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On weekend duty at a private mental hospital in the Midwest, I received a long distance call from New York. The man on the phone inquired about the possibility of getting admitted to the hospital. Initially sounding quite depressed, he made a sudden shift when something apparently dawned on him. He asked, “Are you Japanese?” and became rather excited when I said, “Yes.” He went on: “I heard that Japanese are ‘groupie.’ Are you ‘groupie’?” He continued talking about his interest in the Japanese mentality. The tone of his voice was, if anything, a little hypomanic.
In addition to recognizing, in what the man said, the popular notion that Japanese feel, think, and act more as a group than as individuals, I could perceive in this apparently lonely man a wish to belong to such a group, and a hope to fulfill his wish by absorbing something from my Japanese mentality.
It is not only in the areas of psychology and sociology, but also in the areas of religion, business, and industry that Americans have become increasingly interested in knowing and learning about how Japanese groups work. Some business and industrial companies, as may be seen on TV, have quickly taken on Japanese management styles with a slogan-like dedication to participation and consensus. Very little has been written about the Japanese group from a psycho-dynamic point of view, however; hence, the general understanding of the differences between American and Japanese groups remains