J a p a n e s e    C u l t u r e

The image above is part of an advert by a company offering VHS (etc) analogue tape to DVD dubbing services. People send their tapes and photograph albums to the company, which converts the analogue formats to digital and sends the data back to the customers in DVD form.

But what happens to the video tape itself? Should it just go in the trash? What happens if the video tape is of someone deceased? This Japanese company offers an additional service, in the case of one video tape at twice the price of the dubbing itself, funereal mourning rites, at an affiliated Buddhist temple. Customers pay for about $30 USD for a Buddhist priest to chant Buddhist prayers over up to twenty of their VHS video tapes, several times, before eventually disposing of them.

This question would not occur to a Westerner. But in Japan there is a far greater reticence towards destroying visual representations of people since these visual representations are far closer to the persons videoed. Similarly, for example there are also funereal rites for dolls in Japan because dolls are far more felt to have had lives.

So, is there a Nacalian transformation? Do Westerners pay our respects towards diaries, or voice recordings, especially of the dead, for instance?

Funeral rites for visual representations of persons (real or otherwise) may suggests a desire for visual representations of persons to live on - to go to a pictorial heaven as it were, where images live forever in an eternal light.

While I am unaware of a direct transformation, where Westerners pay respect to the linguistic representations of the dead, while they are alive it is found that at least Westerner strive towards 'symbolic immortality,' in the face of "mortality salience" - being required to think about their own death.

When required to think about their death, humans -- or at least Westerners -- attempt to live on in their narratives. The question as to whether Asians attempt to achieve "symbolic immortality" is controversial. Heine, Harihara, and Niiya (2002) found that Japanese do. Kashima, Halloran, Yuki, and Kashima (2004) found that mortality salience produced different effects in Japanese and Westerners. Yen & Cheng (2010) found that Taiwanese do not. Ma-Kellams and Blascovich (2012) found that Asians do other things in the face of death: rather than focus upon symbolic immortality they attempt to enjoy life more.

I hypothesise that Japanese would aim not for symbolic immortality but for vision-imaginable immortality. In the real world this may translate to the attempt to enjoy that picture book which is life more, or leave descendants that they can watch and protect forever. In the lab I hypothesise that Japanese will draw more positive "jimanga" (Takemoto, 2017) (prideful auto portraiture) should they be required to think about their death.

Heine, S. J., Harihara, M., & Niiya, Y. (2002). Terror management in Japan. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 5(3), 187–196. Retrieved from
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-839X.00103/full
Kashima, E. S., Halloran, M., Yuki, M., & Kashima, Y. (2004). The effects of personal and collective mortality salience on individualism: Comparing Australians and Japanese with higher and lower self-esteem. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40(3), 384–392.
http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2003.07.007
Ma-Kellams, C., & Blascovich, J. (2012). Enjoying life in the face of death: East–West differences in responses to mortality salience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(5), 773–786. http://doi.org/10.1037/a0029366
Yen, C.-L., & Cheng, C.-P. (2010). Terror management among Taiwanese: Worldview defence or resigning to fate? Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 13(3), 185–194.
http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-839X.2010.01328.x
武本, Timothy. (2017). ジマンガ：日本人の心像的自尊心を測る試み(Auto-Manga as Prideful-Pictures: An Attempt to Measure Japanese Mental Image Self-Esteem). 山口経済学雑誌= Yamaguchi Journal of Economics, Business Administrations & Laws, 65(6), 351–382. http://nihonbunka.com/docs/Jimanga.pdf

Labels: buddhism, culture, image, japan, japanese culture, nihonbunka, 日本文化, 自己, 自己視

When Japanese play sports they make meaningless noises, most famously the kiai shout of karate. Various meaningless shouts and calls are used by Japanese sports persons of all types, from tennis to (in this video) little league baseball. Sports persons are taught to throw out their voice (koe wo dasu) in order that they concentrate. Why?

Heejun Kim (2005) has demonstrated that while Westerners perform marginally better at task when they are required to vocalise their thoughts, when East Asians are required to "vocalise their thoughts" they perform significantly worse because Japanese thoughts are not in language. Conversely, when Westerners are required to make meaningless vocalisations they become significantly worse at a task since it prevents their thoughts, whereas it negatively impacts upon East Asians very little.

It seems clear that making meaningless vocalisations can in fact improve performance among Japanese, such as those playing baseball in this video, since (I argue) these meaningless vocalisations clear the mind of linguistic thought and allows the players to concentrate upon their Japanese-style-thoughts, which I argue are visual.

The throwing out of the voice or destruction of the logos is a common theme in Japanese culture especially Buddhism where people chant the name of the Buddha, count breathes, or simply and directly attempt to silence the mind. I argue that the central ritual act performed at Japanese Shinto Shrines, that of "harai" literally sweeping away, or purification by waving zigzag strips of pure white paper overy people's heads, is also intended to exorcise the mind of the dreaded logos.

