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The Japanese are said to be hygienic because they care about how they look to others but many Japanese hygiene and prettifying behaviors such as, decorating the interiors of their cars and trucks, bathing at night, wearing fancy underwear (that sometimes becomes outer wear it is so fancy), bidets, not wearing shoes at home, snot suckers, enemas, the popularity of ear cleaning, the prevalence of toothpicks, and (not pictured) the use of flannels to clean ones hands and face before meals,  toilet slippers, and disposable cotton gloves when doing dirty chores at home, are carried out in the eyes of God (the Sun Goddess and ancestors who are always watching) and themselves but are nearly invisible to other people. 

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Labels: autoscopy, japanese culture, Nacalian, 自己視

You practice the forms. Eventually they come naturally. Miyanaga claims that there is an intermediate or parallel ability to visualise the forms in her paper on robots.

The paper in English comments on the similarity between form mastering Japanese, and form mastering robots

Miyanaga, K. (1985). POPULARITY OF ROBOTS IN JAPAN── Tradition in Modernization──. 国際基督教大学学報. II-B, 社会科学ジャーナル, 24(1), 111-123.
icu.repo.nii.ac.jp/?action=repository_uri&item_id=366...

However in section 4, entitled "Image and Action," of her paper in Japanese Miyanaga (1987) explains how it is an ability to generate an integrate *image* of ones behaviour, through the practice of forms, that enables Japanese humans (but perhaps* not robots) to move from doing things by rote to doing things freely and naturally.

宮永國子. (1987). 日本のロボットと土着文化 (「ロボット・人間」). 社会心理学研究, 2(2), 7-13.
www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jssp/2/2/2_KJ00003724946/_pd...

This Miyanaga's assertion is at the centre of my understanding of Japanese culture and therefore the best Nihonjinron (other than my own!) that I know.


* There is work to create robots with autoscopy
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326998491_The_Synthetic_Psychology_of_the_Self
Cyberdyne?

Labels: autoscopy, japanese culture, martial art, Nacalian, nacalianism, nihonbunka

Doutak bells are a quite mystery to me.

They are found dating from the Yayoi period when, I believe the previous, indigenous Japanese Joumon ("rope pattern") Japanese culture that had existed in Japan for millennia was invaded by horse mounted invaders from the continent. These bells were probably originally horse-bells, to allow horse mounted warriors to know where their horses are in the dark for instance. They started out being about the size of the bell that Ray is holding in the above photo, but were gradually made in larger and larger sizes.

My guess is that these larger and larger bells were in part to prove regal (or invader) hereditary, "My father or (great great..) grandfather was a horse mounted warrior." And with each passing generation the bells were made in larger sizes, perhaps.

The Japanese themselves have a tendency to believe that there was no "invasion" and that the Joumon people evolved into Yayoi people, and subsequently Kofun people, due to the arrival of "technology" from the continent rather than due to subjugation. The Japanese tend to believe, traditionally at least, imho, that their culture is continuous or contiguous from the year dot. And they may be right.

The genetic record however seems to point to a considerable differences (in height for instance) with at the same time much overlap, so at least there was interbreeding between an indigenous and arriving race. On the other hand, I suppose that genes might also be described as a "technology," and Japanese culture may have survived changes to the gene pool. I think it very likely.

I imagine Yayoi warriors arriving and breeding (no offence intended) with the indigenous Joumon people, and then later a second wave of invaders (related to the first) arriving in the Kofun (ancient burial mound) period. This two wave hypothesis is suggested by some (Korean) historical interpretations of Japanese mythology. After the latter wave vast tombs were created. The creation of vast tombs, all around Japan, makes me think that there was great stratification within society. I imagine that those that were related to the invaders rounded up and forced vast numbers of indigenous and mulatto stock Japanese and had them build tombs the size of the Egyptian pyramids for their new masters. But this is all my imagination. Korean and Western historians tend to present a sort of "Japan was invaded" type of history, whereas, as I say, the Japanese tend to portray their history as one of continuous evolution with changes in society being attributed to the arrival of new technologies such as for rice farming. I guess that the difference in historical outlook is one of degree. The Japanese are, and their culture is, great at maintaining continuity, of which a great deal remains. This post is about the possibility of continuity between doutaku (as held by my son Ray) and dogu (pictured above right).

Returning to the dotaku bells, they have peculiar characteristics. They appear to have been kept, while not in use, buried in the ground, being unearthed at specific occasions. One theory has it that they were buried in order to soak up and be replenished with the spirit of the earth. The bells often have pictorial inscriptions that may be rebuses, punning on that which they represent. They seem to have a lot of water related imagery and a preponderance of images of deer.

Ah yes, I remember now (I make the same observations over and over again): it seems to me that these doutaku bells may be the origin of the temple bells that are used to ring in the new year in Japan in the "joya no kane" (除夜の鐘) ritual, which are even more massive than the largest doutak. They look similar. They are likewise inscribed. These "joya no kane" bells are now associated with Buddhist ritual to purify the ringers of sins, of which there are said to be 108.

The "rope pattern", Joumon culture indigenous Japanese, who existed for millennia, seem to have created first person body view (McDermott, 1996) figurines or dogū (土偶) which have similarities with the Venus figurines found all over the palaeolithic world. These figurines in Japan were often destroyed. I wonder if they were destroyed (and perhaps buried) in an attempt to exorcise their owners from the mother that occupied their, and perhaps all our, minds.

If so then, by a vast leap of conjecture, it might be argued that the practice of making first person body view figurines and then breaking and burying them, may have evolved into the practice of making vast bells and ringing then (at first) burying them.

This conjecture parallels the hypothesis of Lacanian (and Freudian but less explicitly) psychology which has it that the self evolves by first being represented visually as a body view, then narrativally in phonemes.

In each stage the self is paired with an other-of-the-self that witnesses the self representation.

Lacanian psychology seems to lack reference to self-person body views. The visual or "mirror-stage" is purported to be one in which the the mirror self, or third person body image such as represented in mirrors, and the form of other children with whom infants identify, is seen from the perspective of real others and is therefore groupist, and interpersonal, rather than intra-psychic (in the mind).

It is only, according to Lacan and Mead, with the arrival of language that humans internalise an imaginary friend or Other or ear (of the Other). In Lacan and Mead, and Western philosophers in general, ears are argued to be internalisable but eyes are not. They claim that one can speak, whisper and eventually "think" in words to "oneself," or rather that hidden friend, a generalised other, super ego, super addressee. Eyes are always, interpersonal, groupist, social, out there in the world.

Till the discovery of mirror neurons, our paper on Mirrors in the Head, McDermott's first person, Nishida's Mephistopheles in 'active direct vision', and the lyrics of David Bowie ("Your Eyes" in Blackstar) it was not realised that people can create a watcher within their minds.

Western theorists seem to have missed out on autoscopic potential of the mirror neuron, or McDermottian possibility that eyes are just as internalisable.

Until recently I had thought that the "eye of the Other" was internalised in an abstract, ineffable way. Japanese pictorial art is often represented from the perspective of "an eye apart," typically looking down, from the sky such as one can experience when playing Mariokart, Final Fantasy or other third person view Japanese video games (Masuda, et al., in preparation).

At the same time however, it also seems possible to model an eye within the self in a more concrete way, as the the first person view of self, such as may be represented by dogū, and the first person view that we have of their own brow nose and limbs. When I look at myself in the mirror I can see the noses and brow of the person on this side of the mirror. I can hold out my hand and caresses the surface of the mirror. Narcissus is portrayed attempting to scoop up his image from the surface of water, using his this-side-of-the-mirror hands.

