Italy and Japan: like two peas in a pod?

I’ve been back in Europe for about 5 months now. I originally came back from 18 months in Japan and two months of travelling without any ‘real’ idea of what I was going to do next and so ended up staying in Italy, a country I actually have never lived in as such even though I am a national. I grew up in France and spent all my holidays in Italy for years, and considering that these holidays amounted to about half the year, I’ve kind of lived here before. I originally came back to see my mom, and being that I was bumming around a bit following my trip, staying here seemed like a good idea at the time and I decided to give a try at living here properly, you know get a job and all that good stuff. Never quite managed to get my own place though.

Five months on and I’m leaving Milan and going back to London, even though most people who live there might rightfully question why I would want to do such a thing. And while it’s true that Milan, and Italy, has a lot going for it, culture, good food, fashion and all that, believe me it’s also Italy, and that entails a lot of things I’ve come to remember I don’t want to be dealing with.

Looking at the title of this post though, you might gather that a UK/Italy comparison isn’t the order of the day here. Instead I want to look at some parallels and differences between Japan, a country I lived in for 18 months, which I’d always dreamt of living in and which I really like, and Italy, one of my two ‘homes’ and a country I haven’t lived in for 12 years and with which I’ve always had a bit of a love/hate thing going on.

This idea originally came to me when I was in Japan. I can’t quite remember when exactly, but at some point it started to dawn on me that Japan and Italy were actually not that different, socially and culturally. This feeling also has roots in my childhood and early fascination with Japanese animation. I remember watching a Dragon Ball imported OVA when I was a kid in Italy once and thinking to myself that Japanese sounded a little like Italian. At the time I had pretty much nothing to base this comparison on aside from my knowledge of Italian, yet as it turns out nearly 20 years later I’ve come back to this memory and realised that there is quite a bit of truth to it. And this extends beyond the language, Italy and Japan really aren’t that different.

First up is politics. This resemblance between the two countries first came to my mind a little after I arrived in Japan but didn’t become obvious until I started working at the Asahi Shimbun. Having been forced to come out of my self-imposed exile from news, I began to learn more than I ever wanted to know about the Japanese political process. As a result it occured to me at some point that both Italian and Japanese politics seemed to rest on very similar key facts: corruption, protection of corrupted officials, a bit of organised crime influence, nepotism and old men who have no relevance whatsoever to their country, its people and the world around them (though that last one most likely applies to pretty much any political system in most countries). These generalisations, by their very nature, could apply to a lot of political systems I am sure, but the fact remains that overall politics in Italy and Japan just really aren’t that different, on the surface and underneath it. It’s something that comes to you from living in either country as well, it’s a feeling of sorts and I never really felt the same similarities between the English and Japanese system for example.

The politics aspect ties in with another key similarity: both Italy and Japan are male dominated, patriarchal societies. Look at the political, business and social landscape and you see men in most key positions. In both countries, the norm tends to be for the father to be the bread earner in the family while the wife/mother stays at home to look after the kids. Men are looked after and catered for. Men seemingly run things. ‘Seemingly’ is the important word here because in both cases some women do have a certain amount of power, generally wielded behind closed doors by mothers. In Italy the image of the ‘mama’ is a powerful one and in Japan mother figures also have a great deal of power and influence. This importance is seen in statistics for both countries about the fairly high percentage of male children who remain tied to their mothers well into their adults life, from those who have their mom cook and wash for them to those who still live at home during their 20s and sometimes even 30s. While times have changed and women are more empowered than before in both societies (with Italy probably a little more ahead than Japan for that), the fact remains that in both cases men are still very much the dominating figures in the public and social spheres.

Both the political and patriarchal aspects of the societies are likely factors for another common point between Italy and Japan: the prevalence of nepotism. In both politics and business, nepotism is a fairly rampant and common practice in both countries. My few months back here were enough to remind me that in Italy it’s very much who you know and how you know them rather than what you can do that impacts business decisions, careers and the likes. While in Japan the same applies and is only amplified by the belief that respect is everything and that following the chain of command and respecting people regardless of competence or any form of logic is what will get you somewhere.

Which brings me nicely to the subject of respect and politeness. This is probably one of Japan’s most well-known social characteristics, often mentioned in the West but also often misunderstood and slightly misreported. I came with my own preconceptions of what it entailed and soon after moving to Tokyo I learnt that it was actually not as straight-forward as it is sometimes made out to be in the West.

Back to the point, Japan is a deeply respectful and polite society: at a public level, a business level and a private level. This respect and politeness is a bit of a double edged sword: on one hand it’s great because it makes certain aspects of social life much more pleasant, and easy (like daily transactions or talking to strangers in public places), on the other it’s taken to such an extreme that it also complicates things that should otherwise be a lot more straight forward, and which generally are outside of Japan (for example ordering a drink when you don’t speak the language, or speaking to a ’superior’ in your office/work environment).

Coming back to Italy, four months of working in the office of a small ‘international,’ but Italian, company in Milan made me realise that Italy also had a level of respect and politeness which I had never realised, mainly because I never really lived here as an adult or worked here until now. It doesn’t compare with Japan’s, but after working in offices in both countries I’ve realised that they’re a lot more similar than I first thought and have roughly the same effect. They’re similar in that they both create an unseen but understood hierarchy in the office which should always be observed and maintained, unless you want to mark yourself out. And the effect in both cases creates an unecessary barrier between co-workers and superiors, putting a wall where there doesn’t need to be one anymore, especially considering how society and business has changed and evolved.

In Italy respect and politeness doesn’t extend as deep as it does in Japan and doesn’t have the same hierarchical connotations outside of business, but you do also see it elsewhere than in the office with people in shops and various other public spaces a lot more polite than any other European country I’ve lived in or visited. If anything living and working in both countries has made me realise just how much I enjoy the anglo-saxon way of doing business, with its lesser reliance on unecessary politeness and hierarchy in the office (to an extent).

Another similarity I remarked recently is the importance of religious buildings and their quasi-ubiquity in the urban and rural landscape. In Italy this means churches in every shape, size and form, while in Japan it’s shrines and temples. While the structures and ‘religions’ are different, I can’t think of any other country where there is such an amount of religious structures in every village, city and town, with some places I’ve been to having them within eyesight of each other. If anything it’s proof that both countries are fairly set in their religious ways and place a lot of importance on them, but it did make me smile and think, especially as I’d been racking up this list of similarities in my head for a while when this one came up.

Rounding off the list, sort of, are the languages, which I mentioned briefly earlier. To anyone with an understanding and grasp of both languages this might make some sense, or maybe not. Either way try me out. I first thought of this as a kid, to me Japanese just seemed to have some phonetic similarities to Italian. Fast forward about 20 years and I would now quite happily argue with anyone that the languages do indeed have a fair bit in common. Nothing grammatical mind you, but phonetically speaking it’s a bit scary. Word endings, phonetic compounds etc… listening to Japanese while living in Italy has made me realise that there was definitely something to this thought I had as a kid. Granted though it’s pretty thin, and doesn’t have a lot of social or cultural relevance.

I’ve been thinking about all this for a while and in that time I often wondered if I was just seeing things because I wanted to rather than because they were there. And then last month after mentioning these similarities to someone, they told me that they’d heard the same thing from a friend of theirs who was the Italian ambassador to Japan and had just returned from two years of living in Tokyo. Which was nice as I was seriously wondering.

So the question now is, do you agree? If so, why or why not? And do you have anything to add to the list or similarities between Japan and another country?