The popularity of Self Help in Japan after the Meiji Restoration and opening of Japan to the West is pretty fascinating. The book is fundamentally about “rugged individualism”, which of course doesn’t at all go with the popular conception of the Japanese as being group-orientated and consensus-driven. You’d have expected the book to have gone down like a lead balloon in Japan, but it didn’t.
Having spent several years in Japan myself (and having written my degree dissertation on the subject of this conundrum), I think there always has been a type of individualism there (particularly outside of the cities) that isn’t recognised in the West. You’ll not be surprised to learn that the origin of the Japanese hive-mind, “non-individualist” has some of its roots in allied propaganda and psyops leading up to and during WWII, but also as a political mechanism of social control at various times from the Meiji period (and the lead up to pre-war fascism at that time) and beyond. There is even a pretty ideological branch of cod sociology for it called “ninhonjinron”.
I suspect the reality is that Japanese society is, under the hood as it were, much more similar to the West than many would like to admit.
