Implicit in this statement are two characteristic ways of looking at the world: cultural
reductionism and cultural relativism. By cultural reductionism I mean explanations of
social, political and economic phenomena in terms of culture perceived to be
characteristic of a nation. Here, conflicts resulting from trade imbalances between Japan
and other countries are reduced to a cultural problem, that is, the failure of Westerners to
understand, and the failure of Japanese to explain, the peculiarities of the Japanese
patterns of behaviour. Furthermore, cross-cultural understanding is proclaimed through
an extreme form of cultural relativism.6
In the following discussion I will show the curious parallels between anthropologists’
views of world cultures several decades ago and the Japanese business elites’ cultural
views of today