D==
I agree to your opinion, “And let’s not wander too far down the road of “Japanese exceptionalism”. There are plenty of cultures around the world that place a high value on face/pride and politeness.”
H== mentioned about the saving-face attitudes of the Japanese. It is seen in the overall east Asian countries. Japanese business persons doing their business with those people are often surprised to see that those people stick to save faces far much more than the Japanese people.
In the World Value Survey by Ronald Inglehart, the cultural map shows that Japan is indeed in the same domain named Confucian as other east Asian countries like China, Hong Kong, Taiwan etc. But it is on the opposite edge far from the other domain members.
And when taking a look at the position of Japan in the whole map, it is solely located at the very above end of the axis of “Traditional vs. Secular-rational values” among all of the countries researched. So there must be some kind of uniqueness of Japan for sure. But that is not something called like “value of honorable society from the feudal ages,” as it does not value traditional viewpoints at all compared to all of the other nations researched in the world.
To be precise, according to the web page,
“Societies near the traditional pole emphasize the importance of parent-child ties and deference to authority, along with absolute standards and traditional family values, and reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia, and suicide. These societies have high levels of national pride, and a nationalistic outlook. Societies with secular-rational values have the opposite preferences on all of these topics.”
And Japan is at the most extreme of the latter. The map is shown at the following URL.
http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs/articles/folder_published/article_base_54
The result of the survey was broadly introduced to the Japanese by the famous economic writer, Akira Tachibana’s latest book. I read the book and learned how biased the commonly perceived “Japanese unique culture” has been.