Respecting and Considering Others: How Democracy Is Inactivated in Japan?

It is important to respect and consider others in everyday life. It could be true in almost every society. But what “respect” and “consider” mean should vary from a society to another. How you respect and consider others depends on what kind of society you live in. In some societies, respecting and considering others could mean controlling and suppressing others’ will and Japan is one of the good examples of such societies.

Respecting others often means respecting others’ status and role in Japan. It has tendency to neglect what they really want. But this neglect doesn’t neccesarily mean disrespecting or destroying their dignity. If you breath an atmosphere of a society where people are basically supposed to behave according to their status, respecting status of others is directly respecting them for you. It is the case especially when they identify themselves with their status and want to perform its role. They may sometimes appear an automatic and emotionless humanoid that doen’t have their own will.

Accepting an assigned status and performing its role as perfectly as possible is one of the most important thing that Japanese children are taught and trained. There they have almost no time to think about what they really want. They are led to think that their hope is to meet others’ expectatoins, which means they identify others’ expectation as their own wish.