Bibliography
Kim, H. S. (2005). We talk, therefore we think? A cultural analysis of the effect of talking on thinking. Social Cognition: Key Readings, 63.http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/labs/kim/kim_2002.pdf

Labels: buddhism, culture, japan, japanese culture, logos, Nacalian, nihonbunka, Shinto, 日本文化, 神道, 自己視

While agreeing with the layering "vortex" of images in Ezra Pound's interpretation of haiku, I go further to propose a deliberate subversion of interpretation by the use of layered optical or aural images to produce an "interpretive illusion" from which the reader is freed. In haiku poetry, the reader is fed three images, one of which is shown to have been a product of interpretation - the dreaded sign - and thus the reader is returned to the veracity of the image and the purity of the experience. Haiku, in their own small way, encourage us to experience this purity - a minuscule satori, enlightenment - by suddenly divesting us of the misinterpretation that they encouraged in the first place.

Here are some specific examples from the first few in this net selection of 100 famous Haiku (in Japanese).

As already discussed possibly the most famous Haiku is
古池や蛙飛び込む水の音
Furuikeya, Kawazu tobikomu, Mizu no oto
An old pond, frogs jump in, the sound of the water.
We are presented with a view of an old, and presumably over-grown, murky pond. The poet then assumes that a frog, or many frogs, have (probably) jumped into the water. This second phrase - frogs jump in - is pure interpretation. In the third phrase we are reminded, in quite shocking fashion, the grounds for second assumption: the sound of the water. The poet had provided an interpretation - that frogs had jumped in - and then shown it for what it was. All that has occurred in truth, in the immediate purity of the experience, was a view of a pond, and the sound of the water. From the image, the frogs -- dread signs that they were -- completely disappear, for they were never there in the first place. Plop!

In the poem
さみだれを集めて早し最上川,
May rain, Collected quick Mogami River,
is quite straightforward in telling us that there may not be any rain at all, only the river which has collected the rain and is running rapidly. The way in which the "quick" falls between the second and third phrase, at first appearing adverbial (to mean fast collection) but finally we realise is probably adjectival referring to the fast river, adds to the switchback, satorific, "vortex" of the poem. Bashou was looking at the river all along, but took us to an interpretation, which while in part true, was not the reality of his experience: a view of a river. As a Buddhist Bashou would not have needed Heraclitus to remind him that a river is all we are ever looking it, though we see so many things collected in it.

閑さや岩にしみ入る蝉の声
Shizukesaya, Iwa ni shimi-iru, Semi no koe
Silence Soaks into the Rocks Sound (or, rather, voice) of Cicadas,
Here it is all too clear that the initial "silence" is not silence at all. It is an interpretation of the monotonous summer sound-scape, the deafening (you need to listen to this if you have not lived in Japan) truth of which we are returned to in the last phrase.

Looking at a field of summer grass, at the site of a once great military castle in Hiraizumi, Bashou writes
夏草や　兵共が　夢の跡
Natsukusaya, Tsuwamono-domo ga, Yume no ato
Summer Grass 　Soldiers(') Remains of dreams
The usual interpretation is that the summer grass is all that is left of the the once lofty aspirations of the soldiers. I think that this interpretation is correct, but there is also another. The "ga" (が) or apostrophe (') in my translation can be read as linking word meaning that the dreams are of or possessed by the soldiers. But it also can be read as a subject marker, which is not used in English, hence the apostrophe is in brackets. Taking the "ga" to be a subject marker the final clause comes as a shock because instead of the soldiers being active subjects, or there present, we see that only their field of dreams remain. Further, almost as if the solders have been killed in the middle of the poem, it seems to me, gazing at the field, Bashou himself let his imagination run free, so the "dreams" are not only those of the soldiers but also the dreams Bashou himself who imagined (dreamt) the soldiers. Indeed the summer grass itself may have looked like legions of soldiers. In strong support of this hypothesis is the fact that Bashou wrote the word "kusa" or grass with the non-standard (even for Bashou, even in the same book) ideogram "艸" (Matuso, 1997, pX) which looks a little like soldiers standing in a line. I.e. Bashou realises, and makes us realise, that he has dreamed up solders from his image of the grass, to the truth of which he returns us. Like all the best haiku however, the poem has no incontrovertible interpretation. Basho could be talking about the dreams of the soldiers, or his own dream of soldiers, but we do know, all he sees is a field of grass. Bearing in mind the fact that Basho deliberately edits his poems for poetic effect, I would not be surprised if he thought this one up well before arriving in "the deep north." In any event, it was well worth the journey.

