As was typical in the 1980s and early 1990s, the 1993 movie Rising Sun regarded Japan as a culture of success, economically all-conquering, busily fulfilling the hypothesis made by historian Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987): Japan would be the next superpower, inheriting the mantle from the USA, who had in turn inherited it from Great Britain after WWII.

At one point, writers Michael Backes and Philip Kaufman have Capt. Connor (Sean Connery) admonish Lt. Smith (Wesley Snipes) with the pearl of wisdom, “Americans like to fix the blame. The Japanese fix the problem… Their way is better.” However, Capt. Connor had it backwards. Not only does Japanese culture indeed play the blame game, it also tends to ignore problems altogether, which hamstrings the Japanese even today.

In pre-modern Japan, blame was such an integral part of the dominant bushido culture that death was the penalty not only for virtually any crime, but even for failure. Far from being blameless, any peasant could be killed by a samurai at any time, for any or no reason, and the peasant who actually did something offensive forfeited the lives of his family as well. Samurai themselves were expected to commit ritual suicide (seppuku) to atone for wrongdoing and mistakes. Bushido prescribes that, upon the discovery of a problem, correction is less important than satisfaction of honour (i.e. suicide) by the problem-causer, as suicide is habitually performed before the error is even corrected. It can be argued that apportioning blame is important for avoiding future mistakes, as might be said of Western culture, but when death is the penalty for a mistake, that is restricted to deterrent for others, not correction. The Japanese placed a higher value upon the apportioning of blame and the death of the offender than on the correction of the problem and future avoidance.

Japan also has often preferred to ignore serious problems rather than tackle them. When Western explorers arrived in 1542, the introduction of firearms threatened the Japanese mode of life. The samurai, like medieval knights, depended upon skill of arms for dominance. The sword and the bow were difficult to master, and samurai did not need to fear mere peasants. The gun, however, represents a fundamental change in the social order. The military elite can no longer maintain its standing with skill of arms, since any peasant with a musket and bandolier can, without much strength or skill, fell a knight.

In Europe, the gun indeed accompanied changes in the social order. Government and society became increasingly less elitist, with the advent of limited monarchy and even limited democracy (in Switzerland, for instance). Although Oda Nobunaga utilised firearms, samurai as a rule refused to use them and relegated them to common footsoldiers, and outside of a serving army non-samurai were not permitted any weapons. Social changes had to wait until 1868 and the Meiji Restoration, fourteen years after Commodore Perry had finally flung open the door that the Japanese had closed to the West in 1639.

Christianity was also introduced into Japan with the first European explorers. The Christian faith offered more compassionate and humane beliefs than the dominant Shinto religion, offering the love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ in place of unswerving allegiance unto death towards a feudal overlord, and teaching the value of life and human rights, including the fundamental non-aggression principle of Jesus, in place of the Shinto/Zen view of life as transient and lacking in value, the justification of aggression and bloodshed and the neo-Confucian view of the social hierarchy. Rather than adapt to this change, the Japanese on the whole rejected it. Toyotomi Hideyoshi began to enact edicts against Christianity and, by 1638, Japanese Christianity was extinct. Japanese Christians were tortured and executed, as they had been in the Roman Empire.

It is fair to say that Europeans have ignored their fair share of problems, but never on the scale or extent of the Japanese. Europe quickly adapted to new ways of life and new technologies and those peoples that did not, such as the Abbasid Mamelukes (whose rejection of firearms in a very similar manner to that of the samurai led to their destruction by firearm-wielding Turks in 1515-1516) were left behind. Great Britain, for example, rejected submarine warfare in the last years of the 19th Century as an “underhand, unfair, and damned un-English” strategy, as Rear-Admiral A.K. Wilson opined, but even by the time Wilson spoke his words the Royal Navy had already ordered five submarines and by the eve of WWI, had the largest submarine fleet in the world.

Japanese collectivism may be largely to blame for these cultural issues. Conservatism has been a part of the predominant Japanese mindset for so long because Japanese religion and belief encourage it. Shinto, neo-Confucianism and Zen Buddhism teach the abandonment of individuality and to disregard life itself. This lack of individualism slows progress: lack of individual rewards discourage work and research, ascetism discourages material gain, and collective social goals discourage individual human rights. Christianity places an emphasis on the individual, emphasising individual action and responsibility, and this mindset has been responsible for the Western attitudes that have led to greater Western progress in science and in social values.

The collectivist aspects of Japanese culture are alive and well in the modern age. Employees sing their company song every morning and “pledge allegiance” to the board of directors, who reward their fealty with jobs for life, at least, until the Japanese recession made that an impossibility. Western workers, conversely, grumble about their employers and remain on the lookout for better jobs, while Western employers look for opportunities to cut costs, sack any unproductive worker and outsource wherever profitable. However, employees loyal to a company are unlikely to demand better in the labour market, thus retarding the development of better working conditions, while fickle employees encourage employers to pay and provide more. Companies that place job security above profits may be more highly regarded, but will never be able to match the low prices of more ruthless competitors, thus they retard advances in standards of living.

Not only this collectivism but the desire to ignore problems has followed the Japanese people. The Japanese economic crash happened well over a decade ago, but unlike Western nations the Japanese have not been able to recover. The Nikkei index closed today at 11,453, but at the end of 1989 it was at 40,000, and in the intervening years it has never even come close again. In March 2001, it fell below 12,000, and in almost four years it still has not gone above that level. Since WWII, Japan has held tight to Keynesian and Monetarist economic ideas and maintained a high level of government interference in the economy. The Japanese government has tried all Keynesian and Monetarist prescriptions for economic recovery, and all have failed - and yet they continue to try them.

Rather than confront the fact that their economic ideas are wrong and that interventionism does not work, the Japanese keep slogging away, enacting countless spending programmes that do nothing but build up public debt and devalue the Yen. Like Shoguns who outlawed Christianity and shut themselves off from the world and samurai who disdained the firearm and charged onto 18th Century battlefields wielding katana and wakazashi, the modern-day Japanese wish this problem would just disappear, and until it does they seem determined to hide from reality like the Shogun and the samurai. However, there is no escaping reality, and the economic equivalent of Commodore Perry is likely to sail into Tokyo Bay soon and destroy both Japanese misconceptions and the failures they have spawned, whether they like it or not.