In linking through various stories on various blogs, I came across this gem about the Japanese concept of nihonjinron...the entire post can be found here.

I reserve comment, but needless to say, I have heard many of these same arguments before, but the word "Japanese" was replaced by other "races".    I have not been to Japan in a while, but maybe some of you have been living there for a while or have recently visited can shed some light on this way of thinking, although I get the feeling that this was more along the lines of their thinking 100 years ago or something, but then again, in this day and age, you never know. 

 

Nihonjinron as pseudoscience

Racialist modes of thinking predominate in many types of nihonjinron writings, with some writers citing dubious "scientific" findings as justification for a variety of social practices or political policies that are identified as being "inherently Japanese". ^[4] Examples include:

• Japanese people have different brains from Westerners and hence cannot pronounce "r" and "l" correctly. ^{[citation needed]} Consistent with depictions of the Japanese race and Japanese nation as indistinguishable, this suggestion ignores the example of Japanese youth growing up outside of Japan speaking another language, who display no discernible difficulty.
• 'Because of the unique properties of their language, the Japanese people have brain patterns that differ from those of most other people in the world. Whereas vowels and consonants are processed respectively in the right and left hemispheres of 'Western' brains, for example, it is argued that the 'Japanese' brain processes both sounds in the left hemisphere. [1].
• Japan is the only country with four distinct seasons, and Japanese people thus have a unique connection with nature. Technically Japanese climate can be viewed as marked rather by two seasons.^{[citation needed]} The four seasons celebrated in the nihonjinron reflect a division inherited from canonical distinctions in Chinese poetry.
• Only the Japanese language has words for various subtle emotions and shades of colors. These cannot be expressed in Western languages. ^{[citation needed]} This suggestion ignores that the Japanese adjective aoi means both green and blue - the separate word for green color, midori (meaning jade), is an imported noun. A lexical gap (lacuna) is a common phenomenon when comparing languages and not unique to the Japanese language.

Some frustrated Western businessmen consider nihonjinron fabricated rationales of pseudo-science for Japanese protectionism, citing as examples claims that foreign cars are too big for Japanese roads, foreign towels are too rough for Japanese skin, foreign shampoos were unfit for Japanese hair, or that foreign beef could not be digested by Japanese intestines. Other cultural critics note that supposed aspects of Japanese culture, such as the widely-reported used-pantie vending machines, function as a sort of meme in the West, repeated over and over long after the phenomenon has disappeared. Perhaps the best final word on this topic was stated more than a hundred years ago, by Oscar Wilde: "The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them."