharply from the theory.

Japanese public opinion and propaganda place great emphasis on “circles” and are highly attuned to politics. The Prime Minister’s Office, central government ministries, and local governments all have press clubs, composed of resident reporters dispatched by major mainstream media outlets. There are more than 800 press clubs nationwide. Press clubs are closed groups—not just anyone can join. They generally accept only reporters from mainstream media outlets. Tabloid weeklies, freelance journalists, and foreign media are often unable to gain entry; even Japanese-national reporters working for globally prominent outlets like the New York Times have complained bitterly about being excluded.

Government agencies generally hold press conferences only for press club members, and mainstream media have in practice monopolized news resources through the press clubs, giving themselves a special advantage. To maintain their relationship with the government, media outlets naturally follow the government’s lead—otherwise they risk being cold-shouldered or even expelled from the circle. Those who comply can be rewarded with “carrots”; those who refuse and persistently criticize the government are punished with the “stick”—having certain news sources cut off. Japan’s TBS television network was once sanctioned by the Liberal Democratic Party with a refusal to accept interviews from the station, after it criticized Abe’s policies.

In this atmosphere that prizes circle culture, the front pages of Japan’s mainstream media are often nearly identical—a distinctive feature of the Western media landscape. Of course, Japanese media have their own leanings: the Sankei Shimbun has a relatively strong right-wing character and gives considerable support to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. The Asahi Shimbun leans more toward Euro-American liberalism and sometimes criticizes the LDP government to cater to its readers, but such criticism is often toothless. Its purpose is singular: to maintain the group, to maintain the circle.

Thus, under the influence of circle culture, Japan’s mainstream media has successfully guided public opinion in directions favorable to the government. One might say that although Japan has no government propaganda department, it is no less effective at managing the media and controlling the public opinion landscape.

Consider also Japanese society. Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword devotes an entire chapter to the principles governing social interaction in Japan, titled “Taking One’s Proper Station”—which speaks precisely to the “orderliness” of Japanese society. The stability of social order is clearly an important component of national security. When we discuss the distinctive features of Japanese enterprises, we often mention the “lifetime employment system” and the “seniority system.” The former means that once a person becomes a company employee, they will not be dismissed as long as they do not commit a serious error, thereby eliminating the vast majority of their anxieties about the future. The latter is often seen as “promotion by seniority” within enterprises, but in reality, providing different treatment based on the length of one’s tenure has a certain rationality of its own. In the past, some large companies set wage standards according to employees’ age: those in their twenties might earn around 200,000 yen per month, those in their thirties around 300,000 yen, and those in their forties around 400,000 yen. This does not mean that a person in their forties contributes more than someone in their twenties and therefore receives higher pay. It is simply a balance that the company strikes across generations under the premise of lifetime employment. The reason a person in their forties can earn 400,000 yen is that they need that much—at that age, employees typically have both elderly parents and young children to support. The company deliberately pays lower wages when employees are young, and then distributes what it has accumulated on their behalf when they actually need the money.

These systems ensure stability and order within enterprises. Some argue that they stifle competition and are detrimental to economic efficiency. But the contribution of these systems to Japan’s social stability over the decades following World War II cannot be dismissed. Under the lifetime employment system, Japan’s unemployment rate has been very low—one reason why Japan has low crime rates and a relatively strong sense of social well-being. Within enterprises, the circle culture of “taking one’s proper station” weakens internal competition, but at the same time ensures that group members need not fear losing their jobs. The system of wages and positions rising with age gives employees a relatively clear sense of what to expect from the future, which is conducive to the stability of both enterprises and society.

Beyond the two examples mentioned above, circle culture permeates every aspect of Japanese society. It is one of the foundational conditions—one might even say an indispensable condition—for Japan’s distinctive form of stability.

The Source of Cohesion

In modern times, coups d’état have been rare in Japan. The two coups that are well known—the May 15th Incident and the February 26th Incident, both occurring before World War II—were not in essence armed seizures of power by the military over civilian politicians. A group of young men within the Japanese military at the time resented the upper echelons of society (including senior military officers and high-ranking politicians), believing they had corrupted the state and plunged ordinary people into suffering. They therefore raised the banner of “purging those around the emperor,” demanding the removal of the “malignant tumors” surrounding the throne so that Japan could truly realize the ideal of “one sovereign, ten thousand subjects”—that is, “all are the emperor’s subjects, save the emperor himself.”

Like Song Jiang and his band on Mount Liang, these young military radicals “opposed corrupt officials but not the emperor.” In other words, they had no objection to building an authority structure with the emperor at its apex. The purpose of their coup was not to overthrow the emperor, nor to reduce him to a figurehead, but to ensure that the emperor held and exercised real power. This model of coup is rare anywhere else in the world.

All of Japan can be said to constitute one great collective, one great circle. The role of the emperor in maintaining the order, stability, and cohesion of this great collective cannot be overlooked. Although the emperor did not necessarily exercise power directly, in pre-war Japan the emperor undoubtedly commanded enormous authority. In post-war Japan, while the emperor is no longer the head of state in a legal sense—on March 17, 2016, Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko paid their respects to victims of the 2011 earthquake—the attitudes of ordinary Japanese toward the United States changed dramatically before and after the surrender. Mei Ruao, the Chinese judge who participated in the Tokyo Trials, wrote in his diary about his impressions of Japan: “[American troops] paraded through the major streets of Tokyo, with American and Japanese police maintaining order, and crowds of onlookers lining the roadsides. From the expressions on the faces of Japanese men and women, young and old, I could not discern a thing. By rights, they should have felt anger or shame at this highly provocative display of force. But I could not detect any of it. … It is said that from the time the American forces landed until now, not a single ‘incident’ has occurred.”

he is still revered and beloved by many Japanese. Many elderly Japanese consider it an honor to be selected to spend a day cleaning the Imperial Palace and “serving” the emperor. After the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko visited the disaster areas to inspect conditions and offer comfort, playing no small role in steadying public sentiment and maintaining social order.

