2019 Volume 8 Issue 1 Pages 25-46
More than two decades ago, Yamagishi and Yamagishi demonstrated in a seminal article that trust was markedly lower in Japan than in the US. They tentatively attributed the lack of trust to the prevalence of committed long-term relationships in the Japanese economy. These relationships, they argued, assure cooperation because defection is costly and can be effectively sanctioned by the partner. This study’s secondary analysis of the Japanese National Character Survey casts doubt on the assumption that the Japanese preference for committed relationships has had a substantial impact on the level of general trust during the last 35 years, as other factors seem to be more relevant. General trust is weakly positively affected by age but substantially positively affected by education. Processes of cognitive mobilization and the aging of the Japanese society may, therefore, lead to an increase in general trust. The effects of urbanization remain ambiguous. Women were less trustful in the early surveys, but around 1990 gender differences disappeared. All together these variables cannot explain the decline in general trust between 1990 and 2008, which we tentatively attribute to deteriorating economic conditions during the “lost decade” and the worldwide economic crisis in 2008, which seem to have had a particularly strong impact on the youngest cohorts.