The usual interpretation of
荒海や佐渡に横たふ天の川
Araumiya, Sado ni Yokotau, Amanogawa
Routh Sea, Lies down in Sado, The milky way.
is that Basho is seeing the milky way above the rough waters around the island of Sado but to me the first phrase "荒海" is an optical illusion. First of all, from the historic record, and the fact that Bashou uses the word "milky way" this poem was written on the night of the festival of the Weaver stars who are said to cross the milky way to meat each other on 7th of July. This is the first hint to me that something is amiss. Despite adding this "season word," it would be a a little unseasonal for the sea to be rough on a summer night (though an early typhoon is not an impossibility). Secondly, while there are various interpretations of "lies down," taking a straight forward one, it suggests that rather being over the sea, the milky way is on the surface of the water. The natural explanation for this would be that the mily way is being reflected in the sea, a beautiful image appropriate for the romantic festival night. This would further suggest that the sea was flat, for the starts to be reflected, and therefore that the "rough sea" was an optical illusion created by the white light of the stars brilliantly reflected in the water's surface. What initially Bashou saw as white waves, turned out to be the light of stars lying on the water. Again we are fed a plausible misinterpretation to be returned to the truth of the image.

明けぼのやしら魚しろきこと一寸　
Akebonoya, Shiraushirokikotoisun
Dawn! white fish, its whiteness one inch (or very briefly)
This poem was originally "雪薄し”or thin snow which Bashou changed to dawn, in my view because the optical illusion of seeing thin snow as a white fish was a bit too obvious. In other words the poem started out as an optical illusion where the poet claimed/thought he saw snow before realising it was the flash of a white fish in the water, to the optical illusion of thinking one has seen the first rays of sun on the sea, which turned out to be the flash of white fish. In either case the reader is taken from a misinterpretation to the purity of the image. The substitution of "dawn" for "thin snow" - which both might produce flashes of light - shows the deliberate way in which Bashou sets the reader up. What a trickster.

The excellent poem (which I read now for the first time)
この道や行く人なしに秋の暮
Konomichi Ikuhitonashini Akinokure
This road, no one goes along it, late autumn,
was written shortly before Bashou's death at an inn, when he had already fallen terminally ill. The road in question is thought to refer to the poetic path that Bashou had walked throughout his life. The lack of a road goer or goers is usually interpreted to refer to the solitude of the poetic path, but it may also refer to the breakdown of the ultimate illusion: the poets own absence as realised near death, "late autumn." If so then it is more upbeat than usually interpreted, as it implies a lack of fear of death, since Bashou feels himself absent from his own "road" already. Bashou is so cool.

Skipping the two poems related to death, and moving on to Buson
菜の花や月は東に日は西に
Nanoyanaya Tsukihahigashini, Hiha nishi ni
Field mustard (flowers), The moon is in the East, The sun in the West
This poem at first confused me since it could so easily have created an obvious interpretive illusion and return to the truth of the image (the pure experience), by reversing the order of the last two lines. Let me explain. Since the moon is unlikely to produce an affect on Buson's field of vision when behind him, I presume Buson is looking East at the moon over a field of mustard flowers, that are illuminated by the setting sun behind him in the West. In other words it would seem that the poem proceed towards interpretation rather than towards the pure image; The poet sees flowers, sees the moon, and interprets that the sun must be behind him.

Had Buson written instead
菜の花や日は西に月は東に
Field mustard (flowers), Sun in the West, Moon in the East
Then the second line would have created in the reader the impression that the poet was watching the setting sun, but with the final line the reader would be returned to the pure experience, with the realisation that the poet is in fact looking at the moon, and the second line regarding the sun was an interpretation of the setting sunlight falling on the flowers.

However, upon reflection and thinking more deeply regarding the direction that Buson was looking, it is important to ask whether he was looking at the son or the moon. Googling images related to this poem shows views facing both the moon and the setting sun. We are told that this poem was written on Mount Maya in the Rokkou range of mountains overlooking the Koube bay. The field mustard flowers were presumably on the bay (rather than mountainous) side. Since the Koube bay lies to the West of Mount Maya, this suggests that Buson was looking West at the setting sun. In other words, the second line regarding the moon, was an interpretation, based upon the time of day: sunset. The poem does indeed proceeds from image (the flowers) to interpretation, 'the moon (must be) in the East' to the return to purity of the experience, the setting sun in the West.

Reconsidering once again, however, since there is a plain to the East of [the very appropriately named, and conceivably deliberately chosen] Mt Maya, this poem is, like many of those above, left in interpretive abeyance. We know that Buson was looking at a something big and bright above a field of flowers. We know that he can not have been looking at towards both the East and the West, but we do not know in which direction he is looking. No definitive, incontrovertible interpretation is possible. We are left only with the visual experience: the sphere of light above a yellow field. Wow. Buson is very cool too.

