Why Are Japanese People So Deeply Bound by Seken?

Thinking about Japanese History and Applied Psychology: The Nature of Invisible Evaluation

■It is not illegal. Yet it feels difficult to do.

There are many situations in Japanese society that take this form. In schools, workplaces, and local communities, people are often strongly constrained by something that has never been formally written down as a rule. Most people call this force the atmosphere. In older language, it may be called seken, or the social world.
Seken has no statutory code like the state. It is not distributed like company regulations. Yet at times, it moves people more powerfully than laws or institutions. For that reason, this issue cannot be dismissed as a matter of national temperament. Japanese people are not inherently weak in the face of seken. It is more accurate to say that, over a long historical period, Japanese society developed in ways that made it easier to live by remaining highly attentive to seken.
This is also why history education places such importance on the ability to examine materials from multiple perspectives and to make fair judgments. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology clearly states that social studies, geography, and history education should cultivate the capacity to use a range of sources, examine historical phenomena from multiple and layered perspectives, and make balanced judgments. In other words, the purpose of studying history is not merely to learn about past events. It is also to understand the origins of the invisible norms that continue to constrain us today.

■Seken is not law. It is a network of evaluation.

The difficulty of seken lies in the fact that it does not appear in the form of prohibition or permission. Rather than clearly telling people what is right, it makes them anticipate how their actions will be perceived. In this sense, seken is less a mechanism for judging actions themselves than a mechanism for regulating people through evaluation.
From the perspective of applied psychology, what operates here is not only the question of whether something is right, but whether it will be accepted. Human beings are deeply sensitive to social rejection. Rejection is known to be associated with anger, anxiety, depressive feelings, and reduced cognitive functioning. People therefore conform not only in order to obey rules, but also in order to avoid exclusion.
Seen in this way, conformity to seken is not simply weakness. For human beings, belonging has an importance close to survival. That is why the question of how one is seen by seken can move people more powerfully than abstract reasoning.
Moreover, seken does not appear directly like the state or the legal system. It is dispersed across intimate relationships, such as family, neighbors, colleagues, classmates, relatives, and local communities. It is invisible, yet powerful. As a result, people may often feel that they have chosen freely, while in reality they are acting in accordance with the expectations of seken.

■In village communities, not deviating from seken had practical rationality.

If we trace Japanese history, one foundation of this sensibility can be found in early modern village communities. Villages under the Tokugawa order were not merely places of residence. They were also administrative units that supported tax obligations and local governance. The village was a space where everyday life and rule overlapped, and serious deviation from collective labor or internal coordination could easily lead to concrete disadvantages in daily life.
The Tokugawa period is widely understood as an era characterized by political stability and the maintenance of order. Yet that order rested upon the accumulation of countless small communities of this kind.
In such an environment, the question of whether one violated the law was often less pressing than the question of whether one became isolated within the village. What operated here was not simply morality, but the rationality of daily survival. Avoiding friction with others and not departing too far from communal expectations were reasonable strategies for sustaining one’s life.
From the perspective of applied psychology, this can be understood as learning through the avoidance of punishment and the maintenance of relationships. Even if we do not apply the term seken directly to the early modern period, we can still say that the structure in which people could not easily escape evaluation by those close to them long formed part of the foundation of Japanese society.

■The modern state did not eliminate seken. It expanded it in another form.

With modernization, it may appear that the constraints of local communities weakened. In reality, however, the power of seken did not disappear. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan was reorganized as a centralized modern state. Through the school system, conscription, bureaucracy, and other institutions, people were incorporated into shared systems and disciplines.
The state developed laws and institutions while also spreading the expectation that people should face the same direction. The experience of following the same school timetable, learning the same norms, and being evaluated within the same framework was not only an internalization of legal and institutional order. It also intensified the sense of concern over how one was seen.
What matters here is that the modern state did not completely dismantle communal pressure. Rather, it reorganized that pressure in another form. The gaze of the village was replaced by the gaze of the school, the workplace, and the administration. The network of evaluation became broader.
The existence of law does not automatically produce freedom. If invisible norms such as “that is what people normally do” or “one should not do such a thing” continue to operate outside the law, people still live within seken. Seken is not merely a remnant of the premodern past. It persisted through modernization by changing its form.

