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That’s fascinating! Does the book have any insight into how Japan made the complete 180° in I guess a few decades? The Meiji Restoration was already incredible
by aikinai 8y ago
That’s fascinating! Does the book have any insight into how Japan made the complete 180° in I guess a few decades?
The Meiji Restoration was already incredible but I thought the work ethic was there throughout and helped make it possible. I had no idea there was also a revolution of work ethic.
- johnchristopher 8y agoWait, what ? What makes you think (and other commentators) that it's the Japaneses who changed and not the view held by post-colonialists ? (Managers complaining about their workers ? How weird)
- jacobwilliamroy 8y agoIt wasn't just the Japanese. "Korean time" was a thing back when Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world. Germans also used to be stereotyped as dishonest, thieving, dull and overly emotional before their country industrialized. There is correlation between stereotypes and GDP.
- baud147258 8y agoLike the sterotypes common in (Western) Europe regarding Eastern Europe, like for the Polish people?
- kingofhdds 8y ago>Germans also used to be stereotyped as dishonest, thieving, dull and overly emotional before their country industrialized. Any links on this?
- j9461701 8y ago>Any links on this? https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=3739&context=gradschool_theses https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=h... TL;DR (it's a 213 page grad thesis) Old Germany used to be basically Hufflepuff, a simple-minded, loyal, obedient rustic bumbler who's too stupid to really be a threat or even much of a partner. New Germany arose post-German unification and especially post WW1, where the stereotypes shifted to the modern more sinister concept of a nation of amoral mad scientists and clockwork soldiers - largely as an attempt to justify Germany being the great rival of England.
- barry-cotter 8y agoThat’s just extending the already existing stereotype of Prussians to all of Germany.
- psergeant 8y agoThe Brits used to be > passionate, melancholy, romantic, and tearful https://m.huffingtonpost.co.uk/thomas-dixon/british-stiff-upper-lip-our-emotional-past_b_1929511.html https://m.huffingtonpost.co.uk/thomas-dixon/british-stiff-up...
- paganel 8y ago> overly emotional before their country industrialized. After all some of the most famous Romantic artists came from Germany: Heine, Beethoven, Hölderlin and Goethe himself. The latter's Werther was the most emotional novel until at least Madam de Bovary, which was written about 80 years later.
- jacobwilliamroy 8y agoIt doesn't go into specifics on what Japan did right, but it does make a very good point that there are elements of every culture which can either help or hinder economic growth and that the economy has a much bigger influence on culture than culture has on the economy. People are lazy because they are poor. Not the other way around.
- jakidud 8y agoThere is a podcast episode by Dan Carlin which I'm listening to which goes into this issue in depth. Basically according to him the Japanese basically "imported" values of warfare from the Samurai class into the general population and created an expectation of going 'above and beyond' for even ordinary citizens.
- zhdc1 8y agoEducation. The Japanese Empire was one of the first, if not first, nation in the world to have mandatory schooling that was accessible by a large majority of it's population. They beat the Brits by about a decade.
- coldtea 8y agoYep. Mass education (as opposed to high end elite education) can turn a nation of free people into slaves (or, as Japanese call it, 社畜: corporate livestock). After a century of that, they're losing their collective will to live, too [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan
- ginko 8y ago>The Japanese Empire was one of the first, if not first, nation in the world to have mandatory schooling Are you sure about that? Compulsory education was introduced in Austria in 1774. Apparently Japan introduced it shortly after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. If anything the UK was particularly late to the game.
- zhdc1 8y ago> that was accessible by a large majority of its population Austria had major attendance and implementation issues (e.g., only a 50-60% attendance rate) which apparently weren't fixed until the Reich Public School Law of 1869. That said, I remember that there was a lot of discussion at one point about how individual behavior in countries that overlapped ex-Austrian/Habsburg territory could be mapped against historical (19th century) boundaries. Getting back to the original point, Japan was successful because it had high levels of urbanization, which made state directed education more accessible and easier to attain. Other countries/territories implemented compulsory education well before Japan (e.g., Massachusetts first required compulsory education in the 1640s), but efforts either had comparatively lower penetration or relied on non-state institutions (e.g., the church or private institutions) to enforce.
- baxtr 8y agoI think the larger question, which has haunted me for a long time, is: how do you change culture on mass scale? Singapore is an example where brute force top-down was used. Maybe that’s the only way?
- windows_tips 8y agoTotal war, ending with a couple nukes?
- OldSchoolJohnny 8y agoAsk the Russians, they've been illustrating it's pretty easy in the US for years now.
- windows_tips 8y agoIn what way? Organizing protests?
- OldSchoolJohnny 8y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/5paqh5/putins_throwback_propaganda_playbook_behind/ https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/5paqh5/putins_...
- windows_tips 8y agoSupposed Russian "bots" were tweeting at Merkel parody accounts?