Received: 23 March 2019 Accepted: 7 May 2019

DOI: 10.1111/nana.12553

SYMPOSIUM

The nihonjinron in daily practices: Yoshino's

Shigeki Sato

Faculty of Social Sciences, Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan

Correspondence
Shigeki Sato, Faculty of Social Sciences, Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan.
Email: ssbasis@[Link]

Kosaku Yoshino's Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan (1992) is one of the most important works to contribute
to the study of Japanese nationalism. Before this work was published, most studies on Japanese nationalism shared
the “top‐down” and “production” approach: They were primarily interested in the ways in which nationhood and
nationalism were “produced” and mobilised by political elites, state institutions, and leading intellectuals. Their
temporal focus naturally centred on the eras from the Meiji Restoration through the Asian‐Pacific War. However,
Yoshino's work is concerned with the boom of the nihonjinron (日本人論) in the heyday of Japan's post‐war economic
prosperity. The nihonjinron, literally “discussions on the Japanese,” generally refers to a vast array of literature that
discusses the uniqueness of Japanese culture and society. Many books on Japanese uniqueness were published in
the post‐war period and had a significant impact on self‐understanding among the Japanese. The publication of
the nihonjinron reached its peak in the 1970s and 1980s, although some of the important “classics” like Ruth
Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) and Nakane Chie's Tate shakai no ningen kankei (Human Relations
in Vertical Society; 1968) were written before the boom.
The features of Japanese uniqueness repeatedly emphasised in the nihonjinron include group‐oriented decision‐
making, “interpersonalistic” human relations, and non‐assertive and non‐logical modes of communication. Referring
to these nationally distinctive characteristics, the nihonjinron explains how the Japanese are culturally different from
the non‐Japanese. Arguing that the discourse of the nihonjinron is a form of “cultural nationalism,” Yoshino attempts
to explore why the nihonjinron was so widely diffused and popularised in the 1970s and 1980s in Japan. It does not
advocate a nationalism that prescribes nation‐building or national expansion but a nationalism that seeks to preserve
and enhance national identity in an already established nation‐state. Yoshino calls the latter “secondary nationalism.”
In this type of nationalism, the historical origin of the nation is not of central importance. The tenno (emperor) system,
which has traditionally been the core issue of studies of Japanese nationalism, thus hardly plays a role in the
nihonjinron in Yoshino's analysis. The nihonjinron provides an anthropological and sociological “folk theory” that
explains how “ordinary” Japanese feel and behave.
There were, to be sure, some critical studies of the nihonjinron before the publication of Yoshino's work. Peter
Dale (1986), Yoshio Sugimoto and Ross Mouer (1982), and Harumi Befu (1987), for example, examined various works
of the nihonjinron in different ways and all pointed out the weakness of the nihonjinron as academic study. However,
as Yoshino correctly insists, their criticisms of the nihonjinron's one‐sided emphasis on the Japanese “uniqueness”
paradoxically led to another one‐sided criticism of the Japanese uniqueness: The Japanese are unique in that they

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© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019

1116 [Link]/journal/nana Nations and Nationalism. 2019;25:1116–1118.

are always obsessed with their own uniqueness. According to Yoshino, what they lack is a sociological and compar-
ative perspective. Just examining the texts of the nihonjinron is not enough. It is indispensable for a sociological study
to investigate how “ordinary” Japanese receive, talk about, and use, or “consume,” the discourse of the nihonjinron
from a “bottom‐up” point of view. The most important finding of this study is that the main “bearers” of the
nihonjinron are “businessmen,” that is, managerial and non‐managerial members of relatively large companies, and
owners of relatively small‐sized family firms. Compared to such businessmen, school teachers are less active in
receiving and disseminating the nihonjinron.
Most Japanese, including scholars, see the nihonjinron as an expression of national pride in the great economic
success of Japan. The sense of national pride was typically invoked by Ezra Vogel's Japan as No. 1 (1979), a best‐seller
published right in the middle of the nihonjinron boom. Yoshino confesses that he also naively took this view for
granted when he started his research. As he continued, however, he found out that this view was wrong: Business-
men actively received the nihonjinron for more practical reasons. The ideas of national distinctiveness illuminated in
the nihonjinron directly concern daily practices in working life. He argues that “businessmen have been actively recep-
tive to the nihonjinron because much of the nihonjinron deals with Japanese social culture as manifested in manage-
ment, employment practices and industrial relations, and thus provides useful insights for ‘organization men’ ”
(Yoshino, 1992, p. 158). By using the ideas of nihonjinron, Japanese businessmen could understand work organisation,
rationalise their activities, and explain them to co‐workers and business partners (including non‐Japanese). The dis-
course of the nihonjinron is thus connected to the daily occupational interests of Japanese businessmen.
Businessmen's active reception of the nihonjinron is not simply a manifestation of their “economic nationalism.”
The cultural nationalism embodied by the nihonjinron is, however, reinforced as the “unintended consequences” of
the daily practices of businessmen.
This is an illuminative analysis on the diffusion of the nihonjinron in the 1970s and 1980s, when many
Japanese companies developed overseas businesses and Japanese businessmen had more opportunities to
come in contact with non‐Japanese people. This analysis provides a valuable insight for nationalism studies as
well: It sheds light upon the way in which the “nation” is practised in everyday life. In well‐established nation‐
states, the majority of “ordinary” people do not normally concern themselves with the problem of national identity
as such, but the “nation” is received and reproduced. Why is this possible? According to Yoshino, “ordinary”
people's interest in nationalism actually comes from “their concern to understand and solve specific problems
that confront them in their own immediate environments” (Yoshino, 1992, p. 201), such as workplace,
schools, neighbourhood, and family. Thus, nationalism was routinely “consumed” even without explicitly
nationalist intentions.
Yoshino's analysis reveals similar points to those discussed in recently emerging studies on “everyday
nationalism,” which follow Eric Hobsbawm's well‐known dictum that “nationalism cannot be understood unless
analysed from below” (Bonikowski, 2016; Fox & Miller‐Idriss, 2008; Knott, 2015). Research on everyday nationalism
does not see nationalism as an overtly manifested political ideology that motivates people to act for “the nation.”
Rather, it provides a cognitive and moral scheme through which people apprehend social reality and deploy
routinised strategies of action. As Yoshino's study shows, the discourse of the nihonjinron also worked as a “folk
sociology” that Japanese businessmen used to understand their environment, find meaning in their daily activities,
and pursue their own interests.
Such an approach may prove useful to analyse the recent rise of nationalism in Japan. In fact, Yoshino did have an
interest in this issue. When I met Yoshino at an annual meeting of the Japanese Sociological Association two years
ago, he said to me that he had “come back to nationalism” after several years of research on the English language
and higher education in Malaysia and talked about his new research project on the “right‐wing” nationalism that
was proliferating under the current government led by Abe Shinzo. Curious about his new interest, I asked him
how he would analyse it, to which he simply replied: “I am now thinking about it.” I suggested that an analysis with
a focus on “consumption” would be interesting. It is now highly regrettable that we will not be able to see the result
of this research.
1118 SATO

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How to cite this article: Sato S. The nihonjinron in daily practices: Yoshino's “bottom‐up” approach to nation-
alism. Nations and Nationalism. 2019;25:1116–1118. [Link]