J a p a n e s e    C u l t u r e

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: blogger, Flickr, image, japaneseculture, lacan, nacalianism, nihonbunka, 日本文化

It is a common perception in Japan that non Japanese make more and more exaggerated gestures while talk to each other than Japanese. This excerpt from a comic (Oguri, 2010, p.8) on the differences between a Japanese woman and her foreign husband includes the copy "Well of course foreigners have much more exaggerated gestures, as we all know."

On the other hand, Western perception of Japanese gestures is mixed. On the one hand there is a perception that the Japanese wear for instance a "mask of inscrutability" and are covered "beneath courteous reserve" (Craigie, 2004, p. 172). In Japan "people have to suppress their true feelings practically all the time" (Rice, 2004, p144).


At the other extreme, caricatures of Japanese such as in the Directors Cut of Grand Blue where a Japanese diving coach works his diver so hard the later feints, or Isuro "Kamikazi" Tanaka played by Takaaki Ishibashi "who helps excite the team" with his frantic overwrought gestures in Major League 2. Japanese gestures can appear exaggerated to Westerners too. Part of the reason for both Japanese and Westerners thinking that the other's gestures are exagerrated is likely due to the fact that the gestures themselves are different, and phenomena to which one is not accustomed stand out.

Surprising though it may seem to Japanese, research on nodding beat gestures (Maynard, 1987: see also Kita, 2009) generated during speech production, showed that Japanese approximately four times more nods, once ever 5.57 seconds whereas Americans nod only every 22.5 seconds (informal study, Maynard, 1987, p602, note 4). Both Japanese and Americans nod at the beats, and baton touch turn-taking position. But Japanese nod, not only at these times and in the back channel, but also in the middle of their own statements.

So who does make more gestures. A quick comparison of a couple of wedding speakers in Japanese in English on Youtube demonstrates the source of this difference. Americans wave their hands more and use obvious exaggerated, semi iconic facial gestures (like those caricatured above) more liberally but Japanese use a great deal of nodding and bowing to emphasise what their are saying, demonstrate sincerity and as beats. No wonder Japanese speakers get "shoulder ache" (katakori). Conclusive research on the relative importance of gesture remains to be done.

The Japanese, like Italians, also have a wide lexicon of iconic gestures that can be used in place of speech. And as always, I argue that Japan is NOT a high context culture (Hall, 1966; Honna, 1988: see Tsuda, 1992) but that visual communication is the central media and in Japan language is considered to be part of the context. This means that language will often be used to express flattery and other pleasantries (tatemae, such saying "I'll think about it") in stead of "no". Whereas the true meaning (honne) is expressed in the face, posture, pause and expression. Returning to Major League 2, for all his exaggeration, famed Japanese comedian Takaaki' Ishibashi's caricature of the Japanese is faithful. His expressions move from one form to the next like a Kabuki actor, or Kyari Pamyu Pamyu, nothing is left to chance, there is in Barthes' words "perfect domination of the codes" (1989, p.10)

The closest that a Western scholar gets to recognising that gesture and the non-verbal could be central to self and meaning in Japan is Roland Barthes' "Empire of Signs" (1983) (based in part on the observations of Maurice Pinguet).

Now it happens that in this country (Japan) the empire of signifiers is so immense, so in excess of speech, that the exchange of signs retains of a fascinating richness, mobility, and subtlety, despite the opacity of the language, sometimes even as a consequence of that opacity. The reason for this is that in Japan the body exists, acts, shows itself, give itself, without hysteria, without narcissism, but according to a pure - though subtly discontinuous - erotic project. It is not the voice (with which we identify the "rights" of the person) which communicates (communicates what? our-necessarily beautiful-soul? our sincerity? our prestige?) but the whole, body (eyes, smile, hair, gestures, clothing) which sustains with you a son of babble that the perfect domination of the codes strips of all regressive, infantile character. To make a date (by gestures, drawings on paper, proper names) may take an hour, but during that hour, fur a message which would. be abolished in an instant if it were to be spoken (simultaneously quite essential and quite insignificant), it is the other's entire body which has been known, savoured, received, and which has displayed (to no real purpose) its own narrative, its own text. (Barthes, 1983, p.10)

Barthes comes close. He can't help making a "text" of the Japanese body, the only way that he can admit it has meaning since in his hierarchy only language can truly mean (see Barthes, diagram p. 113).


Barthes famously claims that "the centre (of Japan, the Japanese subject) is empty," and in the above passage that its communication has "no real purpose," but at the same time Japan has forced him to question the purpose of his own vocalisations. And he is wrong that the body talk is erotic. He is talking to and about himself. Japanese signs and selves are cute. The relative absence of words, and the erotic beguiled him to conclude that the centre of Japan is empty. The self and centre of Japan does not have or needs words, but is is far from empty rather visual and raging, fury Kyari Pamyu Pamyu barfing eyeballs full.

Finally, while Merbihain's 93% (Mehrabian & Ferris, 1967) has been rejected even by Mehrabian (Mehrabian, 1995: see Lapakko, 1997) it is clear that non-verbal communication is extremely important. Bearing this in mind the pressing question for me is how Hall (1976) had the gall (!) to claim that those cultures that do not see language as central to human communication are "high context" at all? That nonverbal communication is contextual assumes that language is central, privileged when in fact in Japan, it is often the reverse.

Taking one example, Hall claims that in Japan people expect more of others.

"It is very seldom in Japan that someone will correct you or explain things to you. You are supposed to know and they get quite upset when you don’t. ... People raised in high context cultures expect more of others than to the participants in low-context systems. When talking about something that they have on their minds, a high context individual will expect his interlocutor to know what is bothering him, so that he doesn't have to be specific." (Hall, 1976, p98)

Do Westerners really expect less of others?

I find that in interaction with Japanese I often expect them to have heard my words, the generalities that I have stated, and to apply them across multiple situations. I expect this of them. When I bothered about some situation where previously expressed verbal wishes and requirements are not being met, I expect others to know and get quite upset (like a arrogant fool) when they don't. Americans expect others to understand their generalities - their linguistic expressions - as Japanese expect others to look, mirror and behave appropriate to the situation. This is due to the fact that the central mode of meaning is different not because members of either culture place greater or lesser expectations upon others.

Dumping the hierarchy of the old Western text/context word/world dualism will help us to understand the Japanese and ourselves.


