Standard business cards are all the range in Japan. Did you know that? It’s been long observed, since The Eighties if not The Seventies or even before that, how the typical Japanese, and not only the average salaryman, carries around business cards to exchange with people by way of an introduction. In fact, the practice is so commonplace that it’s become quite the stereotype for Japanese people the world over!
The movie “Good Morning” parodies this cultural tendency to substitute meaningless signs and symbols for real conversation and real connections. While set in postwar Japan, the society shown onscreen is a fairly comfortable one and would not seem too much out of place in our own times for the most part. This was a long time before handing out business cards became a customary greeting on par with the handshake, but the psychological motivations remain the same – as so ably and mostly humorously pointed out by the movie.
Of course, all human societies revolve around signs and symbols; we are creatures whose first impulse seems to be to indulge in abstract thinking. But the Japanese are justly noted for having taken such instincts to a higher level of development, of formalizing them so much more elaborately than many, to the point that their very language reflects social status by offering alternating forms of address depending on the listener’s place in the greater hierarchy: words will take on different suffixes simply to recognize such social distinctions!
And so we come to the exchange of business cards. This way, one knows immediately one’s place, which is to say, how to relate to one another. This is Japan, after all, a country with a cultural heritage that doesn’t pretend to be egalitarian and so has no qualms about formally identifying people’s social standings.
A militaristic mindset, potentially. Not one unique in kind to Japan, it must be noted again, but certainly one with few peers elsewhere insofar as degree, intensity, is concerned.
One most conducive to modern business.
Business cards. Yes, too much can be made out of such simple things. But so can too little be; so is it possible that important cultural currents are ignored.
Indeed, non-Japanese businessmen and women trade cards all the time as well. Indeed, the practice originated in the West, with Europe and America. But there isn’t the same “moral authority,” for lack of a better phrase – there isn’t the same “cultural force” (for continuing want of a good way of putting things) – attached to the business card in the West as there is in Japan.
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