In a sense perhaps the phonic equivalent of the nose and brow is the voice. I can narrate myself and when I do, when I call myself names, such as "Tim" or "I," the in that situation, there is likewise a "this side of the mirror" in the voice that expresses these names. Mead, and Derrida, rightly point out that hearing oneself speak (s'entendre parler in Derrida) introduces a believable duality. But I think that Nishida is right to point out (at least I think he is pointing out) that a similarly believable, or en-actable (kouiteki) duality exists in seeing. Since we can see our brow, and our nose(s), and often our hands, we see ourselves see. We do not even need a mirror to do so.

So, aware of the fact that self always presupposes and entails a self loving drama (with [less than/not?] one actor and two personae), in an attempt to rid themselves of their self-loving sin, the Japanese may have moved from destroying images of the self-person view in the act of destroying and burying dogū figurines, to destroying the phoneme in the act of a DONNGG, of a doutaku or joya no kane bell.

One can hear the sound of a bell on the Japanese joya no kane wikipedia page and in this Youtube Video.

Bibliography
McDermott, L. R. (1996). Self-representation in Upper Paleolithic female figurines. Current Anthropology, 37(2), 227–275. websites.rcc.edu/herrera/files/2011/04/PREHISTORIC-Self-R...

I have also argued that Japanese attempted to destroy inner ears (converting them to external ones) by snapping their earrings. The more you love others the less you love yourself, and vice versa.

Labels: autoscopy, cultural psychology, image, japanese culture, Jaques Lacan, nihonbunka, psychology, religion, reversal, 宗教, 日本文化

Labels: autoscopy, blogger, Flickr, japaneseculture, Nacalian, nihonbunka, 日本文化

Labels: autoscopy, blogger, Flickr, Nacalian, nihonbunka, tourism, 日本文化, 観光

I thought "Pokémon the Movie: Hoopa and the Clash of Ages" was a Japanese commentary on Western culture personified in "Hoopa, the hooper that could not loop" (my subtitle).

Hoopa has two forms (as do many Pokémon), and as are believed to exist in the Buddhist view of ourselves: the small (unenlightened) and large (enlightened) self. We see the giant form of Hoopa first who uses giant hoops to move (or steal) things from anywhere in the world. Hoopa's power rests in this telekinetic ability. Herein lies the first parallel with Western culture. The Japanese have a bit of a tendency, in my limited experience, to see the British and their descendants as thieves, or "vikings" as they tactfully put it, conquering the world and taking it home. The seven hoops of Hoopa (one around each of his six arms, and one around his waist) may correspond to the sense of Buddhism (although there is one too many) which include the sense of the heart. From some Japanese points of view Westerners look upon nature and the world as a source of things to take, rather than as something with which one feels in harmony, to an extent unified.

Hoopa finds himself internally conflicted and unable to evolve into his large self who remains trapped in a bottle by a religious organisation that bears more than a passing resemblance to Judeo-Christianity. From a Japanese perspective Western culture separates God and humankind whereas in Japan, the enlightened, a supreme martial artist for instance, becomes one with God or the Buddha - which tend to be seen as the same things.

This inability to evolve into his large self, and being in conflict with it, parallels Hoopa's inability to pass through his own hoop. As we have seen Hoopa has six hoops (plus one around his body) that he uses to move or plunder the cosmos. He seems partially able to pass through one of his hoops (the one around his middle) but unable to pass through any of his others.

This inability to pass through his own hoops is due to Hoopa's lack of gratitude. Through his experience of growing up once again as small Hooper, however, Hoopa learns to love and feel gratitude and finally, when he does this he is able to pass through one of his own hoops. In this sequence, before the triumphant auto-looping-hooping the hoop, and overcoming self-conflict, Hoopa imagines himself growing up and all the love he has received. This introspection - literally seeing himself - works on a lot of levels as the defining characteristic of Japanese culture. The Japanese believe their heart to be a mirror, are found to literally have a mirror in their heart, they are (through the practice of Noh and Karate forms) able to see themselves from a perspective outside, and use this ability to see themselves from the points of view of others. Autoscopy is also especially noticeable in the last letters of suicide pilots and the Japanese version of psychoanalysis: Naikan therapy.

This self-seeing, or self perception may be what the whole "Pocket Monster" mythology is about as represented by the Pikachu Satoshi Diad. There is a monster within us, sitting on our shoulder, who sees us, but at some level, or in some way, Satoshi and Pikachu are one. Perhaps in a final Pokémon movie this fact will be revealed. Or perhaps it already has. I have only seen two Pokémon movies.

Reading perhaps far too much into the iconography, it seems proper that Hoopa should be appear from out of one of his hoops (little Hoopa), have hoops on his ears (little Hoopa) or have one of his hoops as a hole at his centre (Big Hoopa) since Westerners do feel able to perceive themselves, linguistically. Only being able to perceive ourselves through this especially dark mirror, we are able to wreck destruction on an unparalleled scale, believing that anything that can be linguistically justified is acceptable. Hence a Briton feels able in saying that the British enforced importation of narcotics into China, for more than a hundred years, was acceptable because "the Chinese chose to smoke (opium). Or, in my experience, Americans (and others from the allied nations) generally continue to approve of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as just since 'the Japanese started it.' It is only when one starts to see oneself, hear the crying children, smell the stench of results of what one does, it is only when one passes through other hoops, that such justifications become untenable. We need to learn other forms of insight fast.

Hoopa learns gratitude, becomes able to perceive himself, is no longer conflicted, walks in the light, or becomes Japanese, in harmony with, not apart from the world. In the last part of the movie giant Hoopa spends his time rebuilding that which he has destroyed, only plundering the occasional doughnut.

I was moved by the compassion with which Hoopa the destroyer was viewed. Even though he destroyed the humans that fed him, Hoopa was not punished with death, but merely part of him kept in a bottle, since after all, as grandfather says, Hoopa is one of the family.

(I have a Japanese family, and lack gratitude, so this notion moves me to tears.)

Labels: autoscopy, cultural psychology, culture, japan, japanese, nihonbunka, occularcentrism, self, specular, 日本文化

The Japanese think that they are being collectivist but there is one simulated autoscopic gaze whose x-ray eyes they can cannot meet. Likewise, we Westerners think that we are only speaking to ourselves and our absent friends but there is one ear that we ignore. Paraphrasing Archimedes, "Give me a place to stand on, and I will make the Earth." Just one subject position hidden: that is all it takes to believe in a visual, or verbal (Kantian, ideal) world.

The need to hide the superaddressee is the reason why Westerners think they are individualists and Japanese think that they are collectivists. The horrific other can be hidden, as well as by being horrific, in one of two ways.

If the superaddressee is an ear then it can't be hidden publicly since one would need to go around talking out loud all the time. This is what children do at first (c.f. Vygotsky) but the content of the chanting that they do is too weird for them to keep doing it out loud. Once they start doing it quietly it does not take long before they think that they are talking purely and simply to themselves (but as Vygotsky demonstrates, children still in the talking out loud stage give up if put in a room full of foreign language speakers). Since we Westerners kid ourselves that we are talking only to ourselves, we claim that we are individualists. Individualism is a lie that helps keep the sin, that is so horrific, hidden.

If the superaddressee is an eye, then it emphasises its own duality be requiring space, or a gap, between the see-er and seen. The way that phonemes require a temporal gap is less obvious. Westerners imaging that it is possible to understand the living word in mind even as it is spoken in immediate "presence." To hide their sin, which is not nearly so disgusting since the superaddressee is less passive, the Japanese claim that they only care about the eyes of others. This allows them to forget that they are posturing to vast and scary Starman, or sun goddess. While, however, individualism is a lie since meaning is always transitive, it is in fact possible to be collectivist. In this situation the Japanese mirror is clean; the abject feminine can be washed from it. For this reason I believe, it may be necessary to be born again, as a Japanese, in the sense of someone who lives in the light, in order to be saved from the beast!

