J a p a n e s e    C u l t u r e

In Japanese mythology the primal female, Izanami (top left), "the female inviter", who together with the primal male, Izanagi, created the first entities - the islands of Japan, mountains and finally fire, at which point she died and went to the underworld.

Such was her partners mourning, he spoke to himself liberally, that he decided to go to the underworld to get her out. Despite her warning he looked at Izanami, and saw that she was dead! This should not have been a surprise, but he was horrified and fled. Izanami gave chase and the two parted at the gates of hell with the following promise.

Inazami: "If you trap me in the underworld with that rock I will kill 1000 children a day"
Inazagi: "I will make 1500 parturition huts (where japanese women go in myth and relatity to give birth)."

Like the myth of the Fall, in Genesis, this creation myth has a taboo (on birth hence the "parturition huts" rather than fig leaves hiding sex) and explains the origin of death, the seperation of two worlds, and the beginning of going forth and multiplying.

The Japanese population has increased ever since, until, five years ago, when in 2010 it started to fall. It occured to me that Izanami must be out and about. But I did not know what that might mean.

More recently I have tended to believe that these primal females that are shut in caves, hell or our breasts, are the interluctors that some Western psychologists and philosophers claim underpins the narrative self. I met her a long time ago, in a brief moment of psychosis and presumed it was only me. Still more recently I have seen that Freud and Derrida are hinting at the same structure. It is not only me. Izanami is listening to everyone who talks 'to themselves'.

Who was she? Izanami helps her partner drip brine from his "pond lance" to create the first "self-stiffening" island. She accepts (but must not give) invitations to sex. When she invites the results are disasterous, so she just says yes, "Ah! what a fair and lovely man!". Izanami affirms. Until that her partner realied that she was dead, Izanami made him feel really good about himself. She completed him. Izanami is the great male-ego-massager.

This is what the narrative self does for you. Our self-narratives allow us to spin self-evaluations in a positive direction, and in the West this tendency has spun out of control (Twenge & Campbell, 2009; Ehrenreich, 2009). While there are still lots of people with low self esteem the USA, and they are maintaining the birth rate, it has been pointed out that self-esttem correlates with low teen pregnancy, (Mecca, Smelser, & Vasconcellos, 1989), high use of contraceptives (Ager, Shea, & Agronow, 1982; Cvetkovich & Grote 1980: Herold, Goodwin, & Lero 1979; Hornick, Doran, & Crawford 1979: see Mecca, Smelser, & Vasconcellos, 1989) and the singles culture that has exploded since the 1960's and 70s in the USA (Twenge & Campbell, 2009) . .

A Japanese television presenter (Hasegawa, 2014) has made a similar claim regarding the declinging birth rate in Japan. "The decline in the Japanese birth rate does not stop because young people love themselves more than raising children." (日本の少子化が止まらないのは、若者が子育てよりも自分のことが大好きだから).

The opinion of one commentator is all very well but what about hard research?

Nagahisa, Kashiwa, (2003) gave adult married women a questionnaire about how they felt about their lives containing containing 21 questions (Table 3, p 42 bottom three factors shown), upon which they performed an exploratory factor analysis to see which items grouped with which others. They found that there were four main factors in the womens lives which they named (reordered to match Table 4)
1) Satisfaction with husband
2) Satisfaction as parent.
3) Satisfaction with self
4) Impatience and disillusment with own individuality.
Unfortunately for my theory, self esteem correlates positively, and self-dillusionment negatively with satisfaction with parenthood. My hypothesis was not upheld. I thought that hypothesis may have been supported when I first started writing this post since the factors are ordered diferently in Table 3 and 4 in the original paper.

Still the paper tested satisfication with parent child relationship and not the intention to have more or less children. I shall have to do my own research. The prediction is that self-esteem will be related to sexual self-worth (see Anderson, 1990) rather than as valuations of and as a parent. It is probably more appropriate to investigate Japanese male self esteem and desire for children.

The Japanese have been pushing self-esteem on their children since the 1990s. They now have a large sector of their population that not only see themselves positively (in the usual Japanese autoscopic manner) but narrate themselves positively as well. As Hasegawa (2014) says, these hybrids are unliklely to want involve themselves in childrearing.

Bibliography
Ehrenreich, B. (2009). Bright-sided: How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America. Macmillan.
Hisanaga, Kashiwagi (1999) 永久ひさ子, & 柏木惠子. 成人期女性における資源配分と生活感.教育心理学研究 Vol. 47 (1999) No. 2 p. 170-179
Hasegawa, Y. 長谷川富.(2014).日本の少子化が止まらないのは、若者が子育てよりも自分のことが大好きだから. Blog post.
spotlight-media.jp/article/93578650305704689
Mecca, A. M., Smelser, N. J., & Vasconcellos, J. (Eds.). (1989). The social importance of self-esteem. Univ of California Press.
Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell (2009) The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement,  Free Press.

