Jenny Uechi's article is phrased in terms of a dominating opposition in Japanese society between seken -- the society or people that one deals with -- and what her article looks forward to -- namely, an "individualist revolution."
While she is correct to look for causes in terms of the interaction between the individual and the group -- indeed, it is difficult to look anywhere else -- the manner in which such notions as society and the individual are addressed in her article points to important oversights.
To suggest, as Dr. Seiei Mutou of the Tokyo Mental Health Academy does, that Japan will "eventually need" an "individualist revolution," even though, as the article argues, "many people still care about securing their place within" the seken, is to set up an impregnable state of attrition between society and the individual.
If commentators could begin to think in terms of community and tolerance -- notions that lend themselves more easily to a modern psychological language that prioritizes emotional and affective life -- then Japanese society might find a way forward beyond such stiff oppositions. Japanese universities spend millions of yen on advertisements that imitate Ivy League models; yet their campuses are more often than not counselor-free. My students have often nowhere to turn in times of emotional crisis, except to foreign teachers.
At a recent university lecture at my university, an educationalist informed the assembled professors that Japanese students prefer to communicate by e-mail rather than face to face. The professors were not surprised. I very much doubt that phrasing such desperate events as the Kato killings in terms of such archaic notions as seken can confront and tackle the emotional needs of the Mixi-besotted, generation Z, student body.
MICHAEL O'
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