Ikegami Eiko’s honorific individualism thesis – critique and development

Abstract

The aim of this qualitative study is to test Ikegami Eiko’s “honorific individualism” thesis, which claims that the modernization of Japan was the result of a tension between honorific individualistic and collectivistic impulses in the dominant samurai culture, against our counter-hypothesis that the development of conscientious collectivism was the cause of modernization in Japan. We propose a multi-dimensional theoretical framework for the individualism-collectivism divide, and by applying this framework to the interpretation of the ethical discourse of the samurai it is possible to show that our counter-hypothesis is more successful in interpreting the historical data than Ikegami’s thesis. We furthermore test both theories against recent empirical data from the GLOBE study, and also this result supports our hypothesis that modern Japan is best characterized as a conscientious collective society. The driving force towards the modernization of Japan was therefore not honorific individualism (a combination of shame and egoism) but much more likely conscientious collectivism (a combination of guilt and altruism)