Do the rats race in Japan?

I lived in Tokyo for three and a half years as a Monbusho research student and then as an employee of a Japanese software company. This was a wonderful, memorable time for me, although it was also punctuated by the frustration and aggravation of being an American in Japan. My wife, who is Japanese, reminds me that during the months just before I returned to the US I complained at length about living there. Just about all my discontent arose from an evaporating patience with the Japanese adverse to risk and challenge. This is a deep cultural trait, that has both long historical roots and widespread contemporary manifestations.

Conversely, Americans love challenge and embrace risk, and consequently we foster from a young age the personal independence and ambition that drives us to them. I have been home two years and already I find myself being swept up in "the rat race," although I can hardly even tell what rat race I am in. In the US we value an individual not necessarily on his or her character, but on his or her achievements. We are not in love with good Americans so much as we are with successful ones. Gates and Trump are admired and beloved icons of American capitalism not for what they stand for morally, spiritually, or intellectually (although to be fair Gates, unlike Trump, has made considerable charitable contributions) but for their self-made power and money.

In Japan success is much more a matter of professional or personal alliances and seniority than personal ambition. If I am not an especially successful person in Japan that's okay, because everyone knows that in large part my success, like their own, is beyond my control. To be sure, this certainly takes away the pressure to achieve we place on ourselves in the US. The Japanese work themselves hard, but more so out of a sense of commitment to the company than to one's future social progress. By contrast in the US, most of us work hard for the promotion. Here, personal interest supersedes everything. Although I very much enjoy living in a country where ambition is encouraged and rewarded, I find it disheartening that achievement, regardless of the means or ends, has become a virtue in its own right.