■In postwar society, seken moved into companies, schools, and local communities.

After Japan’s defeat in World War II, the country underwent democratization, and the wartime forms of state led control could not continue unchanged. Yet the invisible network of evaluation that constrained people did not vanish. Instead, it became embedded in companies, schools, and local society as everyday norms such as not disturbing harmony, not creating unnecessary friction, and sensing what others expect without being told.
Even when the direct command of the state weakened, the structure in which people cared deeply about how they were seen within intimate human relationships remained.
This does not mean that prewar and postwar society were the same. Rather, it means that in a society that has experienced strong forms of integration, patterns of behavior that avoid open conflict and prioritize adjustment are likely to be reproduced within everyday life.
Cultural psychology has also discussed the tendency to understand the self not as an isolated individual, but as a being embedded in relationships with others. The work of Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama is a representative example. What is important, however, is not to treat this as a fixed ethnic trait. It should instead be understood as a form of self understanding shaped by cultural institutions, customs, and systems of evaluation.In an environment such as Japan, where adjustment, coexistence, and adaptation to others are repeatedly required in daily life, the understanding that the self exists within relationships is likely to become stronger. Seken constrains people not only because it gives commands from the outside. It also enters into the very way people understand themselves.

■Why does seken feel so exhausting?

The pressure of seken is exhausting because it is not formally stated, yet its punishments are real. Even without explicit sanctions, one may be kept at a distance, spoken about behind one’s back, regarded as troublesome, or lose trust. These small disadvantages accumulate. Moreover, many of them remain invisible at the institutional level.
As a result, people are adjusted by seken without being able to clearly say what they are obeying. From the viewpoint of applied psychology, this is a condition in which behavior is regulated in advance by the anticipation of social exclusion. The possibility of social rejection affects not only emotions, but also judgment and action.
At the same time, it is important not to overlook the functional side of seken. Seken is not only suffocating. It can also help maintain local order, facilitate collective life, and reduce unnecessary conflict. Precisely because it has practical value, it does not easily weaken. It remains because it is useful.
Yet there is a cost. Dissent becomes harder to express. Individual choices are more easily judged as abnormal. Safety and acceptability may be prioritized over correctness. Seken produces order, but it also reduces freedom. If we overlook this ambivalence, our understanding of the issue becomes shallow.

■The meaning of studying history lies in understanding the genealogy of seken.

From this perspective, the meaning of studying Japanese history becomes clear once again. History is not only a matter of memorizing old institutions and events. It is also a way of understanding where the invisible forces that constrain us today have come from.
Why does the question of how one is seen so often become more powerful than law in Japanese society? Why do people care not only about what they themselves think, but also about whether their view will be accepted by seken? Behind this tendency lie not only the general human need for belonging, but also the layered historical formation of communal logic, modern state standardization, and postwar cultures of adjustment.
To know history does not mean becoming completely free from seken. Human beings are social beings, and no one can live without caring at all about the evaluations of others. Yet it is possible to ask why one cares so much, and why in certain situations seken feels stronger than law.
Once that question arises, seken is no longer fate. The meaning of studying Japanese history does not lie only in nostalgia for the past, nor in judging earlier times from the present. History is necessary because it allows us to understand the genealogy of the evaluative network that quietly moves us today, and to gain some distance from its power.

■Conclusion

Japanese people are not born weak in the face of seken. Rather, over a long historical process, they have learned to live in a society where attentiveness to seken often made life easier. This issue should therefore be understood not as a matter of personality, but as a historically formed pattern of behavior.
To study history is not merely to know the past. It is also to understand why the present self can be so strongly bound by the question of how one is seen. In that sense, history has a deeply practical significance.