Within a collective, having a single authoritative core confers great advantages in maintaining cohesion and stability compared to having no core or multiple competing cores. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, the period of disorder was relatively brief, and the shock of defeat did not shatter the social order entirely—the emperor played a certain role in this.

The reason the United States preserved Japan’s imperial system after World War II was, of course, to facilitate its own governance of Japan. Emperor Showa’s surrender broadcast caused Japanese citizens who had been gripping bamboo spears in preparation for “one hundred million dying together” to lay down their arms and welcome the Americans with remarkable docility. The

In fact, the transformation of the Japanese public after World War II—from a steely resolve to “die together to the last” to an embrace of peace—took an extraordinarily short time. Even those who had been crying out “American and British devils” and vowing to fight to the death against any landing forces became, after the surrender, among the first to welcome American General MacArthur.

Their attitude toward American forces was no different from their attitude toward the Chinese. On the road back to Tokyo from Atami, Mei Ruao and his companions found their car stuck in mud and unable to move. Mei Ruao recounted: “While our car was struggling, the more able-bodied Japanese men came forward very eagerly to push and pull it, exerting themselves with great energy. They knew perfectly well that we were Chinese, yet showed not the slightest trace of resentment.”

Mei Ruao was a man of wide experience, and even he found these scenes quite astonishing. In the traditional Chinese way of thinking, being occupied means the destruction of one’s country, and the “anguish of a fallen nation,” even if it cannot be translated into action, should at least be visible on one’s face. Yet the Japanese of that time showed no such emotion. Mei Ruao’s diary does not offer a deep explanation for this, but it provides us with first-hand information through which we can glimpse the psychological state of ordinary Japanese at the time—a window into circle culture: the paradox of Japanese cohesion.


＜ 梅汝璈先生故居

In the eyes of ordinary Japanese, the decision to surrender in defeat was made by the emperor. To be loyal to the emperor meant obeying any decision he made—this was the belief instilled in ordinary citizens by Japan’s rulers at the time, and it was a belief that ordinary citizens followed. Thus, after the emperor ordered the laying down of arms, the vast majority of Japanese offered no resistance. When the emperor cooperated with the American occupation forces, the people followed the emperor and played the role of cooperators as well.

Even with the entire economy in collapse after defeat, Japan saw no powerful revolutionary tide emerge. In the early 1950s, the Japanese Communist Party, under Soviet influence, put forward a guideline of armed struggle, but it received no response from the public. The Party’s armed struggle ultimately failed, and it returned to the old path of “parliamentary struggle.”

Because Japanese society at the time was permeated by loyalty to and dependence on the emperor, Japan was able to maintain stability. It did not fall apart after defeat, and within a relatively short time it recovered its vitality, eventually embarking on a path of rapid economic growth.

This great circle of Japan as a whole was no different from the countless small circles that existed within Japanese society. The renowned Japanese intellectual Maruyama Masao once vividly compared these various circles and collectives to “octopus pots.” Wang Min, a professor at Hosei University, elaborated further: within each “octopus pot,” there exists its own “pot master.” The authority of this “pot master” is the key to ensuring the stability and cohesion of the collective. The factional cliques of the Liberal Democratic Party, for example, are textbook “octopus pots,” with the faction leader as the “pot master.” The leader wields enormous power of intimidation within the faction—this is precisely why Tanaka Kakuei, even after being forced to resign as prime minister and convicted in the Lockheed scandal, was still able to manipulate Japanese politics for more than a decade.

Beyond authority—the primary factor—internal checks within the collective are also worth noting as an important element in Japan’s political stability.

Before World War II, the Japanese military vigorously pursued a militarist policy of external aggression. The military establishment, which controlled the armed forces, theoretically had the power to destroy the existing political system, yet this extreme outcome never materialized. Japan never developed a fully military government, even though the military and military figures wielded considerable influence within the political system. That figures like Tojo Hideki rose to become prime minister was not the result of a coup, but rather the outcome of power struggles within the existing political system, in which the civilian bureaucratic structure continued to impose some constraints on military authority.

This was due not only to the emperor factor, but also to the fact that the military establishment itself was not a monolithic bloc—it contained various competing interest groups. During World War II, the Japanese Army and Navy were locked in mutual opposition and antagonism. The two services not only pursued diametrically opposed strategic directions and engaged in fierce internal rivalry, but also maintained strict barriers in areas such as weapons development and personnel exchange. When the Army or Navy sought to acquire foreign military technology, each would rather pay a separate licensing fee to foreign manufacturers than share information with the other. After the disastrous Japanese naval defeat at Midway, the Navy tightly suppressed the news—even spinning defeat into victory—partly out of fear that the Army would seize on the setback to attack and undermine the Navy. Within the Army itself, there was the well-known rivalry between the Control Faction and the Imperial Way Faction. The Imperial Way Faction sought to transform the existing internal command structure of the military and establish a new system with the emperor at its apex; the Control Faction sought to preserve the existing internal command structure. In short, the Imperial Way Faction sought to overturn the existing system of vested interests, while the Control Faction sought to protect it. They were united in pursuing a war of aggression, but their internal divisions caused them to check each other, limiting their pursuit of further power. The Navy was likewise not monolithic. Before World War II, there was fierce rivalry between the Fleet Faction and the Treaty Faction. These rivalries and conflicts between small groups had a considerable constraining effect, preventing them from pulling together to achieve larger objectives. If the Army, for instance, attempted to seize power, the Navy would be wary that an Army monopoly on power would be used to suppress the Navy, and would therefore drag its feet; the situation within the Army was much the same. Thus, mutual constraint often produced a kind of dynamic stability—one in which contradictions and struggles existed, but the overall system and situation did not descend into violent upheaval.

The Gene of Internal Attrition

Deference to and maintenance of authority can indeed preserve the stability of a circle. But everything has two sides. Rivalry and competition between factions and circles also produces internal attrition, creating obstacles to the formulation and implementation of policy. At the same time, placing group interests above all else and suppressing dissenting voices within the collective can cause the collective to veer off course—and if this continues unchecked, it will lead to harmful consequences.

