Book Project: The Japanese culture and its subtleties II

Consideration

The limited space and the resultant closeness which confines the people of this island country contribute to a high almost bewildering degree of consideration displayed endlessly by its citizens. It is as if everybody is a strict adherent of the golden rule and you will witness very few if any instances of impolite behavior in Japan.  It seems as if the people contemplate how their actions might impact others as well as their surroundings.  Without this orientation, Tokyo, one of the biggest cities of the world would look like a garbage dump.  If compared to London, New York, Berlin or Istanbul, Tokyo is one of the cleanest of the large cities that I have seen.  Surprisingly, the people who live here accomplish this enviable standard of cleanliness even though public trash cans are rare because of the widespread fear of terrorist activity.

That same consideration applies to public transportation.  When riding the subway you will not hear much talking or loud music.  Unlike the German travelers, the Japanese are very quiet and most of the commuters will sleep, read or occupy themselves playing or emailing on their cell phones.  Given the thoughtfulness of the Japanese, I think that our group of ten foreign travelers was always a bit too lively and I only hope that we did not offend too many kind and courteous fellow passengers.

I am adding here an example of how this consideration works at the more personal level.

Before our tour I had asked our designer to create a banner for online promotional purposes.  We always worked closely with him and never really had to give him any directions about a particular design or logo.  He seemed to anticipate what would be acceptable, representative, and pleasing to all the members of our band.  So for this tour promotion he created a banner using a red rising sun as the background with Mount Fuji in the front announcing our Japan tour dates.  We thought the banner was great and immediately published the picture of it on our different websites.  At the same time as that was happening, I was working with a woman from the Goethe-Institute in Osaka trying to find out if they had any services that might help in support of our tour.  In the first email I received from her she referred to the internet banner and asked whether its connection to the ultra right radical extremists was intended.  After some initial confusion we came to understand that we had used a design closely resembling the Japanese Battle Flag that was used during the Second World War as a backdrop for our promotional banner and that many people of several nationalities would find it offensive or insensitive.  It was comparable to an American band advertising their tour to Germany on a banner featuring a swastika.  It was too late to change much, but we changed the rising sun from red to the colors of the rainbow.

This incident gave us more than just a surprise, it also gave us a glimpse of how deeply ingrained consideration is in Japanese people.  You see we had shown this banner to our Japanese friends and did not get any negative feedback from them.  While this mistake shows our ignorance of Japanese history it also shows just how far our Japanese friends would go in excusing that ignorance to avoid embarrassing us.