"Swedishness versus Japneseness"
In the above presentation, I have outlined some featureswhich are seen to be characteristic of the Swedish mentality and which are comparable to certain characteristics of the Jpanese. Any presentation of features of a national cultureis, out of necessity, simplified and should, in contrast to what has been done here, include specific details of how this culture expresses itself within various subcategories such as class, age, sex and geographic area. The empirical documentation should be rich and preferably include quantified data. Some important features described in literature about Japan have not been mentioned at all, even if such matter would diversify the comparsion between Sweden and Japan. These are, for example, the paradoxes in the Japanese personality (see Singer 1973), the relationship with nature, which shows a great similarity to the Swedes’ feelings about nature, authoritarianism, where there are also similarities worth commentingon, etc.
The aim here has been to show that the Japanese mentality shows great similarities to the Swedish mentality, just in those respects which usually surprise foreignersin Sweden. If Japanese culture is unique, which the Japanese in general imagine, and to the extent that a similar self-image exists in Sweden, then this paper shows, at least, that this isn’t the case to the extent that we believed on our opposite side of the planet.
What this comparsion could further have taken up, but which space has not allowed, would have been that despite some striking similarities between the Swedish and Japanese mentalities, the two countries have very dissimilar historical backgrounds, for example, with reference to religion. There are, however, certain parallells: the relatively isolated geographical location, the unbroken political autonomy, the homogeneity of culture (Hasagawa 1938), the great receptivity to foreign trends, not to mention that Japan, over a long period of time and up until 1868, tried to prevent such contacts. It is as important as it is difficult a task to historically reconstruct the processeswhich generated the Swedish chracteristics, "Swedishness", the social character - or whatever one chooses to call the object of study - as well as making systematic comparsions with similar analyses of other cultures.
One further way to comparing the Swedes and the Japanese is by trying to see to what extent the analysis of mental characteristics in both countries support a given hypothesis, where the mental characteristics are seen as being connected to a structure. It would mean that the characteristics described above form a configuration and to some extent depend on one another: social reserve, conflict avoidance, practical-mindedness, shyness.
Åke Daun
Professor, fil. dr.
The Institute of Ethnology,
University of Stockholm,
Luthusporten 10,
S-115 21 Stockholm
