Re: [tlug] (OT) The enigma of Japan (was: UNIX jobs on TLUG)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Josh Glover writes:

 > Anyway, my problem with Japanese Studies, having encountered it on
 > both sides of the Pacific (or rather, the east side of the Nihon-kai
 > and the west side of the Atlantic, but you know what I mean), is that
 > there are all of these cliques that encourage a certain school of
 > though whilst insulting the rest.

One thing that I'd observed myself (even before reading "Enigma") is
the way that Japanese academia breaks up into cliques, along "who was
your sotsuron->MA->PhD advisor"[1] lines.  There's even a technical
term for it, 学閥.  It's extremely important to employment, promotion,
and even publication possibilities.  It also leads to meetings and
seminars where the participants talk past each other for hours on
end. :-(  Fortunately for Japan, this effect probably doesn't affect
industry very much.

But I've been told by people working in industry that gakubatsu affect
hiring and promotion there.  Eg, the Keio-Mitsubishi connection is
famous.  I think it was Honda (I and the engineer-turned-economist who
told me about it were both pretty "happy" at that point of the
evening) that avoids engineers from Tokyo and Kansai schools, almost
exclusively filling development positions from Kyushu Kogyo Dai.  Of
course the Todai network is unbeatable in finance, politics, and the
bureaucracy.

I've seen how it works in publication, too, when editing papers for a
chemistry professor tennis buddy.  He's had decent luck with
international journals, but he can't buy a page in a Japanese journal
(even the English language ones).  I can't judge the novelty or
importance of the results, but I can vouch for the fact that the
formal quality of his English and logical structure beats almost all
the papers in the targeted journals.  But he had the "wrong" teacher.

Gaikokujin get to bypass this to a great extent, but since gakubatsu
connections (especially Todai) are actually valuable to the company,
the system is somewhat biased against us (at least for Keidanren
members).  It also makes for *very* boring dinner conversation, where
nobody talks about anything but mutual acquaintances and their recent
"jinji".

Back to the flamewar:

 > e.g. van Wolferen's writings, or the pro-Nihonjinron and
 > anti-Nihonjinron factions. Why not read it all and draw your own
 > conclusions?

Well, some of van Wolferen's stuff is sick-making, and not because of
what it teaches you about Japanese society.  I can't really recommend
もう一つの鎖国 for example.[2] ;-)

One thing that bothers me about Japanese studies (in the general
sense, not as a narrow academic department) is the amount of Keidanren
money that follows certain prominent folks around (check out
J. Mark Ramseyer's home page at Harvard, for example).

In other words, it's not just that Microsoft astroturfs Linux[3], but
Mitsubishi astroturfs Japanese studies, too.

N.B.  Researchers need access to resources, too, and there's no doubt
in my mind that Mark, though his biases differ from mine, is just
publishing what he thinks.  This money is IMO a net benefit to the
field.  But the (past?) greater access to resources of pro-Japanese
researchers does bias the field as a whole.  Caveat lector!

 > Anyway, as this has nothing to do with Linux, let me just direct you
 > to the mail headers, which may just contain the user agent of the web
 > browser I used to type this message. ;)

No such luck, Mr. Moderator.

Footnotes: 
[1]  Yes, unless they go abroad, even in economics it is very often
the case that all three are the same!

[2]  It's a pro-China, anti-America (== G.W.Bush, apparently)
pamphlet, and not really about Japan at all.

[3]  Hello there, Mr. Moderator!