Bibliography
Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies. (A. Lavers, Trans.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Barthes, R. (1983). Empire of Signs. (R. Howard, Trans.). Hill and Wang.
Craigie, R. (2004). Behind the Japanese Mask: A British Ambassador in Japan, 1937-1942. Routledge.
Hall, E. T. (1976). Beyond Culture. Anchor Press.
Kita, S. (2009). Cross-cultural variation of speech-accompanying gesture: A review. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24(2), 145–167. doi.org/10.1080/01690960802586188
Knapp, M., Hall, J., & Horgan, T. (2013). Nonverbal Communication in Human Interaction. Cengage Learning.
Lapakko, D. (1997). Three cheers for language: A closer examination of a widely cited study of nonverbal communication. Communication Education, 46(1), 63–67. Retrieved from www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03634529709379073
Maynard, S. K. (1987). Interactional functions of a nonverbal sign Head movement in japanese dyadic casual conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 11(5), 589–606. doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(87)90181-0
Mehrabian, A., & Ferris, S. R. (1967). Inference of attitudes from nonverbal communication in two channels. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 31(3), 248. Retrieved from psycnet.apa.org/journals/ccp/31/3/248/
Oguri, S. (2010). Dārin wa gaikokujin.
Rice, J. (2004). Behind the Japanese mask--: how to understand the Japanese culture-- and work successfully with it. Oxford: HowToBooks.

Labels: collectivism, culture, image, individualism, japan, japanese, japanese culture, 日本文化, 自己視

This essay explores the intersection between Derrida's Post Card (1987), and Baudrillard's simulacra (1995) in Western and Japanese culture: word/idea pairs and images respectively.

Most Western philosophers are unintentionally obfuscating. They want to tell their readers that it is okay, That the way we understand the world is not a grotesque lie. A few, larger French philosophers such as Baudrillard (1995) and Derrida (1987, 1998, 2011) attempts to pull the lie apart, to expose its untruth. But, because they are polite and the lie ingrained, they is not quite persuasive enough. Obfuscators take the mickey out of their "Parisian logic" (Mulligan, 1991).

In order to see oneself it is self-evident that one has to model the perspective of an other and or mirror. However, when talking about oneself to oneself, this need for another, real or simulated, is not apparent. Many clever people (I am thinking of Steven Heine e.g. in Heine, 2003) claim that face, or image is essentially for others whereas language, (that most social of media!) and our Western narratives selves are for ourselves.

Indeed, most Westerners think, that when they think they are thinking, talking simply to themselves (and not to Mel Gibson's Satan, above right). Seeing oneself requires a spatial distance that makes the alterity of self-observer far more apparent. But speaking, hearing oneself speak, does not seem necessarily to involve anyone else, real or imagined, at all. Derrida rejects this possibility forcefully (Garver, 1973).

The truth in my humble opinion, and experience is, that as Derrida argues, speaking to oneself does require an other, simulated or real. But few people, or atheists at least, seem to realise this. How can I convince folks of the truth, that self-narrative requires an other to be meaningful?

Derrida's gambit is something on the lines of the following.

When I talk about myself I use signs, signs like "Tim" and "I". Each time I say or think a sign I may be slurred or abbreviate but for the phoneme to mean, it needs to be one of a group of other iterations of the same sign. Signs are iterative. I can say Tim TIM Tm, tem, timu, timm, with all sorts of slurings and blurrings but for "tim" to mean me it must be member of the set of signs that are iterable. It must be one of the sayings of "Tim." "Tim" as a sign is a sign by virtue of the fact that it is recognisable and distinguishable from tin (can).

Therefore, Derrida opines, since signs have this property in themselves of being repeatable and recognisable their use implies a distance or disappearance of the subject that uses them. Derrida fundamental insight is I think that this iterability implies speech is no different from writing.

Mulligan (1998) is right to point out that it is going to be difficult to convince anyone that the iterability of signs implies anything threatening about the Western self. Conversely, the fact that signs are iterable (repeatable in time) is a phenomena that obfuscating philosophers have used as evidence for the existence of "presence:" the co-temporal, co-presence of "ideas".

That signs are essentially "iterable" is a proposition that Derrida gets from Husserl who he paraphrases in the following way.

"When in fact I effectively use words, and whether or not I do it for communicative ends (let us consider signs in general, prior to this distinction), I must from the outset operate (within) a structure of repetition.... A sign is never an event, if by event we mean an irreplaceable empirical particular. A sign which would take place but “once” would not be a sign; a purely idiomatic sign would not be a sign. A signifier (in general) must be formally recognizable in spite of, and through, the diversity of empirical characteristics which may modify it. It must remain the same, and be able to be repeated as such, despite and across the deformations which the empirical event necessarily makes it undergo. A phoneme or grapheme is necessarily always to some extent different each time that it is presented in an Operation or perception. But, it can function as a sign, and in general as language only if a formal identity enables it to be issued again and to be recognized. (Derrida, 1967, p55—56; Derrida, 2001, p.42 see Mulligan, 1992, p.5.)

Derrida also states more pithily “a sign which would take place but `once’ would not be a sign”

Hansen (1993) traces this distinction too, between sign tokens or instantiations and signs, and points out Western philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have claimed that (Aristotle writes, see Hansen, 1993) "spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of the spoken sounds. And just as written marks are not the same for all men, neither are spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs of-affections in the soul-are the same for all; and what these affections are likenesses of - actual things - are also the same."

This is basically the same argument as presented by Husserl about 2000 years earlier. Our feeling of their being identity in difference, of a unity, despite multiple instantiations, demonstrates to us that there must be existences underpinning them. Words are somehow the same every time we use them. This is not true, but we feel it strongly.

I think it is possible to be far more persuasive, and threatening, by taking a detour through Japanese culture. The use of Japanese culture as an analogy is similar to writing a book of self addressed postcards (Derrida, 1987) to illustrate the weirdness of self-addressed speech, except that the Japanese, unlike the postcard writer of Derrida's book (ibid), are not fictional, and I believe they send themselves blank postcards - images without words (Kim, 2002) in the form of selfies, purikura (Toriyama et al., 2014), souvenir photos (kinenshashin: see Davidson, 2006 p36), third person memories (Cohen, Hoshino-Browne, & Leung, 2007), and autoscopic video games (Masuda and Takemoto in preparation).

I argue that whereas Westerners hear a shared, identical unity behind multiple slightly differing sound tokens, Japanese may feel the same way about images. A copy of a shrine, horse, bonsai tree, karate form or a face, though it changes in each instantiation call to the Japanese mind a similar sense of unity as called to the mind of Westerners when they hear words.

