| INTRODUCTION"Harmony and strength" (wa to chikara) is the official mottogin, a Japanese bank I studied for eleven months in 1968-the participant-observer approach.1 A study of a large, modern bank is not the kind of research normallyundertaken by cultural anthropologists, yet our discipline's centralconcern with culture and cultural variation must be extended to thestudy of modern organizations particularly as they assume more sig-nificance in the non-Western world. Japan is one obvious place forthis kind of study, since it is the non-Western nation most character-ized by industrial development, urban concentration, and modern or-ganization. It is safe to estimate, for example, that more than half ofthe working population of the country is employed in a company ofone kind or another. Uedagin is one such company. It is considerablylarger than average, employing three thousand people, and its com-mercial rather than industrial nature places it in the category of awhite-collar organization having more in common with governmentbureaus than with factory situations. There are many reasons why one would decide to study such a com-pany. The extraordinary vigor of Japan's economic growth has gen-erated a good deal of general interest in Japanese companies, andscholars from a variety of disciplines (primarily business management,sociology, and industrial relations) have in the last decade been study-ing the subject with growing intensity.2 The major social science fo-cus, however, has been blue-collar workers in industrial firms, andthere is an obvious need for more information on the kind of com-pany Uedagin represents. White-collar workers, white-collar work, andcompanies in which these predominate deserve greater attention, andthis case study of a bank will hopefully reveal many new avenues ofinquiry and comparison. My intention here is primarily to demonstrate the general applica- bility of the anthropological perspective to the study of modern or- 1 An account of my fieldwork methods appears in the last chapter of 2 The list of significant studies is too long to include here, but in thethis book most will be mentioned in footnotes at the relevant juncture.this book. |
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