Kayako Saeki pictured above, always looks like she is trying to get out of the image, because like Sadako, she is. Furthermore she is not really modelled as a member of the crowd, with a face that can be seen from the front, but rather as or in the boundary of experience: the first person view of the subject. The Japanese, I believe, look out of her eyes. She is especially difficult to see because East Asians have smaller, invisible, noses like Gachapin!

Image of Kayoko Saeki copyright Aiko Horiuchi and Ghost House Pictures / Vertigo Entertainment

Labels: autoscopy, horror, japanese, taboo, tabuu, ホラー, 日本文化

If you tried to have a conversation with this lady you might mistakenly think that she is alll and humble lacking in individuality. She has dressed up her car interior in vivid pink, leaving the outside black with only a hint of weird. The Japanese have an X-ray eye that can see even into their hearts. No Japanese can meet its gaze and live.

Vip Style Magazine (July, 2015) p. 131

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Labels: autoscopy, horror, japanese, japanese culture, nihonbunka, occularcentrism, ホラー, 日本文化

The Japanese do not linguistically self enhance (Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999) and since language is generally considered to be the universal modality of self, it is often argued that the Japanese do not self enhance at all. However from inspection of their autophotography (Leuers & Sonoda, 1999), collage, and self-manga (such as those of manga artist Yoshinori Kobayashi) it seems that Japanese do enhance their visual self representations. I argue that this is due to fact that Japanese identify with self-manga but not with verbal self representations.

What is it to identify with a self-representation? Many psychologists claim that in order to have or cognise a self we need to see it from the point of view of another within self, "the generalised other" of Mead, the "super-addressee" of Bakhtin, the "alter ego" of Derrida, the "Other" of Lacan, the "impartial spectator" of Smith, "the third person perspective" of Mori　(1999), and the "super ego" of Freud.

Bataille (1992, p31) for example says "We do not know ourselves distinctly and clearly until the day we see ourselves from the outside as another."

The Flashed Face Distortion (FFD) effect (Tangen, Murphy, & Thompson, 2011) is a trippy newly discovered illusion in which when faces are flashed side by side we seem distorted, to an extent in caricature (see videos here and here).





It is not clear why. I suggest that it is probably that this caricaturization of faces is not limited to times when faces are flashed, but that we become aware of the caricaturisation when faces are flashed.

Still more recent brain neuro-imaging research (Wen and Kung, 2014) finds that the FFD effect is mediated by at least two neural networks: "one that is likely responsible for perception and another that is likely responsible for subjective feelings and engagement".

Why should subjective feelings and engagement processing take place? Again, it is not clear to me, but it seems likely that "subjective feelings and engagement" would differ for ones own face as opposed to the faces of others.

I created therefore a similar video except with my own face as one of the target faces. The video is far from ideal (as you can see) but it seems that the FFD is much weaker in this situation. The face that I am comparing various versions of my own face to is only slightly distorted or caricaturized whereas my own face does not appear to be caricaturized at all. I presume that this is a function of a variation in subjective feelings and engagement, and because I do not see my own face as the face of another, and either do not bother or feel inclined to caricaturize my own face. But then, I don't think of my face is my self. I think of that which is described by my self narrative as my self.

I hypothesize that from the way in which Japanese enhance their self representations, from the way it is claimed that their "mask" is the centre of their persona (Watsuji, 2011), and from in their self-enhancing self-manga ("jimanga") that Japanese will feel the Flashed Face Distortion (Tangen, Murphy, & Thompson, 2011) effect even when watching a video of their own faces. This is because they are seeing their own face as another and this is, paradoxically, a condition of seeing ones face as ones "self."

Bibliography
Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds., V. W. McGee, Trans.) (Second Printing). University of Texas Press. Retrieved from pubpages.unh.edu/~jds/BAKHTINSG.htm
Bataille, G. (1992). Theory of Religion. (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York: Zone Books.
Derrida, J. (1978). Edmund Husserl’s origin of geometry: An introduction. U of Nebraska Press. Retrieved from books.google.co.jp/books?hl=en&lr=&id=pW9PQxAOo0s...
Freud, S. (1961). The ego and the id. Standard Edition, 19: 12-66. London: Hogarth Press.
Heine, S., Lehman, D., Markus, H., & Kitayama, S. (1999). Is there a universal need for positive self-regard?. Psychological Review. Lacan, J. (2007). Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. (B. Fink, Trans.) (1st ed.). W W Norton & Co Inc.
Leuers, T., & Sonoda, N. (1999). The eye of the other and the independent self of the Japanese. In Symposium presentation at the 3rd Conference of the Asian Association of Social Psychology, Taipei, Taiwan. Retrieved from nihonbunka.com/docs/aasp99.htm
Mead, G. H. (1967). Mind, self, and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist (Vol. 1). The University of Chicago Press. Nelson, T. O., Metzler, J., & Reed, D. A. (1974). Role of details in the long-term recognition of pictures and verbal descriptions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 102(1), 184–186. doi.org/10.1037/h0035700
Mori, 森, 有正. (1999). 森有正エッセー集成〈5〉. 筑摩書房.
Smith, A. (1812). The theory of moral sentiments. Retrieved from books.google.co.jp/books?hl=en&lr=&id=d-UUAAAAQAA...
Takemoto, T. (2002). 鏡の前の日本人. In 選書メチエ編集部, ニッポンは面白いか (講談社選書メチエ. 講談社.
Tangen, J. M., Murphy, S. C., & Thompson, M. B. (2011). Flashed face distortion effect: Grotesque faces from relative spaces. Perception-London, 40(5), 628. Retrieved from expertiseandevidence.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/TanMu...
Tversky, B., & Baratz, D. (1985). Memory for faces: Are caricatures better than photographs? Memory & Cognition, 13(1), 45–49. Retrieved from link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03198442
Wen, T., & Kung, C. C. (2014). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the flashed face distortion. Retrieved from jov.arvojournals.org/data/Journals/JOV/933545/i1534-7362-...
Watsuji, T. (2011). Mask and Persona. Japan Studies Review, 15, 147–155. Retrieved from asian.fiu.edu/projects-and-grants/japan-studies-review/jo...

Labels: autoscopy, culture, japan, japanese culture, self, 日本文化, 自己, 自己視

The lion, naked, prostrate and clearly lacking a womb, is scared. Sazae can tame anything and has tamed a sealion too, left. Like most Japanese women most of the time, Sazae appears to be on stage. She alone is fully aware of an audience. The lion is, like the Western wife perhaps, aware of the audience only through Sazae. The young chap with the ball, Katsuo I presume, is as yet oblivious. The audience constrains Sazae as it empowers her. In Japan phallogocentrism is replaced by wombimagocentrism*. When the audience watches, the women are in control, as they are controlled. Give up on the "different voice" (Gilligan, 1962) and get wombimagocentric now.

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Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Harvard University Press.

Notes
* I think that this can be pronounced a bit like the Wombles, wom-bi-mago-centrism.

Addenda

What is it about logocentricism that is phallic?

Lacan mentions that mothers are often primary caregivers whereas males are fathers by virtue of their symbolic (linguistic) position in society, and often because of their work. In some societies the brothers are those which work to support sisters and their children and are treated much like fathers to those that they support.

In patriarchal societies, patriarchs may hope that their work, their significant acts, their money is rewarded on an exchange basis, with "presence" and "affection." The "philosophy of presence", where signifier are co-present with meaning in the "car-loving" mind, may be enacted in logocentric bedroom. 

Logocentrists place themselves into the imagined dialogue between their parents.

"Car-loving" is one of Derrida's puns on "auto-affection", or onanism.

Labels: autoscopy, culture, feminism, japan, japanese, manga, Nacalian, occularcentrism, self, sex, specular, 日本文化

A recent video showing the extent to which Japanese children return wallets moved me to tears.


