Word: tend
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Foreigners contemplating the Japanese tend to fall into two schools of perception: there are the elaborationists and the simplists. The elaborationists see an infinitely subtle and refined and complex people whose minds and customs are deeply rooted, reaching back centuries through a thousand lamina tions in time. Most Japanese are elaborationists about Japan. It is part of their cultural self-defense...
...Japanese stress personal relations because they are interested in the long-term implementation of an agreement. Western businessmen, on the other hand, may tend to look more at the shorter term. "The American feeling is that it's the horse buyer's fault if he fails to ask whether a horse is blind," says George White of the Harvard Business School. "For the Japanese, however, a deal is more of a discussion of where mutual interests...
...criminal cases, Japan's courts tend to be staunchly severe on rape, gun control and narcotics violations. But the nation's 99% conviction rate in cases brought to trial is not solely due to tough application of the codes. Prosecutors rarely go before the bench unless their case is a strong one. Moreover, the confession rate is very high. Japan's 2,774 judges are often moved to impose lighter sentences by pleas of remorse. Writer Frank Gibney, an expert on Japan, observes, "Be it only a traffic accident, if a person has caused injury to another...
That pragmatic attitude is echoed in the quality of many Japanese performances, which tend to stress technique over insight. This is largely due to the extraordinary respect, bordering on veneration, that the Japanese have for teachers, or sensei; too often students seek to imitate a teacher's style in preference to developing an individual interpretation. The innate Japanese reluctance to assert oneself in public is partly to blame, as is the strong desire to honor the sensei by reproducing their imparted wisdom. But in Western music, which prizes individuality, such cultural conditioning is a hindrance. Notes Kimura: "The principal...
Westerners tend to locate the origin of the modern novel in the pages of Don Quixote. In fact, the first instance of fully developed narrative occurred 600 years before Cervantes in The Tale of Genji, a 1,135-page work by Lady Murasaki, a member of the court of the Empress Akiko. The 11th century work offers a panoply of "modern" elements; analyses of character, elisions of time and place, divisions into chapters...