J a p a n e s e    C u l t u r e

In this all too Japanese ukiyoe - picture of the floating world - admonishing "kogaeshi" (lit. "returning ones child) or the practice of infanticide, a Japanese mother is shown in the act of killing her unwanted child even as she thinks, pictorially, of her judgement by Enma, the Japanese St. Peter, at the gates of hell (rather than heaven), who will look in his book (enmachou) as St. Peter also does, and then show her deed in his mirror-come-DVD or her whole life, which St. Peter does not do.


In the DVD come mirror of her conscience the woman's face is transformed into that of an ogre.


The Japanese have a visual, rather than linguistic conscience, and their self esteem is stored and cognised largely in their self-appraisal (generalised other's/impartial spectator's/ superego's appraisal) of their own face.

Labels: autoscopy, crime, culture, japan, japanese culture, Jaques Lacan, mirror, Nacalian, occularcentrism, religion, reversal, specular, 日本文化, 自己視

The Japanese feel responsible, and are especially legally responsible, for that which they can see, that which is in their field of vision, but imho feel far less responsible for that which is not in their field of vision, even if they can rationally predict it, sometimes with unexpected and even disastrous consequences in their interaction with Westerners like me.

In the UK there are laws which stipulate that one pay attention to that which one can "reasonably" predict. E.g. in British contract law one may enter into a contract even if one does not sign on the line which is dotted, when one can reasonably expect to have entered into a contract. E.g. If you go into a posh restaurant and drink the water on the table, even though you may not have been told that the water costs money, if you can reasonably expect, that water to cost money, for it to have come from a bottle and not the tap, then one will be held responsible for paying for it. British people are required to be reasonable, to exercise their reason, to engage perhaps in an internal dialogue with themselves, and act in accordance with the results of that "discussion."

In Japan however, (performing a Nacalian transformation) one is required far more to exercise care over that which one can see. This especially applies in road traffic laws, and road behaviour, where one is expected to "zenpouchuui," （前方注意) sometimes translated as "proceed with caution" but literally, "Pay attention to that which is in front of you." This means that in Japan more than in the West, if you see someone standing at the side of the road in front of you, then as you proceed towards them, to make sure you see them, and make sure that you imagine that they may walk out in front of you, even if it is not "reasonable" for them to do so.

I sometimes find that Japanese people come out in front of me, when I am on my bicycle for instance, especially if they are travelling at an oblique angle (just greater than 90 degrees and slightly in the same direction as the road as travelled by the possibly oncoming traffic). In this situation, from the visual perspective of the person crossing the road at a slightly oblique angle, there is nothing in their line of vision. Their field of vision and their field of responsibility is clear. Twisted Westerner that I am, I sometimes feel that Japanese people deliberately cross roads at oblique angles (in the above photo, imagine that the carpet is the road) deliberately not looking anywhere but in front of them so as to give themselves right of way. This can, and has, resulted in disastrous consequences when the Westerner proceeding forwards expects those in front to use their reason to anticipate things that are not in their field of vision.

This formula: that one is responsible for that which one can see and imagine from that visual data, rather than that which one can reasonably predict from the facts of the situation, may have implications in other areas of cultural behaviour.

I wonder if the way in which, for instance, Japanese family law privileges the rights, and responsibilities of the parent with whom the children are living (that can see the child) is partly motivated by the above consideration.

The cultural psychologist Takahiko Masuda (light years above me research wise, highly perceptive of cultural differences, and a nice guy) argues that the Japanese are more aware of context , whereas Westerners are more analytical thus focal, concentrating only one the "important" data. This is demonstrated for instance in his superb experiments on change blindness (Masuda & Nisbett, 2006) where Westerners only notice changes in foreground, focal objects whereas Japanese notice changes in the background. I am not sure how this could be operationalized (made verifiable, the subject of an experiment) but I predict that in situations where one can rationally predict events based upon present data, it may be Westerners, not Japanese, that are paying more attention to the (rational, linguistically predictable) context. In other words, perhaps everyone is paying attention to context, but the context to which Japanese and Westerners are paying attention to is Nacalianly transposed.

The way in which Japanese feel able to ignore that which they can not see is perhaps illustrated in this television commercial (called, poignantly "I am only looking") in which a group of Japanese ladies feel able to ignore sales staff partly by moving obliquely in front of them, keeping the sales staff out of their field of vision. In my interactions with Japanese road users I sometimes feel like the I would expect the shop attendants to feel, if they were British.

