Are some Japanese insecure about self-esteem?
Posted by Matt Dioguardi on June 17th, 2007
There was a totally weird article about self-esteem that got published in the Yomiuri recently. It was titled, New test shows Japanese don’t lack self-esteem.
The article really bugged me, so I want to look at three quotes here and explain why the article bothered me.
First quote:
Psychological tests of American, Chinese and Japanese university students have shown for the first time that Japanese have as much self-esteem as students from the other nations, it has been learned.
My first reaction is who cares? Self-esteem is such a vague and ambiguous concept to begin with that there simply can’t be any tests that would be sufficient to measure it.
However, there is a hidden irony here. Clearly there are some people who are very insecure about Japan’s place in the self-esteem world rating. So insecure, in fact, that they need some kind of study to validate their psychological well-being as Japanese.
How’s that for some low self-esteem?
Second quote:
Research teams from Tokyo University, Harvard University and East China Normal University conducted the new test on 505 students from the three countries to try to gauge their subconscious view of themselves.
A completely meaningless sample size and sample group.
Third quote:
Under the old method, self-esteem was tied to self-assertiveness, and Americans came out with the highest scores, followed by Chinese and Japanese students. However, with the new method there was no difference between students from the three countries.
The above might be hard for some people to parse, so let me rephrase it:
Using a previous definition of self-esteem Japanese were shown lacking, so we re-defined the term at our convenience and then found that Japanese were equal.
This reminds me of the Kurt Vonnegut story where where everyone is finally made equal:
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. …
Click here if you want to read the rest of the Vonnegut story.