Japan’s government ministries are roughly equivalent to the ministries and commissions under China’s State Council. Japanese media often describe them with a single phrase: “vertically segmented.” In theory, once government policies are announced, the various government departments should work in concert, each contributing its strengths, to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of its parts—a “1+1>2” outcome. In practice, however, Japanese government rarely achieves this kind of synergy. In Japanese, there is a fixed term—<the Kasumigaseki district where Japan’s central ministries are located> absolute loyalty to one’s group, with no tolerance for defection—which differs from the Chinese case. In Chinese society, “loyalty” is not unconditional. As the saying goes, “a wise bird chooses its tree.” Like the ideal of the wandering scholar-knight of the Warring States period, a talented person could choose the object of their loyalty. When a ruler lacked benevolence and righteousness, the people had the right to leave or even oppose that ruler. Thus, in Chinese history, Tang, who rose up against the tyrannical Xia king Jie, and King Wu of Zhou, who launched a punitive campaign against the brutal Shang king Zhou, were both revered by later generations as sages.

“ministry benefit”—meaning that government bureaucrats, in their conduct and actions, do not place the national interest (the obvious and proper goal) first, but instead prioritize the interests of their own ministry or department.

Take Japan’s early childhood education system, for example. There are two parallel systems: the hoikuen (nursery schools) under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, and the yōchien (kindergartens) under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. In practice, there is no particularly significant difference between the two—they simply fall under different supervising ministries. But staff who hold only the certification issued by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare cannot work in a yōchien, and vice versa. This practice of prioritizing one’s own ministry’s interests creates pointless internal attrition and has a negative effect on government administration.

Placing group interests above all else and prioritizing group stability is also reflected in the refusal to tolerate group members who “elbow their way out”—that is, who act against the group’s interests. Japanese society demands absolute loyalty to one’s collective or circle

Circle Culture: The Paradox of Japanese Cohesion

In Japanese society, figures like Tang and King Wu of Zhou would certainly be repudiated. Japanese “loyalty” is a behavioral code of the collective—it is submission to the collective itself, and it typically manifests as submission to the collective’s leader. Loyalty to the leader carries a certain absolute and exclusive quality. Thus, when social interests conflict with group interests, anyone who betrays group interests for the sake of social interests is branded a “traitor” and subjected to ostracism and suppression. Individuals within the collective are therefore often compelled, for the sake of their own interests, to choose compliance.

Consider the issue of sexual harassment in Japanese society, which has become a focal point of public debate in recent years. Although journalist Ito Shiori won her first-instance lawsuit against Yamaguchi Noriyuki, “Ito Shiori” remains an extreme rarity in Japan. According to a 2017 Japanese government survey, only 4% of women come forward to seek justice for themselves. Ito was the first woman in Japanese history to publicly report a sexual harassment incident under her real name. The reason for this is that the cost of doing so is enormous. While her decision to speak out was an assertion of her own rights and a defense of women’s rights more broadly—carrying positive social significance—in practice her actions damaged the relationship between her own organization and Yamaguchi’s organization. In Japan, sexual harassment of this kind is to some extent an unspoken rule. Even when it occurs, the leaders of the victim’s organization will do their best to minimize and suppress the matter in order to preserve inter-organizational relations. Ito’s decision to speak out effectively harmed the interests of her own organization, creating many difficulties for that organization’s subsequent reporting activities. As a result, Ito found herself unable to remain within her original workplace—her own collective—and because so many people deeply believe in the primacy of group interests, a considerable portion of Japanese public opinion did not endorse her actions either.

In Japanese society, so-called internal whistleblowing—where group members report to law enforcement agencies, supervisory authorities, or other oversight bodies—is also discouraged. Internal whistleblowing inflicts serious harm on the collective: it not only implicates important figures within the group, but also brings shame upon the entire collective. Such behavior is therefore typically repudiated and suppressed. Take the cases of Kobe Steel and Takata airbags, exposed in 2018: both companies had been falsifying data continuously for more than a decade without ever being exposed. The people inside these companies were not unaware of the problems. When confronted with them, most hesitated and were afraid, feeling that once they told the truth, they would face enormous consequences—not only would they be unable to remain within their own company, but even after leaving, other companies would view them as people who had once “betrayed” their employer, seeing them as having a treacherous streak, and re-employment would be fraught with difficulty.

This culture of placing group interests first can produce extremely harmful consequences. The phenomenon described above—where a company’s products are substandard for years without anyone raising the alarm—is one example. What is true of enterprises is even more true of the state. From the Meiji Restoration onward, Japan was gradually moving down the path of external aggression. It was not that there were no dissenting voices along the way, but those voices were scattered and could not form a current. During World War II, for instance, even within Germany there existed anti-war forces—but in Japan, anti-war forces were virtually nonexistent. The reason is simple: when group interests are paramount, once a decision has been made, it is very difficult for dissenting voices to emerge in order to protect those interests. Even if someone was willing to brave the wrath of the world and stand up, they would quickly be ostracized, drowned out, or even eliminated, and ultimately silenced.

It was precisely this inability to correct an erroneous course that caused Japan to stray ever further down the wrong path of external aggression. Although prioritizing group interests strengthens cohesion, this is not unconditionally beneficial to national security. If that cohesion moves in the wrong direction, it can inflict incalculable damage and harm upon national security.

Japanese Learning as Substance

There is a common misconception among outsiders that Japanese culture is a branch of Chinese culture. The eminent British historian Arnold Toynbee took this view in his classification of civilizations in A Study of History. It is true that in certain cultural respects—traditional architecture, clothing, food, housing, and daily life—Japan has been profoundly influenced by China. In the realm of ideology, Chinese Confucianism, Chinese Buddhism, and even Taoism have all had a deep influence on the development of Japanese culture. The tatami mat and the kimono, for example, have inseparable connections to China’s Tang dynasty, and the Shōsōin treasury in Nara is renowned for its rich collection of Tang dynasty artifacts. Japan’s six Buddhist schools of the Nara period were all formed after Chinese Tang dynasty Buddhism was transmitted to Japan, and Chinese Chan Buddhism, after entering Japan, was further developed and became enormously influential—even considered to have close ties to Bushido. Zhu Xi’s “Zhu Xi Learning” was also regarded as the dominant ideology of the Edo shogunate.

