It has long been believed that the Japanese are more collectivistic than the Americans. To assess the validity of this common view, we reviewed 15 empirical studies that compared these two nations on individualism/collectivism. Surprisingly, 14 studies did not support the common view; the only study that supported it turned out to bear little relevance to the ordinary definition of individualism/collectivism. An examination of the supportive evidence of the common view disclosed that this view had been formed on an unexpectedly flimsy ground. It further turned out that the wide acceptance of the common view may have been the result of the fundamental attribution error, which may have led to an underestimation of situational factors in interpreting the past obviously collectivistic behavior of the Japanese.

It has been long believed that the Japanese are typical collectivists whereas Americans are typical individualists. To examine the validity of this common view, we formerly reviewed 15 empirical studies that compared Japanese and Americans regarding individualism/collectivism (I/C), and found that the overwhelming majority of those studies had not supported the common view (Takano & Osaka, 1999). In this follow-up, we reviewed 20 additional empirical studies (7 behavioral studies, 13 questionnaire studies), most of which had been published after the former review. When combined with the formerly reviewed 15 studies, 19 studies reported no clear difference, and 11 studies reported that Japanese were more individualistic than Americans. These 30 studies are inconsistent with the common view. Only 5 studies supported the common view, even when we included 3 studies whose validity was questionable. After it was formerly found that the common view was not supported empirically, a variety of alternative accounts were presented regarding the reason for this finding. We examined three major accounts in light of the reviewed studies and found that none of them was congruent with the empirical data. Thus, it seems to be reasonable to conclude that the common view is not valid.

Similarities of language-independent form symbolism were tested across different geographical regions. In Experiment 1, word-form matching between 10 abstract words and 16 computer-generated nonsense forms was performed by between 61 and 107 undergraduate or volunteer participants in nine geographic regions of the world. Participants were native speakers of one of eight different languages: Japanese, Chinese, Korean, English, Italian, German, Serbian and Slovakian. The results demonstrated similar trends across languages and geographic regions. The small but significant differences between Eastern and Western groups found in Experiment 1 could be attributed to differences between them in the affective meanings of words rather than forms, as suggested by the results of Experiment 2. Experiment 2 involved participants (49 to 116 undergraduates from Japan, Taiwan, the US and Serbia) performing the 11-scale Semantic Differential technique on 10 words and eight of the 16 forms used in Experiment 1. It was concluded that the cross-regional similarity of form symbolism is based on the similarity of affective meanings of forms across different regions and languages.

Takano and Osaka (2018) tested the validity of the common view that Japanese are more collectivistic than Americans by reviewing empirical studies published mainly during recent two decades, and found that this common view was not supported by most of the reviewed studies. All the four commentaries on this review of ours shared with us the basic judgment that the common view is untenable. In this reply, we present arguments to resolve some doubts cast on our review, and then argue that situation is a key concept to investigate critical issues related to individualism and collectivism such as their dimensionality and distinction between societal level and individual level cultural difference.

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