Cultural Attitudes

Responsibility and Collectivism

Japan has a culture of responsibility. Children are taught as young as two or three how to go on errands for their parents and how to appropriately find help if they need it. Because of this responsibility culture, many children in Japan are fully latchkey kids, expected to follow the rules set down, and take care of themselves while their parents work until they can get home.

However, that has its dark side. Japan is a collectivist culture, and with that, someone taking responsibility for failure is paramount. Institutional failures are often placed on one person's head, whether they truly are to blame or not. People being scapegoated, or made to take the fall for a larger institution, is extremely common within society.

Seniority and Status

Status is determined in nearly all organizations, including the family, in a very strict hierarchy. A sibling that's a year older, a classmate that's a grade higher, and a coworker that has a year more seniority all have higher status than someone younger, a grade lower, or with less experience.

These social rules can be comfortable to some, since the ideal is that the older will take care of and guide the less experienced, but they become extremely stifling in the context of someone suffering injustice due to the actions of someone else simply due to the latter being seen as higher rank. Persona 5's 'shitty rotten adults' often stem from adults who abuse the mere fact that they're older than someone else. Tohru Adachi is Ryotaro Dojima's partner in Persona 4, but he's also younger, and as such Ryotaro Dojima has higher power. Smacking him around may seem extreme, but it's widely accepted that the boss keeps their subordinate in line. This extends to many power abuse issues in the workplace.

So too do these 'power' issues extend into various restaurants and retail shops. In Japan, the expectation of service is extraordinarily high, with certain expressions exalting the customer as god being baked into these cultural attitudes. This can lead to many incidents of 'kasuhara' or customer harassment which the customer's expectation leads to abuse of younger employees, even managers or owners are expected to cater to the customers whims, no matter how unreasonable or against the rules they might be.

Filial Piety

Another important cultural notion to consider is that of filial piety. Originally rooted in Confucianism, respect and obedience to one's parents is deeply ingrained in Japanese culture. Japan is quite conservative in this way, and individuals that do not 'take up the family business' or 'move away against the wishes of their parents' might be viewed in a negative light by the people around them. We see this often in Persona 4, whatever one might think of his characterization in the West, Yosuke Hanamura is an exceptionally popular character in Japan, because he works diligently at Junes for his father's business whereas Saki Konishi is viewed as a pariah in her home town for betraying her own family business and working at Junes.

Mannerisms In Speech

Japan is fully a politeness-focused culture with indirect speech as the norm. Two crucial social concepts are 'honne,' or one's true feelings, vs. 'tatemae,' or one's public facade. Rarely does one ever directly say what one means to someone else, and instead vague answers are often given within the workplace and elsewhere, often with a far more direct meaning. The result is often that one must learn to 'read between the lines' and rarely ever will anyone in Japan give someone an answer as concrete as 'yes' or even worse, a 'no'.

This can be easily taken advantage of. Barkers and touts in Red Light Districts fully utilize people's reluctance to say no in order to lure people in predatory ways, something one sees in Persona 5 with Makoto Niijima, despite having fully prepared herself for this kind of behavior.

The ideal of Honne and Tatamae is to be conscientious of others' feelings and avoid saying hurtful things; still, keeping this in mind, it's easy to see how Persona's themes of 'being your true mind' came to be.