Despite, upon consideration there being a plurality of word phenomena, each instantiation is as good as the others. No word is inferior to another, no word is a copy of another word, since they all refer to a (illusionary) underlying unity. All words are authentic because they match up to ghostly metaphysical meanings. Westerners until Dennet (1992) find it difficult to deny the existence of these idealities, because they are one of their number. Our self, existed traditionally as an idea in the mind of God, or according to Dennet, who somehow manages to obfuscate even as he reveals the truth, is an abstraction or fiction.

Similarly Japanese may be able to feel that "foreign villages" (in Japan - gaikokumura 外国村) are as good or the same as villages abroad, or that video tapes of a deceased grandfather require funeral services just as did the body (image) of their grandfather, or that a sculpture or even a picture of a horse (ema 絵馬) is as pleasing to a god as real horse, or that a mask or face can represent the underlying unity of a person (Watsuji, 2011).

Nowhere are simulacra, or authenticopies, more visible than the Japanese religion, Shinto. Shinto shrines, especially that of the sungoddess are rebuilt (senguu 遷宮） made in miniature for household shrine shelves (神棚), and replicated (e.g. the replica of Ise shrine in Yamaguchi city's main shrine) but in all cases thought to be authentic. Japanese deities are infinity divisible (bunrei 分霊) and and transportable (kanjou　勧請) to be enshrined elsewhere (bunsha 分社). Originally this would require the copying of the object felt to contain the spirit/deity (goshintai 御神体）, but more often now simply by stamping the characters on a piece of wood, card or paper to form a sacred token （神符), as in the case of the sacred talisman that serve to transport the deity into household shrines　(ofuda お札) and inside protective amulets (omamoriお守り）. Sometimes these sacred stamped tokens (shinpu/ofuda神符/お札) were felt to fall from the sky causing great merriment, singing, dancing and tourism（"("good isn't it?" or "hang loose" ええじゃないか）. Just as the Lords prayer on the lips of one bishop is the same as that on the other so the stamped names of Japanese deities are the same in all their instantiations. Conversely, in Japan words without material representation are felt to be hot air, as the Jesuits lamented being required to bring presents and not express gratitude in words.

It does not matter that faces age, seals smudge, or that there are minor differences between sculpted and real horses, just as it does not matter that I might say my name, or I, with a hoarse voice (To the Japanese the voice is always horse..!). That is not to say that the Japanese are fully identified with their bodies. Traditionally the Japanese were also aware of the field of vision, that which which sees, the mirror as soul. But that space is no different from that which is seen, or rather contains the authenticopies as they are, without their need to be unified and represented by an idea.

Narcissus is a fool for mistaking his reflection for himself but there is identity, Echo, in his voice (Brenkman, 1976). Likewise Susano'o is a fool for repeating his words but there is identity, Amaterasus, in his image. Iterability in time is like copiability in space - there is a ridiculous distance. When Narcissus falls in love with his self reflected in the water we want to shout "but that isn't you!" There is an obvious plurality, a painful not-one-ness. It is as ridiculous to a Japanese person to hear someone speaking to themselves or praising themselves as it is to a Westerner watching Narcissus love his image. in each case evaluating subject can not escape from evaluated object, and the loop is felt incomplete.

These differences in perception depend upon culture not some inherent superiority of one or other media. Writing is no more a record of speech than speech refers to writing.

This is due to the nature of the Other being simulated in the mind. There never was a layer of ideas, or metaphysical realm, just a partner in the heart. Westerners from Plato to Baudrillard (1995) tell us that is God that In the West we feel (and or do not feel) as if a super-addressee is always listening and Japanese feel (and or do not feel) as if someone is always watching.

By "and or do not feel" I mean that the Other is both felt and hidden. That on the one hand I "feel" someone is listening make this preposterous self-speech that I do, even in my head, meaningful, pleasurable but on the other if the door were to open and I were to see what I am speaking to, I would recoil in horror. So in that sense I do not feel the presence of the other. I will come back to this.

I think that the two forms of ridiculous distance should start to erase each other in those that experience them. The way in which Post Cards and images destabilise the structure of the word/idea complex is also discussed by Baudrillard (1995).

Baudrillard writes "[Iconoclasts] predicted this omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the conscience of man, and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear—that deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum—from this came their urge to destroy the images.rage to destroy images." (1995, p4)

Baudrillard's term "simulacra" seems too broad, being used to mean words, images, simulated subject positions and even perhaps the imminent universe. Nevertheless he has a point. It seems to me that the two types of simulacra that I differentiate (Western words, and Japanese images or "authenticopies") should have a tendency to draw attention to the limitations of each, and not so much erase but resurrect (!) or make people aware of God, in one person or another, as intra-psychic other.

By consideration of Edo period artwork and research on Japanese artistic representation (Masuda, Wang, Ito, & Senzaki, 2012) third person memories (Cohen, Hoshino-Browne, & Leung, 2007) the Other of the Japanese is not "in the head" but outside of it, a spatial distance but still in their psyche, that is to say a simulated, undead viewpoint. Japanese ancestors look down and protect. Though simulated, I don't think they could ever be as dead as words and images since it is a simulated subject position, but in the title I am using "simulacra" to be simulated subject positions, a viewer, or hearer. It is really these that have ensured the meaning of Western Words and Japanese images.

Theists experience these subject positions as their Gods: ancestors or Amaterasu, and Jesus. Atheists may experience them as the monsters shown above Sadako of "Ringu", (Nakata, 1998) and Satan of "The Passion of the Christ" (Gibson, 2004).

When Baudrillard further writes "If they [iconoclasts] could have believed that these images only obfuscated or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn't conceal anything at all, and that these images were in essence not images, such as an original model would have made them, but perfect simulacra, forever radiant with their own fascination. Thus this death of the divine referential must be exorcised at all costs." (1995, p4) he is correct to say that images do not require a second term, a "divine referential:" ideas. However, both word/ideas and images do require a third term a simulated hearer/view point. Images exist in the mind of their god unmediated.

Returning to the way in which the Other is and is not here.

Husserl is adamant that no one is listening to thought, and it is precisely this fact, coupled with the fact that he can yet understand himself, that convinces him that something other than what happens when we speak to others must be going on. "He believes that he finds pure expression [of another layer of ideal things] in interior monologue because, in interior monologue, my thoughts seem to be present to me at the very instant that I say them." (VP, p. xxv). This argument convinces cleverer people than me, such as Mulligan.

