ABSTRACT
Goto asked that his railway men be not only kind to each other but also courteous to the freight they handled. We might say, cynically, he wanted all to become smiling robots who with their smile suppressed their latent discontent and rebellious emotions. As ideological instruments of exploitation the insistence on smiling willingness to do any kind of work, on answering positively to expectations without claiming rights, was effective indeed. But looked upon in the ethics of role expectation within the entire con text of Japanese ethics, it is hard to deny that there was more at work than pure exploitation. Those who did the smiling felt positively - for they were brought up this way - that they were virtuous. Duty was more than rights, smile was superior to har mony-disturbing struggle, and, as Goto did not fail to stress, all this served the nation as such. For the micro-role fulfilment (micro in the sense of individual-enterprise service) received its final approval only from the msicro-kokutai which was 'the heavenly way'. The basic problem lay here, in the harmony be tween the micro-goals of the self-sufficient groups (zaibatsu) and the national interest.
