Wa: The Harmony That Holds Japan Together (and Sometimes Holds It Back)

The character is everywhere once you know to look for it. It is in washoku, Japanese food, and wafuku, Japanese clothing, and washitsu, a Japanese-style room, and wagyū, Japanese beef. It is in the old name for the country. It is on the first line of the oldest legal document in Japanese history. It is a personal name, a company name, the name of a thousand restaurants. It is wa (和), and it means harmony — and also, simply, Japan.

That double meaning is not a coincidence. For most of its history the country has understood itself, at the deepest level, as the place where things are in accord. Everything that visitors find smooth about Japan follows from that. So does everything they find frustrating.

Article one

In 604, according to the chronicles, Prince Shōtoku — regent, Buddhist, and the closest thing early Japan has to a founding father — issued a document known as the Seventeen-Article Constitution. It is less a constitution than a set of moral instructions to officials. The first article begins: wa wo motte tōtoshi to nasu. Harmony is to be valued.

The article goes on to say that people are given to factions, that few are truly wise, and that when superiors and inferiors are in accord, discussion proceeds and things get done. It is a remarkably practical opening for a founding text. It does not invoke God or rights or the nature of the state. It says: get along, and the rest will follow.

Fourteen centuries later, wa is still the first article. It is the value that Japanese institutions — the school, the company, the neighbourhood association, the family — most consistently put ahead of every other, including efficiency, including honesty, including the individual.

What harmony means here

The Western word "harmony" suggests something musical: different notes sounding together, each distinct, the beauty in their combination. Japanese wa is closer to smoothness. It is the absence of friction. A group has wa when it functions without visible conflict, when decisions emerge rather than being fought over, when nobody has been made to lose.

This is not the same as agreement. People inside a group with strong wa may disagree profoundly. What wa requires is that the disagreement not surface in a way that damages the group's ability to act together. The Japanese distinction between honne, true feeling, and tatemae, the public face, exists to make this possible: you keep your honne, and you present the tatemae that preserves the wa.

Outsiders often read this as hypocrisy. It is better read as a division of labour. The tatemae handles the group. The honne is kept for the people you trust, late, over drinks. Both are real.

Where it comes from

The usual explanation is rice.

Wet-rice agriculture, which fed Japan for two thousand years, cannot be done alone. The paddies need irrigation; the irrigation needs coordination; the planting and harvest need every hand in the village at once. A farmer who fell out with his neighbours could not farm. So the village developed, over centuries, an intense pressure toward cooperation and an intense sanction — murahachibu, ostracism, the withdrawal of all cooperation — for anyone who broke it. Being cut off from the group was, quite literally, starvation.

The rice explanation is probably too neat, but it captures something. Japan is a crowded, mountainous, disaster-prone archipelago that has, for most of its history, had no room for people who could not work together. Wa is the survival strategy of a place with no spare space.

What it produces

The list of things wa makes possible is long, and a visitor sees most of it in the first hour.

The train that arrives on time because a thousand people are cooperating to make it so. The clean street that nobody is paid to clean. The queue that forms without being told to. The restaurant kitchen where five cooks move around each other without speaking. The company that survives a bad decade because nobody defects. The disaster response in which people share water instead of fighting for it.

And, less visibly, the decision-making process called nemawashi — "going around the roots," from the gardener's practice of preparing a tree's roots before transplanting it — in which a proposal is quietly discussed with every stakeholder one by one, objections absorbed, adjustments made, so that by the time the formal meeting happens the decision is already unanimous. Foreign managers find nemawashi maddeningly slow. Japanese managers find the alternative — a vote, with losers — unthinkable, because losers damage the wa.

What it costs

And then there is the other list, which Japanese critics have been writing since at least the 1960s.

Wa discourages dissent. The person who says the plan is wrong has broken the harmony, and the sanction for that is real: not ostracism now, but the slow cooling that anyone who has worked in a Japanese organisation will recognise. The proverb — deru kui wa utareru, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down — is not a joke.

Wa protects the incompetent and the abusive, because removing them would be disharmonious. It slows innovation, because the new idea disturbs the accord. It exhausts the people who maintain it, because the labour of not-saying is real labour, and it falls hardest on whoever has the least power to break the silence — the junior, the woman, the outsider.

And wa can be used. The word has been invoked by every institution in Japan that wanted its members to accept something they should have refused — by the wartime state most notoriously, and by employers and schools and families since. Harmony demanded from above is not harmony. It is obedience with a nicer name.

The balance

None of this is a case against wa. It is a case for seeing it whole.

The Japanese are not naïve about their own central value. Every generation has had its writers and its reformers arguing about where the line falls between the cooperation that makes life livable and the conformity that makes it small. The argument is itself, in a way, a form of wa — the group examining the group, carefully, so that the accord can continue.

For a visitor, the useful thing is to see the wa you are being given. The smoothness of Japan is not automatic. It is made, every day, by millions of people choosing the group over the self in a thousand small ways, and most of them would tell you, if you asked over drinks, that the choice has a price and that they pay it. The gratitude that is owed is not for the harmony. It is for the labour.

The character

Look at it once more: 和. The left half is 禾, a rice plant, bending under the weight of its grain. The right half is 口, a mouth. Rice, and mouths. The character for harmony is, at its root, a picture of people being fed together.

That is the whole idea, and it is not a small one. It is what a country decided, fourteen hundred years ago, to put first — and what it is still, with all the cost, trying to keep.