In the USA when a child found some money (admittedly not inside a wallet) he was lauded for giving it to someone else.

Handing the money into lost property did not seem to cross anyone's mind in the USA.

Western commentators since the Edo period have marvelled at Japanese honesty with regard to personal possessions and the absence of theft. They also marvelled at the sexual mores (nakedness and the prevalence of prostitution), and speech crime (e.g. flattery, deceit, and creative accounting). That said I believe the Japanese to be the most moral nation on earth.

"The Lost Letter Technique" made famous by Milligram et. al. (1965) found that 70% of personally address letters but only 25 of Nazi/Communist party addressed "lost letters" were returned. Earlier research by Merritt and Fowler (1948: see Liggett, Blair, & Kennison, 2010) found that 85% of letters, but only 54% of letters presumed to contain money were returned.

And yes, there is comparative Lost Letter Technique research. West (2003) dropped phones and wallets containing cash in Tokyo and New York and the results were T 95% vs NY 77% for phones and T 85% vs NY30% for cash. That makes Tokyoites about three times more honest when it comes to returning wallets. Near Tokyo rates of return were obtained outside a Japanese supermarket in New York, so this is not something geographical. The Japanese are extremely honest when it comes to personal property.


In Japan stealing is almost absent, but creative accounting and linguistic obfuscation is reported to be prevalent. In the historical record numerous commentators report the low level of stealing (Bird, 1880; Cocks & Thompson, 2010; Coleridge, 1872; Golovnin, Rīkord, & Shishkov, 1824) and the strict way in which it is dealt with. At the same time, visitors have noted that linguistic misdemeanour's such as flattery, deceit, and "the squeeze" (taking a kickback of up to 100% to 200% of cost: see Bird 1880).

I claim, as always, that the amazing way in which the Japanese do not steal things but are at the same time able to "squeeze" double or triple the expenses from their employer relates to the nature of the Other (and horror) in Japanese culture.

Westerners have a horrible other that listens. This encourages us to be fairly honest, if very self-serving, in our self-narrative. Our narratives are self-enhancing but are constrained by the need for them to be palatable to another imagined human being. On the other hand, we feel no one is watching, so how we look, however, is far less fraught, ego-involved. We can get very fat, or even justify theft as redistribution of wealth (Robin Hood), since "property is [or can be argued, narrated to be] theft." We are good at promises and institutions of linguistic trust (such as insurance, and financial products) since we want to be heard to be, narrated to be, good.

The Japanese, on the other hand, have an Other (that is almost as horrifying) that looks, concealed not in the head but amongst the crowd. This encourages them to be fairly upstanding, if very self-serving, in their posture (sekentei). Their self-imaginings are self-enhancing but are constrained by the need for them to be palatable to another imagined human being. So the Japanese abhor crimes and misdemeanour's that can be seen, such as theft and physical violence. When it comes to linguistic malfeasance such as "the squeeze" or kick-back however, this can be seen as just a way of doing business involving no visual injury. The Japanese are good at creating things (monozukiri) since they want to be seen, imagined to be, good.

This modal -- language vs vision -- difference highlights one aspect of the origin of the myths of individualism and collectivism. It is not in fact the case that the Japanese are any more or less individualistic or collectivist, nor Westerners likewise. Both Japanese and Westerners care to an extent about real others and care more about their horrible intra psychic familiars, but in each case the horror of the familiar must be hidden.

It is only because our familiars, our imaginary friends, are horrible that they can remain hidden and continue to be familiar. Identity is a contradiction that depends upon horror, or sin, on a split that must be felt to be, but not be cognised as being. Identity or self is impossible (nothing can see or say itself) but the dream of its possibility is maintained by desire for, and abhorrence -- and resultant obfuscation -- of the duality required.

In the Western case the necessary, horrible imaginary friend is hidden *inside* the person as an interlocutor that, as inside the person, can only therefore be denied by being claimed to be part of, and one with the self. Eve, that gross "knowing" helper we have, is hidden by virtue of being thought of as just another me (see Levinas vs Derrida and "altrui"). She disappears because, as Adam Smith says, we are just splitting ourselves into two of ourselves. If there is just me and me, then there appears to be nothing disgusting going on. Westerners think, "I think to myself."

But if on the other hand the Other is external, as is required by any visual (self) cognition, there is little way of claiming that the Other is me. Spatial dualism, or rather distance, eye and surface, as required by visual cognition, becomes apparent, and undeniable. So the Japanese claim that all they are doing is being collectivist. The Japanese horrible Other is just another person, one of many other people. The Japanese hide the horror, their familiar, their imaginary friend, in the crowd.

Individualism and collectivism are myths by which means we hide Eve/Amaterasu, a part of our souls, our "helpmeets"or "paraclete" (John's term for Jesus). 

In a similar way to paradox of Japanese morality in which Japanese will not steal your wallet even if you leave it on a table at a restaurant and walk out, but may (or did) charge a kickback doubling or tripling the price, the British will be utterly polite, honest and even humorous as they sell you narcotics and destroy your country, as we did to China for 150 years. Some estimate that the enforced import of opium into China resulted in the deaths of 100 million Chinese, but at least one British academic makes jokes about it .

Paraphrasing Isaiah, those that worship the logos have a tendency to smear over their eyes so that they cannot see, and those that worship idols have a tendency to smear over their hearts so they cannot comprehend.

Bibliography (all available online)
Bird, I. L. (1880). Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels in the Interior Including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrines of Nikkô and Isé. J. Murray.
Cocks, R., & Thompson, E. M. (2010). Diary of Richard Cocks, Cape-Merchant in the English Factory in Japan, 1615–1622: With Correspondence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coleridge, H. J. (1872). The life and letters of St. Francis Xavier : in two volumes. Asian Educational Services.
Golovnin, V. M., Rīkord, P. Ī., & Shishkov, A. S. (1824). Memoirs of a Captivity in Japan, During the Years 1811, 1812, and 1813: With Observations on the Country and the People. H. Colburn and Company.
Liggett, L., Blair, C., & Kennison, S. (2010). Measuring gender differences in attitudes using the lost-letter technique. Journal of Scientific Psychology, 16–24. Retrieved from http://www.psyencelab.com/images/Measuring_Gender_Differences_in_Attitudes_Using_the_Lost-Letter_Technique.pdf
Milgram, S., Mann, L., & Harter, S. (n.d.). The lost-letter technique: A tool of social research. Retrieved from http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/the_lost-letter_technique-_a_tool_of_social_research.pdf
West, M. D. (2003). Losers: recovering lost property in Japan and the United States. Law & Society Review, 37(2), 369–424. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1540-5893.3702007/full

Labels: autoscopy, collectivism, individualism, japanese, japanese culture, Nacalian, nihonbunka, reversal, sex, 日本文化

Labels: autoscopy, blogger, culture, Flickr, japanese, nihonbunka, 日本文化

If you identify with your face as the centre of your persona (Watsuji, 2011), point at it to indicate yourself (Leuers & Sonoda, 1998), then it is not surprising that make up has a very positive effect upon how you are feeling. Moritsuchi et al. (2006) separated female subjects into two groups one of which were given a full make over
by a professional make-up artist, the other who where asked to wait. The latter group showed little change except in a decrease in liveness and increased tiredness. The former group became less stress, less depressed, less angry (less animosity), more lively, less tired, and less confused. It is not surprising that Japan women spend the most per head on cosmetics.

That this spending data has an inverse correlation with well-being says less about how happy Japanese women are, than how those that identify with their self-narrative, rather than their faces, are inclined to think positively, and prevaricate about their level of happiness.