Bibliography
Matsuo, B 松尾芭蕉. (1997). 芭蕉自筆奥の細道. (上野洋三 & 桜井武次郎, Eds.). 岩波書店.

Labels: buddhism, japan, japanese culture, Nacalian, nature, nihonbunka, occularcentrism, specular, 日本文化, 自然

The biggest contradiction facing the gambler is the obvious fact -- bearing in mind the luxury of gambling establishments -- that the house on average wins. In her seminal paper on gambling, Langer (1978) argues that gamblers have an "illusion of control". They believe that they can beat the odds, and come out above average. If they did not have some sort of illusion then they would not even enter the casino or pachinko hall in the first place.

I think that "illusion of control" can be unpacked in the following way
1) The essential illusion that "I am not an average player. I can beat the odds."
2) That one has a method of beating the odds.

As argued in previous posts it seems to me that (2) has a cultural aspect along the lines of
2.1) The illusion that one can make superior choices.
2.2) The illusion that one can persevere more, rely on ones konjo.

To relate this cultural difference to the overall message of this blog (Nacalianism), I argue that we westerners have illusions about our linguistic thoughts to ourselves, our self-narrative, our 'hearing ourselves speak' (Derrida, 1976). When Westerners think that their choices are better than average, that they can "choose" better numbers on the roulette wheel, they are betting on their internal voice: "This time it is going to be a six," "This time it is going to come up red." "Choice" and verbalisation are, I believe, inextricably linked. Choice is an act of meaning (Stevens, Markus, & Townsend, 2007). Westerners gamblers believe that their words will express the world.

The Japanese do not have any unrealistic expectations about their self-narrative but they do have a similar illusion about what they see and imagine. Japanese style perseverance is seeing a task through to the end. As they look at the pachinko machine, and merge with it as if looking at a Mandala (top right) they think that their imagines and expectations will come true.

The Western linguistic gambler ignores the sights that he sees, and holds onto the notion that his words will come true.

The imaginative gambler ignores the linguistic notions of odds but believes that his visualisation will come true. He negates the linguistic self. He becomes one with with the pachinko machine, and believes that his view will conform to his imagination.

Pachinko machines resemble Buddhist mandalas (top left). They invite the player to realise that the visual world and the self are contradictorily the same (Nishida: see Heisig, 2004).

Roulette tables invite the player to think that the linguistic (34, 33, even) outcomes are the same as the linguistic pronouncements in the mind.

Images
Top left:Tawang Monastery Doorway Mandala by D Momaya. Creative Commons, share alike.
Top right: Pachinko by psd
Bottom:A Nightcap by priskiller. Creative Commons, share alike.

Bibliography
Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore.
Langer, E. J. (1975). The illusion of control. Journal of personality and social psychology, 32(2), 311.
Heisig, J. W. (2004). Nishida’s medieval bent. Japanese journal of religious studies, 55–72. nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/publications/jjrs/pdf/674.pdf
Stephens, N. M., Markus, H. R., & Townsend, S. S. (2007). Choice as an act of meaning: the case of social class. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 814.

Labels: buddhism, economics, image, japan, japanese culture, Jaques Lacan, Nacalian, nihonbunka, reversal, theory, 日本文化

On the day after the death of his wife of some thirty years, Kitaro Nishida, probably the most famous Japanese philosopher and by then an old man, wrote a poem which went something like this (from memory),

The plant on my window ledge
That I planted last autumn
Will bloom in spring
But there will be no body there
To see it

This is, literally, too sad! I will come back to this point at the end.

Yesterday I attempted to read two excellent articles by James Heisig, (Heisig, 2004 and 2010, both online) the renowned author of two of the most famous books for students of Japanese, "Learning the Kanji," and professor of philosophy at the Nanzan Institute of Religion and Culture. I am of course academically a million miles away, and yet I feel jealous. Fortunately, I was consoled by the fact that 'there is always someone above the person above' as they say in Japan, and in this case, that would be the subject of these two papers: Nishida Kitaro. Both papers were very interesting, very good introductions to Nishida but rather critical.

In the first, (Heisig, 2004) after expressing his doubts regarding the confidence with which Nishida expressed his ideas, professor Heisig likens Nishida's thought to medieval European mysticism, a genre of thought that he seems to feel is something from which we need to move on.