Notes
The "pond spear" of Izanagi and Izanami is usually translated as jewelled spear from a reading of the 沼 character used in the Kojiki to mean jewel. But the Kojiki rarely uses characters phonetically alone unless it says so ("these three characters should be read phonetically") so the lance was jeweled and one from a bog or pond. Weapon's entering a reflective pond, is repeated in the next section of the Kojiki when Susano'o meets Izanagi's replacement above the "well in the middle of heaven" and allows his sister to chew up his sword and spit it into this new pond.
Much of Japanese mythic creation takes place over water often dripping upon them. I think that this is an attempt to illustrate the "contradictory" (Nishida) looping of the klien bottle of the visual self. For that which sees, consciousness, to see itself, the face in the mirror must at the same time cover it, become it. So Japanese heroes and heroines, and the first person of Japanese songs, are often crying, spitting, and dripping impure symblos above mirrored surfaces.

Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell (2010) The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement
books.google.co.jp/books?isbn=1416575995
At the same time that the interest in self-esttem and self-expression ramped up, the culture begam to move away from community-oriented thinking. As Robert Putnam showed in his bestseller, Bowling Alone, membership in groups such as Kiwanis, the PTA, and even bowling leagues began to decline in the '70s. Personal relationships showed similar trends. The divorce rate skyrocketed, young people began tomarry later, and the birth rate plummeted. Singles culture, practically nonexistent in the 1950's and 1960's was all the rage, with singles only aparment complexes springing up and disco rooms full of gold-chain wearing bachelors and young bachelorettes trying not to spraing their ankles dancing to "Stayin Aliv" in four inch platform heels. A few other atuhors have also pegged the roots of the narcissim epidemic to the 70's..."the "Me" Decade"


publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6c6006v5&...
Four of the five studies investigating the association between selfesteem and contraceptive use report similar findings: low self-esteem is associated with less frequent or less sustained use of contraceptives. ...No study demonstrates a link between low self-esteem and effective use of contraceptives.

Ager, Shea, and Agronow 1982
Cvetkovich and Grote 1980
Herold, Goodwin, and Lero 1979
MacKinnon Self-Esteem Scale
Hornick, Doran, and Crawford 1979
Rogel and Zuehlke 1982

high self-esteem has been associated with effective contraception primarily for white adolescents, thereby limiting the applicability of these findings to other groups. Nevertheless, there is sufficient correlational evidence to further consider a possible causal link between self-esteem and contraceptive use.

www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=1446
Males become sexual predators whose self-esteem rests on mastering women, maneuvering them to relinquish sexual favors without commitment or support from the man.35 A male's status will actually be enhanced to the extent his mastery of women allows him to parasitically draw economic and material support from them.
Elijah Anderson, Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990), pp. 112-119.

news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1368&dat=19900818&...
Self-esteem, values called tools to help curb teen pregnancy.

www.overpopulation.org/pop-sustainability.html
Dr. Adamu: Giving them information on how to control their reproduction and get health care - and that there is a choice - empowers them and gives them the self-esteem to choose the number and the spacing of their children.

Dr Potts: If you respect women and give them a choice, they will tend to have fewer children.

spotlight-media.jp/article/93578650305704689
日本の少子化が止まらないのは、若者が子育てよりも自分のことが大好きだからフリーアナウンサ 長谷川豊

Labels: japan, japanese culture, nihonbunka, religion, Shinto, specular, taboo, tabuu, theory, 日本文化

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not withstanding the superb research by Hazel Marcus (Kitayama, Snibbe, Markus, & Suzuki, 2004; Markus, 2008; Markus & Schwartz, 2010; Savani, Markus, & Conner, 2008; Savani, Markus, Naidu, Kumar, & Berlia, 2010) on the way in which non W.E.I.R.D (White Educated Industrial Rich Democratic) (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010) persons are not so interested in making choices, it is my opinion that the cultural desire to exercise ones autonomy depends upon the medium or channel in which the choice is to be made.

"Choices" generally refer to verbal expressions, vocalised or thought. Westerners look at menus and make orders and people bring them things. Westerners like to do this. They feel that it increases their self-esteem, empowers them, and makes them feel like God, in whose image they were made, with the word.

The Japanese however often say "I'll have that too" copying the first person to order, and feel less desire to make choices as expressed in verbal orders for food. The Japanese even feel that making choices and orders to be a burden so that good service in Japan, as shown in the above video is often believed to be one in which the verbal choices are made by an expert host who serves his guests with the food that is in that season and locale, the most delicious, and it was indeed delicious and looked great.

But at the same time, the Japanese are very keen to express their autonomy in the visio-behavioural domain. For this reason it is another strong characteristic of Japanese food as served at Japanese restaurants, that it allows the patrons to make it themselves, there on the table according to their proclivities.