When a Japanese person is looking at a mirror (which she may not need), or imagining herself, she may feel that that the person in the mirror or the image in her mind is herself. Looking at a Japanese person looking at a mirror I may want to to say "no, that is not you! Look you are on this side of the mirror not that thing over there!" But the Japanese lady is cleverer than me. She "knows", like Husserl "knows", there is no one else in her head, so there is no way someone can watch from the wings to claim "You are not the person reflected in the mirror."

To me sight is always seen by someone (an eye) just as to the Japanese (Mori, 1999) language is always heard by someone (an ear). Language in Japan is always contextual. Sight in the West is always contextual. Conversely, the "third person perspective" (Mori, ibid) exists in language in the West, and in those birds eye views that the Japanese see, feel and represent.

The experience of hearing oneself speak proves to Husserl that speech can be heard and understood without another listener (other than the one speaking) because he feels he is absolutely alone. Specifically Husserl can understand the word "I" to refer to himself.

The experience of seeing oneself imagined proves to Japanese that images can be seen and understood without another viewer (other than the one seen) because she feels she is absolutely alone facing the mirror. Specifically she can understand the image to be herself.

Addressing Husserl, Derrida says that consciousness is temporised, and that the other needed and simulated to understand the interior I is deferred in time. "You don't realise that you are writing letters to yourself in the future/ reading letters from yourself in the past." You are not alone at the level of simulacra.

Addressing the Japanese person I want to say that consciousness is spatialised, and that the other needed and simulated to understand the interior self image is distanced. "You don't realise that you are signing to yourself at a distance/ seeing yourself from a distance." You are not alone at the level of simulacra.

It is so obvious to me, a Westerner, that one can see imagine oneself from the outside. That is obvious to the Japanese too. But if the Japanese have an extra viewpoint that is horrifying, then erasing that viewpoint, and yet at the same time viewing themselves from it, they can misunderstand themselves as that which is seen, forgetting that they are not turning to meet the gaze of a monster, distanced, in the image.

It is obvious to a Japanese person that I can defer understanding, when I practice justifying myself for instance (Haidt, 2001). That is obvious to me too. But I if I have an extra ear-point, a super-addressee that is horrifying, then erasing that ear-point, and at the same time hearing myself from it, I can misunderstand myself as that I am that which is said, forgetting that all I am doing is deferring speaking to a monster deferred. Who am I going to meet?

All is needed for self is an other in mind which is too horrible to be fully aware of. That one is aware of but can not admit of, nor gaze at. Someone you know is there behind a door. Someone that will open a door one day, when Japanese people go somewhere.

That there are two ways of doing this auto-affection (which are interlinked) may at the boundary between the two make obfuscation apparent.

Am I oversimplifying? Regarding Derrida, his translator writes "In other words, if we think of interior monologue, we see that difference between hearing and speaking is necessary, we see that dialogue comes first. But through dialogue (the iteration or the back and forth) of the same, a self is produced. And yet, the process of dialogue, differentiation-repetition, never completes itself in identity; the movement continues to go beyond to infinity; the movement continues to go beyond to infinity so that identity is always deferred. always a step beyond." That sounds very complicated.

But if self-speech is just practice speech (Haidt, 2001) that we do all the time before meeting people to whom we explain ourselves to, then self speech is surprisingly mundane. Self speech might be compared to a love-song to a lover that we'll never meet, or a series of amorous post cards to yourself in the future (Derrida, 1987), or those letters that remain unopened in a Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Bibliography
Baudrillard, J. (1995). Simulcra and Simulation. (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). Univ of Michigan Pr.
Brenkman, J. (1976). Narcissus in the Text. Georgia Review, 30(2), 293–327. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/41399656
Cohen, D., Hoshino-Browne, E., & Leung, A. K. (2007). Culture and the structure of personal experience: Insider and outsider phenomenologies of the self and social world. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 1–67.
Davidson, C. N. (2006). 36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan. Duke University Press.
Dennett, D. C. (1992). The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity. Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives. Retrieved from ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/selfctr.htm
Derrida, J. (1987). The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. (A. Bass, Trans.) (1 edition). Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. (1998). Of grammatology. (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). JHU Press.
Derrida, J. (2011). Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Northwestern Univ Pr.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814. Retrieved from psycnet.apa.org/journals/rev/108/4/814/
Hansen, C. (1993). Chinese Ideographs and Western Ideas. The Journal of Asian Studies, 52(02), 373–399. doi.org/10.2307/2059652
Heine, S. J. (2003). An exploration of cultural variation in self-enhancing and self-improving motivations. In Nebraska symposium on motivation (Vol. 49, pp. 101–128). Retrieved from books.google.co.jp/books?hl=en&lr=&id=UCl0stabm54...
Husserl, E. (2001). Logical Investigations Volume 1 (Revised Edition). London ; New York: Routledge.
Kim, H. S. (2002). We talk, therefore we think? A cultural analysis of the effect of talking on thinking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(4), 828.
Masuda, T., Wang, H., Ito, K., & Senzaki, S. (2012). Culture and the Mind: Implications for Art, Design, and Advertisement. Handbook of Research on International Advertising, 109.
Mulligan, K. (1991). How not to read: Derrida on Husserl. Topoi, 10(2), 199–208.
Watsuji, T. (2011). Mask and Persona. Japan Studies Review, 15, 147–155. Retrieved from asian.fiu.edu/projects-and-grants/japan-studies-review/jo...
Toriyama et al. 烏山史織, 齋藤美保子, カラスヤマシオリ, サイトウミホコ, KARASUYAMA, S., & SAITO, M. (2014). Awareness of Purikura in youths: A comparison of high school and university student’s. 鹿児島大学教育学部教育実践研究紀要=Bulletin of the Educational Research and Practice, Faculty of Education, Kagoshima University, 23, 83–94. Retrieved from ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/120005434882
Mori, A. 森有正. (1999). 森有正エッセー集成〈5〉. 筑摩書房.

Labels: cultural psychology, culture, derrida, eye, horror, image, japan, japanese culture, 日本文化, 自己, 自己視

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

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

The founder of the Panasonic corporation claimed that the reason why putting things to a vote was unpopular in Japan, and the emphasis on consensus, is not because the Japanese are sheep who feel the need to move in a heard, but conversely there are always so many big egos that would be offended if their faction lost the vote (Tanisawa, 1995, p60). Vote made visible, by a show of hands or by standing up, are only very rarely used, and never in any Japanese committee meeting that I have attended. To lose, and lose visibly in this way would be for the Japanese extra specially painful and ego-damaging because the Japanese are who they see themselves to be.

