“Mister Spock I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

Lots of people think of Japan as a very spiritual, traditional culture. To them, Japan is all toriis and haiku and wandering monks. But according to an international survey, Japan is actually one of the most rational, least “traditional” countries out there. Say what?

The World Values Survey (WVS) is an international organization that surveys people all over the world to gauge how different countries and cultures think. WVS hands out surveys to people across the globe asking tons of questions, like how important are things like family, religion, work, and leisure time are to them, and how happy they are.

WVS is super important because governments like to use the results to understand how to deal with other countries’ governments, and academics like to use the WVS to study how people live.

No, the answer isn’t always C.

And for data nerds, the WVS is practically porn. With all the information gathered by the survey, the WVS makes all sorts of graphs and infographics to people to drool over. (Except for design nerds, who will probably shudder at how ugly said graphs and infographics are.)

So what does the WVS tell about the world? The WVS says that countries are different in two main ways:

Survival vs. Self Expression Values

The WVS looks at much people are worried about basic human needs like having enough food and being safe versus how important individualism and self expression are to people. Obviously poorer countries are more security-minded, worrying about things like stable governments, corruption, and food security. Most First World Countries, on the other hand, generally have more stable governments and care more about individual freedoms.

Traditional vs. Secular-Rational Values

Traditional Values are pretty much exactly what you would think they would be, valuing things like religion, traditional family structures and rejecting more modern practices.

Secular-Rational Values are the exact opposite. Countries that are okay with things like gay rights, divorce, and abortion and don’t rely so heavily on traditional social structures.

WVS calculates scores for each of these categories, and even makes spiffy little graphs to visualize what different countries value. Check out this really interesting but kind of confusing graph, mapping the priorities of countries and regions across the world:

As you can see in the graph, Japan is pretty middle-of-the-road when it comes to Survival versus Self Expression Values, meaning that Japan is isn’t too worried about the basics, but isn’t really a society that focuses a lot on individualism.

On the other hand, Japan is on top (#1! #1! #1!) when it comes to Secular-Rational Values. This might not be too surprising given that Japan is pretty hands-off when it comes to issues like abortion, and how Japan tends to try and rationalize its problems instead of turning to a higher power to deal with them.

“Can you guess what I’m smiling about?”

The WVS also measure happiness in different countries around the world. When you see “Happiest Country in the World” headlines, they’re usually referring to WVS results.

Scandinavians are usually on top of these happiness polls, which doesn’t make any sense to me. How can you have all that snow and so little sunshine and be so happy all the time?!

You wouldn’t guess this if you think about Japan’s economy, but Japan ranks pretty highly in terms of happiness, and is even getting happier as time goes on!

Of course, this survey is extremely general and doesn’t mean that every single Japanese person thinks like this. It’s also important to keep in mind that this survey is only updated once every couple of years and doesn’t reflect how people feel about more recent things like the 3/11 earthquake.

Still, it’s an interesting gauge of how the country in general feels.

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So do you think the World Values Survey did a good job figuring out what Japan is all about, or do you think that it’s totally off the mark? Let us know in the comments.

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