The Grand Narrative

Back in my previous post on this subject (again, apologies for the length of that), I argued that the phenomenon of most Koreans living with their parents until marriage is less a timeless, unchanging part of Korean culture that most Koreans will claim, and more a simple reflection of the financial difficulties of living away from home without parental support, most notably the low wages in the service industry and astronomical costs of “key money” required for renting. Of course, legions of homebound but financially-independent Koreans in their mid to late-twenties would beg to differ, but then if financial circumstances had forced me to spend my early-twenties living with my parents then viewing it as “normal” and part of my national “culture” would have allowed me to cope with it too.

I’m sure I’m doing a grave injustice to it, but by arguing that this supposed element of Korean culture is in fact economically determined, in this respect at least I’m subscribing to the Marxist “base and superstructure” view of social order. I’m not quite as determinist as Marx was of course, but I do certainly think that if the economic “base” of conditions in the service industries and real-estate system change here, then the “superstructure” of Korean living arrangements and habits will surely follow. Or in other words, despite sentiments today I expect that when young Koreans can afford to live away from home then they will, and ultimately rates of premarital sex and cohabitation will reach those of Western countries today. By the time my now 18-month old daughter will be at university, I fully expect that like my readers, Koreans too will regard not having sex and/or living together before marriage as simply crazy…hmmm, only 18 years…okay, maybe not when she enters, more like when she finishes her PhD. But it will happen.

Thinking this means I take sides in a much bigger and well-known sociological argument I’ll discuss below, but don’t worry, you don’t need to even have ever opened a book on sociology to understand it (although I don’t know how you found the blog though!).

Convergence vs Divergence

Very basically, I believe that the dictates of capitalism mean that as a country develops, its society and culture “converge” towards those of the most advanced capitalist countries of North America, Europe and Australasia. Now, let me hand you over to Yoshio Sugimoto, pp. 18-19, who points out that:

Japan provides a logical testing ground for this debate since it is the only nation outside the Western cultural tradition that has achieved a high level of industrialization. On balance, a majority of Japan specialists, be they culturologists or institutionalists, have tended to underscore the unique features of Japanese society, thereby siding either explicitly or implicitly with the [divergence] stance.

I’d suggest that most Japan specialists do so because of the special Orientalist role that Japan has in the Western and particularly American imagination, and regardless, very few Western social scientists originally became interested in Japan because of its similarities with back home. By 2007, of course Korea is too a prime candidate for study, but in the English-speaking world it tends to get overshadowed by the deluge of material on its neighbor. When my Korean is good enough, I plan to see what work has been done on this debate by Korean sociologists, but in the meantime, what Sugimoto says about Japan is still very applicable to Korea. To continue then:

Many convergence theorists see the so-called unique features of Japanese society mostly as the expression of the nation’s late development, lagging behind the early-developer countries. Ken’ichi Tominaga, for example, regards four patterns of transformation presently in progress in Japan as pointers that suggest that it is becoming increasingly like advanced Western societies.

I can’t get into it here, and this Wikipedia link doesn’t do it justice, but that first line is a core component of the ”developmental state” view of East Asian political-economy that I’m a big proponent of. I’ll blog more about that next month.

First, Japan’s demographic composition is changing from one in which a young labor force compromises an overwhelming majority of the population to one in which the aged compromise the larger portion. The proportion of those who are sixty-five years of age and older exceeded the 10 percent mark in France in the 1930s, in Sweden and Britain in the 1940s [and so on] while Japan reached this stage in the middle of the 1980s. This means that the comparative demographic advantage that Japan enjoyed in the past has begun to disappear.

Second, Japan’s family and kinship groups have dwindled and even disintegrated in a way similar to that in Europe and the US. Nuclear families are now the norm, and the percentage of singles has increased. While the anti-convergence theorists use the Japanese family system and kinship networks as a cornerstone of their argument for the distinctive character of Japanese society, Tominaga underscores their decline and suggests that the Japanese are undergoing a Western-type experience somewhat belatedly (italics added)

I’m sure you can see why I added the italics. Like I alluded to in my last post, its not just Western social scientists that emphasize differences, as naturally defensive Koreans would too like to exaggerate their uniqueness against domineering Japanese and now Western culture.

Third, so-called Japanese management is changing. There are many signs that the twin institutions of permanent employment and seniority-based wage structure cannot sustain themselves. Company loyalty is weakening among young employees. The aging profile of the corporate demographic structure makes it difficult for starting workers to expect smooth and automatic promotions at the later stages of their career….

I’ve always loved the above picture: the young woman is quite relaxed, while the salaryman is rushing to catch a bus, probably trying to make a meeting or something. To me, its signifies how her generation are not going to put up with the crap work-ethic that their parent’s generation subscribes to, and indeed I’ve already taked a great deal about changing workplace culture and management styles in Korea here. By coincidence, this week there is a special report about this in Japan in the Economist, and I’ll write a post about that from Australia’s sunny beaches on my vacation next week. If you can’t wait, you can read the report for yourself here and here.

