Sue Perkins in Japan

 Subject: Sue Perkins in Japan





The cult of shouting, subordination and self depreciation in a Japanese business school where the gifted few are weeded to further eradicating any weakness which interferes with the corporate goal was graphically illustrated in a show meddled around the likes and dislikes of presenter Sue Perkins. These disciplined middle class worker bees who famously queue up to be ignominiously pushed and squeezed into the already overcrowded rail carriages (a concept of subordination unknown outside of Japan) jostled and pushed into the city along with thousands of others, each headed for a long day of corporate slavery.

The acceptance of this mind set, along with the inevitable postponement  of a child bearing family life makes the oriental mind a significant adversary when it comes to competitive business practice since in the West we should be aware of our obsession to equate our citizens, irrespective of cultural and political and religious acuity, to a corporate bottom line without demanding  a high level of corporate sensitivity. To the Japanese respect is the same as sensitivity and respect you earn. Their use of work committees to inform management of the views of the shop floor, has produced a collective so different from the ‘tell’ of British management and instead of one of ‘consultation’, and collective decision making.

Religion rates highly in Japan and the two major ones, Shinto and Buddhism coexist harmoniously. Shintoism places great importance on purity, harmony and family respect plus the subordination of the individual to the group, the very antithesis of our own cultural and religious belief.  Although the word 'religion' cultivates the idea that each religious calling is unique  and each group has the certainty of it being right, the substance of culture is much more divisive since it balances 'its certainty' on locality and local practices. Wall Street in its global obsession with costs a cheap goods has drawn us all into latter day slavery where, for the bulk of us, the path has been that of national decline as we seek, or are forced into competing with labour from systems with the lowest common denominator. China with its communist doctrinaire approach, India with its indifference and Russia with hubris about its place in history.

In the case of Japan its strength was not exploitive cheap labour but an unusual conformity, a pride in country and a self centred deprivation which saw the worker willing to be  manipulated for the corporate and therefore the national good.

In our quirky sense of individualism and rights, we in this country place our own needs first and so water down our power of the collective to one of the individual kudu wandering the plains waiting for the predator to take us down.

It’s the price of freedom, the price we pay to do, or not do, according to taste and as the world settles into competing groups, is sadly out of kilter to compete with the collective and their group think.