Indeed, in the same experiment (Moritsuchi et al., 2006), the make-up condition start in a state of more negative affect, and overall (bottom graph) while those that wore make up had significantly increased psychological well-being, whereas the control group remained the same, at the same time the made up group reported themselves as less happy than the un-made up group. Bearing in mind how make-up improved their state of mind, this difference is likely to be due to the way in which focus upon improving appearance may make people less inclined to "self-enhance" -- speak bs.

Conversely, pride, or linguistic self-esteem, takes people away from the light as is suggested by the strong correlation between self-esteem (self-bs) and calorie intake and obesity.


Image from page 114-115 in (Moritsuchi et al., 2006)
Morichi, Hirose, Tanaka, and Hisayo 森地恵理子, 広瀬統, 中田悟, & 久世淳子. (2006). メイクアップの心理的効果と生体防御機能に及ぼす影響. 日本福祉大学情報社会科学論集, 9, 111–116. Retrieved from research.n-fukushi.ac.jp/ps/research/usr/db/pdfs/00074-00...
Leuers = Takémoto, T. R. S., & Sonoda, N. (1998, October). 心像的自己に関する比較文化的研究（1） Cross Cultural Research on the Specular Self. Oral Presentation口頭発表 presented at the The 62th Annual Convention of the Japanese Psychologiocal Association English日本心理学第64回大会, Tokyo Gakugei Daigaku. Retrieved from http://nihonbunka.com/docs/shinzoutekijiko1.doc
Watsuji, T. (2011). Mask and Persona. Japan Studies Review, 15, 147–155. Retrieved from asian.fiu.edu/projects-and-grants/japan-studies-review/jo...

Labels: autoscopy, blogger, culture, Flickr, japanese, nihonbunka, 日本文化

Yogo et. al. (1990) found that as women's make-up improved from no make, normal make up to make up provided by a make-up artist, their confidence and satisfaction increased, and their anxiety decreased. This is very much to be expected in a visual soul-as-mirror rather than soul-as-narrative country like Japan. Better make-up and other visual self-presentation in Japan corresponds to better self reports among Westerners and is likely to result in improved confidence and effect.

At the same time however, the pitch of their voice increased. Or because a high pitched voice is an indicator of positive effect like laughter or a smile? Or conversely is this because they were aware that a high pitched voice is desired by others - as suggested by the high pitched voice in which shop assistants and telephone operators are required to speak - and their increased confidence and positive affect allowed them to use that other-wise unpalatable falsetto? Finally, since it is found that Japanese use tone of voice in contradistinction to linguistic content does their higher pitched voice represent a greater emphasis on tone and a further de-emphasising of self-narrative? In any event higher tone of voice, together with thicker make up probably represent a greater identification with female gender stereotypes, which are generally viewed more positively, rather than negatively, in Japan. The Japanese are members of womankind.

Yogo 余語真夫, 浜治世, 津田兼六, 鈴木ゆかり, & 互恵子. (1990). 女性の精神的健康に与える化粧の効用. 健康心理学研究, 3, 28-32.

Labels: autoscopy, blogger, culture, Flickr, japanese, nihonbunka, 日本文化

Oda, Hashimoto, Kashio and Dohi (2003) based upon the theoretical distinction of Hashimoto and Kashio (2003) found that overall Japanese (or at least Japanese mothers) dress up for internal reasons rather than to impress others.

Quoting Yamabe(1993: See Hashimoto and Kashio), Yashimoto and Kashio note that dressing up or primping (oshare) has generally been studied from the perspective of outward appearance, but is in fact also an expression of identity. Hashimoto and Kashio (2003) went on to develop an internal and external dressing up questionnaire and found that the internal aspect of dressing up for oneself is more important than the extrinsic motivation to dress up for others overall, especially in older Japanese.

This is hardly surprising given that the Japanese are especially capable of and chronically inclined to autoscopy through the use of simulated intra-psychic other. Since the Japanese dress up for themselves, for a simulated self-directed gaze rather than real gaze, they pay more attention to underwear. Real others can not see underwear, but a simulated gaze can see inside things, as the Japanese are found to be able to do.

Strangely however, attention to underwear is an item on the both the internal and external motivation to dress up questionnaire, where wearing underwear that does not affect ones outer wear correlates with intrinsically motivated primping but paying attention to the visual design (デザイン） of ones underwear correlates with extrinsically motivated primping.

This implies, rather surprisingly to me, that Japanese wear visually designed underwear, that is popular in Japan, to show to others.

I have translated Hashimoto and Kashio's (2003) questionnaire as the Intrinsics and Extrinsic Primping Questionnaire which is available for download here, or in Japanese at their links below.
取り下げご希望でありましたら、下記のコメント欄かnihonbunka.comのメールリンクからご連絡ください。

橋本幸子 ・柏尾眞津子;日 本社会心理学会第
44会 大会発表論文集,(2003) Retrieved 2015/5/26 www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP1208780887.pdf
尾田貴子, 橋本幸子, 柏尾眞津子, & 土肥伊都子. (2003). おしゃれの二面性に関する研究-被服・化粧行動, 心理的健康との関連. 繊維製品消費科学会誌, 44(11), 700-709. Retrieved 2015/5/26 from www.bunken.org/jssp/conf_archive/paper_download.php?s=200...
山辺知行，日本のおしゃれ（1993），日本経済新聞社.

Labels: autoscopy, blogger, culture, Flickr, japanese, nihonbunka, 日本文化

The modality of self-ing is the one in which reflexivity, such as self-praise, appears to entail no contradiction or duality.

On that day nearly 20 years ago, Yuko Arimori did not praise herself. Perhaps she was aware she could not. She only expressed the desire to do so.

From a Japanese socio-linguistic point of view (Mori, 1999), to be able to praise herself Ms. Arimori would have needed to have become two people.

This is why she used her, now famous phrase "For the first time, I want myself to praise myself ." Hajimete, jibun de jibun wo hometai to omoimasu. 初めて自分で自分をほめたいと思います

Ms. Arimori writes she borrowed the phrase from the poem of a folk singer and marathon runner as explained here in Japanese but in fact her version retains the duality (myself twice, "jibun de jibun wo"), expressed in the original only by the fact that it is addressed to the song's listener "you."

Arimori could no more praise herself than Westerners can see themselves without the aid of a mirror. A duality is required. The Nacalian transformation of Arimori's statement is Narcissus's gaze but that is not to say that Ms. Arimori is a narcissist - far from it. Both express the impossibility of self reference on ones own. And yet, Westerners praise themselves, and Japanese can see themselves without any apparent contradiction.

Mori, A. 森有正. (1999). 森有正エッセー集成〈5〉. 筑摩書房.

The original version of Ms. Arimori's explanation is here

有森　あの言葉を最初に聞いたのは高校のときです。私は高校の三年間ずっと都道府県駅伝で補欠でした。その開会式に高石ともやさんがこられて、読まれた詩にあった言葉です。それを聞いて感極まるものがあって大泣きしたんですよ。
アトランタの練習中、ネガティブになっていたとき、クルーのだれかに「自分で自分をいいと思えばいいじゃないか」といわれて、ふっとその言葉を思い出し たんですね。でもそのときは、「いや、いまは自分で納得できない、ここで自分をほめたら弱くなる、するんだったらレースの後にしたい」と思いました。
I first heard those words when I was a high school student. For the three years of my high school I had always been the reserve team member for the prefectural long distance relay (ekiden). The Tomoya Takaishi (folk singer and runner) came to the opening ceremony, and the phrase was in a poem that he read. I was so moved by his words that I burst into tears. Then, when I was in training for the Atlanta Olympics, and became negative, when one of the crew said "If you think you are okay, then that'll do won't it?" I remembered Tomoya Takaishi's words. But then, I thought, "No, not now. It wouldn't fit. If I praised myself now, I'd get weaker. If I am going to praise myself, I'd like to do it after the race."

