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It may be too that every nation acquires certain habits at certain moments of its growth. One of the best descriptions of Japanese "conformity," as stereotype conceives of it, was given by William Manchester in The Glory and the Dream. Believing, he wrote, that "leadership came from the group, that progress lay in something called problem-solving meetings, ((they)) had no use for drive and imagination. Above all, they distrusted individualism. The individual sought prestige and achievement at the expense of others. He was abrasive; he rocked the boat; he threatened the corporate One, and they wanted no part of him." The only trouble is, Manchester was describing Americans there, in the "silent generation" '50s.
Yet an even closer kinship links Japan, ironically, with the country that many Americans feel closest of all to, and regard as their second -- or cultural -- home, the country with which we enjoy our "special relationship." The affinities between England and Japan go far beyond the fact that both are tea-loving nations with a devotion to gardens, far beyond the fact that both drive on the left and are rainy islands studded with green villages. They go even beyond the fact that both have an astringent sense of % hierarchy, subscribe to a code of stoical reticence and are, in some respects, proud, isolated monarchies with more than a touch of xenophobia. The very qualities that seem so foreign to many Americans -- the fact that people do not invariably mean what they say, that uncertain distances separate politeness from true feelings, and that everything is couched in a kind of code in which nuances are everything -- will hardly seem strange to a certain kind of Englishman.
Perhaps the best illustration of this can be found in the best-selling novel about six days in the life of an English butler, The Remains of the Day. The book reads almost like a handbook of traditional Japanese values: a samurai- like loyalty to a master, a quiet and impenitent nationalism, a sense that self is best realized through self-surrender. Many of the scenes -- in which the butler speaks to his father in the third person, talks of "military-style pep talks" to his staff and resolves to practice "bantering" -- might almost be translated from the Japanese. Yet here are all these values, in the midst of an instantly recognizable England, in 1956! The book's author, Kazuo Ishiguro, who moved to England from Nagasaki at the age of five, grew up simultaneously as a Japanese and an English schoolboy, and so can see that the two are scarcely different. "I think there are a lot of things about the Japanese way of communicating that I don't know about," he says, "simply because I don't know my way around the codes. But the actual Japanese method, the actual approach, I think I'm quite at home with -- because I've been brought up in middle-class England." Japan, as Wilde might have said, is only as alien as ourselves.