The Japanese have not yet been able to develop individualism as it is understood in the West. They have been used to repressing their own ego in their relations to the family or community. Thus, a Japanese individual can be said to be devoid of backbone, so to speak. He is pliant, has no firm convictions of his own, and tends to act with group psychology. This is the reason why Japanese, when he goes to a Western country for the first time, often falls in love with the country to a remarkable degree. Many Japanese who resided in France for any length of time have, in many cases, become Francophile. I have known many such Japanese who take inordinate pride in speaking French, singing French chansons, and wearing beret Basque caps even after they come back to Japan. People like the French who have a strong individual character, seem particularly to appeal to the Japanese, whose life has always been fettered by numerous social strictures and inhibitions.
Hence the Japanese, when they go to a Western country like France, at last breathe the air of freedom which they have never experienced before, so much so, that they readily take to the way of life of the country. Many of my colleagues who had been stationed in England likewise became so enamored of the English way of life that some of them even continue to wear a bowler hat, read the Times of London, and carry an umbrella regardless of the weather, after returning to Japan. And, they will probably continue to do so for the rest of their lives.
In Japan there is some sort of craze, or what the Japanese call a "boom," that strikes the whole nation from time to time like an epidemic. There has, for example, been a craze for growing orchids, for collecting old coins, for owning Western antique furniture, etc. Recently there was a boom for collecting stones and rocks, large and small, mainly for ornaments, when most well-to-do frantically went in for all sorts of stones, curiously shaped or fantastically colored. As a result, there developed a big market for stones not only for business but also for speculation. It is characteristic of these fads, however, that they are usually not sustaining and once the craze is over, everybody completely forgets about it as if nothing had happened, much like a calm morning after a stormy night.
If someone starts doing something out of the ordinary, his fellow countrymen find it difficult to resist the temptation not to follow suit, and in fact, the whole nation succumbs to the fad. The absence of a strong ego with the Japanese is also responsible for the Japanese penchant for imitating indiscriminately what others, especially Westerners, do or say.
This Japanese "selflessness" may in part account for the recent corruption of the Japanese language with English words. Everywhere in Japan today one catches the sound of English words—in the jargon of politics, in the language of trade and technology, clothes fashions, magazine titles, foods, and sports. For instance, mudo for English mood, is a word which might seem a little odd but everyone can at least guess the meaning. Mudo is increasingly used in daily conversations as well as in advertisements. An advertisement for a high-class apartment house in Tokyo says that "the manshon (mansion) is hai kurasu (high class) and gojasu (gorgeous)." Mansion, high class, and gorgeous are all English words adopted into the Japanese language with somewhat perverted meanings. A man may take a takushi (taxi) to go to resutoran (restaurant) and have hamu raisu
(ham rice), a favorite Japanese dish consisting of boiled rice mixed with chopped ham and green peas. They are pretty accurate and certainly uninhibited approximations. No danger of mispronunciation confronts the Japanese, for they think in syllables and everything can be transliterated into the relatively simple Japanese katakana syllabary.
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