True. Tight hierarchical social conditioning from birth. If reasonably fluent in Japanese and of European stock what is an all too frequent response to unorthodox queries? Shikataganai. In English that's usually translated as "it can't be helped" but the kanji suggest an even deeper meaning. A more literal translation would be: an official received methodology does not exist (so no action on my part will be taken). By extension this suggests that only received ways of doing things should be employed (which you should know already, gaikokujin). At least that's the way the social concept was explained to me by a Tokyo-based book illustrator friend with a philosophical bent during a recent visit.
I always heard "shouganai" rather than "shikataganai". Looked it up and found out neither is wrong [1]. Shouganai is actually shortened from shiyouganai (using the same shi kanji as shikatagani) so that can be used to get the kanji. Although apparently the meanings are almost identical according to this answer.
'Shouganai' struck me as more urban where the locals chatter at 200 words per minute. If you ever visit the back-country like Okayama Prefecture and pose one of those 'riyuu o fushigi ni omoi masu ...' (wonder why ..) questions you can still elicit both a stoic face and a 'shikataganai' in response. BTW, Jim Breen's Monash U website:
is still a good haunt for researching J-colloquialisms (ad nauseam) when and if you're in the mood. He's a retired IT prof and a friend of Jack Halpern, composer of a popular JE character dictionary.
Agreed. At the extreme one configuration culminates in a sclerotic dystopia and the other into a dysfunctional freak-show. But even if someone were smart enough to scare-up and responsibly impose a configuration which optimized individuality and mutuality based on actual human nature (which exhibits a tendency towards a Peircean pragmatism) what's going to prevent abuse by the powers-that-be then charged with managing and maintaining the social structure? As the old behaviourist Skinner put it over 40 years ago: who's going to control the controllers? AI? Sounds like a plot lifted from the old cold-war SF movie "Colossus - The Forbin Project (1970)". As they say, shikata ga nai, neh?
