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The Japanese are not only intimate with themselves, but with their gods. They have no transcendent God of the Judaeo-Christian kind. The divine presents no forbidding immensities, no snow fields of abstraction, no terrible threats. The ancient Shinto deities, ancestors really, are essentially earthbound; they share the islands with the Japanese, and they can be summoned at a shrine by merely clapping one's hands. It is a friendly religion. But because of Shinto, the very earth and air and trees and mountains of Japan are numinous, filled with preternatural life. One secret of Japanese commercial success may have something to do with Shintoism, with the way that the tribe, and everything it does, achieves mythic importance. A French business executive, Antoine Riboud, remarked, "What struck me first was the degree of seriousness with which the Japanese consider economic activity, as such. They conceive of it as a civic matter, way above the mere quest for profit."
Shintoism has a sort of ethical partner in the Japanese soul.
The American commercial itch went to church with the Calvinists. The Japanese conscience has been shaped by Confucianism, a system of social ethics based on five relationships: father and son, older brother and younger brother, ruler and subject, friend and friend, husband and wife. But Confucianism has a Calvinist spine. It is the moral architecture of Japan, of the Japanese group and the hierarchical systems of address and deference. The Japanese find it easier to deal with one another as unequals than as equals. They must know whether the person addressed is superior or inferior to them in status. The up-or-down vectors of all relationships are crucial. They always exchange business cards on meeting, in order to tune their language to one another's relative status. All this makes for close-woven judgments and the most delicate calculations when the Japanese meet socially.
The language also makes for a certain elaborate vagueness.
In Japanese, the verb comes at the end of the sentence, rather than in the middle. It is thus possible to state the subject and object of the sentence, all the while watching the reaction, and then adjust the verb (which states the relation between subject and object), softening it, for example, if the sentence begins to seem too strong, or displeasing. The speaker may even change his mind and insert a negative at the end, thereby reversing the entire meaning of the sentence, but preserving the human relationship. The Japanese approach to things is essentially one of indirection.
The Japanese have married feudalism to high capitalism, and that union has brought forth a formidable machine. The hierarchical feudal virtues—the emphasis on authority and loyalty and deference—remain in place despite much individual mobility. They legitimize the entire enterprise. Japan is a private club—almost a private race. It is possible to overstate the idea that everything in Japan is done by consensus, the idea that the entire country is a committee. Still, being Japanese is the most important reality in the life of any Japanese. Japan may be the first society to combine the sensibility of the modern mass with the house rules of a small tribe.