And remember the Japanese proverb, the nail that sticks up will be hammered down. Indeed, the Japanese are a good example of Asian values at work. It is absolutely de rigueur for the Japanese sarariman to hobnob with his colleagues in the karaoke bars after work; and the Japanese travel in herds. There's an excellent short story by Graham Greene in which he depicts a self-absorbed young lady who aspires to be a novelist. Her poor fiance' tries to talk her out of it and the entire dialogue takes place in a restaurant where a group of Japanese tourists are noisily bowing and taking each other's pictures. When they leave, her lover refers to the tourists. "What Japanese tourists?" screams the would-be writer: a woman's powers of observation must be incredibly feeble to miss a congregation of Japanese tourists. In Bangladesh, tour operators to the Sundarban mangrove forest love Japanese tourists: they travel in groups, so a package is easily put together. But then so do Bangladeshis: large families of 30 travel together to Cox's Bazaar, and the children make a devil of a noise and break glasses at the Sagorika restaurant.
About Japan's change of government in the mid-90s, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew had said: 'I do not see them becoming a fractious, contentious society like America, always debating and knocking each other down. That is not their culture. They want growth and they want to get on with life. They are not interested in ideology as such, or in the theory of good government. They just know a good government and want a good government.
"Americans believe that out of contention, out of the clash of different ideas and ideals, you get good government. That view is not shared in Asia [8]."
(Note that Asian values explicitly exclude ideology and, therefore, fascism and totalitarianism. Ideology slides irresistibly into totalitarianism, as witnessed in Bangladesh and India at present.)
Anthropologists have found that only in western civilisation do the children sleep in separate rooms from infancy: in no other society on earth (I'm not sure about Jupiter or the newly discovered solar planets) are kids packed off to another bedroom: they snuggle in with the parents [9]. Really!
[1] William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1955), p. 43
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