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Japanese Traditional Vocational Ethics: Relevance and Meaning for the ICT-dependent Society

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Tetsugaku Companion to Japanese Ethics and Technology

Part of the book series: Tetsugaku Companions to Japanese Philosophy ((TCJP,volume 1))

  • The original version of this chapter was revised: MS Mincho font was updated throughout the book for Japanese and Chinese characters. The correction to this book is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59027-1_13

Abstract

Although Japan is a global leader in the development and usage of information and communication technology (ICT) and ICT-based information systems, issues regarding information ethics have not been appropriately addressed. Traditional ethical thinking and discourse have declined because the Japanese have, in the process of developing a capitalist democracy, lost sight of their core vocational ethical values, which were developed during the Tokugawa Era. Restoration of these values as the basis of ethical thinking and discourse, as well as the recognition of their limitations, is necessary for the Japanese to appropriately address ethical issues concerning ICT, many of which have a multicultural aspect.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Original Buddhism probably first came to China (Han Dynasty) in the first century, and started to be syncretised with the indigenous religions including Confucianism and Daoism during the third century at the latest.

  2. 2.

    Differently from Christianity or Islam, Buddhism is not a revealed religion but a religion proposed by a person (Gautama Buddha).

  3. 3.

    Confucianism was also introduced from Baekje. In the early six-century, Five Classics scholars were sent to Japan from that country (Bito 2000).

  4. 4.

    Shintō 神道 is the Japanese traditional natural religion developed based on the ancient traditions of nature worship, animism and shamanism, which did not have any systematic doctrine or scripture at the time. The theologies and theoretical treatises of this religion were thereafter developed using concepts, ideas, terms and logical systems of Buddhism and Confucianism (Inoue 1998).

  5. 5.

    This typically shows the Japanese tendency to turn to religion for realising worldly benefits.

  6. 6.

    The Pure Land sects criticised zazen as mortification.

  7. 7.

    The tenets included the concepts of Hell and the decline of Buddhism (mappō shisō 末法思想).

  8. 8.

    The de-mortified Buddhism aimed to realise the spiritual salvation of everyone. In this doctrine, there were no competitors for anyone to defeat (Teranishi 2014).

  9. 9.

    This does not mean that others’ objectives or values are prioritised over a person’s personal ones. Rather, a person exploits others to attain his/her objective of self-actualisation (Teranishi 2014).

  10. 10.

    The idea of engi in Mahayana Buddhism means that all of the elements composing the world are insubstantial (emptiness or kū 空) while they arise mutually dependently (Bito 2000). In this respect, Buddhism is ontologically a system based in the category of relatio (Izutsu 2001: 23). A logical conclusion of this is that there is no need to discriminate something from something else.

  11. 11.

    In the world of engi, all living things do not live independently but are allowed to live, thanks to other life as well as inanimate beings. A normative implication of this idea of indebted life is that human beings have a duty to live their life in gratitude for, and repayment of, their indebtedness to all other beings (hō’on 報恩). Ooms (1985) explained that Shōsan developed a decentralised definition of personality based on the idea of on; one is constructed by several centres outside of oneself.

  12. 12.

    To demonstrate the legitimacy of the bakufu, Ieyasu was posthumously apotheosised and called Tōshō Daigongen 東照大権現 (Great Incarnation Shining over the East) and shinkun 神君 (divine ruler). As Ooms (1985) pointed out, the legitimatisation led to a social misrecognition of power and domination as virtue.

  13. 13.

    Alternatively, the Yoshida Shintō sect insists that Buddhas are manifestations of kami (Bito 2000).

  14. 14.

    By 1871, there were outcaste people called kawara no mono (riverside residents) or eta (much polluted people), hinin (non-human) and shōmoji, who engaged in specific occupations such as leather manufacturing and performing arts and formed their own guilds (Hattori 2012).

  15. 15.

    In the Tokugawa Era, the transformation of the samurai from a class of semiautonomous warriors into domesticated bureaucrats progressed while suppressing the samurai’s resistance based on their honorific individualism (Ikegami 1995).

  16. 16.

    Studies examining Shushigaku in the Tokuwaga Era criticised Zhu Xi’s ideas and thought, leading to a regard for the Lu-Wang school of Neo-Confucianism as well as for original Confucianism. This also involved the foundation of Kokugaku 国学, the study of Japan’s ancient culture, thought and spiritual world-view, before the arrival of Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism to Japan, by an investigation of the early Japanese classics and the ideas of Koshintō or original Shintō.

  17. 17.

    On the concepts of ōyake and watakushi, see Nakada and Tamura (2005), who explain the nuanced differences between these Japanese concepts and their English counterparts.

  18. 18.

    In the Tokugawa Era, the common law of kenka ryōseibai (all parties to a quarrel earn equally severe punishment) was observed (Ikegami 1995).

  19. 19.

    The Tokugawa samurai culture of valuing honour above all – even above their lives – functioned as an ideology of the master-follower relationship by supplying an internal principle of predictability for judging the follower’s and the master’s actions and intentions. This ideology often became a tool in the hands of masters to encourage their followers’ loyalty to them (Ikegami 1995).

  20. 20.

    Izutsu (2001) pointed out that mushin is not to be understood in a purely negative sense as the mind in the state of torpidity and inertness or sheer ecstasy; it is a psychological state in which the mind finds itself at the highest point of tension, a state in which the mind works with utmost intensity and lucidity to the contrary, despite its apparent inaction.

  21. 21.

    According to Izutsu (2001), the Oriental “Nothingness (mu 無)” is not a purely negative ontological state of there being nothing, but it is a plenitude of Being.

  22. 22.

    The general form of this logic is “A is not A, therefore it is A” or “A is A, because A is non-A.”

  23. 23.

    Bellah (1985) explained that hōtoku means essentially the same thing as hō’on.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan) Programme for Strategic Research Bases at Private Universities (2012–2016) project “Organisational Information Ethics” S1291006 and the JSPS Grant-in-Aids for Scientific Research (B) 25285124.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Commerce and Centre for Business Information Ethics, Meiji University, Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan

    Kiyoshi MURATA

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  1. Kiyoshi MURATA
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Correspondence to Kiyoshi MURATA .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Engineering Sciences, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Thomas Taro LENNERFORS

  2. School of Commerce and Centre for Business Information Ethics, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan

    Kiyoshi MURATA

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MURATA, K. (2019). Japanese Traditional Vocational Ethics: Relevance and Meaning for the ICT-dependent Society. In: LENNERFORS, T., MURATA, K. (eds) Tetsugaku Companion to Japanese Ethics and Technology. Tetsugaku Companions to Japanese Philosophy, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59027-1_7

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