The song is here.



Earlier version:

On the occasion winning of her second Olympic marathon medal, a bronze medal at the Atlanta Olympics, Arimori Yuko famously said "I want for the first time to praise myself" before bowing her head in defiance, shame and tears,. Ripples of shock rang out through the Japanese nation.

To a Westerner it is a marvel that this might be the first time she praised herself, and a mystery as to why she might wish to bow, bashfully (?) and cry afterwards. But in Japan the soundbite became famous and even controversial. This is because in Japan it is rare, and not cool to praise oneself. Generally, and in Arimori's case in Barcelona, Japanese sports persons even or especially when they are winners solely praise other people (see the first half of the same video for evidence).

For example the postwar Japanese philosopher, Susumu Iribe (Kobayashi & Irebe, 2004, p42) who believes in linguistic nature of the self and (lacking a linguistic Other) the dependence of the individual upon the socius, criticized Arimori's words as indicating that she was happy just for herself, when he feels that she should have been running for the good of the nation.

In my opinion Japanese sports persons do run for themselves as well as for their nation, but there is something preventing them saying so -- a block to linguistic self-praise. This taboo is parallel, I believe, to the Western rejection of "narcissism" a term which particularly applies to be people who are infatuated with how they look like the hero of the eponymous myth. In either case the resistance to self praise or love in each media is because that media is not perceived to be self, and as such, it involves a duality.


This distinction between enjoying how you look and self-praise may explain the gap between boasting and flattery in Japan. The Japanese are big on flattery, use it liberally and seem even to enjoy it a little. From a Western point of view, anyone vain enough to enjoy flattery would also be likely to indulge in self-praise. But this is not the case. Japanese, like Arimori praise (and perhaps flatter) others liberally, but praise themselves only once in a lifetime. How can this be explained?

If how one looks matters then flattery praises that visual aspect of the self. Self praise on the other hand, praises the narrative subject .

Why can't Japanese linguistically praise their own self-image? I think that to do so would be to introduce a gap between themselves as acting, praising subject, and their self-image, which they generally regard as themselves, except in exceptional circumstances.

This event was one such circumstance. In both occasions when Arimori praises herself there is a duality, a self-to-self gap. In the second more famous instance she does not simply praise herself, as a Western sportsperson might, but used the now famous "For the first time, I want myself to praise myself ." Hajimete, jibun de jibun wo hometai to omoimasu. 初めて自分で自分をほめたいと思います。

In the same interview, three minutes earlier however, the interviewer had suggested it must have been tough running after on her heel, after her recent heel operation. Fending off the interviewer's attempt at flattery, Arimori responded (in what was in fact, her first self/heel praise) "Rather than think about the operation and all that, I was really pleased and grateful to [my heel which] had carried me all this way, and to the start line at the Olympics." Arimori's first self praise (of her heel) in the original was
Kakato no shujutsu no koto yori, koko made sasaete moraeta koto ga sugoto ureshikatta"踵の手術のことより、ここまでささえもらえたことがすごくうれしかった。

Whether Arimori's disembodied state of mind was encouraged simply by the interviewers question, or not I do not know, but I think that at the end of a long hard race, while being videoed on national television, Ms. Arimori was in an unusually disembodied state of mind, which enabled her to praise first her heel, and then a little later herself, "for the first time".

Conversely perhaps, Westerners are in a chronically disembodied state of mind which makes it easier for them to praise themselves.

Image of Yuuko Arimori from 9:03 in this video used without permission.
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Bibliography
小林よしのり、西部邁. (2004). 本日の雑談, Volume 4. 飛鳥新社

Labels: autoscopy, collectivism, culture, image, individualism, japanese culture, nihonbunka, 日本文化

There is a strong tendency even among psychologists, to believe that the visual is presentational and external and therefore not really pyschological in the same way as linguistic thought.

There is no denying that the visual is external. The environment in which we were raised (Mori's fields and mountains), our faces or mask (Watsuji) are on our outsides as well. To say that the visual is psychological is not to deny its exteriority, but to assert the following:

1) One can imagine oneself and world of vision in ones psyche. This is obvious
2) In order to imagine oneself one needs the viewpoint of an Other who is physically external but simulated within the psyche.
3) Language likewise requires an other interluctor, who is external (or should be!) simulated within the self.

I think that the horror that (3) entails - that they are sharing their heads with someone, something else - is so great for atheisits at least, it tends to be rejected, or concealed behind claims of a metaphysical presence of "ideas," or "meanings."

Once one can accept these three assumptions however, it is clear that visual expressions are equally psychological and of self. In this video I introduce the dolls made by my wifes mother to express her aspirations for her granddaughters - things like health, wealth, happiness and a happy marriage - throught the use of graven images. In Japan I believe that these expressions are felt to be "paired-images" (guuzou,偶像) or like words, authenticopies of the aspirations which they represent. These are not worshipped in the same way as a Catholic worships Yahweh, but regarded fondly, important, and sincere. As such I think that they fall under the definition of graven image as defined by the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/para/2113.htm

Labels: autoscopy, cultural psychology, culture, cute, family, japan, japanese culture, kawaii, 日本文化, 自己, 自己視

I wrote recently about the creation myth of Guam. To recap, it goes like this.

Human souls were all slaves in hell but due to a conflagration, one soul managed to escape to Guam where he made a human child out of soften rock and gave it a soul made of the sun. When the king of hell came looking for his lost soul he thought it must be that of the child and tried to bring him back down to hell, but hard as he tried, he could take the child to hell, because its soul was made from the sun.

The creation myth of Guam is almost a paraphrase of that of the Japanese in the Kojiki where it relates that soul of the Japanese is also made from the sun -- the mirror of the sun -- and that the creator of this sun-mirror-soul went to hell - or the underworld - and came back.

Indeed, the deities and heroes of Japanese mythology are always going somewhere rather under-worldly. Susano'o visits the Sun who hides in a cave with hellish consequences. Yamasachi HIko goes down to the kingdom in the sea. But they always manage to come back. And their soul remains, according Heisig's reading of Nishida, visual, self-seeing, in the light, made of the sun. How did the Japanese achieve this?

Consider first the alternative. What is hell or "the underworld." Having at last worked out what Derrida means by "mourning," and what Freud was hinting at by his "acoustic cap," I now realize that hell is that which was nearest and dearest to me, and where in large part I live. Hell is a place where there are dead people. I don't see them, I talk to them. I talk principally to a dead woman, a woman who was never really alive, or even a woman, in my head. This is the essence of the narrative self. Mead calls it a Generalized other, Bakhtin a "super-addressee," Freud the super ego, Lacan (m)other, Adam Smith "the impartial spectator" and I think that the Bible refers to it at first as "Eve." A dead woman to keep you company, for you to get to know, and have relations with. Hell indeed. (There is a Christian solution, that involves replacing the internal interlocutor, with another "of Adam" and, quite understandably, hating on sex.)

So how did the Japanese manage to avoid talking to the dead woman? There are various scenes in the mythology. Izanagi runs throwing down garments which change into food (this chase with dropped objects turning into things that slow down ones attacker is repeated all over the world. I have no idea what it means). And in the next myth cycle, as mentioned recently, the proto-Japanese get the woman to come out of her cave with a sexy dance, a laugh, a mirror and a some zizag pieces of paper to stop her going back in again. In this post I concentrate on the last two, shown in the images above.

The mirror was for her to look at her self. She became convinced it was her self and told the Japanese to worship it as if it was her, which they had done every since, eating her mirror every New Year, until quite recently.
The zigzag pieces of paper have two functions. One in purification rituals where I think they are used to soak up words since the woes of humans are in large part the names given to those woes (e.g. of the proliferation of mental illnesses). As blank pieces of paper are waved over Japanese heads a priest may also chant a prayer about how impurities were written onto little pieces of wood which are used to take all them back to the underworld where they belong.

