A Question That Began in a Dentsu Training Room
A journalist’s exposé describes a scene like this: a young employee, newly hired at Dentsu, is ordered to strip naked and get laughs at a client dinner. Some refused. Others set fire to their own body hair for a cheap laugh.
It would be easy to file this away as one more episode of “Showa-era harassment.” But I see something larger in this scene — a structure, perhaps, 150 years in the making.
Why could no one in that room refuse?
The standard answer has long been: because there was no self to draw on. The Japanese, it is said, never developed a self in the Western sense. They dissolve into the group, read the air, defer to hierarchy. This is the stock explanation of postwar theories of Japaneseness (nihonjinron), and it still gets wheeled out, unquestioned, whenever someone wants to explain Japan’s low productivity or its Galápagos isolation.
But is this explanation actually correct?
Interrogating the Origins of the “No Self” Diagnosis
The claim that “the Japanese are collectivist and weak in individuality” is, to a significant degree, a self-representation that Japan itself adopted in the course of modernization. Ruth Benedict wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Sword without ever setting foot in Japan — it was a product of wartime intelligence strategy. The “shame culture / guilt culture” framework she proposed went on to shape Japanese studies decisively, but it was built less to understand its object than to construct a strategically legible other.
What’s more, the very yardstick used to make this diagnosis — the concept of “the individual” — derives fundamentally from the structure of monotheism. A single, indivisible soul, standing in a vertical relationship of accountability to the one God: this is the skeleton of the modern Western concept of the individual.
For a people who lived within the cosmology of eight million gods, by contrast, the self was never required to be defined as a single fixed point to begin with. The very fact that a first-person pronoun shifts — watashi, boku, ore, jibun — depending on the listener and the situation, is not evidence of a thin or diffuse self. It may instead be the linguistic residue of a supple selfhood that arises anew within each relationship.
The unguarded interiority of Heian-period literature; Shinran’s teaching that the individual reaches salvation directly, without institutional mediation; the clash between private passion and communal norms in Chikamatsu’s love-suicide plays — all of these testify to a rich and active selfhood. It was not that Japan lacked a self. What was lost was the “kata” — the form — that trained and sustained it.
Here, “kata” should not be confined to a single domain like the legal system. It encompasses the posture of zazen, the discipline of martial arts, the choreography of the tea ceremony, the handling of ma in Noh theater, the nuances a master passes individually to a disciple — the whole plural technology by which a self is forged and given shape. The absence of a legal framework for individual rights was merely one symptom, the way this deeper loss of kata happened to surface within the modern concept of rights.
Kata: A Technology for Forging the Self
What matters further is that this “supple self” never existed as formless license. Zen sitting meditation, tea ceremony, Noh, the martial arts — these forms of “kata” constituted a paradoxical training system: the experience of formlessness achieved through disciplined form. Only by repeating the form to its limit could one finally leave it behind. Shu-ha-ri — follow the form, break the form, transcend the form — was precisely the blueprint for this.
In other words, the traditional Japanese self was not fluidity without discipline, but disciplined fluidity.
This kata was forcibly severed by the Meiji Restoration.
The destruction of temples and monastic halls under the haibutsu kishaku purges. The dissolution of the economic base of samurai training through the sword-abolition edict and the commutation of hereditary stipends. And, decisively, the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890. The system of character cultivation, which had until then been transmitted individually, over time, from master to disciple, across the plural sites of Zen temples, private academies, and domain schools, was collapsed into a single text — one rescript.
Nor was this merely a matter of textbooks. Through ceremonial recitations at school, the deepest bow before the Imperial portrait, and compulsory memorization, the very sites of individualized training that had once instilled kata in the body were replaced by a single, nationwide regime of ritual and rote memorization. The “space between the lines” — the gyoukan — that different masters had once conveyed to their disciples, calibrated to context, was collapsed into a single canonical text and its repeated bodily ritual. The form remained. The relationship that transmitted it vanished.
The vessel of kata survived. But the process that had filled it — individualized transmission between master and disciple, built up over time — was lost. Not extinction. Rupture.