パナソニック株式会社の創業者・松下幸之助は、欧米人と比較して日本人の方は自尊心があまりにも高いとする稀な見解を示した。松下によれば、欧米と違って民主主義的な多数決が日本人に馴染まない理由は、「全員の自尊心を満足させなければならない。自尊心が日本人ほど強いと、多数決は絶対に成立しない」（谷沢永一, 1995, p60）。ましてや、挙手投票や起立投票は私が参加した日本の会議では使われたことがない。自分が自分を見る存在は自分自身ですので、目に見えてまけるというのは特に痛くて「顔がつぶれる」と感じられるであろう。

Image
MEPs vote by show of hands by European Parliament, on Flickr

谷沢永一. (1995). 松下幸之助の智恵. PHP研究所.

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

I take the liberty of using a Japanese newspaper article announcing the tragedy of Germanwings flight 9525 to illustrate differences in the way that Japanese view time.

First of all with regard to the two lines below the article. There is research to show that when Japanese and Westerners are asked to draw a time line and put their life - a mark for their birth and a mark for their death - upon it, Westerners put the two marks close together whereas Japanese put their marks at either end of the line - 57.9% of Japanese females are classified as having an egocentric time perspective using 90% of the line on their lives, significantly more than among Australians(Shiraishi, 1996). Shiraishi suggests that this is because the Japanese were older than the Australians. Cottle (1976: see Cottle, Howard, & Pleck, 1969) however found that older Western children have a less egocentric time perspective so the fact that the Western adolescents were younger makes this difference even more striking. Speaking for myself, the reason why I would be put the two marks close together is because, compared to the enormity of time itself, my life is but a blip upon it. Why do the Japanese put their marks at either end of the line?

With regard to the Japanese newspaper article announcing the recent tragedy, one characteristic is that it announced from the very first, as a headline the number of Japanese persons presumed to be on the flight. My condolences to their families. While Japanese newspapers are a little more self absorbed, British newspapers also mentioned the number of British passengers.

Another characteristic of Japanese, but not British, newspaper articles is that they always say both the local time, and in the small red rectangle above the equivalent time in Japan. Japanese international newspaper articles and television reports, always do this: give both the time at where the event occurred, and the corresponding Tokyo time.

Taken together with the differences in how Japanese mark their time lines, I suggest that the reason for both the egocentric time perspective, and the incessant reminders of the equivalent local time in Japan, is that the Japanese do not believe time to be something unitary and objective but a subjective quality of experience (a sort of qualia). So there is not one massive march of time but there are many times, their own which began at their birth and ends at their death, and that shared to and extent by people in the Tokyo time zone but not by people in France. For the Japanese, time is not the sort of thing that has an "itself."

This relates to how Westerners conceive of their identities to exist in time or space. The Japanese identity is exists at a place in space and centres on the face (Watsuji). That the Japanese have many "kyara" in each of these places, one for home, another for work does not make them any less self consistent. The Japanese have a spatial (Nishida) geography of the self (Miyamoto, Nisbett & Masuda, 2006; Nisbett, 2010; ), that is no less consistent than the self-narrative.

On the contrary, while I think am the same in all spaces and places, I am "sometimes" something and sometimes something else in any one place ( Cousins, 1980), since for my self is my self-narrative, a history, which exists in Time which is itself which is extended and objective. Thus, for the Japanese their selves in the absence of a spatial situation is merely a "default," (Yamagishi, et. al) for me it is my first and primary self in time: who I am.

Similarly again, conversely, for me space, res extensa, the image is merely a qualia, a quality of subjective experience. For me, space does not have an itself, indeed if empty it is nothing at all.

Bibliography
Cottle, T. J. (1976). Perceiving time: a psychological investigation with men and women. John Wiley & Sons Australia, Limited.
Cottle, T. J., Howard, P., & Pleck, J. (1969). Adolescent perceptions of time: The effect of age, sex, and social class1. Journal of Personality, 37(4), 636–650. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1969.tb01770.x
Cousins, Steven D. "Culture and self-perception in Japan and the United States." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56.1 (1989): 124.
Miyamoto, Y., Nisbett, R. E., & Masuda, T. (2006). Culture and the physical environment holistic versus analytic perceptual affordances. Psychological Science, 17(2), 113-119.
Nisbett, R. (2010). The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... and. Simon and Schuster.
Yamagishi, T., Hashimoto, H., Cook, K. S., Kiyonari, T., Shinada, M., Mifune, N., ... & Li, Y. (2012). Modesty in self‐presentation: A comparison between the USA and Japan. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 15(1), 60-68.
Shiraishi, T. 白井利明. (1996). 日本の女子青年の時間知覚における Cottle の仮説の検討―サークル・テストとライン・テストの結果から―. Retrieved from https://150.86.125.91/dspace/handle/123456789/2830

Labels: cultural psychology, culture, image, japanese culture, nihonbunka, specular, 文化心理学, 日本文化

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

"Look at this figure now!" the image above is one of many mother and child joint attention pictures from the floating world of ukiyoe artists which, according to the famed psychologist Osamu Kitayama, express something important about the Japanese mind. It shows a mother showing her rather terrified child a glove puppet.

Osamu Kitayama is right and further, I think that these express the cosmology of the Japanese.

If one has (or has modelled) a linguistic, listening father figure, "super-ego," or "generalised other" in ones mind then concepts or later "matter;" that dark stuff that has properties, can be thought to be the essence of things and the visuals, "res extensa" a fleeting subjective veneer.

But, if one shares ones heart with a vast and joint attentive seeing mother, then the figure, or face, can be the centre of gravity of the self, and of things also.

Words and their meanings are no less subjective. The deciding factor is the nature of ones generalised other: does s/he hear or see.

I don't think that there can be any deciding who is right about the cosmos, but it is interesting to note that scientists are now experimenting to see whether the universe is two dimensional a two dimensional floating world in which three dimensionality is an "emergent" property.

Labels: image, japan, japanese culture, nihobunka, 自己

With the tragic slaying of French journalists, and caricature artists, most of the world mourns, myself included.

In Japan however, the reaction was tempered. The Asahi Newspaper, normally quite vociferous regarding the protection of freedom of expression, even featured the following satirical poem (which are, I would argue, the linguistic Japanese equivalent of "mere image" satirical cartoons) this morning

表現の自由に混入する憎悪

Freedom of expression
Includes added
Hatred

The hatred referred to in the satirical poem may refer also perhaps to the murders, but I am afraid it refers primarily to the "Freedom of expression" in which the Japanese satirical writer felt there was an admixture of hatred.



