BEYOND THE PAPER SCREEN / America's individualism and Japa.

BEYOND THE PAPER SCREEN / America's individualism and Japan's 'personalism'

Sawa Kurotani / Special to The Daily Yomiuri

Yomiuri

I am in the middle of a major painting project--no, I don't mean a great work of art, but my living room and dining room walls. As I struggle with paint rollers and edge-trimmers, the results for the U.S. primaries, in which each party selects its candidates for the autumn elections, are reported on the TV. So, what do my painting project and the primary results have in common?

Home-improvement stores have sprung up all over Japan in recent years, where weekend carpenters and home decorators gather for supplies for their do-it-yourself projects. In the United States, bigger and more extensive versions of them have been around for some time. Here, doing it yourself is nothing unusual; people take for granted that they do whatever they can by themselves around the house. In part …