Yoshitoshi Are you wondering what Japanese personality traits are?

I can answer the question.

I am Japanese and live in the US. When I am in the US, I sometimes realize that I am Japanese, not American. I think that my Japanese national characters are unique in American society because I grew up in Japan.

When I list some of Japanese national traits, they would be, for example, “Patient”, “Groupism”, “Do same as others” and so on. However, that’s just my opinion and I am not sure if those characters are truly considered as Japanese national characters.

In this blog article, I looked up statistics online about Japanese national characters. Data are from website of Research Organization of Information and Systems, The Institute of Statistical Mathematics.

Japanese personality traits

The Institute of Statistical Mathematics has been conducting surveys on the Japanese National Character continuously every five years since 1953. Every survey took at least more than 1,000 samples from nationwide in Japan. If you would like to know more details about the study, please see this link, A Study of the Japanese National Character: The Thirteenth Nationwide Survey (2013).









The figure above shows the survey result of Japanese characters (strong points).

There are 4 words that stand out as Japanese national characters in particular from the figure. They are:

・Diligent

・Persistent

・Kind

・Polite

It’s a little bit surprising that “Original” does not earn high votes from Japanese people compared with other traits. There are many great inventions that Japanese people made such as Nintendo, Manga, the concept of wabi-sabi, etc. Japanese people may still be thinking they are lack of originality, being good at imitating something rather than creating something new.

As a Japanese person, I feel the survey results are certainly correct. It can be seen in the figure that those 4 words have high points in any year of survey. When you explain about what type of people Japanese people are in general, those 4 words would be good choices to describe Japanese character.

Are Japanese people selfish or unselfish ?

Also, when I’m talking with my wife, my wife sometimes says that Japanese people care about other people’s feelings more and American people are more self-serving. I think it’s maybe true in general. However, it does not mean that Japanese people are unselfish. I have seen Japanese people who seem to think about themselves only in Japan. I wondered how Japanese people see themselves regarding selfishness.









The figure above shows the survey result for the question of “Would you say that most of the time, people try to be helpful, or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves ? “ in Japan. The purpose of the question is to see whether people are helpful to others or not generally in Japan. If there were many selfish Japanese people, people would choose the answer of “look out for themselves”.

The percentage of “try to be helpful” has been increasing since 1978 and it has overcome the percentage of “look out for themselves” at 45% for the first time in 2013. The percentage of “look out for themselves” was 43% in the same year. That indicates that there may be a little more unselfish people than selfish people nowadays in Japan or the ratio of number of unselfish people to selfish people may be about the same.

The survey results reflect the historical background and should have been affected by the social conditions such as economic condition. Japan was still experiencing a high economic growth in the 1970’s after recovering from World War II. For example, Japanese people wanted to earn so called “3C” products which mean Car, Color TV, and Cooler (Air conditioner) in the 1970’s. Those 3C products were representative products that many Japanese people wanted to possess back then. On the other hands, nowadays the young generation in Japan does not want things such as cars. It’s due to the several reasons such as decreased disposable income, changing lifestyle, and so on. Such less desire for things would be one of the reasons for the lower percentage of “Look out for themselves” in 2013. In the US, it’s been reported that the younger generation prefers experiences over material objects. Perhaps the younger Japanese generation is also interested in experiences too.

It would be interesting to see if there are similar surveys in the US. The survey may show that the percentage of selfish people is higher than the percentage of unselfish people in the US. I would like to look at the studies about American national character in the future.