Joe Sacco, the artist of this second image implied in his cartoon "Joe Sacco: On Satire – a response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks" that as a result of the geopolitical situation in the Middle East, then even if there was no hatred in Charlie Hebo's expressions, Muslims have geopolitical reasons, and suffering, to be especially sensitive towards being represented in a humiliating way, as blacks and Jews do, or did especially in the past.

It is my view, however, there are additionally enduring cultural reasons why Asians are more sensitive to humiliating images, because unlike Westerners, they do not see them as "mere" images but rather even representations with which they may identify. Images bear meanings, soul, love and even hate.

This difference in the cultural perception of images may be one possible factor in the tragedy. There are laws against "hate speech" in many Western countries, but when it comes to images, they are thought/seen to be "mere" images.

Since at least the time of Plato and Aristotle, Westerners have believed that they and the world are not "mere images", nor any part of this fleeting photostream of sense impressions, but that there is another world of "forms", "concepts", or more recently "physical matter", that underpins the image. In Japan, on the other hand, Tetsuro Watsuji (1937) argued that it is the face, or mask, that provides the "centre of gravity" of the Japanese self, not a concept, nor a self-narrative.

Westerners believe the self to be a product of the self-narrative, the experience of hearing themselves speak. This is related to the nature of the "generalised other" (Mead, 1967) or "superaddressee" (Bakhtin) to whom Westerners, but not Japanese, address themselves in language-as-thought (Kim, 2002).

In other places, where there are more literal "impartial spectators," -- the Japanese have a mirror, or the Sun Goddess, in their heads -- people exist as seen (see Heine, Takemoto, Moskalenko, Lasaleta, & Henrich, 2008). People, groups, and things do not centre upon shared concepts, but are a network of binary relations (Yuki, 2003; Lacan, 2007, see e.g. Pile, 2013 p. 130), usually with a representative "character" such as Kumamon, "persona" or face such as that of his Royal Highness the Emperor and symbol of Japan.

The image above top is not the man but "merely" an image in the West. Here in Japan, however, the deceased are represented as images（iei, 遺影）in which their souls are thought to an extent to inhere.
May the man, his soul, those that loved him and the world, have peace.

Bibliography
Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. (V. W. McGee, Trans., C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds.) (Second Printing.). University of Texas Press.
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. Retrieved from http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~heine/docs/2008Mirrors.pdf
Kim, H. S. (2002). We talk, therefore we think? A cultural analysis of the effect of talking on thinking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(4), 828.
Lacan, J. (2007). Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. (B. Fink, Trans.) (1st ed.). W W Norton & Co Inc.
Mead, G. H. (1967). Mind, self, and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist (Vol. 1). The University of Chicago Press.
Pile, S. (2013). The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity. Routledge. https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=X1qN4siP0AcC&lpg=PA130&ots=lrX_8UPWUn&dq=lacan%20%22binary%20relationships%22%20Imaginary&pg=PA130#v=onepage&q=lacan%20%22binary%20relationships%22%20Imaginary&f=false
Yuki, M. (2003). Intergroup comparison versus intragroup relationships: A cross-cultural examination of social identity theory in North American and East Asian cultural contexts. Social Psychology Quarterly, 166–183. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1519846.pdf
Watsuji, T 和辻哲郎. (1937). 面とぺルソナ. 岩波書店.

See Also
One Japanese article suggests that the leniency towards cartoons has something to do with the Western ego.
adishakti.org/_/goddess_remains_the_esoteric_heartbeat_of...

Labels: autoscopy, cultural psychology, culture, image, japan, japanese culture, Jaques Lacan, Nacalian, nihonbunka, 日本文化, 自己, 自己視

This picture bears the words
"When facing up to your opponent before a fight, be attentive (lit distribute your "ki" mind/attention) with a silent mind, and be as Mount Fuji (make the shape of Mount Fuji your own form)."

This picture stands in the entrance hall to the gym where my son learns karate. The caption translated above, expresses the essence of Japanese martial arts and thought. First of all there is the emphasis on the importance of facing off. The fight is won and lost - or better still avoided - in this period before it commences which is typically far longer than the fight itself which it is often over in seconds. I would like to draw attention to several aspects of this pre-fight period.

The pre-fight "tachi ai" period involves both intimidation and analysis. There is no better result than the ability to stand with such bearing as to encourage your opponent to admit defeat, or loose confidence to the extent that the fight is a foregone conclusion. Further that this period of mutual analysis and intimidation involve standing facing the opponent. The significance of this will be considered below.

Mental activity within the pre-fight 'tachi-ai' period should be conducted in silence. I believe that this injunction is specifically directed towards the cessation of all self-narrative, hearing oneself speak, asking oneself questions and replying to them (自問自答）, dialectical thought and all other types of linguistic thought.

The next injunction is to be attentive or literally to spread out ones "ki" (attention, mental energy, focus, consciousness) The use of ones "ki" in this way is the core of martial arts and Japanese thought. There are numerous expressions involving "ki" including to be careful (ki wo tsukeru, "attach ki"), be keen on (enter ones ki, ki ni iru), loose consciousness  (ki wo ushinau, loose ki).

I suggest that the use of ki is the direct counterpart to Western narratival-self and that it is used for similar things, specifically for helping us to gain a theory of mind, and in this particular instance, read our opponents mind. Westerners use reason to ascertain how other people are thinking. By thinking we put ideas up in the courtroom of the mind for inspection by another, Reason, a super addressee, a generalised other, and in so doing understand how others feel about our predictions.

The Japanese on the other gage how others will behave more directly, by using their ki. There have been books written about ki and I have read one one of them. Since the use of ki is clearly a non linguistic activity, the use of further words to describe it may be in vain. I and others who wish to understand the use of ki, need above all do it. But, counter productively perhaps, I would like to add one more exposition and suggest that using ones "ki" is using ones mirror neurons. Mirror neurons allow us to model seeing, ourselves, are activated when we look at a mirror, and are activated when we look at other people, telling us, by activation of the same neurological states in us as in the object of our vision, what we would be thinking and intending to do if we appeared as the person we are facing. 

Finally, there is the injunction to make of our own form the form of Mount Fuji. This echoes the advice of a Buddhist priest to a sumo wrestler, and numerous other philosophies of martial arts (such as Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five) rings which encourage the practitioner to become as some natural object, animal, element, or in this case the biggest mountain in Japan.

