Relationships in Japanese Society

This Chapter presents the characteristics of human relationships in Japanese society, based on the key phrase You-You relationship mentioned in Part I. Notably, Japan is a high-context society that requires us to rely on context and make inferences. It is a society wherein using your imagination to guess is better than expressing yourself clearly in words. This is not a bad thing in itself; as such, not everything can be verbalized. The fact that we can understand each other through what is called A-Un no kokyū in Japanese without using words is a kind of physical knowledge, and it is also a function of human intelligence. However, there are times when we are overly concerned with what the other person is saying, when we suppress our words and actions to fulfill the other person’s expectations, and when we suppress our own true feelings. This reflects a negative aspect of relationships in Japanese society. Bullying and harassment in the workplace can be understood in terms of such characteristics of relationships in Japanese society. This chapter elucidates phenomena occurring in the workplace within a high-context society from the perspective of phenomenology.