150 Years of Mistaking Symptom for Cause
The true causal chain should have run like this:
The forcible extraction of kata’s substance → the hollowing-out of the training system that forged the self → and, as a result, a self that struggles to find institutional and behavioral expression.
But the narrative that actually circulated inverted this sequence entirely. The cause (the loss of kata) was forgotten, and the symptom (a weak self) was recast as an essential Japanese trait — “this is simply what the Japanese are like.”
Why has this misdiagnosis survived so long? The answer is simple: it was useful.
The story that “the Japanese lack a self, and must therefore hurry to learn from the West” was a powerful engine of self-mobilization for a Meiji state racing toward wealth and military strength. During the postwar high-growth era, the same narrative flipped into a celebration of “Japanese-style management” as a virtue. After the bubble collapsed, it was called back once again as the explanatory principle for stagnation. As a highly manipulable narrative — switchable between self-flagellation and self-congratulation depending on convenience — this country has been reusing the same tool for a century and a half.
Within academia, research dismantling nihonjinron itself as an under-evidenced ideology has been accumulating since the 1980s. But when scholarship corrects an error, and that correction is inconvenient for those in power, it simply gets ignored. Knowledge selectively forgotten by power structures — this, too, is a structure this society exhibits with striking consistency.
Why Reclaiming Kata Is a Threat
Here lies the real reason this narrative refuses to die.
If the diagnosis were to spread that “it is not that there is no self, but that kata was extracted, and the self can be recovered through discipline,” it would mean that individuals could reclaim the right to challenge structures of control on their own judgment.
Conversely, sustaining the narrative that “the Japanese never had a self to begin with” quietly legitimizes a doctrine of self-responsibility: “so it’s pointless to expect anyone to object in the first place.” The Dentsu recruit who cannot refuse to strip, the bureaucrat who cannot break from precedent — once absorbed into the story of “that’s just how it is,” no one need shoulder individual judgment, responsibility, or dissent.
The true danger of this narrative lies in making people give up on responsive judgment before they even try — preemptively severing the entire circuit of dissent against structures of control, for the whole of society.
The Reiwa Paradox: Idealizing “Meiji”
And now, an intriguing — or rather, alarming — repetition is underway. Certain conservative discourses are not idealizing the plural kata of the pre-Meiji era, but are explicitly naming and idealizing Meiji itself — the very moment when the state seized that kata and distributed it from above as a single, unified story.
This is a decisive inversion.
“Reclaiming the kata that forges the individual” and “reclaiming the regime under which the state monopolized kata” point in exactly opposite directions. The former is a return to responsive thought; the latter is nothing but the purification and reinforcement of controlling thought. Nostalgia for the Imperial Rescript on Education, and arguments about imperial succession that treat the Meiji-era Imperial House Law as unchanging tradition — these are, in truth, simply celebrating, once again, the very operation by which the Meiji state extracted the substance from existing kata.
Offering the pathogen itself as the cure — is there a repetition more ironic than this?
Who Fills the Void?
When two people who possess a self face one another, the “ma” — the space between them — holds a taut, living relationship of dialogue and response. But when two people who have lost the technique for forging a self face one another, that space becomes mere void. And a void is always filled by something. By hierarchy. By precedent. By the unspoken air of the room. And now, in some quarters, by a narrative called “Meiji.”
The corporate creed of “never let go, even if it kills you,” the precedent-worship of politics, the demerit-avoidance of bureaucracy, the ranking rituals of male-centered culture — all of these are peripheral symptoms. At their root lies the repressed memory of a primary loss: the forcible stripping of kata. Unless we excavate that memory, we will go on filling the same void, one substitute narrative after another.
What is needed is not, at long last, to properly acquire the Western self. Still less to return to the Meiji mode of governance that once monopolized kata.
What is needed is to excavate, as memory, the supple and disciplined lineage of selfhood that genuinely existed on this archipelago before it was extracted in the Meiji era — and to reconstruct it for the present.
That, I believe, is the only realistic point of departure for quietly stepping off the 150-year pendulum swing between self-flagellation and self-congratulation.
This piece began as a social commentary on a magazine article and developed through dialogue into the reflection reconstructed here for note.