However, Japan’s adoption of Chinese culture was not an integrative absorption—this differs from the repeated cultural fusions that characterized ancient China. Chinese culture underwent multiple great fusions in its development. Chinese culture as expressed in the Tang dynasty, for example, differed greatly from that of the Han dynasty, having passed through the Sixteen Kingdoms period and the Northern and Southern Dynasties—a result of ethnic fusion. The Huaxia people, as the dominant culture, absorbed and integrated the cultures of various ethnic minorities, forming new cultural characteristics.

Japan’s situation was different. When outsiders speak of China, Japan, and Korea together, they often describe them as belonging to a “Confucian cultural sphere.” This formulation highlights certain commonalities, but it cannot be said that Confucianism is the dominant ideology in these countries. Each country has its own cultural characteristics; Confucianism is only one of them, and perhaps only a surface-level characteristic at that. The core remains each country’s own culture. In Japan, for instance, the animistic religious culture represented by Shinto is one of the core characteristics of Japanese culture—and this is actually at odds with Confucian culture, which emphasizes rationality and “respecting the spirits while keeping them at a distance.”

When adopting the cultures of other peoples, whether ancient or modern Japanese have never swallowed them whole or copied them wholesale to completely replace their own native culture. Instead, they have selectively imported external culture according to their own needs. For example, when Japan’s ritsuryo state in the eighth century adopted various Tang dynasty political and economic institutions, it did not adopt the civil service examination system. The examination system established in the Sui and Tang dynasties served to dismantle the existing aristocratic power structure, allowing many men of humble origins to rise from the lower to the upper strata of society. Had this system been transplanted to Japan at the time, it would clearly have posed an enormous threat to the powerful aristocratic clans that then ruled Japan.

Japan’s adoption of Buddhism also vividly illustrates this characteristic. In Japanese culture, there are concepts known as honji suijaku (“original ground, manifest traces”) and shinbutsu shūgō (“the amalgamation of kami and buddhas”), which essentially use the Shinto framework to accommodate the Buddhist framework, thereby achieving compatibility between Shinto and Buddhism. The sun goddess Amaterasu, for example, is considered to be the manifestation in Japan of the esoteric Buddhist deity Mahavairocana—the two being essentially one and the same. As Buddhism took root in Japan, it absorbed many characteristics of native Japanese culture, and its outward forms underwent significant transformation. To this day, a Shinto shrine is generally found in one corner of a Japanese Buddhist temple, and a “shrine temple” (jingūji) is generally found in one corner of a Shinto shrine. This mutual compatibility is extremely rare in other countries.

After the Meiji Restoration in modern times, there was a period during which Japan comprehensively aligned itself with Euro-American models in architecture, clothing, law, and even political institutions. The “transformation of customs and habits” during this period had no small impact on Japan: it left behind many Western-style buildings, and even the Western formal attire worn by cabinet ministers when they visit the Imperial Palace to receive the emperor’s “certification” after a new cabinet is formed was established during this period. This era is described as “comprehensive Westernization,” and on the surface it appeared to replace what was considered “backward” Chinese culture with the then “advanced” Western culture. This has also led many later observers to regard it as an important reason why Japan was able to rise so rapidly and successfully join the ranks of the great powers.


> 日本京都东寺内的镇守八幡宫神社

However, after the Meiji Restoration, Japan had a phrase—”Japanese spirit, Western learning” (wakon yōsai)—whose meaning has much in common with Zhang Zhidong’s vigorously promoted formula of “Chinese learning as substance, Western learning for application” from the late Qing dynasty. Both emphasize the need to uphold the primacy and initiative of one’s own culture while selectively importing Western culture, institutions, and science and technology.

The Japanese scholar Tominaga Ken’ichi, in his “theory of modernization,” argued that modernization can be divided into techno-economic modernization, political modernization, social modernization, and cultural modernization. Tominaga held that for late-developing countries absorbing these four forms of modernization from early-developing countries, the difficulty increases in that order. In practice, Japan performed relatively well in techno-economic modernization, while the remaining three—political, social, and cultural modernization—were never thoroughly “Westernized.”

The renowned Japanese intellectual Maruyama Masao, in discussing Japan’s fascist movement, quoted the words of Tsuda Mitsuzō, secretary-general of the Japanese Muraji Faction Alliance at the time: “In Japan’s familism, unlike the modern Western civilized nations, the foundation of society is not placed on the assertion of individual rights, but on service to the entire family. The family is an independent living entity in society, or as a living body it is itself a complete cell. The individual is only a part or an element of this complete cell… The extension and expansion of this familism is our nationalism. Our nationalism is precisely this ethnic union of families. And as the head of state of this ethnic union, its patriarch, its center, its supreme representative, is the emperor.”

Under this “family-state isomorphism” system dominated by circle culture, the adoption of external culture must inevitably pass through the ideological filter of the collective. What is compatible with this ideology will be imported; what challenges this ideology will be rejected.

For example, although Western culture was adopted after the Meiji Restoration, Euro-American political institutions—especially Anglo-American democratic systems—were regarded by the rulers of the time as a flood or a savage beast. Under the premise of maintaining imperial rule and the vested interests of the bureaucratic ruling class, Japan at the time promulgated a constitution and conducted limited elections. But the institutional model it primarily adopted was the German political system—for no other reason than that Germany was an empire, sharing common ground with Japan’s imperial system.

After the war, Japan adopted Western-style democratic political institutions, and Japanese rulers—such as former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō—spoke at length about so-called “universal values” such as freedom, democracy, and human rights. In reality, however, these values have not been genuinely accepted by Japanese society, or they exist in name only. These values have not taken deep root in Japanese society, nor have they become political rules. To a large extent, these “universal values” are a signboard—a signboard displaying ideological “alignment” with Europe and America.

