A recent Daily Yomiuri article asks whether or not Japanese people have lost their ability to empasize with other peope. I wonder if this isn't a global reaction to modern urban living and consumer society in general. The bonds of community seem more tenuous than ever. That being said it seems as though concepts like avoidance of meiwaku (to cause trouble for others) still drives a lot of individual behavior. I think living in a densely populated scoiety where your personal space is constantly being encroched may also promote a sort of public withdrawl where you try to find your personal space through little acts of escapism with music on your headphones or imersing yourself in a book on the crowded train as you try to forget that there's a breifcase jammed into your back.
There is widespread concern today that traditional Japanese modes of behavior and thought are breaking down.The government's Education Rebuilding Council considers the collapse of ethical standards among students to be one of the biggest problems facing the country. In response, it is likely to propose that ethics be taught as a regular subject at school.
However, traditional mores are faltering in other ways, too, and the public has various opinions on how to rebuild them. In this article we look at some examples of moral decline, as well as people's efforts to rebuild the high ethical standards that they feel have been lost.
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The Japanese once were said to hold altruism in high regard, but that may no longer be the case.
Yoshimasa Nakazato, professor emeritus at Toyo University, has been researching altruism among the Japanese.
In one of his experiments, Nakazato, a social psychologist, has measured the degree of compassion for others by getting primary school students to play a game, then studying how winners used the game chips they gained.
Reviewing the records of such experiments going back to the mid-1980s, he says 80 percent of winning students used to give some of the chips that they won to the losers. However, after the late 1980s, the percentage suddenly dropped to the 40 percent level.
"My concern in those days was that our society would become a very brutal place in the future if we left such problems unattended--and I see signs that this is coming true," Nakazato warns.
Makoto Kurozumi, a professor at Tokyo University who specializes in the history of Japanese thought, says that compassion for others was long one of the most important characteristics of the Japanese people.
"The origin of this is a tradition of animism that teaches that everything, including plants and trees, has a spirit," Kurozumi explains. "That has cultivated a compassion for all living creatures, including human beings, in the Japanese."
Even during the process of modernization that began in the Meiji era (1868-1912), animism remained a core part of Japanese spiritual culture. Over the past 20 years, however, all aspects of life have been computerized and mechanized, depriving people of any relationship with Mother Nature, Kurozumi said.
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