Heisig writes, "If I had to focus these general impressions on a single idea running through Nishida’s writings, it would be his almost superstitious belief in the fundamental unity of consciousness and reality: a belief never questioned, never proved, never even argued, and yet never very far from his mind. "

Heisig claims that like medieval European thinkers, such as Eckhart and Cusanus, Nishida located the infinite in the finite world, in the experience of a sphere without edges, a single world, or mental mirror, both terms given in the Latin of medieval scholars, ”unus mundus” and ”speculum mentis” respectively. Secondly Nishida finds a unity in the “identity of absolute contradictories,” which is shared by medieval philosophers though in a different way, the latter by appeal to an infinite god. Finally Heisig questions the purity of Nishida's pure experience, wondering I think whether from with the god of the medieval mystics it has yet to be distilled. Wow. I did not really understand, or agree, but I was very impressed.

Following on from this, I feel, in the second paper Heisig questions how Nishida's place, referred to several times as a mirror, can act as a unifying principle rather than the the 'blooming buzzing confusion' found in William James. Heisig complains (quite rightly in a way I think) about the lack of scent or smell in Nishida's 'place' despite the fact that it is found in Zeami's notion of "flower" which grows from the same Buddhist ground. Heisig finds Nishida's logic of place which "relies throughout on images of space and sight" (p.), "thanks the primacy given [to the] sense of sight."(p.)

I am just loving Heisig's version of Nishida and agree with everything that I understand, except the rather harsh criticism. I am looking forward to reading lots more Nishida. I was inspired to make a picture of a blooming, buzzing confusion, superimposed with Zeami's Kanji for flower, which I have called flower-place. I think that Heisig was spot on to point out the parallel between Zeami's flower, Nishida's place, and that both have something to do with an appreciation of Kanji - which Heisig has in abundance.

When reading the second paper, I was kind of trembling with excitement (!) because I thought that Heisig would come to the same conclusion as my own: that the unifying principle in Nishida's logic basho is indeed supplied by Zeami in riken no ken(Yusa, 1987), or the ability to see oneself. Zeami claimed that practising Noh allowed the actor to see himself from the perspective of the audience. In Heisig's discussion of Nishida's "mirror" it comes across as all blooming, and confusing, but perhaps that is to forget that Nishida's place is a flower-place: the sort of "mental mirror" that no only reflects but is seen, and means something.

Returning to the blooming confusion of William James, the Western answer to the provision of unity to the experience is as provided by Mead(1967), through the action of the rational intellect, or more precisely through speech. Speech enables us to express ourselves and hear, and understand, that which we express from the point of view of others, and thus to have meaning. Meaning is found in this our ability to hear from the point of view of others, ever more universal, in the sound box of our mind. Mead rejected the idea that humans could reflect visually without the aid of a mirror, and says that such visual introspection, and meaning making is limited to actors.

"Is is only the actor who uses bodily expressions as a means of looking as he wants others to feel. He gets a response which reveals to him how he looks by continually using a mirror. He registers anger, he registers love, he registers this that or the other attitude and he examines himself in a glass to see how he does so." Mead, 1987, p66-67)

In my own very limited research (Heine, Takemoto, Moskalenko, Lasaleta, & Henrich, 2008) we have shown that that the ability to see oneself is not limited to actors, Noh or otherwise, but to Japanese in general. A seminar student found that this ability was particularly prevalent among those who had mastered a Japanese martial art.

Many Western semioticians and linguists (Barthes, 1977; DeFrancis, 1989; McDonald, 2009; Unger, 1990) however, are quite categorical or even vehement in their dismissal of meaning in vision. They claim that for any meaning that is more than rudimentary, visual meanings have to be pass through the vector of spoken words. This debate has become positively passionate (see Lurie, 2006) in the field of sinology on the part of those that critique the "ideographic myth" (see Hansen, 1993).

In the Chinese language each Kanji has a different sound, so the phono-centric myth is more plausible. Japanese is perhaps alone in using Kanji alongside multiple readings. I do not know how Zeami pronounced the Kanji in the image above, "ka" or "hana," and I don't say either when I see it, but I do know that he used it to mean something like the background of the image. So when sinologists like DeFrancis (1989) claim that it visual meaning is "unthinkable," what I think that they mean is that they can not think see those characters from the viewpoint of another, and can not integrate them with the phonetic medium of their thought, their selfing (McAdams, 1997). For those in this mode of self, there can be no meaning, and no unifying principle in the visual.

It is this ability to simulate the consciousness of another that allows one to mean to oneself and create a self for oneself. At the limit the self may be expunged, but the ability to see or understand, the God part of the equation, is only subsequently expunged.

The important point is that it comes with practice. Language does not come with a mirror built into it, and nor are Japanese born with a mirror in their heads. Westerners learn to "express themselves," define their objectives, debate, and think objectively by thinking about how others would hear their expressions, definitions and oration. Japanese people, through different kinds of practice and attention learn to see from the eyes of the world. These different types of practice give rise to different types of unifying ability, different kinds of "God." Not that the Japanese do "God" exactly. In Japan the notion of God is more often replaced especially these days with the notion of loving 'ancestors' those by whom we have been predeceased.