Take the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Japan’s ruling party. For the decades since its founding, its internal operations have been neither liberal nor democratic. “Factional politics,” “boss politics,” and “smoke-filled-room politics” are all common terms used to describe the LDP. Within factions, the leader’s authority holds an absolute advantage, and democratic procedures are merely a formality. The party’s nominally supreme decision-making body, the General Council, has long operated by a “unanimous consent” voting method that would be unimaginable in Europe or America. “Minority submits to majority” is the very essence of democracy, yet in the General Council it is regarded as a negative factor that undermines unity. Contradictions inevitably exist, but they cannot be allowed to surface in the final vote—they must be resolved and smoothed over through private consultations beforehand. By coordinating beneath the surface and preventing contradictions from becoming visible, all participants are allowed to save face, thereby maintaining stability and harmony within the circle.


＜ 日本自民党总部

Consider also the Japanese government’s so-called “deliberative council” (shingikai) system. By its intended design,

Circle Culture: The Paradox of Japanese Cohesion

a deliberative council should be a body in which the government invites experts and scholars in a given field to freely express their views on a particular issue, thereby allowing the government to “hear all sides and be enlightened,” enhancing the scientific rigor and effectiveness of decision-making. But the renowned Japanese economist Noguchi Yukio explicitly exposed the true nature of these so-called “deliberative councils”: “The ‘deliberative councils’ or ‘advisory committees’ convened by the government are also a form of ‘false citation.’ The content of the [experts’] responses has been determined from the outset [by the government]; the deliberative council’s discussion is merely a formality.”

The Walls of the Circle

At the end of 2019, Carlos Ghosn, the former chairman of the renowned automaker Nissan, slipped out of Japan undetected—while out on bail—and fled to Lebanon, his ancestral homeland, without the Japanese being “any the wiser.” In his subsequent statement, Ghosn accused the Japanese government of subjecting him to judicial persecution, which ultimately led him to leave Japan.

There are many explanations for the origins of this incident; some have even suggested it was a struggle between the Japanese and French governments for control of the Renault-Nissan Alliance. What the incident truly reveals, however, is one manifestation of Japan’s circle culture within the corporate world.

In Japanese, there is a word: gaijin. The same characters exist in Chinese, and the meanings are broadly similar—both refer to “a person outside one’s own group or organization.” But there is a subtle difference. In Japanese, gaijin carries a slight pejorative connotation, which can be rendered as: “one who is not of our circle, whose heart must therefore be different.”

At Nissan, Ghosn was a gaijin. When Nissan was on the brink of collapse at the end of the twentieth century, France’s Renault acquired a stake in Nissan, and Ghosn entered the company and began sweeping reforms—dismissing employees and closing factories. Within a few years, he brought Nissan back from the dead and turned it profitable, and the outside world came to see Ghosn as Nissan’s “savior.” But Ghosn’s culture clashed fiercely with Nissan’s circle culture in the process. His “autocratic” and “dictatorial” style greatly upset the “cheese” of those who had belonged to Nissan’s original power structure, and the resentment between the two sides deepened continuously. At its core, the circle of Japanese insiders within Nissan was unwilling to have an “outsider” interfere with their own way of doing things. As Ghosn himself said: “The revived Nissan didn’t want this Frenchman telling them what to do anymore. The best way to get rid of me was to drive me out.”

Circle culture determines that Japanese companies find it very difficult to accept “outsiders.” For a long time, the top leadership of Japanese companies operating in China was almost entirely Japanese—a stark contrast to European and American companies. The China division presidents and equivalent positions at Western multinationals are often filled by local Chinese or overseas Chinese from their home countries, with the aim of better integrating into the Chinese market and engaging with various Chinese stakeholders. Japanese companies are not unaware of the advantages of hiring Chinese executives, but circle culture has made it difficult for them to accept this approach.

This inward-looking, collectivist tendency of Japanese companies may lead to efficiency losses by excluding outsiders from their “pie,” but they are sensitive when it comes to corporate economic security. The Japanese government’s unambiguous support for Nissan’s Japanese leadership in this matter also demonstrates the government’s sensitivity on questions of economic security—though objectively speaking, this sensitivity had already exceeded what was necessary.

Japan’s labor unions are also steeped in circle culture. In the United States, there are massive cross-regional, cross-industry union organizations like the AFL-CIO. In Japan, however, unions are first and foremost enterprise unions, and only secondarily industry unions. Umbrella union organizations like Rengō are in practice merely aggregations of individual unions, lacking genuine capacity to guide and lead their constituent organizations. When conflicts arise between companies, enterprise unions prioritize the interests of their own company rather than the interests of the union as a whole—because union members are themselves employees of the company, members of the company’s “collective,” and therefore will not “elbow their way out” against the company’s interests.

On one hand, unions that prioritize their own company’s interests can strengthen workers’ sense of belonging to the enterprise, which is undoubtedly conducive to enhancing corporate cohesion and can also have a positive effect on improving production efficiency. On the other hand, labor-management disputes can be contained at a relatively small scale. Large-scale industry-wide strikes of the kind frequently seen in Europe and America are almost impossible in Japan, and labor-management relations are relatively harmonious. This allows enterprises to maintain stable operations, which also has an undeniably positive effect on economic security.

Circle culture is also reflected in Japan’s national debt situation. Japan’s public debt has exceeded twice its GDP, and outside observers have long believed that Japan will eventually face a fiscal crisis. Yet to this day, Japan has not experienced an economic crisis of the kind triggered by national debt far exceeding GDP, as occurred in the European debt crisis. Beyond the fact that the Japanese government holds large assets that can substantially offset its liabilities, another important factor is that the majority of Japan’s national debt is held domestically. Before Abe launched his massive quantitative easing in 2013, more than 90% of Japanese government bonds were held by the Bank of Japan and Japanese commercial banks, with foreign holdings accounting for less than 10%—a crucial lever for stabilizing Japanese bond prices and public finances. In recent years, as the Bank of Japan has purchased large quantities of government bonds, the central bank’s share of holdings has exceeded 40% and the foreign-held share has risen somewhat, but the fundamental pattern of predominantly domestic holdings has not changed.

