Japanese Have Low Self-Esteem
We Japanese have very low self-esteem.
The root cause of this are the lies that plague our education system and media. The schools plant the seeds, and the media waters and grows them. By the time they flower, our self-esteem is already low.
There’s one reason in particular why the Japanese education system lowers people’s self-esteem. Rather than teaching students to value individualism, the education system here engrains the idea that we are all the same, or in other words, substitutable.
Individualism-icide using Peer Pressure
If you live in Japan, you don’t need to conduct research or take to statistics to see that foreigners have more confidence and higher self-esteem than Japanese. Just take a walk down a street in Tokyo, and looks aside, you can tell the difference.
Japanese who have lived overseas for many years are vibrant with energy. You don’t see them upset themselves over pointless things, and they are very optimistic and outgoing. That’s because they never received the elementary education in Japan that destroys individualism. For example, people who receive an American education that values “being unique” or “being creative” can feel how collectivist Japanese culture is. The Japanese need to “do what everyone else is doing” or the feeling that one feels “pressured to take a similar action”.
Here’s a roughly translated quote from Tatsuru Uchida and Hidetoshi Mitsuoka’s book “Kouten no Bugaku” on the diminishing culture of Bushido:
Japan’s education system applies an unprecedented amount of normalization and standardization on children at a level unmatched by any other country in the world. By doing so, the government has long achieved the industrialization of a mass produced labor force whose workers are fully interchangeable and indistinguishable.
However, any country’s education system has at its core a certain ideological principle. For America, that’s freedom and justice. Japan idealizes the high economic growth period from the 1950s to 1970s. In China, the core principle is communism.
It’s difficult to say which approach yields the best results. Getting an American education based on freedom and justice means that you will end up with people who can’t differentiate between being “free” in the intended sense of having rights, and being “free” to do whatever you want, even at the cost of others. “Independence” may also extend in meaning to “Indulgence” as well. This results in protecting one country’s interests at the cost of others, often by force.
When it comes to watching out for and caring about others, Japan stands out more than any other country. We even have the word “Omotenashi” to express this. However when this practice takes place on a societal or community level, the need to be “the same” becomes stronger and the “individual” is sacrificed. Without us realizing it, the principles and ideologies that we are taught shape and limit the way we interact.
The Female Population Cannot Be Brainwashed
Even though the Japanese education system attempts to control all students equally, it fails to fully brainwash females. The biological reason for this is that because no matter how hard you try to brainwash the female body, every month there is a period during the period cycle where the body will rely on parts of the brain other than the cerebrum.
How Corona is Changing Society
The Coronavirus has affected all of our lives significantly, and has required us to reassess our societal values. Even before Corona, younger generations have been pushing for society as a whole to “Reevaluate current societal values”. The Coronavirus situation will only exacerbate this. People are starting to realize that we cannot simply think the way we used to, and this may be the key to lifting the curse of “low self-esteem” among the Japanese population.
Corona has helped in a sense to pressure people to think for themselves and to take initiative of their own lives. This in turn means not taking everything that the media says for granted, and to reflect on how one has lived his or her lives. When a salaried employee starts a side hustle, that’s when they first take a step out of the “pyramid” of the corporate organizational structure, and are able to objectively look at what role they played. That’s when one can start to understand how to see capitalism and the history of Japanese society at its core.
By understanding how “distorted” the structure of society and capitalism is, one can start to understand one’s purpose in life. That’s the first step to remolding oneself from a replaceable, refundable “factory item” to a real, valuable, “individual”.