I like to think that in a way Nishida's wife saw his flower when it came into bloom.

Bibliography
Barthes, R. (1977). Elements of Semiology. Hill and Wang.
Hansen, C. (1993). Chinese Ideographs and Western Ideas. The Journal of Asian Studies, 52(02), 373–399. doi:10.2307/2059652
Heine, S. J., Takemoto, T., Moskalenko, S., Lasaleta, J., & Henrich, J. (2008). Mirrors in the head: Cultural variation in objective self-awareness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(7), 879–887. doi:10.2307/2059652 http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/Website/Papers/Mirrors-pspb4%5B1%5D.pdf
Heisig, J. W. (2004). Nishida’s medieval bent. Japanese journal of religious studies, 55–72. nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/publications/jjrs/pdf/674.pdf
Heisig, J. W. (2010). Nishida’s Deodorized Basho and the Scent of Zeami’s Flower. Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy 7: Classical Japanese Philosophy (p. 247–73). Nagoya: Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture. Retrieved from nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/staff/jheisig/pdf/Nishida%20and%20Zea...
Lurie, D. B. (2006). Language, writing, and disciplinarity in the Critique of the ‘“Ideographic Myth”’: Some proleptical remarks. Language & Communication, (26), 25–269. Retrieved from www.columbia.edu/~dbl11/Lurie-LangWritingDisc.pdf
Mead, G. H. (1967). Mind, self, and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist (Vol. 1). The University of Chicago Press.
McAdams, D. P. (1997). The case for unity in the (post) modern self. Self and identity: Fundamental issues, 1, 46–78.
McDonald, E. (2009). Getting over the Walls of Discourse: ‘Character Fetishization’ in Chinese Studies. The Journal of Asian Studies, 68(04), 1189. doi:10.1017/S0021911809990763
Unger, J. M. (1990). The Very Idea. The Notion of Ideogram in China and Japan. Monumenta Nipponica, 45(4), 391–411.
Yusa, M. (1987). Riken no Ken. Zeami’s Theory of Acting and Theatrical Appreciation. Monumenta Nipponica, 42(3), 331–345.

Labels: buddhism, eye, image, japanese culture, mirror, nihobunka, nihonbunka, occularcentrism, reversal, Shinto, specular, 日本文化

Via Flickr:
Bean-Bread-Man (Anpanman, e.g. Yanase, 1975) is, according to repeated surveys by myself and Bandai (see Nishikawa, 2010), the most popular Japanese hero, and has a detachable, replaceable, edible face. Both my children show an almost religious reverence for this flying, edible hero.

While the creator claims that he chose name and composition of the titular character from his experience of dreaming of eating a sweat bean filled bun or bean-bread (anpan) while facing starvation during the Second World War, I propose a variety of alternative subconscious significance for his use of bean bread.

The combination of the traditional Japanese sweet bean filling and the Western "bread" face, suggests to me that he may be (in somewhat offensive race terminology, Urban Dictionary def. 3.) akin to an "egg," in being of mixed racial origin. Bean-Bread-Man is white, or rather made of a Western food on the outside, and yellow, or rather made of a traditional Japanese food, on the inside.

The use of bread to symbolise Westerners is perhaps evident from the character of Sliced-Bread-Man in the same series, who is idolised by Bean-Bread-Man's enemy's wife (Dokin-chan), and always looks a bit too gentlemanly for his own good. And the Rice-Ball-Man (Omusubi man, who has a series of his own) and Tempura-Bowl-Man (Tendon man) both animate Japanese foods, are given Japanese style clothing and arguably a Japanese style character.

Bean-Bread Man started as a cartoon in 1973 and was first broadcast as a TV series, in 1988 when the Westernisation of Japan had long been in full swing. Furthermore, Bean-Bread-Man shares certain characteristics with Jesus: he is extremely concerned with justice, while he has tree friends and a family he is a bit of an individualist (compared to the groups of Super Sentai/Power Rangers) and he is edible, being eaten by those in need of sustenance. Jesus sustains his followers by being eaten in body, or symbolically, in Christian places of worship.

Eating, and by eating internalising, deities is far from unique to Christianity; it is shared by Shinto. In the most important Shinto festival, that of the New Year, Japanese enshrine "mirror rice cakes" (see later) in the home and eat them early in the new year, thus symbolically imbuing the spirit of the rice, the mirror and the Sun Goddess. This yearly Shinto mass is considered to be a rebirth and the spirit therein imbibed to be constitutive of self. According to the Shinto Sect-Kurozumi-Kyo, the self of the Japanese is that part of the Sun Goddess mirror that they have taken inside them. Thus not only the purity of the mirror but also as pointed out by Ohnuki-Tierney in "Rice as Self" (1993, p8), the purity of the white rice itself is seen to symbolise the purity of the Japanese self. Having a mind made of food, like Bean-Bread-Man, is thus nothing new.