It is unnecessary to elevate the behavior of Japanese banks to “patriotism.” For banks, making money is the sole objective. If holding domestic government bonds were to cause them serious losses, they would not hesitate to dump them—they would never disregard losses for the sake of “patriotism.” Beyond profitability, another important reason why domestic Japanese banks hold their own country’s government bonds is their habitual trust in them. Under the ingrained thinking of circle culture, there is a natural sense of trust toward matters within one’s own familiar collective, while unfamiliarity with matters outside the collective breeds concern about their future trajectory, leading to a preference for investing internally. Investment in Japanese government bonds is a “rational choice” made by Japanese investors under circle-based thinking, not a result driven by patriotic sentiment. Of course, objectively speaking, the behavior of Japanese commercial banks and other investors has served to safeguard economic security.

Japan also has what is known as the “main bank system,” in which specific enterprises maintain long-term transactional relationships with specific banks. The main bank not only provides loans to the enterprise but also holds shares in it, thereby enabling it to monitor and intervene in the enterprise’s management. If the enterprise faces a crisis, the main bank can step in. The main bank system was originally a variant of Japan’s pre-war zaibatsu system—a product of the American occupation forces’ failure to completely eradicate the zaibatsu. The zaibatsu were relatively tightly knit collectives, while the main bank system is a different kind of collective: outwardly loose, but with close underlying ties between banks and enterprises. Within this system, the main bank occupies a relatively superior position and has considerable say over the enterprise. By maintaining this collective, the main bank can both guarantee long-term returns and use these connections to safeguard the security of the collective. Under this system, if an enterprise performs poorly, the main bank can inject capital into it—either alone or in concert with other financial institutions—while simultaneously intervening in the enterprise’s management, effectively carrying out a business restructuring. Compared to the situation in other countries, where creditor banks intervene in management only on an ad hoc basis when a bankruptcy crisis emerges, the main bank, by virtue of its long-standing close ties with the enterprise, can intervene earlier and will encounter far less resistance in the process, thereby achieving a more effective restructuring. Of course, the main bank system in practice gives enterprises a kind of implicit guarantee against bankruptcy, which can cause them to lack a sense of crisis in their day-to-day operations—this is its drawback. But this system can also prevent hostile external takeovers, which is another function it serves in safeguarding economic security.

The Secret of Japan’s “Cleanliness”

During its period of rapid economic development, Japan also faced serious ecological security problems—at times extremely severe—but ultimately succeeded in overcoming environmental pollution and other social problems. Circle culture played a distinctive role in this as well.

The Korean scholar Lee O-Young, in his celebrated work on Japanese culture The Compact Culture: The Japanese Tradition of “Smaller Is Better,” observed: in sharp contrast to Koreans, who go out to view and appreciate nature, Japanese prefer to bring nature into their own homes, to be in intimate contact with nature and merge with it—this is the origin of Japanese garden culture.

Lee O-Young also offered his own distinctive explanation for the Japanese love of cleanliness: the Japanese are particularly fastidious about cleanliness because they cannot tolerate the presence of garbage—useless things—in their midst. In the Japanese view, nature is a humanized nature, one that coexists with people.

In the course of industrialization, Japan also went through a period of severe ecological destruction, producing several “pollution diseases” caused by heavy metal contamination and air pollution—among them Minamata disease, itai-itai disease, and Yokkaichi asthma. Particularly during the period of rapid growth after World War II, under the influence of a “growth first” ideology, environmental pollution in Japan was at one point extremely severe. In the 1970s, for example, Tokyo experienced “photochemical smog” pollution so severe that pedestrians collapsed from poisoning on the streets. But after pollution-induced public health disasters became the focus of social attention, the trend reversed. Today, one of the most striking impressions foreign visitors to Japan have is that “Japan is very clean.”

Law and government regulation are of course indispensable to pollution control. From the 1960s onward, a succession of environmental lawsuits brought by Japanese citizens gave rise to a series of laws constituting a victim relief system—including the Special Measures Law for Relief of Pollution Victims and the Pollution-Related Health Damage Compensation Law. Under pressure from air pollution rulings and public demands for compensation for pollution damage, the government enacted the Pollution-Related Health Damage Compensation Law in 1973. This law, by compulsorily levying pollution fees from polluting enterprises to fund compensation for pollution victims, used administrative compensation mechanisms to implement the polluter-pays principle. In addition, there were the Pollution Dispute Resolution Law, the Law for the Punishment of Crimes Relating to Environmental Pollution, and the Law on Enterprises’ Bearing of Pollution Prevention Project Costs—On May 2, 2006, in Minamata City, Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan, victims of Minamata disease participate in the “50th Anniversary of the Confirmation of Minamata Disease” event—which together formed a quiet, small-scale garden. Destroying the environment felt to them like suffering personal harm. So during the years of the worst environmental pollution, a backlash against economic growth even emerged among the Japanese public, with the slogan: “To hell with GNP.”

along with other related supporting legislation. Many lawsuits also played no small role. A few years ago, if one passed by Toyota’s Tokyo headquarters, one would see some elderly people sitting quietly to one side of the entrance. Anyone who did not know what was happening would certainly be puzzled; in fact, they were there to demand compensation. These elderly people believed that conditions such as asthma had been caused by automobile exhaust, and they were demanding that the automakers compensate them. After persisting for a long time, Toyota and other Japanese automakers eventually “gave in,” and the victims received compensation.

What drove this reversal was undoubtedly the public’s deep concern for the environment. In the Japanese conception, the environment is not something external to oneself—it is highly internalized, having been incorporated into the human circle. For Japanese people, the environment and the self are one. Japanese garden culture is highly developed; even in high-rise buildings, many spaces

Public concern for the environment constitutes a form of pressure on both government and enterprises. And it was this pressure that formed the foundation enabling Japan’s environmental pollution remediation to be vigorously pursued in the years that followed.

