Seken is described in Brian J. McVeigh’s book Japanese Higher Education as Myth as:
The surrounding world of community consisting of neighbors, kin, colleagues, friends, and other significant persons considered important.
As a result, some people are seen as to have lost their identity due to it. Some women feel pressure to get married because of it. And it can lead to excessive self-monitoring due to this obsessive concern of what people think of you and has especially counterproductive results in the classroom.
He also refers to it as the “official gaze.” That is to say, it is “a normalizing gaze that scans, screens, selects and shunts students through education-examination system” based on hensachi, or standard deviation mean-where one’s place is measured against all others in society based on test taking ability. I think he’s onto something with this idea. I think it helps explain what some people call the “shame culture”(people acting in a moral way to avoid the shame of society by breaking its laws) and what I see often as a sort of paternalism. People go through life waiting to be told what to do, after a life of being told what to do and how to act and behave through school, which acts as more of a socializing institution than a educational institution. And as a result, they behave properly because they feel they are being watched and judged on their behavior and it also inhibits them from acting out in a way that would draw attention to them and undermines the confidence needed to hold views contrary to the status quo. I’ve talked about the kohai/sempai (senior-subordinate) relationships, and I think this adds to situation in that, the underclassmen fele that they need to follow the example of the upperclassmen. These relationships are particularly potent during the university experience. This behavior seems to crystallize in the classroom where they are being watched by their peers while trying to disappear in the anonymity of the crowd. As a result, this lack of self-challenging and adherence to norm can lead to apathy, de-motivation, and demoralization. It would seem to explain the lack of intellectual curiosity that I see everyday in the university classroom.
I’m not sure this is a good synopsis of his ideas and mine; however, it has got me thinking about these concepts as they apply to people in different roles in society. But it’s something I need to think about more thoroughly. But I think there is a connection to this idea, because I don’t fully buy into the myths of Japanese people being naturally “shy” and “passive.”
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