Japanese Culture
Key Components of Japanese Culture
As with every culture, Japanese culture includes a number of elements which make the culture uniquely its own. Japan is a very homogeneous nation whose people place high value on the norms of acceptable behavior. The Japanese value harmony, conformity and predictability. Japanese cultural norms require people to go to great lengths to avoid actions that might disrupt the harmony of the group. Japanese people feel themselves to be accountable to the group, not the individual; in fact, individualistic behavior is frowned upon. The Japanese believe that conformity produces harmony, the supreme value (Denison, 2002).
While the Japanese people regard their culture as unique, they are actually very flexible and open to adapting to outside influences. Foreign sports and fashions as well as modern technology have gained wide acceptance and dissemination. Also, Japan's written language originated in China, while the Buddhist religion came to them from Korea. The Japanese language, with its 4000 character alphabet, has only past and non-past verb tenses (Denison, 2002). The language is also full of American words which are widely used and accepted. (Bucknall, 2010).
While written Japanese is based on Chinese ideographs or characters, spoken Japanese is not closely related to the spoken Chinese language. As part of their written language, the Japanese also use two phonetic alphabets that have been simplified from the ideographs, as well as a third phonetic alphabet that uses Roman letters (Denison, 2002).
Symbolism is also an important part of Japanese culture. Some standard symbols encountered in the arts include the following:
Pine tree -- Long life
Bamboo -- Constancy and virtue
Fern -- Expanding good fortune
Lobster -- Old age
Carp fish -- Strength and determination
Peach blossom -- Happiness in marriage and the feminine virtues of softness, mildness, and peacefulness
Sweet potato -- Struggle of the poor to survive
Pine needles, mandarin ducks -- Marital fidelity (Bucknall, 2010).
Japanese clothing includes...
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