The other use of zigzag strips is that they can also be used for all the sacred stamped pieces of paper which are used to symbolize identity in Japan, and to encourage the Japanese to realise that words are things in the world - not things that should be in your head. And until recently (Kim, 2002) the Japanese managed to keep the words out of their mirror soul.


But alas it seems to me that the Gates of Hell are opening and the children of the sun are in danger of being sucked back in. How might this be achieved?

The following is the beginning of a recent Japanese journal article (Iwanaga, Kashiwagi, Arayama, Fujioka & Hashimoto, 2013) in my translation (the original is appended below) which, intentionally or not, aims to import Western psychology into Japan.

"As typified by the way in which the phrase "dropouts" (ochikobore) was reported in Japanese newspapers and became a social problem initiated by the report from the national educational research association in 1971, the remaining years of the 1970's saw the symbolic emergence of a variety of educational problems. Thereafter there was an increase in problems such as juvenile delinquency (shounen hikou), school violence (kounaibouryoku), vandalism (kibutsuhason), academic slacking (taigaku), the 1980s saw the arrival of problems such as the increasingly atrocious nature of adolescent crimes including the murder of parents with a metal baseball bat (kinzokubatto ni yoru ryoushin satugaijiken) and the attack and murder of homeless people in Yokohama (furoushashuugekijiken), domestic violence, and bullying, and then in the 1990's the seriousness of educational problems such as the dramatic increase in delinquency (futoukou), dropping out of high school (koukou chuutai), and a series of murders by adolescents steadily increased. "(Iwanaga, Kashiwagi, Arayama, Fujioka & Hashimoto, 2013, p.101)

As you can see the writers are partially aware that all the "problems" that have assailed Japan since the 1970's are in part an "emblematic emergence" or impurities. While some of these problem have worsened in fact, many of them are simply the sort of thing that should be tractable to purification. The Japanese are not for instance assailed by an increase in adolescent crime which as Youro (2003) in his book "the Wall of Foolishness" points out, has decreased and become less violent post war in Japan.

The Japanese are assailed by a variety of emblems - names of problems - which nonetheless cause real suffering.

If it were only this plague of names of social ailments swarming out of hell, then I think that the Japanese would be
fairly safe. The problem is that the above paper, Japanese Education Department, and a great many Japanese clinical psychologists and educators, are offering the Japanese the infernal equivalent of the mirror: self-esteem, a dialogue with the dead woman that allows one to enjoy "mourning," telling oneself for instance, that one is beautiful as one stuffs one's face. The title of the paper (Iwanaga, Kashiwagi, Arayama, Fujioka & Hashimoto, 2013) is "Research on the Determining Factors of the Present State of Childrens' Self-esteem," in which the authors blame the lack of Japanese self-esteem -- the Japanese hardly sext themselves at all-- on the emergence of all the social ailments. What fiendish genius: the cause is being represented as a cure! The Japanese may indeed be dragged back in.

Note Opening paragraph of (Iwanaga, Kashiwagi, Arayama, Fujioka & Hashimoto, 2013) in the original
1971年に出された全国教育研究所連盟の報告書(1を契機として，「落ちこぼれ」という言葉が新聞で報道され，社会問題化したことに象徴的に現れているように，1970年代以降，わが国においては教育問題が顕在化することになる．その後，少年非行，校内暴力，器物破損，怠学へと問題は拡散し，80年代には金属バットによる両親殺害事件，浮浪者襲撃事件など青少年犯罪の凶悪化が問題視され，家庭内暴力，いじめ問題が，そして90年代にはいると不登校の急増，高校の中途退学問題，連続的に起こった青少年の殺人事件など，教育問題は深刻さを増していく

Bibliography
Iwanaga, S., Kashiwagi, T., Arayama, A., Fujioka Y., & Hashimoto, H. 岩永定, 柏木智子, 芝山明義, 藤岡泰子, & 橋本洋治. (2013). 子どもの自己肯定意識の実態とその規定要因に関する研究. Retrieved from reposit.lib.kumamoto-
Yourou T. 養老孟司. (2003). バカの壁. 新潮社. Retrieved from 218.219.153.210/jsk02/jsk03_toshin_v1.pdf

Image bottom
お祓い串 by Una Pan, on Flickr

Labels: autoscopy, japan, japanese culture, nihonbunka, psychology, religion, reversal, self, sex, Shinto, specular, 宗教, 日本文化, 自己, 自己視

This video shows the the view over Yamaguchi City from Elephant Head Mountain at the entrance to Oouchi Mihori area of Yamaguchi City. You can climb this mountain from the rear of Toushiro Tea Shop opposite Yellow Hat and Uniqlo in Oouchi Mihori, or from the rear of Itukushima Shrine next to Shinwaniishibashi junction with the four legged pedestrian overpass. There car parks the beginning of both paths. The path from the shrine is wooded and natural. The path from behind the tea shop is made of concrete.

In this video I argue that Japanese people tend to avoid places with good panoramic views since they associate them with the divine which, in the Japanese case, visually spectates rather than listens. The Japanese simulate birds eye views of themselves and their situations in their minds but since this Other is that which allows them to have a self they also hide from themselves that they are doing this 'impartial spectating' (Smith, 1759). As a result of which, while the Japanese are happy and inclined to create imaginative artworks, such as pictures of the floating world and childrens' paintings, from the point of view of the birds eye view (Masuda, Gonzalez, Kwan, & Nisbett, 2008), the Japanese do not actually want to go there, to the dreaded viewing platform.

Often times Japanese are even unaware that viewpoints exist in reality. One of my colleagues was of the opinion that there is nowhere from where our town could be viewed, but in addition to this viewing platform, I live on a mountain or hill of 118m, which taller than the viewing platform shown in this video, at a mere 85m, right in the centre of Yamaguchi City overlooking both the older part of the city and the Hot Spa area. The under-utilization of Japanese viewpoints represents a tremendous potential tourism industry.

The the birds eye viewpoint is an abject place, a terrifying location that should not exist since it always exists as hidden simulation. In Japanese Horror monstresses (a neologism I use because generally Japanese monsters are female) often hang out on ceilings, looking down, or emerge from mirrors and other images. They also hang out on mountain tops as mountain aunties (yamanba).

There should be a Western equivalent of this phenomenon "Nacalianly" transformed from the visual into the linguistic. As a Westerner I should have a horror of "going" to the place where I can 'impartially' hear myself speak, the equivalent of the Japanese birds eye view. But, logophonic "places" are not really "places," but discursive 'viewpoints' or logical 'positions' (ronten 論点 not shiten 視点), so I was (until I am writing this now) confused as to where the "real" equivalent of the "impartial spectator" that I simulate in my mind might be situated in the world. Where is the linguistic version of a mountain top? Where am I scared to go?

I hypothesize now that the place that I am scared of visiting is "the text," or a particular type of text that is addressed to no one in particular. I can write a blog, here, since I imagine that I am speaking to someone, that this burogu is a dialogue with a real other. But as soon as I attempt to write, objectively, for publication, I face "The Problem of the Text" (Bakhtin, 1986) and the absence of a dialogical other and must confront -- or not confront by not writing -- my super-addressee: a monster in my mind. In fact, as I attempt to write, I often find myself going to look at visual views, especially that from the balcony at the end of my fourth floor corridor at Yamaguchi University, perhaps in order to escape *the horror of linguistic impartial spectation*.

This realisation may make it easier for me to write. Perhaps I should write on top of mountains.