Bean-Bread-Man's face, consisting of three red circles, is in itself appealing to young infants. My daughter was attracted to Bean-Bread-Man on sight. It seems to me that Bean-Bread-Man also resembles as breast, in being edible, and in appearance, he looks like an attempt to focus two breasts as one.

Bean-Bread-Man's face is both central to his character and super-powers. In every episode his face gets dirty or wet causing him to loose his strength, when his adopted mother, Butter-girl, throws a new bean bread face, baked with by his adoptive father, containing magic from a star, onto his shoulders which spins and sets, and enables him to be strong again. His face is thus both external (something made for him) and the centre of his psyche, in line with Lacanian theories of self (Lacan, 2007), and perhaps Watsuji's theory of "persona.&quot (Wasuji, 2007);

Watsuji Testuro, one of the most famous Japanese thinkers, proposed that the Japanese self, or the Japanese version of what in Westerners is a self, is a "persona" which he describes using the metaphor of a noh mask. noh Masks, like Bean-Bread-Man's face, are central to their characters and are thought to be imbued with the power or spirit of that character. Noh actors (like Bean-Bread-Man immediately prior to receiving a new face) are nothing without their masks. The stare at them for a while in order that they become possessed by the character as contained in the spirit of the mask. Again, the character is invested and centred in the detachable, external face, just as Lacan's infant in the mirror stage misconceives himself to be his appearance in the mirror, which though external she takes to be (and in a sense becomes) the centre of her psyche.

In Japan there are a plethora of animate faces, faces which contain the character, the spirit of the individual. They are often oversized, and sometimes detachable. These include Noh, Kagura and Shishi masks, Sanrio and SanX characters such as "Hello Kitty," Masked Riders whose faces are sometimes bought and displayed in lieu of figurines, and the way that the faces of television personalities (tarento) are used to adorn Japanese products (for examples of all of these see slideshow).

I should also be noted that Japanese point to their face when they mean to point to themselves, and like Bean-Bread-Man, metaphorically at least, place a great deal of effort in an on going attempt to prevent (Hamamura & Heine, 2006) their face from being sullied, and "not to loose face," a phrase originating in Chinese (Heine & Lehman, 1999). "Face" in this sense (kao, mentsu) is not merely metaphorical, it is I believe related to the central, defining, focal aspect of the human form and the nexus of the visual representations of the person.

The centrality of mask and face to the Japanese persona, is I argue (Takemoto,2002; Takemoto, 2003) because the Japanese internalised generalised other (Mead, 1967) is, literally, a mirror (Amaterasu), a mirror with the ability to record the whole life of the person, (Enma Daiou) or an entity that watches from on high as do representations of the Buddha in Japanese Art (Low, 2004). Westerners can hear themselves from the point of view of a generalised other, from the point of view of language, from the point of view of a linguistic deity. Japanese can really see themselves, as if they have a mirror in their heads (Heine, Takemoto, Moskalenko, Lasaleta & Henrich, 2008), as if they are flying over their own heads (Masuda, Gonzalez, Kwan & Nisbett, 2008), from the point of view of a visual generalised other, 'the eyes of the world' (seken no me, Satou, 2001), from the point of view of, not a logo-centric, but a a visual, ocular, specular deity.

Bibliography thanks to Zotero!
Low, M. (2004). The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (review). The Journal of Japanese Studies, 30(1), 163–166. doi:10.1353/jjs.2004.0023
Lacan, J. (2007). Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English (1st ed.). W W Norton & Co Inc.

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.
Heine, S., Lehman, D., Markus, H., & Kitayama, S. (1999). Is there a universal need for positive self-regard?. Psychological review.
Heine, S. J., Takemoto, T., Moskalenko, S., Lasaleta, J., & Henrich, J. (2008). Mirrors in the head: Cultural variation in objective self-awareness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(7), 879–887. http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/Website/Papers/Mirrors-pspb4%5B1%5D.pdf
Mead, G. H. (1967). Mind, self, and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist (Vol. 1). The University of Chicago Press.rel="nofollow">www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=egg
Nishikawa, H. 西川ひろ子. (2010). 乳幼児のキャラクター志向に関する研究. 安田女子大学紀要, 38, 147.
Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (1993). Rice as self: Japanese identities through time. Princeton Univ Pr.
Satou, N. 佐藤直樹. (2001). 「世間」の現象学. 青弓社.
Takemoto, T. (2002). 鏡の前の日本人. ニッポンは面白いか (講談社選書メチエ. 講談社.
Takemoto, T. (2003). 言語の文化心理学―心の中のことばと映像(The Cultural Psychology of Language: Language and Image in the Heart). あなたと私のことばと文化―共生する私たち―. 五絃舎.
Urban Dictionary.(n.d.). "egg." 3. Urban Dictionary. Retrieved March 7, 2012, from <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=egg"
Watsuji, T. 哲郎和辻. (2007). 偶像再興・面とペルソナ 和辻哲郎感想集. 講談社.
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Hamamura, T., & Heine, S. J. (2006). Self-Regulation Across Cultures: New Perspective on Culture and Cognition Research. International Conference of the Cognitive Science, Vancouver, BC.

