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The author seeks to investigate particular elements of Japanese culture that may have contributed to the country's success in reducing crime rates since World War ll. In particular, he argues that the fundamental importance of apology and pardon helps to explain this phenomenon. But despite the apparently unique role of apology and repentance in Japanese culture, the author argues that these concepts, although perhaps more readily evident in Japan, are also present to a degree in American communities. He believes that through a consideration of Japan, the United States can learn to incorporate these ideas into American criminal justice. Finally, the author points out the preliminary success of experimental programs in the United States that seek to incorporate the ideas of apology and pardon.
Mention to someone who has lived in Japan even briefly the role of apology and you are apt to evoke a smile if not an effusion of tales of apologies given or received to expiate both slight and serious offenses. Even the most temporary expatriate quickly becomes familiar with the differences between the uses and effects of apology in Japan versus the United States, Europe, and apparently even other parts of East Asia. Apology remains nevertheless one of the least explored social phenomena of Japan. It receives scant attention by all but a handful of the burgeoning number of persons who write on that society, including the Japanese themselves. For the most part, the study of the cultural implications of apology has been relegated to dinner table or cocktail party anecdotes. Until recently, apology has been treated as an inconsequential, albeit interesting, quirk of Japanese social life. There has been no anatomy of apology.
Hiroshi Wagatsuma and Arthur Rosett (1986) and, more recently, Takie Lebra (1995) were among the first to give apology the undivided attention it deserves. In the work of these scholars we are finally able to identify social phenomena that may be accurately described as cultural and perhaps even peculiar or unique to Japan. All three demonstrate what those who have spent any amount of time in both Japan and the United States have discovered by experience: Apology is tendered in Japan in contexts that are far more likely to elicit an excuse or self-justification in the...