Japanese Culture Report

Student name
Student number
Tutor`s name
Subject number
A REPORT ON THE JAPANESE CULTURE
Contents TOC \o "1-3" \h \z \u AN IN-DEPTH LOOK AT THE JAPANESE CULTURE PAGEREF _Toc314340612 \h 3INTRODUCTION PAGEREF _Toc314340613 \h 3JAPANESE LANGUAGE PAGEREF _Toc314340614 \h 4JAPANESE SOCIAL STRUCTURE PAGEREF _Toc314340615 \h 4THE TYPICAL JAPANESE FAMILY PAGEREF _Toc314340616 \h 4FEUDAL SYSTEM PAGEREF _Toc314340617 \h 5MODERN JAPANESE SOCIETY PAGEREF _Toc314340618 \h 5RELIGEOUS PRACTICES OF THE JAPANESE PAGEREF _Toc314340619 \h 6MATERIAL ELEMENTS OF JAPANESE CULTURE PAGEREF _Toc314340620 \h 6JAPANESE CLOTHING PAGEREF _Toc314340621 \h 7JAPANESE ARCHITECHTURE PAGEREF _Toc314340622 \h 7SCULPTURE PAGEREF _Toc314340623 \h 8PAINTINGS PAGEREF _Toc314340624 \h 8JAPANESE CUISINE PAGEREF _Toc314340625 \h 8JAPANESE MARTIAL ARTS PAGEREF _Toc314340626 \h 8SPORTING ACTIVITIES PAGEREF _Toc314340627 \h 9CONCLUSION PAGEREF _Toc314340628 \h 9REFERENCES PAGEREF _Toc314340629 \h 10
AN IN-DEPTH LOOK AT THE JAPANESE CULTURE
INTRODUCTION
The Japanese culture is the way of life which is followed by the inhabitants of Japan which is a series of over 7000 islands located between the Sea of Japan and the North Pacific. Their way of life is heavily influenced by their physical environment which is greatly varied from the sea to mountains to forested landscapes .Group dynamics and social arrangement also plays a major role in the culture of Japanese people. The combination of the above mentioned contributors have given us one of the world`s most colorful cultures. Their culture has evolved over millennia always adapting to suit the times. However, there is an ironical fact to the Japanese people. Despite having very ancient traditions being practiced in their society, they still manage to keep the world abreast with state of the art technology. This is especially witnessed in the area of animation (anime) which still features strong elements of Japanese culture. This has led some to term Japan as an "entertainment superpower" (Aikido Health n.d.)
Internationally, people get to interact and experience this culture in several ways, either in special events or embracing it as part of their day to day life. Take their gastronomy for instance; it`s not uncommon for people to order traditional Japanese delicacies in their home countries. The most famous of these is sushi .other traditional Japanese foods are continuously being embraced worldwide because of their positive influence on heath of individuals (Bloomberg business week 2004). Their rich martial arts heritage is another cultural export that has made its way to the rest of the world, being practiced as a Sport, Self-Defense and also by security forces in as a component of their deadly arsenal. These include karate, jujutsu, and judo among others.
JAPANESE LANGUAGE
The people of Japan all speak Japanese. This language is characterized by a unique form of writing known as ideographs, usually very complicated for foreigners. The significance of language to this culture is that in social interactions, it can be used to show respect or to indicate an individual`s status in society (Mongabay n.d.) .
JAPANESE SOCIAL STRUCTURE
THE TYPICAL JAPANESE FAMILY
The family is the basic social unit of the Japanese society. The traditional Japanese family is a complicated multigenerational arrangement in which members of the extended family live together. It was a patrilineal system where all the matters pertaining to the family were controlled by a man who then passed it on to his son as an inheritance. Only one son could inherit while the rest, if present were expected to eventually leave the family so as to go and establish themselves elsewhere. This practice is known as primogeniture (Bestor & Hardacre , 2004 )
Roles within the family were also clearly defined. The father was the breadwinner and often spent much of his time at the place of work. The mother`s responsibility was to raise the children, often single-handedly by taking charge of their education and moral upbringing.
After 1945, the family unit underwent transformations because the Japanese women also began seeking paid employment. This trend continued over the years and the direct consequence was the reduced size of the cotemporary Japanese family which is a smaller nuclear setup usually with an average of two children (Mongabay n.d.)
The social structure of the Japanese can be looked at in two distinct ways separated by time. This is one aspect of the Japanese culture that has experienced a paradigm shift thus the need for two perspectives to properly understand it. The first perspective is the older form of social Stratification which can be termed as the Japanese feudal system.
FEUDAL SYSTEM
In this system, the society was divided into a four-tier system. At the top of this social stratification were the Samurai. Below the samurai were the farmers and peasants. Third in importance were the artisans and at the bottom were the merchants. This system did not include everyone in society. Some people lived outside the system on both extremes. Those above the Samurai were the Shogun who represented the very summit of society. On the other extreme existed the extremely underprivileged and at times undesirables (Szczepanski, n.d.) .
This system began to diminish during peace time when the relevance of the samurai declined. This led to the unprecedented demise of the four-tier system by creating a suitable environment for the social classes to intermingle and thus giving way to a modern system.
MODERN JAPANESE SOCIETY
This was brought about by the action of emperor to dissolve the samurai class in the 1850s. This was the beginning of a shift from feudalism to an industrial society. This shift did not completely eliminate the social divide but rather rearranged the power balance (Levi, 1941). The Japanese are fond of describing their society as a homogenous one. The reason for this is that there are no significant linguistic differences among them, the absence of major foreign populations among them as well as the relatively small gap between the rich and the poor. The factual basis of this homogeneity is devoid of the fact that this very same society has minority groups which experi...