Going for the bulls-eye and concentrating first upon the apparent mismatch in size between our warrior and the tallest mountain in Japan, I think that this draws attention to East Asian Spiritualism in the literal sense: (唯心論) the assertion that there is only mind or spirit. Similar assertions appear in the psychologism of Ernst Mach (1902), or the immaterialism of Bishop Berkeley. At base all things can only be experienced, are only present to humans or other sentient beings, song long as they partake in that sentience, become a part of that consciousness. Thus, the apparent mismatch between the size of mount Fuji and the warrior is only apparent. When warrior realises his true nature as consciousness, then he will be aware that Mount Fuji, the largest thing that he can imagine, is only a part of himself. This realisation, and the falling away of bodily identifications that accompanies it, can give the warrior tremendous courage and strength.

Finally, but less importantly than the realisation I attempt to express in the previous paragraph, the visual identification with the mountain has the dual effect of positive self-speech. Identifications with natural phenomena allows the warrior to tap into and identify with all the meaning and affect associated with the symbol. And at the same time, through his bearing thus effected, strengthen, calmed, drawn to full height, convey the same, wordlessly to the opponent who is also using their ki, or mirror neurons, to see what is on
their opponents mind.

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I can not read the artists name. It looks like  Shinya Suzuhiromatsu 鈴廣松臣也 but I am not sure, and would like to be corrected. The picture is dedicated to Hajime Matsumura the head of the Yamaguchi Kendo association and 'other comrades in arms', who are the main users of the same gym, or doujou 山口隣保館別館・和光剣心塾道場).

Mach, E. (1902) The Analysis of Sensations, "Not the things, the bodies, but colours, sounds, pressures, times (what we usually call sensations) are the true elements of the world."    p. 23, as quoted in Lenin as Philosopher: A Critical Examination of the Philosophical Basis of Leninism (1948) by Anton Pannekoek, p. 454

Labels: image, japan, japanese culture, martial art, nihonbunka, specular, 日本文化

Choi and his collegues (2003) asked Korean and US subjects to consider a murder incident where a student had murdered his research supervisor. They were then shown a list of 40 factors and asked which of them were irrelevant in terms of motive.

The list included items such as the following: "The professor rejected the student's graduation thesis," "The professor criticised the student in front of others," "The professor used a PC not a Mac," "The graduate student did not like the professors' neck-tie." It was found that while North Americans considered only the big life changing factors (such as failing the student's thesis) relevant, the Korean subjects were significantly less likely to strike other items off list, considering in some case, factors such as the colour of professors' tie to be a contributing factor in the occurrence of the murder.

First of all, despite what Westerners say, I think that the Koreans are not being unrealistic. Take the weather for instance. The hero of Camus' The Outsider ended up killing an Arab partly because it was a hot sunny day, and there is well known relationship between elevated temperatures and violent crime. When conflict is brewing, the fact that it is a hot day can be the final straw.

Choi et al. (2003) explain East Asian sensitivity to the complexity of causality in terms of Masuda and Nisbett's (2001) brilliant theory of analytic and holistic thought. The Koreans are being holistic and taking more factors into consideration.

What Choi does not often mention (I asked him at a conference) is that when the method was reversed, and Koreans were asked, after they had imagined the murder, which factors out of this list are relevant, then they chose no more factors than the Americans. Why is this? Why do the Koreans cease to be more 'holistic' when the choice is presented in this way?

My answer is, as always, that the cultural divide hinges on the relative importance of language and vision. Westerners decide that a factor is relevant if they can construct a compelling narrative for the killing. "He murdered his professor because his professor failed his graduation thesis" is compelling, but "He murdered his professor because he did not like his tie" sounds like a joke.

The Koreans on the other hand are trying to get their imagination around the event, putting themselves into the position of the student. Using their visual imagination they can therefore neither reject factors which it is suggested were present - such as the weather, or the neck tie which might have been the breaking point - nor include factors which they had not imagined. This is because, in both Korea and Japan, language is subservient to vision. Language describes the visual world. On its own it is a lot of bumf (rikutsu).

Bibliography
Camus. A. (1942) L’Étranger. Libraire Gallimard.
Choi, I., Dalal, R., Kim-Prieto, C., & Park, H. (2003). Culture and judgement of causal relevance. Journal of personality and social psychology, 84(1), 46. Retrieved from psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/84/1/46/

Labels: culture, image, japan, japanese culture, Jaques Lacan, Nacalian, nihonbunka, occularcentrism, 日本文化

Japanese people are less likely to adorn their desk at work, or the shelves in their homes with pictures of their relatives, with one exception. Pictures of deceased relatives are often hung above the ancestral altar. This is because, I believe, pictures of people are felt to be so real that it is almost as if they are felt to be present in their picture, as they are felt to be present also inside the altar. Another example of this use of photographs to represent the deceased is the way in which surviving family members of victims and plaintiffs bring pictures of deceased relatives to Japanese courtrooms.

In the above photo (Asahi Newspaper, 17th April, 2013, Photograped by Nishibatake Shirou) Akio Mizoguchi has brought a picture of his mother, deceased, to the High Court of Japan, where it was decided that she was indeed a victim of minamata disease. Mr. Mizoguchi is shown celebrating his, and his mother's victory in the court case. He has brought the photo of his deceased mother so that she may share in the proceedings and eventual victory. Similarly, pictures of deceased victims are sometimes brought by their relatives to murder trials. These behaviours go to demonstrate that contra Westerners, who are meant to grow out of their "mirror stage," the Japanese continue to identify with images even in adult life, and even, in the case of others, post death.

The strong identification between visual images and person hood also explains why so many Japanese ghosts are felt to emerge from images such as hanging scrolls (1,2) lanterns (1,2, 3) and more recently television sets.

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Labels: autoscopy, culture, image, japan, japanese culture, Jaques Lacan, lacan, mirror, Nacalian, occularcentrism, religion, ring, ringu, specular, 日本文化, 自己視

Mouse pads with wrist supporters designed to resemble the breasts of the cartoon figure on the mouse pad so that the user may feel his (presumably) wriststo be supported in their cleavage appear to be popular in Japan judging by the number for sale in a local second hand shop. They were about 10 dollars each, which is 70% less than the price they sell for new on Amazon.com. Yes they are also sold in the USA but they originate in Japan.

Why is it that the Japanese are more able and willing to produce products of this type?

