Confucian Ideas in Confucius Lives Next Door - Book Report/Review Example

Confucius Lives Next Door T. R. Reid uses “Confucius Lives Next Door” to illustrate how the teachings of the ancient philosopher and political activist, known in the west as Confucius, have influenced East Asian cultures as they have risen in economic power. Confucius’s teachings revolve around loyalty between individuals and the groups they belong to. Those groups include one’s family, his neighbors, the company he works for or the school he attends, and any other group of people he associates with. Being a responsible member of a group is central to East Asian culture versus the Western, particularly American, focus on individuality. Reid’s book provides both anecdotal and empirical evidence on the cultural results of this group-focused philosophy on life. To provide a basis for his conclusions on the effects of Confucian ideals on East Asian cultures, Reid explains two important concepts that each member of any group has the responsibility to observe. First, each member of the group is responsible for avoiding meiwaku, or any action that is socially unacceptable and therefore brings shame upon not only the individual, but by extension, the group. Second, every member of the group has the responsibility of preserving the wa, or social harmony and peace within the group. Preserving the wa includes avoiding confrontation and achieving complete group consensus in decision making so that no one feels resentful. These two basic ideas provide the backdrop for why East Asians behave the way that they do. They are even evident in the language, which tends to include a lot of apologizing and self effacing. One Confucian ideal that the Japanese have taken very seriously is the importance of education. Confucius rejected the notion that rulers should be chosen based on the family they were born into, and that rather they should be chosen for their education and fitness to govern. Therefore, it was in the best interest of the entire nation to educate all children so that as many potential leaders could be identified as possible. This view is evident in the educational tracking system in Japan, where students take high school entrance exams to determine if their high school years will focus on challenging academic curricula or more vocational studies. The Japanese have also followed the Confucian idea that virtue and appropriate conduct were as important to be taught in schools as any academic subject. While in the U.S. such character education meets with harsh criticism and accusations of violating the separation of church and state, the Japanese consider moral education “too important to be left to parents, or churches, or Boy Scout Troops.” If fact, it is considered so important that moral education doesn’t stop when one is out of school. Reid devoted an entire chapter, Continuing Education, to the ceremonies young adults attend that lay out their expectations as members of new groups and the “Manner Posters” that line transit stations encouraging appropriate behavior. While their rigorous academic lessons combined with a longer school year can easily be pointed to as the reason for Japanese children outscoring many western countries on standardized tests in virtually every subject area, Japanese schools spend as much time teaching Confucian values as they do academic subjects. Responsibility to the “group,” whether that is one’s study group, one’s class, or one’s school, is emphasized through several practices that seem strange to foreign observers. Students are responsible for the behavior of those in their study groups, i.e. if one misbehaves, all are punished. Student leaders are in charge of keeping the class on task. And students, not adult staff, clean the school daily and serve lunch to their classmates. Individuality is discouraged, even on non-school days. Reid quotes several sayings he heard regarding what happens to a student who stands out in the crowd, “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down,” “You don’t want to be the one that everybody laughs at,” and, “if any branch was sticking out, they took their big, sharp clippers and cut it right off.” Such squelching if individualism would be shocking to progressive educational thinkers in the U.S. Another dark side to the Japanese focus on group membership in the school system is ijime, what we would call bullying. Ijime occurs to a student, like it often does in the U.S., when he is somehow different and doesn’t “fit in” to the group. The side effects are the same as they are here, including depression and even suicide. While Reid didn’t dwell on it, it seems to me that while conforming with the group may be an underlying purpose of ijime, its practice would hardly preserve the wa in the school. Moving on from school life to work life, I found the chapter The Secret Weapon especially interesting. I was unaware of the Japanese views on lifetime employment. While the promise of it “actually applies to fewer than one-third of Japanese men, and fewer than 10 percent of women,” the general expectation of loyalty between employer and employee is a major cultural difference between Japan and the U.S. The link between unemployment and the social problems of crime, poverty, etc. makes a lot of sense and I could find no argument with the logic. However, as I read, I kept wondering if these values had begun to waver in the decade since this book was published. I don’t pretend to understand economics very well, or at all for that matter, but in light of the global economic downturn of 2008/2009, were Japanese companies still sticking with this cultural value? I did some research and found some interesting information. One website I found listed companies that had reported laying off workers, where the companies were located, and how many people they had laid off. As Reid pointed out, Japanese companies are not required to report all the information that U.S. companies are, but even so, while nearly 2400 U.S. companies reported layoffs, only five Japanese companies had done so. The Japanese companies that did report layoffs were large companies that had total layoffs of about 25,000 people. I was surprised that Toyota was not on the list, but I found several articles that suggested one reason for Toyota’s absence is that “contract workers” have been the ones losing their jobs from Toyota. As they are not considered true employees, terminating their contracts doesn’t count as a layoff, but those contract workers were still housed in Toyota employee housing, so losing a job also meant losing a home. In addition, the unemployment rate in Japan hit a record high in July, 2009. Next, I was struck by Reid’s description of the general sense and reality of public safety in Japan, especially that the reason for such safety was cultural rather than as a result of a huge police force with a license to kill. Confucius taught that people were innately good, and that they would behave appropriately when they understood that doing so was best for society as a whole. Before being laid off from my marketing position last year, I had been planning my first overseas trip to Tokyo. The Vice President of International Sales had given me a couple of pointers about Japanese etiquette, and the language tapes I was using offered useful tidbits, but no one mentioned that I need not worry about getting mugged or raped if I wandered into the wrong neighborhood. Such a thought would have never occurred to me; extreme caution was simply part of traveling to a big city, like my regular trips to Chicago or New York. Officials that Reid interviewed or commentators he watched on television who believed that Americans have given up significant personal freedom in the name of living in a free country have a point. I try not to live in fear in my Johnson County town, but my attitude certainly changes when I find myself driving in Kansas City, especially at night. I’m jealous of a country of people who have no such fears in their daily lives. Japan’s low crime rates lead us to another interesting difference between East Asian and American culture: how criminals are dealt with. Reid mentioned the uproar raised by the sentencing of Michael Fay, a teenager from Dayton, Ohio, to six lashes from a cane for vandalizing cars in Singapore. I remember that incident well as I was an undergraduate at the University of Dayton at the time; it was the top news story for weeks. We all followed the story intensely, and I can confirm Reid’s statement that even people in Dayton supported the sentence. Yes, our constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, but what constitutes “cruel and unusual” has clearly always been a subject for debate. We may have abolished hanging, but we still have the death. Reference Reid, T. (2000). Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us About Living in the West [Paperback]. New York: Vintage. Read More