Japanese Sense Of Shame
Ever since Ruth Benedict first distinguished two principal cultural patterns based respectively on the sense of guilt and the sense of shame and cited Japanese culture as the typical example of the latter, most foreign students of Japan seem, despite a certain amount of criticism from Japanese scholars, to have accepted her theory. I myself am on the whole disposed to side with her, but more for what we have learned through the sensitivity of her feeling for the Japanese psychology than from any desire to swallow her theories whole. They raise, in fact, a considerable number of questions, not the least of which is the fact that she allows value judgments to creep into her ideas. Specifically, it is evident that when she states that the culture of guilt places emphasis on inner standards of conduct whereas the culture of shame places emphasis on outward standards of conduct she has the feeling that the former is superior to the latter.
A second difficulty is that she seems to postulate guilt and shame as entirely unrelated to each other, which is obviously contrary to the facts. One and the same person very often experiences these two emotions at the same time, and they would seem to have a very close relationship; the person who has committed a sin is very frequently ashamed of what he has done. Nevertheless, the impression still remains that in characterizing Japans culture as a culture of shame she has pointed out something extremely important, and in what follows I shall examining this point in greater detail.
Let us first examine the fact that in Western eyes the Japanese sense of guilt appears to be rather sluggish. The reason is probably that where the Westerner tends to think of the sense of guilt as an inner problem for the individual, the Japanese has no such idea. It would be foolish, of course, to assume that the Japanese have no sense of guilt. What is characteristic about the Japanese sense of guilt, though, is that it shows itself most sharply when the individual suspects that his action will result in betraying the group to which he belongs.
Even with the Western sense of guilt on might, in fact postulate a deep-lying psychology of betrayal, but the Westerner is not normally conscious of it. What probably happened is that...