Ochazuke
A Responsibility Culture
By Gwen Muranaka
Saturday, Oct. 11, 2008

In Japan there is a ritual to business or political scan­dals that to an outsider can seem as ritualistic as any performance of Kabuki or Noh. The poli­tician, bureaucrat or company president will tearfully appear before the press, head down, bowing low and solemnly, repeatedly apologize. If there are criminal charges, the accused is taken by police car, and is shown briefly in the back seat heading to his fate amid the flash of media cameras.

When I lived in Japan, I viewed these maudlin scenes with a cynical eye. It seemed the officials responsible for the screw ups were often simply reshuffled to other positions, given a window office (a downgrade in Japanese culture); while those who suffered such as the victims of the mercury poisoning in Minamata by the Chisso Corporation or the patients who received HIV-tainted blood pro­vided by the Green Cross Corporation in the late ‘90s were left to suffer the consequences with little recompense. The Japanese apologies were mere theatrics, a way to show public accountability with­out having to bring about any meaningful change in policy or practices.

However a more positive interpreta­tion is that a public apology can serve a cathartic function of accepting respon­sibility and owning up to mistakes. An example of this is the redress apology. For Japanese Americans the continued success of our community goes back to the presidential apology of 1988 and how it let us move forward from the collective hurt of war and racism. The apology Japanese Americans received for the wartime incarceration was hard fought and backed up with real monetary compensation for the individuals still liv­ing who had suffered.

There are many painful steps towards righting America’s financial crisis, with the passage of the $700 billion bailout only the first. If ever we were deserving an apology from leaders in Washington and Wall Street it would be now: an apology for lax regulation and oversight of banks; an apology for creating this culture of easy credit and greed that has turned us into a debtor nation; an apology to the millions who are losing their homes to foreclosure.

But America doesn’t have the same apology culture that Japan has. Where Japan favors consensus and harmony, in America it’s all about winners and losers. Apologies in America are rare and never given easily or willingly, they are seen as a sign of weakness. Unfortunately, right now we are all losers. It’s a time to bring us together. The public’s failure to buy into the financial bailout is a disconnect caused by years of a lack of leadership from the president, Congress and Wall Street. It’s also a failure of all of us to recognize that responsibility starts at home, where too many of us were spend­ing too much for luxuries we simply couldn’t afford.

To get through this, we’ll all have to learn to forbear and sacrifice, to get past our differences and come together. Apol­ogizing may not be part of the American character, but accepting responsibility, collectively and individually, would be a good start out of this mess.
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Gwen Muranaka is Rafu English editor-in-chief and may be contacted at gwen@rafu.com. Ochazuke is a staff-writ­ten column. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of The Rafu Shimpo.