Japan On-Line: The Internet as a Gaijin Community
By Richard Thieme

Learning to do business on the Internet is not simply an opportunity to learn a new set of skills. It is a journey into another culture, forcing us to see ourselves and our habits in a new light. Because the Internet is a distinct community different from each of our native cultures, we all bring strengths and weaknesses to the opportunities it presents.

The processes of informatization (johoka) and internationalization (kokusaika) have been inseparable and ubiquitous in Japanese thinking and behavior for several decades. They are simultaneous processes. The transformation of the boundaries of nation states into more permeable, transparent membranes calls into question for all of us the difficulties of being truly local and global in our thinking and behaviors.

Americans have a conceptual framework that sees everything we encounter -- every culture, concept, people -- as available for incorporation into our "universal" schema. Our egalitarian inclusiveness is implicitly imperialistic; we experience our culture as a kind of divine elixir into which everything else dissolves. The price of the encounter with American culture is the price of the encounter with modernity: that which is distinctive about each culture is turned into a simulation of itself and reconstructed through the filter of our understanding.

Japanese culture, on the other hand, is so tightly bound by homogeneity and common history that other cultural practices are included and integrated into the Japanese experience in a different way. Everything is welcome, everything is used, but not in a way that compromises the original culture. Everything is somehow turned into another aspect of being ... Japanese.

Sometimes misunderstood as a lack of principle, this capacity to include and exploit other cultural practices without compromising the core Japanese culture is really a way to preserve that unique identity while at the same time excluding nothing that might be useful.

Japan will interact with the unique culture of the Internet as Japan has interacted with all other cultures. The Internet will affect Japanese culture in subtle ways, but Japan will not lose its core identity in cyberspace because Japan can not lose it. The essence of Japan identity is a deep commitment NOT to lose itself through interaction with other cultures.

Americans believe that everyone is somehow a potential American. Japanese believe that no-one could ever be a potential Japanese. The progressive interaction of large numbers of Japanese citizens with netizens all over the world will reveal what is unique and distinctive about the Japanese contribution to global cyberculture. Cyberspace will become one more outer sphere surrounding the concentric spheres of other cultures at the core of which nevertheless remains an inviolable Japanese sensibility.

What are the unique strengths of Japanese culture and character in relationship to doing business on the Internet? How will some specific Japanese modalities -- such as the high priority on nuance, innuendo, indirect communication -- translate into the typographic world of e-mail? How will the deep subtext of "haragei" or nonverbal communication work on mailing lists and in newsgroups and chat rooms?

I once worked in an organizational structure that required consultation with the Japanese patriarch of the community before important decisions were made. I always called to arrange a meeting, but while we visited, I never mentioned my reason for being there, nor did he. But when I left, I knew his position, and he knew that I knew.

During an e-mail exchange, I have often been confused because the context is unclear. Doing business on the Internet is more like networking than direct selling. I had to build a context that spoke more loudly than our few typed words. This was accomplished over time through the deliberate construction of a virtual relationship. Once that had happened, we could begin to do business.

When e-mail is used for simple communication between English speakers, it is exchanged in a context of shared presuppositions. Non-native English speakers may not share those assumptions. The construction of an explicit context for meaningful exchange will be necessary. Because it is axiomatic to the Japanese way of doing business, Japanese will come to excel at the painstaking construction of a comprehensive non-verbal context as the presupposition of meaningful electronic conversation.

The entrepreneurial spirit, the headlong rush for a new frontier, has characterized the American surge into the virtual world. The current dominance of the Internet by Americans raises the question, how can it be true that Japanese culture is particularly well-suited for success on the Internet when the American style, which is so different, works so well?

The answer tells us something about cyberspace itself.

Cyberspace is a "space" -- sheer potential that becomes actual only when individuals and organizations project their psychic contents and organizational structures into it. Then cyberspace looks to every netizen like an image of himself or his culture.

Cyberspace is a mirror of our hive mind. It is a domain of symbols of symbols of symbols. At the highest level of abstraction, those symbols become reflexive, showing us our hive mind engaged in the rising spiral of a self-conscious dialogue with itself.

In this the Net is like the world of text which enabled us to discover and create new "typographic selves" as we engaged with the world of printed books.

Just as Americans define cyberspace as a new frontier, imagining virtual space in metaphors derived from our history, the Japanese experience of the Internet will look Japanese ... to the Japanese.

One important antecedent for the distribution of information through networks, for example, evolved in Japan during the Edo period (1620-1630). The writing of Haikai (haiku) or short poems included an activity called Renku, a cooperative effort that brought short poems into a single chain. As the network evolved, other kinds of information, including commercial, were distributed.

Neither Renku nor the Internet is about technology as much as the generation of structures that enable people to network for a mutual advantage. The Internet creates the "space" in which we build new opportunities to do business, but it also generates new possibilities for creativity and community.

Japanese culture during the Edo period was neither fast nor slow. It was what it was. Nor has Japan been "slow" in coming to the Internet as some claim; Japan has been prudent, patient and deliberate as she felt out and engaged with a new culture. If the wholesale abandonment of the current economic system is not to happen, that pace of engagement is essential.

I once visited a Zen monastery for a day of meditation and instruction. The monk greeted us with a bow, then asked if we knew why monks bow in the monastery. Various answers came forth - bowing shows respect for others, acknowledges the essence of the other, and so forth -- but the monk politely waited as we exhausted our guesses, then said, "No, we bow because it works better when we bow."

That which works on the Internet will be incorporated into Japanese business practices in ways consistent with the long-term development of trusting collaborative relationships.

Organizational and national cultures have a wisdom which no individual in the system can approach. The system factors in variables over a long period of time that individuals forget. That's why natural organic growth is best for cultures intent on sustaining themselves over the long run.

The acculturation of Japan to the Internet will be done in a way that preserves the root characteristics of Japanese civilization. That civilization is permeated with the practice of on, acknowledgement and discharge of full obligation to those who have given a benefit or gift. The gift to Japan of participation in the virtual world will be repaid with participation in that world in ways that subtly build new models of cooperation, creativity, and historical continuity.

Sidebar: Hierarchy or Web?

Everyone entering the culture of the Internet discovers a web or network of relationships. It seems as if hierarchical structures have completely disappeared. On the World Wide Web, for example, we experience ourselves at the center of the web, yet no-one is displaced: everyone else is also at the center.

In hierarchical structures, on the other hand, we act as if the organizational schema -- boxes and rectangles connected by straight lines -- is the real world. We act as if our presence in a box necessitates knocking someone else out of that box. We experience our organizations as win/lose games.

Power is exercised in a hierarchy by dominating and controlling others. In a web, however, power is exercised by participating and contributing. Efforts to control a web are futile because our energy is dissipated throughout the structure.

The Japanese practice of avoiding confrontation and working by consensus is an advantage in cyberspace. "Nemawashi" or "root-binding," the process by which all participants are felt out and patiently included before a decision is made, will contribute a subtle but powerful energy to building cybercommunities. Once everyone is on board, the energy of the aligned individuals moves with great power.

The patience needed for the careful construction of consensus is the only way to align the energies of every individual in a system in a single direction.

Paradoxically this does not mean the end of hierarchy. Our exploration of fractals reveals that structures recreate themselves in self-similar shapes at every level of abstraction. The devolution of vertically integrated pre-war zaibatsu into the horizontal structures of post-war keiretsu looks like the transformation of a hierarchy into a web, but hierarchy never disappears. Hierarchical structures have a thousand lives because they are useful ways to organize human enterprise. We live always in tension between cooperative horizontal structures and command-and-control vertical structures.

1996

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