A while back, I claimed to possess “a profound understanding of human nature.” Two weeks in Japan made me second-guess the scope of my understanding. During Covid, for example, I had no doubt that humans’ Covid fanaticism was just a phase. No matter how strictly they hewed to the rules at first, they would gradually slide back into normalcy. Unless, of course, the government used draconian punishments. In hindsight, I was completely correct about Americans, Europeans, and Latin Americans - but far less so for the Japanese. If you had explicitly asked me, “Will the Japanese voluntarily stay stricter for longer?,” I would have said “yes.” But I would have been way off on the magnitude of the difference. 90-95% of Japanese still mask outdoors, at least five times higher than even the wokest areas of America.
Why do the Japanese stay so strict? Most observers will cite the immense social pressure. The problem with this story is that Japan is almost totally urbanized - and therefore highly anonymous. In public spaces, a lone Japanese has almost nothing to fear from social pressure, because no one around you knows who you are. Yet I saw little sign that the Japanese tried to take advantage of this anonymity. Which strongly suggests that compliance is largely internally motivated. They don’t wear masks because they must, but because they don’t want to be “different.”
Related issue: When I talked to ACX Tokyo, several of the attendees argued that I overrate the power of choice, especially in Japan. My reply: Even if society strictly constrains your upward options, it almost never constrains your downward options. A 7-11 worker who wants to be a salaryman may be out of luck. But a salaryman who’d rather be a 7-11 worker can almost surely make it happen.
So what? Well, many of the people I talked to emphasized that Japan’s 7-11 workers have pretty good work-life balance, while the salarymen sell their souls. Then why do we so rarely see salarymen quitting to work at 7-11? Not because society denies them the option, but because they refuse to exercise it. Which, on reflection, is true outside of Japan as well. “Society is crushing me!” is usually a thinly-disguised case of “I want to be normal!” or “I want to be successful!”
Noah Smith has repeatedly claimed that Japan isn’t especially conformist. In fact:
Another pitfall is the tendency to see other cultures through the lens of your own preconceived stereotypes. I’ve seen a few Westerners interpret the boundless creativity and self-expression of the Japanese street fashion scene as some kind of expression of conformity, simply because they had always been told that Japan was a “conformist” country (even though surveys have found Japan to be slightly more individualistic than the U.S. since around the mid-1980s).
Noah has spent a lot more time in Japan than I have, but what I saw confirmed the stereotype of Japanese conformity. All of the expats I talked to also accepted the stereotype. Yes, measured conformity depends on your metric. But commitment to outdoor masking seems like a much better measure of conformity than street fashion.
I don't have a deep understanding of the culture, but I trained in a dojo run by a Japanese sensei here for many years, as well as having traveled there maybe a dozen times. I think a better framing than conformity is harmony - the culture places a high value on not inconveniencing others, as just a pure social value. This (as explained to me by a Japanese citizen) is why eating on the street and other public places is taboo - you might make a mess, make someone uncomfortable from the smell, etc.
I think conformity is a very western framing of this - "there has to be a stick to think about other people". But if you stipulate that the Japanese culture values something like harmony/politeness as a first-order value, then the idea of "I will wear a mask so I don't inconvenience others" makes more sense. I also remember people there telling me pre-pandemic that sometimes you'd wear a mask if you felt like you might be getting a cold, so as to not give it to other people. That's not social pressure, it's social values.
This post seems extremely confused about what social pressure is.
Social pressure is not "you will literally, physically, be forced to do something you do not want to do."
Social pressure is: "you were taught, by society, that certain things are good and approved of, and other things are bad and disapproved of; you partially internalized these messages; you expect the people you know to have these expectations of you and to think less of you if you don't comply; you experience this as a feeling of unwelcome obligation to conform to society's standards."
In a sense, I suppose, it is a "choice", but it doesn't feel like "one's own" choice, it feels like a duty or burden.
If you try to put down that duty or burden, you don't literally die, but you experience social disapproval, which hurts in itself, and which indirectly can cause material harms sometimes.
The severity of the material harms from social disapproval are hard to measure and may vary a lot based on individual situation; that's an essential component of how social pressure *works*, that nobody is quite sure how bad it will be if they defy it.
This is basically the same complaint I have with your Szaszianism.
"I feel compelled to do this" and "I want to do this" are the same to you, but they feel entirely different on the inside. One hurts, one doesn't.
I don't see why you are so unwilling to accept the existence of subjectively different experiences of agency.
Or do you admit that they feel different, but...not care about that difference? For what purpose? What exactly is the claim being made here?