J a p a n e s e    C u l t u r e

A station in Japan has come up with a way of preventing cyclists from parking their bicycles in the wrong places. They have affixed cute drawings by children on the ground next to the rail that people were using to lock their bicycles to. 0 timtak The Japanese feeling highly identified with the visual world and visual representations of themselves and others. While they can say "I'm stupid," and not take a hit to their self esteem, since they have not internalised a linguistic "generalised other," The Japanese really do not like looking bad, in auto photography, while playing sport, in self-representing Manga. And they do not like visually denigrating things that they like and admire, such as, famously, "stepping stones" (or fumie) used to test whether Japanese were Christians or not during the period of suppresion of Christianity. The Edo period authorities new that if they just asked the Japanese "Are you a Christian" they would prevaricate "No, I have given up on that (and will take it up again tomorrow)," "No (but I am still trying to become one)." But if they were forced to stamp on an effigy of the Holy Virgin, then if they were Christian, they would not be able to do it. A recent researcher has used this method to test Japanese self esttem by getting them to put crosses on words for self and other. Crossing out is the paper and pen version of stamping. And so back to the images above, they may prove effective in preventing cyclists from parking their bicycles next to the railings but they may also prevent passers by from standing on them, causing as much, or more, conjestion that the illegally parked bicycles that they prevent. Image from Japan Today and originally from Rocket News. Mori, K., Uchida, A., & Imada, R. (2008). A paper-format group performance test for measuring the implicit association of target concepts. Behavior research methods, 40(2), 546-555. Mori, K. (2003). The development of the FUMIE Test for measuring the implicit association of target words to negative emotions. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Convention of the Japanese Society for Social Psychology (pp. 104–105). Retrieved from http://ift.tt/1wARiLF http://flic.kr/p/pqHbRn