Viewing platform in Google Earth
https://goo.gl/maps/SocFV
Viewing platform  in Google Maps
https://goo.gl/maps/SqQXt

Bibliography
Bakhtin, M. (1986). The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 103-31.
Masuda, T., Gonzalez, R., Kwan, L., & Nisbett, R. E. (2008). Culture and aesthetic preference: Comparing the attention to context of East Asians and Americans. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(9), 1260-1275.
Smith, A. (1759). Theory of Moral Sentiments. Retrieved 2015/03/26 from http://www.ibiblio.org/ml/libri/s/SmithA_MoralSentiments_p.pdf

Labels: autoscopy, japan, japanese culture, Nacalian, theory, 日本文化, 自己視, 観光

Children and adults can make curved jewels at the Yoshinogari museum of ancient Japanese culture in Saga (吉野ヶ里歴史公園) for about 2USD a jewel. My children enjoyed making one each this weekend.

Curved jewels (magatama) are one of the few things mentioned in Japanese mythology that are also found in reality.

As 'transitional object' in both myth and reality, they form one of the three sacred items symbolic of the Japanese imperial lineage the other two being a mirror, of the Sun Goddess, and the sword, that was found inside the tail of a multi-headed snake.

In Japanese mythology, the Sun Goddess is wearing a necklace of curved jewels when she meets her brother Susano who takes some of these jewels, puts them into his mouth, chews (onomatopoeically "kami-kami") them to bits and spits them out into the 'central well of heaven' to create other gods (kami) and imperial ancestors.

This act continues the Japanese mythological theme of "creation via dripping" often onto a reflective surface. The creative act of chewing symbols and spitting them out onto a mirror making the noise of what one is making ("kami" or deities), struck me as being a pagan expression of creation via the word - we speak to internalised other in the mirror of our mind, thereby making the world, speciated, en-wordified.

In Japanese mythology this act of creation, however, ends in disaster. Susano commits all manner of "sins" and his sister the Sun Goddess is lost to the world, since she hides in her cave. When the sun goddess has hidden in her cave, Amenouzume (lit "the headdress wearing woman of heaven) the founder of Japanese masked theatre (and I believe Susano in drag) wears a special headdress including curved jewels, to encourage the sun goddess to come back out of her cave by performing an erotic dance on top of a drum which made all present laugh, which encourages the Sun Goddess to come out of her cave again.

[My interpretation is that this is Susano attempting to return from the hell of the narrative self, by enacting it as an erotic solo, transsexual, auditory - hence the drum - dance to achieve enlightenment through satire and humour. Derrida represents the tragedy in a book of self addressed loving, erotic postcards. Japanese mythology and dance is more behavioural. ]

The curved jewels are said to have first have been made by deity by the name of "Parent of the Jewels" whose shrine is about 20 km from where I live in Yamaguchi Prefecture near Hōfu City (Tamanooya Jinja　玉祖神社).

This brings me to the occurrence of curved jewels in reality. They are found widely in ancient Japanese Joumon (lit. "string pattern" [pottery]) archaeological sites and in ancient burial mounds and in ancient archaeological royal sites from Korea.

The Japanese claim that the curved jewels spread from Japan to Korea, whereas Koreans claim that they spread from Korea to Japan. In Korea they are called gogok or comma shaped jewels and are found paired with mirrors on the regalia of Korean Kings in decidedly ear shaped forms, hanging from a tree shaped crown (similar that worn by Ameno-Uzume, the head-dress-woman, my "Sunsano in drag").

The fact that they hang from a tree has suggested that they represent a fruit.

[A fruit reminds me of Adam's apple, which gets stuck in our throat. I would also be inclined to suggest that the tree crown may also have had a practical purposes as a primitive "selfie-stick" to enable its wearer to see himself reflected, and echoed, in mirrors and jewels, there dangling.]

There are several other theories as to the significance of the shape of curved or comma jewels, all of the following from Wikipedia.
The shape of an animal tusk
The shape of the moon
The shape of a two or three part tomoe (as represented in the above image top row)
The shape of the moon
The shape of the soul
The shape of ear decorations

I had liked the part tomoe (Taoist and Shinto symbol) interpretation, for no good reason, but the ear decoration theory is more persuasive.

According to recent research (Suzuki, 2006) on curved jewels unearthed in Korea and Japan, curved jewels are found alongside "nearly circular ear jewellery split into two halves. The visual evidence for ear jewellery as the origin of curved jewels appears to be strong (see the above link and bottom left in the above image).

This interpretation does not conflict with the tomoe or soul interpretation. Various scholars (Mead, Bakhtin, Freud, Lacan, Derrida) claim that the self is dependent upon the assumption of an ear into the psyche. As such, a fitting together (either as a circle or tomoe) ear-shaped or ear-associated jewel may have represented a transitional, partial-self-object.

It is known that mirrors were given to others as remembrance tokens or keepsakes by the ancient Japanese from poems in the Book of Ten Thousand Leaves (manyoushuu). Looking at a mirror presented by a loved one, one might feel their gaze. Hearing the sound of the clinking of a curved jewel, made from the earring of ones mother or girlfriend, one might imagine the attention of their loving ear.

I have also claimed that headless deformed Venus figurines, including ancient Japanese dogu and and ancient Jewish Ishtar idols, may have represented the represented part of an autoscopic visual self. 'The ancients' may have known more about the parts from which the self is created, or at least been more fully aware that the self is created from parts. Moderns may have become more prudish, and lost our sense of humour.

In Japanese mythology, when Susano chewed the Sun Goddesses' curved jewels and spat them out into a reflective surface (in which he may have been reflected as his sister, I claim), she took his sword and chewed it and spat it out likewise into the well of heaven. The curved jewels therefore form a pair with swords. In a myth parallel to that in which the sword (Kusanagi no Tsurugi) was found in the tail of a snake, the sword is associated with the naming of its owner. Indeed it could be argued that the sword that Susano finds in the snake is his symbolic self-representation. If jewels represent internalised ears, then it would be appropriate that they be paired with swords as self symbols or names. Mirrors can represent the perspective/gaze, and the transitional, part-self image that is gazed at, and the world-heart in which it takes place.

It seems to me that my self-narrative and any internal ear take place on or in the mirror of my consciousness which sees as it is seen.

In China, "nearly circular" earrings (I thought that they were "butt" shaped earrings in an earlier version of this post!) are sometimes represented as a snake or dragon biting its own tail. Out out damn butt (! I jest, ketsu, 玦) snake! My self narrative is gay.

That in Japan the "incomplete circle" 玦 "pig dragon" earrings are broken into two, and worn as necklaces seems to me to represent the way in which language and the linguistic self in Japan does not form an "incomplete circle," completed by the reality of the ear or face, nor go around in Japanese people's minds but is broken. The linguistic self, the "I" of the cogito, is in Japan, as Mori claims, broken, a "you for you."

Under this reading, the myths of Susano - with his sister and in Izumo - are about how one form of selfing defeated another: in Japan the paradoxical circle of light defeated the incomplete snake circle of speaking. Or paraphrasing the myth from Guam, some humans managed to escape from hell to live in the light of the sun, without physically or imaginatively nailing themselves to a tree.

Perhaps I should dress up in drag and dance in front of a mirror. I did in fact recommend dancing in front of a mirror to a schizophrenic many years ago. That patient showed remarkable but only temporary improvement.



Images
http://shiga-bunkazai.jp/%E8%AA%BF%E6%9F%BB%E5%93%A1%E3%81%AE%E3%81%8A%E3%81%99%E3%81%99%E3%82%81%E3%81%AE%E9%80%B8%E5%93%81%E3%80%80no-84/

Suzuki, K. 鈴木克彦 (2006) "縄文勾玉の起源に関する考証."『玉文化』3号.

Labels: autoscopy, cultural psychology, culture, image, japan, japanese culture, Jaques Lacan, mirror, religion, 宗教, 文化心理学, 日本文化, 自己, 自己視