JAPANESE EDUCATOR FEARS AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE
~The "American Way of Life" -- highly touted in the United States and even recommended for imposition on the rest of the world --has no attraction for Kazuo Okochi, president. of Tokyo University. Writing in the September issue’of Bungei_ Shun ju , he views the pattern as the "American Type of Poverty." It is characterized, he contends, by high living on installment “buying.
In Japan, the people are now being "pailroaded" as in: America "by mass media and salesmen into believing that enterprise sets the pattern of life for them to follow."
If the Japanese are to imitate any other people, the professor prefers the British. In his opinion, "The Japanese would be far better off if they went the British way of conservative living instead of the American way of going into debt." .
Okochi feels that the trend is at the bottom of the growing radicalization of the working class. "Organized labor is no exception to the general rule," he says. "It fights for a pay
raise and a year-end bonus year in and year out. It does not do so for'reasons of ‘stark poverty. Its reasons are a biting sense of relative‘and pyschological poverty plus the guided pattern of spending under the ‘American type of poverty.' Labor strikes are’ singularly tied in with the agitated mood for higher living."