Social Capital Makes Japan Strong State

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

What allows members of a polity to be willing enough to trust each other in order to engage in collective endeavors for the common good?

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, in a number of articles and books, has referred to this quality as social capital. It’s the network of thick connections that keep citizens engaged in collective activities on behalf of all.

Social capital rests on a set of mutual understandings about the kinds of behaviour people can expect from one another, and comes about when people all have mutually reinforcing ties across a wide spectrum of civil society institutions.

The single largest factor used to quantify social capital is the level of social trust, he has argued.

The greater the amount of social capital, the likelier it is that members of society will be able to cooperate in the public realm – something of immense importance for the proper functioning of a democracy. 

So, as Putnam suggested in his 1993 book Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, a strong and free government depends on a virtuous and public-spirited citizenry.

Japan provides an excellent example of this. Its culture and its homogeneity may be its greatest strengths. The nation’s deeply rooted shared political and cultural principles allow for a level of social peace, harmony and unity found in few other countries.

Some social scientists posit that this gives the Japanese a sense of meaning and purpose and hence the desire to accomplish tasks to the best of their ability. There is a deep personal investment that people make in their work. Perhaps you work harder when you are all part of one “extended family.”

In an article in the New York Times Magazine of Dec. 18, “What the West Can Learn From Japan About the Cultural Value of Work,” John Lanchester tells us that the word shokunin sums it up: It means something like “master or mastery of one’s profession,” and it captures the way Japanese workers spend every day trying to be better at what they do.

There is also a different approach to business relationships; there is much more of a sense of social responsibility than there is elsewhere.

While company profits are important, so is their corporate social duty to keep their workers employed as much as possible. The relationship is one of mutual responsibility going back to samurai times.

Employees are expected to work hard and demonstrate loyalty to the firm, in exchange for some degree of job security and benefits. Executives and workers look out for each other and not just for the bottom line. So unemployment, at about three per cent, is almost nonexistent.

Companies thus take on a heavy amount of responsibility for ensuring social stability, the latter being a paramount value in Japanese culture.

All of this can sometimes be carried too far. An article by Amanda Erickson in the Jan.14 Washington Post, “Japan’s Employees Are Literally Working Themselves to Death,” observes that the Japanese “might be the hardest working people in the world.”

Even taking a vacation is seen as selfish. The culture is so rigorous that there is a word for literally working yourself to death: karoshi. 

The Japanese have gone through many decades of turmoil, be they economic, political or military, over the past century. They continue to face challenges, especially in their relations with China, South Korea and the United States. But they will see them through as a united country.