Fourth, the emphasis of the Japanese value system is gradually shifting from collectivism to individualism. The rising number of students enrolled in universities and other institutions of higher education leads to the mass production of citizens exposed and orientated to individualistic and rational thinking. The disintegration of the family and kinship systems, plus the gradual dissolution of the local community, tend to liberate individuals from intense social constraints imposed by these traditional structures. As Japanese workers become accustomed to material affluence, their legendary work ethic tends to dissipate and their lifestyles become more hedonistic. In this process, the Japanese are inclined to lose a sense of devotion to the groups and organizations to which they belong and to experience the state of anomie much as do citizens of advanced industrial societies in the West.

I’m not so sure that Japanese universities do this…Korean universities sure as hell don’t…but regardless of the reasons, young Koreans are certainly much more individualistic than those even five years older than themselves, let alone their parents.

Convergence theorists concede that these four transformations have not yet run their courses, but maintain that they head undeniably in the direction of convergence with advanced industrial societies, contrary to the view of unique-Japan theorists who frequently ignore the significance of different levels of development and make erroneous static comparisons between Japan and Western societies. It would be fair for social scientist to compare Japan’s present features with their counterparts in Western countries several decades ago. (italics added)

I said it in the last post, but it’s worth saying it again: you can’t compare the rates of premarital sex, flatting and cohabitation in, say, Korea and America, and make meaningful conclusions without also comparing things like wages, real-estate systems, accessibility of sex-education and contraception and so on…but then it’s human nature to do so. Despite my criticisms of Koreans for doing so in this case, we all do it.

On that note then, that basically is the convergence vs divergence debate that my own area of interest is a small part of. Of course, I’ve just scratched the surface, and you could fill a library with all the material on it. But very quickly, I should mention that there are two major alternate versions of it too:

The convergence debate gained another twist with R. P. Dore’s formulation of the reverse covergence hypothesis. According to his argument, industrialized societies are converging on a set of patterns observed not in Euro-American societies but in Japan. This proposition finds considerable support with the proliferation of the so-called Japanese-style management around the world: and increasing number of industrial and industrializing societies appear to have adopted the systems of multi-skilling, just-in-time, and enterprise-based labor negotiations….

The reverse convergence perspective signaled a new phase in the debate in which the West was no longer regarded as the trailblazer in industrial development. Advancing this line of thinking further, another position which one may label the multiple convergence thesis has gained ground in many years. It postulate that two or more types of convergence are observable, depending upon when industrialization began or the type of cultural background that predominated.

The multiple convergence perspective has many versions. One of them is the so-called late-developer hypothesis that Anglo-American capitalism was a unique type of development of early industrializers, while late-developer societies such as Japan had to evolve different social configurations to cope with different domestic and international constraints. Murakami, for example, contends that, unlike Anglo-American societies, Japan, Germany, Italy and other late-developing countries could not achieve political integration suitable to industrialization as its initial phase. To cope, these countries had to devise a strategy of catch-up industrialization by preserving some elements of traditional heritage while establishing a powerful bureaucracy which steered the process of development.

And he goes onto say that “Japan’s economic structure is regarded at the most refined and polished of this type,” and the last paragraph reminds me of developmental states again. I’m still a convergist, but I’d be much more sympathetic to multiple convergence than the reverse variety, as the Korean postwar economy, for example, is well known to have been a virtual carbon-copy of the Japanese one, and Japanese investment across East Asia since the Plaza Accord of 1985 has certainly spread Japanese workplace practices and the developmentalist state model across East Asia. And although the multiple convergence thesis led to things like notions like “Confucian Capitalism,” “The Pacific Century” and “Asian Values,” all (finally) shown to be somewhat bogus after the Asian Financial Crisis like I briefly explained, the links and similarities make East Asian development as a whole much more explicable.

A Hypothesis about the Western Experience

In my last post I said I would talk about how flatting, pre-marital sex and cohabitation became virtually universal in Western countries…but I’ve never actually studied that, I just have some ideas: although even I will not hit the libraries on my vacation, I will pick the brains of my parents whom I’m flying to see tomorrow. What I’m expecting to find is that higher living-standards, and the quirk of male university students being exempt from conscription for the Vietnam War, meant that it was first young Americans that left their parental nest in droves, and so surely I will find instances of French parents, for instance, saying something like this in response:

“Those crazy Americans….what complete sluts. Having children out of wedlock, never getting a job, always being high in dirty apartments…That will never happen in France…French children are better behaved and more respectful of their parents’ wishes…that’s part of our culture…”

But of course French children did too when they could afford it. Please don’t pick apart that example, which I’m sure you can, just get the gist. I may be completely wrong, but I’ll still be happy to find out. And I’m not for a moment arguing that Korean or Japanese families will ultimately become carbon copies of their Western counterparts, “weekend couples” in both being decidedly Northeast-Asian. But even that too is based on low married women’s work participation rates, and as I’ve shown, those too are unsustainable…the study possibilities are fascinating but endless, yes?

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