They are very different countries. China has a lot more similarity with say Japan then it does with India.
So I thought id make a comparison of the two cultures. It is very interesting and cool to note similarities, some direct, and some coincidence.
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Warrior Class:
Japan - Samurai
India - Kshatriya
God of Death:
Japan - Enma
(direct translation)
India - Yama
(direct translation)
Personification of Death:
Japan - Shinigami
India - Yamaduta
Forms of Respect to Elders:
Japan - bowing before elders
India - touching feet of elders
Classical Swords:
Japan - Katana
India - Khanda
Name of Temple Gateway:
Japan - Torii
(these two seem too similar to be coincidence, could anyone confirm?)
India - Torana
(these two seem too similar to be coincidence, could anyone confirm?)
Native Beliefs:
Japan - Shinto/Buddhist philosophy
India - Vedic/Buddhist philosophy
Similar Philosophy:
Japan - Bushido
India - Dharma
They are very different countries. China has a lot more similarity with say Japan then it does with India.
The major key to Japan's economic miracle, beginning in the 1950's can be found in the same basic organizational structure which was seen among economically successful tribes in the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and is characterized by a formal delegation of regulatory power from the ruling political body to an administrative, politically impartial bureaucracy.
Japanese Government/Ministry of International Trade and Industry
Similarities between the Japanese Experience and Indian Country Today
With respect to sovereignty issues and the independent capacity to generate tribal or "national" wealth, many Indian nations face the same kinds of obstacles, which Japan faced after World War II. In both cases, military defeat preceded the bureaucratic reorganization of institutions. However, in the Japanese case, bureaucrats were left almost entirely unfettered and attempts to impose a non-Japanese developmental framework proved both fragile and temporary. When the old triangular structure of the Emperor, the military and the great family owned corporations, or "Zaibatsu" were broken up, Japan's bureaucrats were freed to operate literally without restraint. Because they could act on a basis consistent with their own culture and national goals, they were able to achieve a tremendously leveraged power of industrial production.
On Indian reservations, the historical situation, which characterizes the rules and range of behaviors and strategies for building and keeping wealth, are almost the opposite of what we have seen in the case of Japan. This is not because the two cultures are radically different. In fact, the Harvard Project on Indian Economic Development commented explicitly on Native American communitarian values. The cultural and emotional similarity between community values in Japan and in Indian Country is often remarkable. The absolutely stultifying difference for Native Americans has been that not only has policy come from outside the reservation, and outside native culture, but that institutions, which are so central to the creation of wealth have been imposed by a Federal bureaucracy which essentially holds deep rooted values and run entirely contrary to the values of Native American communities.
A critical component of the entire range of programs and projects offered by Rose Community Development is to get institutional structure (and following Harvard, this means accountable institutions) back into conformity with Native American values.
The Developmental State: State guidance, private ownership/control
There are a number of interesting references in the literature, which highlight the similarities between today's Indian Nations and Japan of the late 1940's. Chalmers Johnson notes a number of these similarities in his landmark work, "MITI and the Japanese Economic Miracle" among the many important points which he makes are the following:
(a)For one thing, it was the history of poverty and war in Japan that established and legitimized Japan's priorities among the people in the first place.
(b)The priorities of the Japanese state derive first and foremost from an assessment of Japan's situational imperatives, and are in this sense a product not of culture or social organization or insularity but of rationality. These situational imperatives include late development, a lack of natural resources, a large population, the need to trade, and the constraints of the international balance of payments, but the situation nationalism of its people during the 1950's and 1960's is something another people would have to develop, not borrow.
(c)Nurturing the economy has been a major priority of the Japanese state because any other course of action implied dependency, poverty and the possible breakdown of the social system.
(d)The effectiveness of the Japanese state in the economic realm is to be explained in the first instance by its priorities. For more than fifty years the Japanese state has given its first priority to economic development "The third form of the government-business relationship, that of public-private cooperation, is by far the most important."…. The chief advantage of this form is that it leaves ownership and management in private hands, thereby achieving higher levels of competition than under state control, which affords the state much greater degrees of social goal- setting and influence over private decisions than under self-control…. it is hard to achieve." …This form…is not peculiarly or uniquely Japanese; the Japanese have merely worked harder at perfecting it and have employed it in more sectors than other capitalist nations.
(e)The economists are unable to analyze the Japan problem because at root it is actually not an economic problem, but a matter of differing political systems. The key variable and the great asymmetry between Japan and the United States is the state. Japan has a strong state and a long history of its society passively accepting leadership from the state. In this respect Japan is much closer to the history of modern Germany. By contrast, the United States has a relatively weak state, except for its military-industrial complex "
(f)The next stage of history…. it will be shaped in major ways by states practicing the social market and organized capitalism…. Thus, Asian capitalism, understood as a version of Japan's combination of a strong state, industrial policy, producer economics, and managerial autonomy, seems destined to lie at the center rather than the periphery of what economists will teach their students in the nest century
(g)Industrial policy means the government's "development, guidance, and supervision of industry. It explicitly does not mean the tired old cliché about the state's picking winners, nor does it mean the state's displacement of the market. Economic competitiveness does not result from picking winners but from a long-term strategy aimed at learning to win. The logic of industrial policy springs from the realization that what is problematic in economic activity is the organization of productions, not consumption by households and individuals. As Thomas McCraw explains, "Investment by the producers, because it s so far removed in time from ultimate consumption, just be attended to in careful, deliberate fashion. It cannot be left to the whims of individual, who will usual act in their own short-term self-interest…
(h) "Serious industrial policy means modifying the old-fashioned concept of comparative advantage to concentrate on industries with a high human-capital content such as steel, machine tools…The basic measure of performance in producer economics is savings and investment; the goals of such an economy are market share and ever-higher value added products, not short-term profitability.
Rose: Bridging the Gap Between The Japanese Experience and Indian Country Today
The Rose Community Development Corporation sees its corporate mission in acting as a bridge between the experience of Japanese Industrial Policy and Native American Economic Development. The Corporation has designed a unique hybrid economic development model, adapted from the Japanese experience, and adjusted for Japan's learning curve, that fits the situation, culture and governance of Indian Nations, today. The hybrid model and related hybrid technologies, will be bridged into Indian Country, through the Corporation's comprehensive programs and its planned support of Native American institutions through its the five program areas, Rose Solutions, Rose Capital, Rose Communications, Rose Education and Rose Cultural Presentation. Rose Community Development Corporation will exercise a centralized administrative function over these programs in order to maximize efficiency. To the extent, which it is practicable, Rose Community Development Corporation intends to model its functions and services after those employed by MITI in creating the Japanese Economic Miracle. Some of the basic features, which this model embodies, are illustrated on this page.
Rose: Core Structure
Rose: Program Organization Chart
Under the overall supervision of Rose Community Development Corporation, and with the guidance of Rose Solutions, the three subsidiaries of Capital, Communications and Education, will offer a comprehensive set of services to both Indian Country, related state and local governments, and the investment sector and private industry. The industries, selected through the Rose Proprietary Screening Model and funded by the patient capital, investment sector will have the full support of the bundled services of Rose Capital, Communications and Education. Rose Community Development's hybrid blended model, with its' comprehensive set of services, provides coherence, consistency and consonance to the stakeholders insuring long-term, mutually beneficial cooperation.
