> More playing

More playing? How will this prepare them for the real world where they’re expected to work 16 hour days.

I cannot shake the moment my Japanese acquaintances expressed incredulity that kids would actually play after school (or rather, that there was such a thing as after school play).

Social order in modern Japan is ruthlessly maintained through group pressure, extreme enforcement of hierarchy, and deference to various forms of authority.

While many will try to tell you in some Orientalist fiction that this is inherent to the Japanese people, it’s actually more the byproduct of the postwar, American-designed order that rehabilitated the former fascists as a “conservative” parliamentary party and invested them with near unilateral power (including over schooling). Prior to this period and through various forms of popular resistance (up until about the 1970s), Japan was a hotbed of radicalism, producing some of the greatest artists and thinkers about the problems of modernity.

There are other Oriental countries with a similar focus on putting the group before the individual. America has had a lot of influence on a lot of places, and certainly not all for the best, but how could America have influenced a place into a behaving a way that is completely foreign to America?

America occupied Japan and performed political censorship.

Group vs. individual biases are culturally and historically determined, but the politics or ideology they manifest in modernity are not. Anarchism, socialism, and communism all had mass appeal in prewar Japan and the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) was a powerful political force in the early postwar period, being one of the few groups that rightfully opposed the fascist war that led to so much death and devastation.

So powerful in fact was the JCP, that the American occupation force used the threat of its rising power to coerce the defeated fascists into alliance with them and constitute what is now know as the Liberal Democratic Party. From here, it was a mere matter of providing them with massive subsidies and intelligence gathered on their opponents on the left-

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-...

-and use the resulting power to produce a social, political, and economic order that was conducive to US interests.

I’m not certain what you’re getting at with regard to being “foreign” to American ideology, but authoritarianism is certainly not, if evidenced only by its long history and support of right-wing, authoritarian regimes.

I guess what I'm getting at is everything described in this article. The concept of ultra-conformity doesn't really resonate with the America.

Perhaps, but it’s a second-order effect of America rendering postwar Japan as a de facto, right wing one party state. Whether or not Japanese society conforms to specific American social norms is less important than whether the society produced by this order serves broader US interests. You could make the same observation about other far right or monarchical regimes the US is currently allied with (e.g. Saudi Arabia).

> how could America have influenced a place into a behaving a way that is completely foreign to America

Authoritarianism is hardly "completely foreign" to America.

But even if we ignore this, US government has a long established pattern of supporting any movement that opposes left wing politics across the globe to the point of funding coups.

The list is very long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...