Victory Manual

Sakai Junko’s essay 電車の中で若者に注意 got me to thinking about “generation gaps” as “foreign culture”.

In the essay, Ms. Sakai rants about a few episodes where young people should have been admonished for their inconsiderate behavior. In one example, she highlights two young men riding a bullet train watching TV on a cell phone sans headphones. No one steps up to tell them to turn it off, so she has to put on a brave face for the task and asks them as politely as possible to avoid the possibility that they, “get angry back at her.” She phrases it, “Excuse me, but, could you please just slightly turn the volume down, just a bit?” Surprised, they nod and grunt a “yeah” and oblige her by turning the volume down. Except that what she really meant by her comment was that they should turn the phone off completely. This, she argues, is the folly of modern youth - Their lack of consideration.

There were a couple of other examples also, but I’m not going to paraphrase them here as they basically argue the same point. What immediately struck me as amusing was that, while Ms. Sasaki (and most people, for that matter) will argue that they should be admonishing these individuals because they are being inconsiderate, it can be equally perceived that demanding the “offensive action” to cease is itself a selfish act. The phone is annoying her, and therefore she believes it is annoying everyone else around her. She prefers a quiet train. The two men prefer an entertaining train. Who is to say which party has a more valid claim?

The answer is that society, as a whole, determines which party is correct. The majority establish unwritten rules of conduct through common behavior, and these rules are expected to be understood by everyone. In the case of cultures, the “society-in-the-know” are the citizens who reside in any given country. When foreigners first arrive, they may violate these rules unknowingly because their own cultures act on different unwritten rules of conduct.

What we’re seeing occuring in Japan is commonly referred to as a “generation gap”, but I don’t see that as being any different than a “culture gap”. The older generation was raised on different values, and so their culture is different from the culture of modern youth. From the older generation’s perspective, youth are acting terrible. From the new generation, the older generation is unnecessarily strict. We can’t say that either side is “right” or “wrong”; they’re simply different.

Some social commentators lay the blame on “Americanization”, as though it’s a defined agenda of the United States, but I don’t see that as being the case at all. Regardless of what youth are exposed to, the strongest influence on our developing personalities is the parent-figure, for better or worse. Laying the blame on an outside force is to try and create a scapegoat, much like many American parents who blame videogames or music for the violent behavior of their own children. The role of the parent is to create a human that can make sound judgements no matter what they are exposed to, and claiming that outside forces are to blame is essentially the same as saying they as parents could not handle the responsibilities required of them. There are, of course, exceptional circumstances where things like psychological disorders render the process of character development impossible, and it is not at all the fault of the parent that their child ends up doing something terrible. (That’s nature’s fault.)

What is ultimately happening in Japan is that the parents of one generation are acting as a bridge in breeding a new culture through their children, and two differing cultures are colliding head-on in a very confined country.