CULTURE, SOCIETY, AND THE INDIVIDUAL - CROSS-CULTURAL POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY IN JAPAN

Studies of political behavior and attitudes in Japan have often looked to similarities and differences between the West, most notably the U. S., and Japan. This paper details two approaches concerned with examin ing Japanese social and political behavior within a cross-cultural con text. The first-nihonjinron-works; with cultural nationalism which arg ues that Japanese values are unique and thus no social theory develope d in the West can be applied to Japanese society. The second approach is characterized by field studies and tries to assess Japanese social behavior by comparing it to that of Americans and Europeans. There is a great deal of knowledge on political behavior in Western countries w hich scholars in Japan often refer to in order to evaluate the signifi cance of their survey results. But there is still limited information on the Japanese situation, and any attempt to construct a general theo ry in either cultural or cross-cultural political psychology will have to refer also to human attitudes in this non-Western industrial socie ty.