Labels: Bandai, buddhism, eye, image, japan, japanese culture, Jaques Lacan, lacan, logos, Masked Riders, mirror, nihobunka, nihonbunka, 日本文化

Partly as a result of wondering how it is that Japanese can see their relationships with others, including the world, as being internal to themselves, I asked 20 Japanese to rate the extent to which certain things and phenomena are so much you that "If it were changed you would cease to be yourself," and "Not public, or anyone else's." I am not sure if I asked the right questions but I was trying to get to what my subjects thought themselves to be.
I was particularly interested in whether they would deem their view / visual sense percepi as being themselves or out there in the world, as well as the relative selfness (?) of body, self, speech and voice.

I had predicted a greater importance afforded voice since it always seems that in shows featuring suited representations of Japanese cartoon and maskted tokusatsu characters, they have to mime to the voice of the standards voice actor for them to be felt to be the real thing.

The results, shown above, show that Japanese identify most strongly with their head, foollwed by theif feelings, internal self speech, dreams, body, voice, and finally vision. Vision was felt to be way down the list, below the mid point of the scale (1-5) where 5 meant entirely essential and private, whereas 1 meant inessential and public. All the same they were half way to avowing that their vision might be private and that the wold they see might not be shared with anyone else.

I should have included some other, but less, self phenomena such as clothes, name, possessions, home, self-facts (such as being from Saga obviously a 1 on the "not public" part of the scale, but perhaps important to ones identity.)

I think that I should also make the scale a little longer 1-7 perhaps to allow for more variation between the top (head?) and bottom (possessions?) of the scale.

Perhaps the most interesting thing in the above graph is the reversal of the relative heights of the blue and red lines for the three items on the right. It is clear that my two questions are different. In the case of dreams for instance, one might imagine oneself continuing to exist as oneself without dreaming, and yet feel it very strange if anyone else saw, or could see ones dreams. It was interesting however that both voice and vision should be evaluated in the same way. Would I be more surprised if I suddenly had another voice, or if someone else had the same voice as me? I (incorrectly) feel that I have quite a neutral accent, so I am not sure I would be all that surprised to meet someone with my voice.

Finally, I am tempted to think that other people see the same colours as I do, and share the same visual field as I, but I would find it very strange if my experience went dark, if I were to become a philosophical Zombie. Perhaps my subjects' lack of surprise refered to the possibility that they should go blind.

Labels: buddhism, collectivism, eye, image, japanese culture, Jaques Lacan, lacan, logos, mirror, nihobunka, nihonbunka, self, 日本文化

In the above video, some lay practioners chant Buddhist scripture. None of the people that are chanting know the meaning of what they are chanting, but they know it is meaningful. I am not sure which scripture they are chanting. Often it is Hanya Shinkyou or Lotus Heart Sutra, which is a pretty philosophical exposition about emptiness. I think that they are chanting to achieve a bit of enlightenment, purification.

I think that the fact that they do now know what they are saying is important and effective. They are destroying language. Repeat anything, even ones own name, even the most meaningful phonemes, and they will become meaningless after a while. By repeating, chanting, these Buddhists are entering, the mumbo-jumbo, language-free-land, and freeing themselves, purifying themselves of the symbol, the group, society, and returning to their un-symbolised, un-analysed Buddha nature.

They feel that they are praying to the Buddha enshrined here. I think that the Buddha here enshrined approves of their self-and-language-anihilation. They are generally older people. People who do not want to die with this-worldly-public things on their mind. They shake noise-makers, to remind themselves that the soul has many voices, not only the one that they are destroying in their heads.

If Japan is so occularcentric then wouldn't it be a good idea for these Japanese Buddhists to work on their self image more? To disassociate themselves from the image? This ia weak link in Takemoto Theorey of Japan. A great deal (but not all) Japanese Buddhist spiritual practice (shugyou) focuses upon eradicating language, via silence (Za-zen), chanting (all forms of Japanese Buddhism), and unsayable sayings (Zen Koans). At the present time my only answer is that perhaps language is the weakest link in the borromean knot that ties the Japanese self together.

Labels: buddhism, culture, japan, japanese culture, logos, nihonbunka, occularcentrism, theory, 日本文化