Japanese National Character Research Articles

A study of Japanese national character

The problem of nationality has been discussed for a long time and is still one of the current topics today. Social tension often occurs from the mutual misunderstanding which is often caused not only by the difference in logical thinking but by the difference in " the way of thinking" or "point of view" based on the feeling towards life or the social norm. Therefore, for international understanding, it is quite important to study the problem of nationality. There are various ways to investigate this problem. One may proceed by historical consideration or statistical survey or through insight into the problem. All of them will have their own merits. But one must avoid taking such an att i tude as to set up a dogmatic hypothesis and then gather only the data that support the hypothesis and t ry to get the conclusion. It is important to advance the study without any prejudice or preconceived judgements. We have so many studies on this problem before as well as af ter the scond war. However, almost all o f them do not seem to be based upon real data. Further, some of them only give predetermined conclusions through dogmatic deduction. We think that real data are the most necessary thing for the study of nationality and that only statistical methods can provide with such data. In fact, we took up this problem and carried out a survey all over Japan, the results of which will partly be presented in the following.