On the other hand, circle culture also imposes certain constraints on behavior that damages the environment. In Japan, when politicians or celebrities are embroiled in scandal, or when enterprises cause harm to the public interest, they bow at press conferences and say: “I am deeply sorry for causing trouble to everyone.” The Japanese way of apologizing is distinctive. From a Chinese perspective, an apology means acknowledging one’s error, and sometimes even digging into the root causes of that error and articulating the psychological basis that led to it. This is the Chinese approach. But in Japanese society, the manner of apology is quite different from China’s. For members of a collective, not causing trouble and not drawing attention to oneself is a form of “virtue.” If one’s improper behavior draws everyone’s attention and disrupts others’ normal work and life, this is regarded as a fairly serious problem. The Japanese-style “apology” may appear to be nothing more than a habitual “ritual,” and it is difficult to find it sincere or thorough—yet in Japan it plays an important role in constraining behavior.

Consider, for example, a polluting enterprise in a particular locality whose actions have harmed the collective interests of the local community. The people of a given locality in Japan cannot be said to be members of a tightly knit collective, but that local society still has a circle-like atmosphere. This atmosphere constrains the behavior of community members. Littering in public, for instance, invites public censure and contempt. If a local factory dares to openly discharge pollutants, it will face enormous pressure. This pressure, combined with legal constraints, forms an external driving force for environmental protection. A polluting factory that faces opposition and condemnation will see its local reputation ruined. Once an enterprise’s reputation is ruined, it will encounter serious difficulties in both operations and borrowing—so enterprises have many misgivings about discharging pollutants, which objectively helps to protect the ecological environment.

Circle Culture: The Paradox of Japanese Cohesion

This kind of dynamic was quite common in pre-modern societies where transportation was underdeveloped and people’s range of movement was generally narrow. China has many time-honored brands that primarily served their immediate neighborhood, with a limited scope of business. If they gave short measure or cut corners, they would easily be abandoned by local people and pointed at and cursed by their neighbors—this was the motivation that drove some time-honored brands to pursue excellence in quality. As society entered the modern era and social interactions became increasingly complex, this community of acquaintances was gradually replaced by a community of strangers. Many “delicacies” at scenic spots and bustling commercial pedestrian streets, for example, are poor in quality and expensive—precisely because they primarily serve strangers, and can fleece them without compunction. But Japan’s distinctive circle culture has preserved the traditions and rules of the community of acquaintances, which continue to function.

The Ghost of Evil

It is well known that in modern times Japan used the pretext of “safeguarding its own security” to gradually encroach upon and invade neighboring countries. Japan’s modern history of external aggression reflects the errors in its “security consciousness,” and one can also see the no small role that circle thinking played in that aggression.

Japan’s external aggression did not begin on the eve of World War II—it was the established national policy following the Meiji Restoration. In the early Meiji period, there were divisions within the ruling class over the question of “the argument for subjugating Korea,” but the core of the dispute was not whether to invade the Korean Peninsula, but whether to do so immediately. In other words, this was a tactical disagreement, not a disagreement over direction. Thereafter, Japan “probed” China’s Taiwan, formally annexed the Ryukyu Kingdom—a tributary state of the Qing dynasty—in 1879, seized Taiwan from China through the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, and formally annexed Korea in 1910. As Japan grew progressively stronger, its footsteps of external expansion never ceased.

Japan’s trajectory of external expansion also reveals an essential difference between Japanese culture and Chinese culture. Chinese culture is fundamentally averse to external expansion. Since ancient times, there have been concepts restraining the use of military force: the Sima Fa states, “Though a state be great, those who love war will perish”; Mencius said, “Overawing the world is not done through the advantage of arms”; and the Discourses on Salt and Iron declares, “Arms are established but not tested; shields and spears are stored away and not used.”

The reasons for this are, first, that Chinese culture emphasizes cultural influence: anyone who accepts Huaxia culture is considered one’s own. The distinction between the civilized and the barbarian was not based on race but on culture. Expansion does not necessarily achieve this effect and can sometimes even be counterproductive. Chinese culture has an inherent openness and does not place particular emphasis on collectivism.

Second, the Chinese have long understood the enormous cost of governing occupied territories. Ancient Chinese courts long practiced the jimi system in border regions—meaning that as long as the other party nominally deferred to the central government, the central government would not directly administer those areas. Since the Qin and Han dynasties, China has operated under a centralized political system with a single center; the further from that center, the greater the difficulty of governance. As the saying goes, “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.” To exercise firm control over border regions required enormous expenditures of manpower and resources. China has therefore traditionally been inward-looking rather than expansionist. In his later years, the Hongwu Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang wrote in the Huang Ming Zu Xun (Imperial Ancestral Instructions) left for his descendants: “I fear that future generations, relying on China’s wealth and strength, may covet momentary military glory and wage war without cause, killing and wounding lives. This must absolutely not be done.” He specifically listed fifteen overseas countries—Korea, Japan, Greater Ryukyu, Lesser Ryukyu, Annam, Cambodia, Siam, Champa, Sumatra, Java, the Western Ocean, Baihua, Srivijaya, Brunei, and Zigeng—as “countries not to be conquered.” Western societies, drawing on their own experience and history, have viewed China’s ancient tributary system as a symbol of “hegemony.” But the reality is precisely the opposite: the tributary system was a framework for maintaining regional peace, not a mechanism for ruling other countries. The tributary system may appear to Western eyes as a collective, but in fact it was a loose form of association. China never attempted to organize its tributary states into an ordered collective like Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

It was precisely this non-collectivist openness that fostered peace across the entire East Asian region under the tributary system.

As noted above, when Japan adopted Chinese culture—and especially when it imported Confucianism, the mainstream Chinese ideology—it happened not to import the core and foundation of Confucianism: “benevolence” (ren). “To love others and extend that love to all people is benevolence.” Japanese culture, lacking “benevolence,” merely resembles Chinese culture in outward form while being fundamentally different in essence. Pre-Meiji Restoration Japan bore many similarities to medieval Europe: it practiced not a centralized political system but a “feudal lordship system.” Of course, while both were feudal lordships, Japan and Europe had different origins and different forms, but they shared one thing in common: both were “multi-centered” models of governance. After territorial expansion, there was no need for the central government to administer the new territory directly—the king or the shogun simply needed to grant the new territory to a subordinate lord to achieve governance, at a far lower cost than centralized administration. This “historical habit” became deeply embedded in the culture of these countries, shaping different attitudes toward expansion. One might say that history constructed culture.

