NEW YORK — Japan is a fascinating and beautiful country, but its culture can be baffling to Westerners. This seems especially true for Americans, with our long history of geographic and cultural isolation from Europe and Asia.
In their quick visits to Kyoto's majestic Buddhist temples and Tokyo's ultramodern glitz, our tourists catch a glimpse of the old versus the new. But they get almost no real contact with Japanese people. As for those motivated by commerce, most Americans realize soon enough that guidebooks on "how to do business with the Japanese" are cliched, oversimplified and even misleading.
As a New York-based psychologist specializing in personality study, I've been lecturing frequently and collaborating in Japan for the past decade. As a result, seven of my books have now been translated into Japanese. Last fall I served as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, where my wife (a third-generation Brazilian Japanese) and our two tots were comfortably housed on campus, a brisk walk from historic Ueno Park.