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When I was watching Spiderman 3, I was reminded of something that I think represents a pretty significant difference between Japanese and American culture.

Before the movie began, they showed various previews as well as an advertisement against movie pirating. The advertisement showed a drawing of a guy in the back of a theater filming a movie while two people sitting in the row in front of him were turned around staring in disgust and horror. Then it flipped to another image of a guy sitting at his computer, apparently editing the movie file he had taken illegally at the theater, while in the background on a bed was another guy (his roommate?) looking on in disgust and horror. These images were accompanied by a message about how illegally filming and distributing movies is a nuisance to others.

When I saw this advertisement, I had to ask myself, “Is this serious? This has to be a joke…” The images were too ridiculous to me to be taken seriously. For one thing, the situations depicted in the images would never occur. I’ve never actually seen a guy in a theater illegally filming a movie but the way they do it is they go to the very last row and set up their camera there. Because they don’t want to be caught, they do things as discreetly as possible. There’s no way it could possibly become a problem to someone since it’s not blocking anyone’s vision and it makes no noise. Showing images of people turning around in their seats in shock and anger makes no sense.

Also, even more ludicrous is the image in the guy’s room as he is editing the film on his computer. Having the bed in just that position with a roommate there is extremely contrived in the first place, and why is the roommate so outraged? If I had a roommate and he brought in a dead body, I would be shocked. But watching my roommate edit random video files on his computer? Nope, not shocked or outraged.

So, considering this is a paid message, we can expect things not to be portrayed realistically. For example, when was the last time you saw someone get *that* happy just from eating fast food? But, I think the fact that the creators of this ad chose to exaggerate things in this direction, mainly other people getting upset at the individual’s actions, is reflective of the culture in which it was made.

Back in the United States, the MPAA often stresses the criminal nature of the act of illegally filming a movie or points out the large fines associated with it. While the Japanese ad stresses the annoyance done to others by one’s actions, the American counterpart stresses the individual’s badness and the negative personal financial impact (a fine). In fact, if I remember correctly, the Japanese ad I saw didn’t even mention a monetary fine at all which would have caught my attention a lot more than some images of other people getting angry because they saw some guy filming a movie.

I’ve noticed this dichotomy in other areas, too. In Japan, I often see signs that say something like “Let’s protect our beautiful environment!” while in the United States, I see signs like “No littering. $300 fine.” Quite a difference.

I believe this difference stems from Japanese culture’s stress of not offending others around oneself and stress of the group over the individual. In America, the individual is always stressed. Often a type of capitalistic scarcity is also applied to this so that the image becomes one where an individual must fight for oneself against the other individuals around oneself.

This is evidenced by the fact that ads stressing other people’s opinions of one’s actions work in Japan while these same types of ads are never seen in America. Other evidence includes Japan’s dislike of personal confrontation, especially in places where others are watching.

Further evidence is perhaps the fact that certain psychological disorders exist in Japan while they are almost non-existent in the West. For example, consider “Taijin Kyofusho” which is a disorder in which the sufferer avoids social contact. While this may sound similar to social phobia disorders in the West, the underlying reasons for the two are different. In the West, social phobia is due to the “fear of embarrassing oneself or being harshly judged by others because of one’s social ineptness”. In Japan on the other hand, Taijin Kyofusho is caused by a fear of “offending or harming other people”. The focus is shifted away from receiving harm to oneself and shifted towards harm to others.

It’s interesting that this sort of disorder does not exist in the West suggesting that this kind of thinking, mainly concern for one’s actions on the others around oneself, takes a backseat to the thinking that the individual and the individual’s worth is far more important than any of the others around him or her. In America, even in places where you would think group thought is stressed over individual thought like the Army (perhaps the epitome of stress on group rather than individual), just look at their advertising campaign, “An Army of One” which emphasizes the individuality of each soldier.

The premier commercial in January, 2001 showed a soldier saying, “Even though there are 1,045,690 soldiers just like me, I am my own force. With technology, with training, with support, who I am has become better than who I was. And I’ll be the first to tell you, the might of the U.S. Army doesn’t lie in numbers. It lies in me.” These days, even the Army has to cede to the overwhelming cultural stress on the invidual in order to recruit people.

So, while I laughed at those ads that show people enraged at the actions of an individual doing something like quietly filming a movie or editing it on his computer, perhaps some Japanese people in that same movie theater were cringing at the look of outrage on the drawn faces in the ad.

While these types of cultural differences are well documented, what interests me now is why these differences exist. Was it pure random chance that Western culture evolved one way while Japanese culture evolved another? Is there some underlying feature in the past that offered an advantage for each type of culture in its respective area? I’ll save this for a later entry…

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 10:43 am and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.