The reason Japan moved so rapidly toward external expansion after the Meiji Restoration—beyond imperialist factors and the historical factors described above—also owes no small debt to the influence of circle culture.

After the Meiji Restoration, Japan’s leadership and intellectual circles habitually used circle thinking to view the international situation. They interpreted the expansion of Western powers across the globe as the colonization and oppression of colored peoples by a white collective—specifically, in East Asia, the oppression of a yellow-race collective. The Japanese of the time regarded themselves as the natural leaders of the yellow-race collective, claiming that their competition with Western powers for interests in East Asia was a struggle against the invasion of the white-race collective. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this thinking gave rise to so-called “Asianism.” Asianism advocated that the Asian yellow race must unite to resist the Euro-American powers of the white race, with Japan as the natural hegemon of this alliance—this collective. The reason right-wing Japanese organizations such as the Black Dragon Society supported the revolution of Sun Yat-sen and others was certainly not to benefit the Chinese people, but was based on the ideology of Asianism. Their ultimate aim was to have a post-revolutionary China align with Japan, exclude Europe and America, and realize Japan’s dominance over the East Asian order.

Circle Culture: The Paradox of Japanese Cohesion

The “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” was the concentrated embodiment of circle thinking in the course of World War II aggression. The “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” was not, as Japan propagandized at the time, a system of “equal treatment and mutual prosperity among all peoples.” It was a means by which Japan ruled and enslaved the peoples of East Asia—Asianism reanimating a corpse in a new era.

Japan’s expansion was the outward expansion of a collective, aimed at enlarging its own collective. But the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” was not an equal collective, nor one that member states joined voluntarily. It was a collective as unequal as a mountain range, with Japan at its summit. Other countries had to obey Japan and could not stand as equals; “outsiders” could not be mentioned in the same breath as “insiders.” This collective was therefore one with clearly demarcated internal boundaries—not the “Hakkō ichiu” (all the world under one roof) that Japan propagandized at the time.

The propaganda of Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” at the time did manage to deceive some people into serving it in certain countries colonized by Britain and the Netherlands—such as Burma and Indonesia—demonstrating that this propaganda had considerable power to incite. But when the peoples of these countries realized that Japan was not a “liberator” but a colonizer no different from the Western powers—merely changing the soup without changing the medicine—this hypocritical propaganda ultimately collapsed.

The brutality of Japan’s aggression during World War II also had circle culture as its backdrop. Placing collective interests above all else often manifests as placing the collective’s leader above all else. Pre-war Japan called itself the “Imperial State” and its military the “Imperial Army.” Officers and soldiers of the Japanese military were all indoctrinated with the consciousness of “fighting for the emperor,” which made the early Japanese military relatively fanatical and relatively powerful in combat. Precisely because they were “fighting for the emperor,” under the guidance of this value system, aggression was beautified as making the world into “Hakkō ichiu”—all equally bathed in the emperor’s “radiant glory.”

Steeped in circle culture, the faith of Japanese people at the time in the “Imperial State” and their blind devotion to the emperor had long since eclipsed basic moral standards. In their view, external aggression was the means of extending the emperor’s rule to more territories—it was “the greatest good,” not the “evil” that we universally regard it as today. As a result, ordinary officers and soldiers of the Japanese military at the time felt little moral guilt about aggression and expansion. Japan’s atrocities in occupied territories—such as the Nanjing Massacre—were also “legitimized” by this circle thinking: “the interests of the collective are the greatest good; loyalty to the emperor is the greatest good.” Such acts of brutality, with morality collapsed and conscience extinguished, gave rise to one human tragedy after another.

Unit 731 used living human beings as specimens for various experiments—an act of complete moral depravity. Yet not only was this behavior regarded as a matter of course by Japanese military personnel during the war, but after Japan’s defeat, former members of Unit 731 remained tight-lipped, causing the unit’s crimes to go unknown for a long time. Even when individual former members, tormented by conscience, wished to speak the truth, they were immediately subjected to pressure from other members and ultimately capitulated. Even the Japanese government has lacked basic moral standards on this issue. On October 3, 2003, Diet member Kawada Etsuko submitted a written inquiry asking the government how it understood Unit 731’s conduct of biological warfare in China, how it understood the harm inflicted on Chinese civilians through biological warfare, and whether the government had plans to conduct a factual investigation into the biological warfare activities. On October 10 of the same year, Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō replied on behalf of the government: according to documents preserved at the National Institute for Defense Studies, the existence of Unit 731 is a fact, but based on the documents, it is currently impossible to confirm that Unit 731 conducted biological warfare. As for whether there are plans to conduct an investigation, given the passage of time and other difficulties, investigating the facts is extremely difficult; however, if new evidentiary materials are discovered, the government will take them seriously and accept them.

The renowned Japanese mystery novelist Morimura Seiichi, in the course of his literary research, accidentally learned of the existence of Unit 731. He then began interviewing former unit members, collecting their oral testimonies, and ultimately wrote The Devil’s Gluttony: Exposing Japan’s Biological Warfare Unit, bringing this deliberately concealed truth to light. After doing this out of moral conscience, Morimura encountered a series of difficulties: he was not only called a “traitor” and a “non-national” (one who does not cooperate with the state), but his home and family were subjected to various forms of harassment.

Japan’s historical problems are of great importance. We must not only clarify the facts, but also dig deeply into the psychological causes behind those facts. Circle culture is undoubtedly an important foundation for the formation of these facts. Demanding that the Japanese government apologize means not merely a verbal apology, but enabling the Japanese public to recognize that beyond the interests of the circle, there must be a universal moral baseline. No matter what, acts of killing and aggression are evil—they cannot be whitewashed.

References

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Circle Culture: The Paradox of Japanese Cohesion

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