Edward Young, Creatvity and the Japanese

I’ve only known three Japanese really well in my life. All three were bright, well-educated people gifted with special talents that I could not help but envy. One was, far and away, the best math teacher I have encountered in several decades of being a student, a teacher and of studying really good teachers trying to learn something from them that I could, in turn, teach other people about how to teach well. All three of my Japanese friends were convinced that the Japanese, in relation to Caucasians such as myself, lacked creativity. This assumption was always stated with an air of apology, as if my Japanese friends were pointing out that they were doing the best that they could working with a very limited natural endowment and could not be expected to come up with new and original ideas with the ease and frequency that I, so lucky to be American, obviously could. Both the Japanese and we Americans have bought into the cultural stereotype that says that the Japanese are brilliant at refining and improving existing devices but have no gift at all for inventing anything new. The story of the VCR is told in both the USA and Japan as a paradigmatic example of how brilliantly Japanese engineers can work together to improve and refine a working prototype once they have a working prototype to work from. Everyone knows that the VCR was invented in America but that the Japanese came to dominate the market once the VCR become part of the “Standard Consumer Package” (Riesman, 1963).

The assumption is that if you show a group of Japanese engineers a working mouse-trap, they will quickly and efficiently back-engineer themselves into a better understanding of how exactly that device works than the person who built it ever had. They will then begin doing what the Japanese do best, working together as a team to tweak their prototype in a thousand ways, each tweak too tiny to be called a breakthrough innovation but each tweak one more tiny step in the direction of the best of all possible mouse-traps; the mouse-trap that will let the Japanese dominate the world-market in mouse-traps just as they dominate in VCRs. The thing that strikes me about this is the way the result being described, a culture that is very good at learning from other cultures, at assimilating ideas and practices from outside the culture and incorporating these ideas and practices into the culture, often after refinement and improvement, but a culture that, on the other hand,  strikingly lacks the kind of creativity that expresses as radical innovation, would result from the differences in communication style that solid research has established as the real normative difference between East-Asian and European cultures (Kim & Sherman, 2007).

Edward Young defined creativity as the ability to create something in the absence of a rule or example which would provide the rule or example to guide the creation of other things of the same type in the future (Young, 1918). A chair would be one example. Creativity is the capacity to create the first chair in the absence of a chair to copy or a rule based on earlier productions to follow. Once that first chair existed, it would become the example to copy and the record of its production would become the rule to follow. The Japanese accuse themselves of not being the kind of people who would create the first chair and we Americans would agree and would almost certainly claim credit for that first chair, probably while perched atop exquisitely comfy, remarkably well-made chairs imported from Japan.

Young is most famous as the author of Night Thoughts (1818). “Only in silence can one have clear thoughts and ideas” is not a quote from Night Thoughts but it could be. Compare this to “By all means use some time to be alone” (Young, n. d.). There is also “A soul without reflection, like a pile without inhabitant, to ruin runs” (Young, n. d.). Either of these or any of a hundred other quotes from Night Thoughts will give you a sense of how important Young thought that getting all the other voices out of your head so that you can hear what your own inner voice is saying was to thinking and, eventually, to building anything new, anything that is truly original and your very own rather than being something borrowed or stolen from some other person, either living or dead, who found their own voice in silence and, thus, became more than just an echo.       

References

Kim, H. S., & Sherman, D. K. (2007). Express yourself: Culture and the effect of self-expression on choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 1-11. Retrieved from http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/~d_sherma/kim.sherman.2007.pdf

Riesman, D. (1963). The lonely crowd: A study of the changing American character. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Young, E. (1918). Conjectures on original composition. Manchester, UK: The University Press.

Young, E. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved from http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edwardyoun118674.html

Young, E. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved from http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edwardyoun118613.html