The Japanese are better at visual design since they identify with their self-image to a greater extent.

The Japanese are more interested in visual designs since, following on from the above, bodies, even plastic and virtual ones are felt to be animate.

Japanese men are also less repressed about their sexuality and admiration of breasts. In Japan there is no such thing as that fantasy, 'the gentleman' who has 'transcended' his sexual desire. Japanese men believe themselves to be and are believed to be male qua male, and as such admirers of breasts.

But who wants to purchase a mammarian mouse pad second hand?

Labels: image, japan, japanese culture, nihonbunka, sex, 日本文化

The image above, adapted from Yuki (2003, p172) , shows how Americans and Japanese conceive of groups. Westerners concentrate on the name and set of central attributes of that group and all members feel themselves to share that attribute with all other members, in comparison with outgroups and their members who do not share the same attributes. These can be quite simple such as soccer fans may see membership of their teams fan base as derived from their belief that they "Want Chelse/Liverpool to win." They may chant "Chelsea, Chelsea," or "Liverpool, Liverpool," and they may mind merge with the social identity of their group becoming an outgroup hating herd animal. They do this to achieve vicarious self-enhancement through identification with the presumed superiority of their group. Their team wins, and the fans bask in reflected glory. Even if they loose they can believe that the fans are the most "loyal." And either way they can engage in an ego trip believing their group and/equals themselves to be superiority to others. Western group members therefore indulge in intergroup comparison, to enhance beliefs of the form "we are better than them" and "they are worse than us." This herd-like comparative group cognition is illustrated in the top diagram (a).

Japanese on the other hand pay attention to the many and various relationships and the network of relationships *within* their group. They have no interest in making downward comparison to the detriment of other groups. Their groups do not need a scapegoat, an other, to form at all. They are bonded by mutual cooperation, by "give and take" (a loan-expression from English into Japanese), obligation (giri) and ninjou (empathy) towards ingroup members. Rather than compare, they concentrate on maintaining ingroup harmony. Since the name of Japanese group game is cooperation, the individuality of the group members, their many and various talents that they can bring to the mix, are valued rather than ignored. So there is no moronic mind-merge, no hooligan herd, for the Japanese it would seem.

I love this theory and there is a lot of evidence to support it. Westerners are more likely to positively evaluate and be chummy with those that they are similar to (Heine, Foster, & Spina, 2009; Schug, Yuki, Horikawa, & Takemura, 2009), and more likely to remember information regarding inter-group rather than intra-group relationships (Takemura, Yuki, & Ohtsubo, 2010), whereas are more likely to trust someone in the same relationship network as themselves, rather than merely due to the fact of belonging to some nominal group (Yuki, Maddux, Brewer, & Takemura, 2005).

And as I have written before the emphasis for me is upon "nominal." Westerners like myself tend to conceive of others, their groups and themselves linguistically - in the latter case as having some shared characteristics. Whereas Japanese tend to conceive of groups in their imagination which results (as Lacan argues) in groups being conceived in terms of a network of binary relationships.

However, it occurred to me this morning, based upon the above argument, the group of "Americans" should also be that much more mind-merged, herdlike and amalgamous people - believing in common shared characteristics* - whereas the Japanese as a group, should, in so far as they understand themselves as a group at all, be bristling with individuals all cooperating together for the sake of synergy but never, for the sake of the same synergy, becoming the same. The motto of the Japanese group is, the words of Confuscious "harmonise not herd!" (和して同せず）.

Thus in a culture with so great a respect for individuality, such as Japan under Yuki's theory, it is not surprising that "harmony" should be heralded and aspired towards. Likewise in a culture with so much mind-mulching, herdery, it is not surprising that individualism be that towards which its members are encouraged to aspire.

Does that satisfy? I think that I have gone a little too far and suggest a slight amendment to diagram (b) above. Yuki probably only drew the relationships as external to the group members in order to draw attention to them. He makes it entirely clear that intra-group attention is based upon the Interdependent model (Markus and Kitayama, 1991, diagram page 226) or in Kasulis (2010, diagram p 225) which provides philosophic, the relationships are shown interior to the selves. Implied by Yuki's analysis, I suggest therefore diagram (c) as a modification to diagram (b). Under this conception, the Japanese cease to be so radically individual, as compared to Americans, since they are aware that their individuality is fostered, created and maintained by virtue of their relationships with others which are self-forming and interpenetrate and overlap with the self.

How is this even possible? How can other person really be part of oneself? If that other person and your relationship is conceived in the visio-imaginary, then as Nishida (see Heisig, 2010) and Mach (1897), argue, it takes place in a place which is, paradoxically, both oneself and the world.


*The American Mantra: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Heine, S. J., Foster, J.-A. B., & Spina, R. (2009). Do birds of a feather universally flock together? Cultural variation in the similarity-attraction effect. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 12(4), 247–258. Retrieved from onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-839X.2009.0128...
Heisig, J. W. (2010). Nishida’s Deodorized Basho and the Scent of Zeami’s Flower. In Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy 7: Classical Japanese Philosophy (pp. 247–73). Nagoya: Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture. Retrieved from nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/staff/jheisig/pdf/Nishida%20and%20Zea...
Kasulis, T. P. (2010). Helping Western Readers Understand Japanese Philosophy. Dialogue, (34). Retrieved from nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2124
Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review; Psychological Review, 98(2), 224. Retrieved from www.biu.ac.il/PS/docs/diesendruck/2.pdf
Schug, J., Yuki, M., Horikawa, H., & Takemura, K. (2009). Similarity attraction and actually selecting similar others: How cross-societal differences in relational mobility affect interpersonal similarity in Japan and the USA. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 12(2), 95–103.
Takemura, K., Yuki, M., & Ohtsubo, Y. (2010). Attending inside or outside: A Japanese–US comparison of spontaneous memory of group information. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 13(4), 303–307. doi:10.1111/j.1467-839X.2010.01327.x
Yuki, M. (2003). Intergroup comparison versus intragroup relationships: A cross-cultural examination of social identity theory in North American and East Asian cultural contexts. Social Psychology Quarterly, 166–183. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1519846.pdf
Yuki, Masaki, Maddux, W. W., Brewer, M. B., & Takemura, K. (2005). Cross-cultural differences in relationship-and group-based trust. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31(1), 48–62. Retrieved from psp.sagepub.com/content/31/1/48.short

Labels: collectivism, culture, image, individualism, japan, japanese culture, logos, Nacalian, 個人主義, 日本文化, 集団主義