Bibliography
Masuda, T., & Nisbett, R. E. (2006). Culture and change blindness. Cognitive Science, 30(2), 381–399.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to my wife Yasuko for posing for this photo. Thanks to Lacan for his theory the human self. Since I have started using his name (reversed) for my take on Japanese culture, I feel much better about using it.

Labels: crime, culture, japan, japanese culture, Jaques Lacan, lacan, nihobunka, nihonbunka, occularcentrism, reversal, specular, 日本文化

This shows the side of a small street in Tokyo opposite an off licence (liquor store). I suspect that the corner of the road may be the private property of the shop even though it is covered in tar mac. The shop keeper is using this area as a place to keep his and his wife's scooters, and about 100 crates, each containing four empty shouchuu (see below) bottles.
I think that if someone left a large quantity of bottles on a street in London then some young men, returning from the pub would find it amusing to knock over the tower of crates and smash some of the bottles.

　Shouchuu is Japanese vodka. Containing only about 25% alcohol it is considerably weaker than Russian vodka. It is a distilled white spirit made from wheat, rice or sweet potatoes.

In the past Shouchuu was a working mans intoxicant. It was consumed with hot water for, the maximum bang per buck. More recently however the existance of a great number of provincial shouchuu distilleries with a low volume of production, has created a new market, rather that which exists for "fine wines" made up of customers who covet the distinctive flavour and aroma of the various provincial brands.

Would you be able to leave crates of bottles on a street in London?

Labels: crime, japan, japanese culture, nihonbunka, 日本文化

According to an OECD survey Japan has the second least crime of the 22 OECD coutnries surveyed, after Northern Ireland, as measured by the percentage of the population that have been a victim of crime in the past year - in japan 15.2% in Northern Ireland 15%.

More than 30% of Japanese victims where victims of bicycle theft. This is hardly surprising because a lot of people do not even lock their bicycles up!

This is a bicycle in Northern Ireland. Note the U Lock fixing the bicycle to a bench.
www.flickr.com/photos/rosinante/44258869/

While Japan has incredibly low rates of concrete, visible crime, it comes 18th out of the 22 OECD countries in terms of corruption. I am looking for figures on copyright infringement.

I argue that this disparity is evidents of the fact that Japanese people are very much aware of the gaze of others, to the extent that they have externalised a generalised gaze. This means that they feel bad about performing visible and imaginable antisocial acts such as all the crimes listed in the first OECD victimisation ranking. Westerners on the other hand have internalised the ear of the other such that we find it painful to perform acts which are difficult to narrate in a non antisocial way. Hence crimes of corruption which often involve reprimandable linguistic acts, are more painful, more likely to arouse feelings of guilt among those from the cultures of the religion of the book - the West (and the Middle East, I am not sure why they are fighting each other).

Labels: crime, culture, image, japan, japanese culture, logos, nihonbunka, occularcentrism, reversal, theory, 日本文化

These Japanese police officers weres stopping cyclists at random, and checking that the id of the rider matched the registration of the bicycle over their walkie-talkies. In order to combat bicycle theft, bcicycle registration became a legal requirement about 8 years ago.

From a very brief survey of the people that the police were stopping and checking, it would seem that they were concentratiing on those riding the standard, cross bar-less, shopping bicycles (mama-chari - mum's bikes). This suggests to me that the majority of bicycle theft is of such bicycles for the purpose of riding them rather than for the purpose of selling them to a third party. There are quite a lot of expensive mountain bikes and road bikes parked with flimsy locks, or no locks at all. But there are even more shoppers, without locks or with easily breakable built in front wheel locks (which can be twisted so that they do not interfere with the movement of the spokes. These bicycles are about 100 USD new in Japan. They are often abandoned even by their owners and large numbers of them are seen at rubbish collection stations on those days when "large rubbish" can be thrown away. It is my perception that some Japanese people tend to see such bicycles almost as a communal resource. Some towns, such as my old town of Kurume, have organisations that provide bicycles - painted blue - at stations for free for public use.

Perhaps the OECD statistics regarding the rate of theft of bicycles and the fact that bicycle theft represents 30% of crime as experienced by Japanese.

Labels: crime, culture, economics, japan, japanese culture, nihonbunka, 日本文化