Making a sexist assumption, which I believe largely underpins these differences, Japanese restaurants allow and facilitate mummy-autonomy rather than daddy-autonomy. If you want to bark orders to a wife, do not come to Japan. If you want to be free to make food how you like it, then Japan is heaven. Strangely, among feminists, Japan has a bad press.

I also note that the Japanese creation myth or mix starts with what might be called celestial cooking. The first deities mix the 'oily' primal soup and make the first island by dripping salty water. Christians believe in and enjoy creation 'ex-nihilo' by vocalisation. Japanese enjoy creation ex-soup by stirring, and dripping -- a common creative trope in Shinto mythology -- and a lot of fun at the farewell party banquet table.


Notes
'ex-nihilo' is a lie, about a lie!

Bibliography
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61–83. Retrieved from http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0140525X0999152X
Kitayama, S., Snibbe, A. C., Markus, H. R., & Suzuki, T. (2004). Is There Any ‘Free’ Choice? Psychological Science, 15(8), 527.
Markus, H. R. (2008). Does Choice Mean Freedom and Well-Being?. Presented at the International Society for  Cross-Cultural Psychology, Melbourne, Australia. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/651242
Markus, H. R., & Schwartz, B. (2010). Does Choice Mean Freedom and Well-Being? Journal of Consumer Research, 37(2), 344–355. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/651242
Savani, K., Markus, H. R., & Conner, A. L. (2008). Let your preference be your guide? Preferences and choices are more tightly linked for North Americans than for Indians. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(4), 861–876.
Savani, K., Markus, H. R., Naidu, N. V. R., Kumar, S., & Berlia, N. (2010). What Counts as a Choice?: U.S. Americans Are More Likely Than Indians to Construe Actions as Choices. Psychological Science, 21(3), 391–398. http://doi.org/10.1177/0956797609359908

Labels: choice, collectivism, cultural psychology, culture, feminism, hazel markus, japan, japanese culture, psychology, specular, theory, 宗教, 日本文

Labels: blogger, choice, cultural psychology, Flickr, game, Nacalian, nihonbunka, reversal, theory, 日本文化

Is cultural psychology at last taking a visual turn? Yes, and at the same time, not quite. There is the 'theory of Dov Cohen' which integrated the notion of the visual other into the main "collectivist" interpretation of Japanese culture based upon, imho, a misunderstanding of the consequences of a generalised other.

The highly interesting and thorough research of Uskul and Kikutani (2014) appears to follow this Co-hen-ian ;-; trend demonstrating that taking a third person perspective on ones self is related to public self awarenes, motivating actions that are social but not those that are private.

And yet, mirrors -- the easiest way of promoting a third person perspective on self -- are found to promote private self awareness, and the tendency to reject social expectations. Mirrors provide another type of generalised other, and another type of individuality not heightened collectivism.

Who is right? This research (Uskul & Kikutani, 2014) presents hard data, demonstrating the connection between third person perspectives and motivation to conform to social expecations.

Perhaps the problem is the "person." In my opinion, the Japanese do not have a third person perspective, but see themselves from eye of their god (generalised other, super ego, Other, (m)other, superadressee, impartial spectator). The generalised, impartial, super, unconscious, de-personalised nature of the Other (verbal or visual) is the key to making a "god", and commcomitant (verbal or visual) self.

But basically I am all washed up. Kind professor Steven Heine already gave me some work. Perhaps, in the words of the late great Satoshi Kon, when I am starving I can ask for some more work, but by then they may ask "he was a Co(-author w)hen?"

Sorry.

写真お取り下げご希望でありましたら、ご連絡ください。Please contact me if you would like me to remove your photos, taken from your homepages via the comments or email link at nihonbunka.com


Uskul, A. K., & Kikutani, M. (2014). Concerns about losing face moderate the effect of visual perspective on health-related intentions and behaviors. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. works.bepress.com/ayse_uskul/31

Labels: collectivism, individualism, japanese culture, Jaques Lacan, Nacalian, nihonbunka, reversal, specular, theory, 日本文化, 集団主義

Image from Voy et. al 2001, pp 57-58

That the Japanese have very little positive to say about themselves, while Americans do is one of the most robust, and well documented of cultural differences (see the irrefutable work of Steven Heine).

However, as I have demonstrate in a number of studies, when it comes to images the tables are turned. Here above is more proof, that when it comes to images, the positivity of Japanese self imagery blows that of Americans out of the water. Their authors are only seven years old but already, the Japanese are showing the self confidence that they will go on to retain throughout their lives, though they will never express it in words (rikutsu, phah, humbug).

Not only are the Japanese self-drawings more detailed, but also they are twice the size! And this despite the fact that self-image drawing size has been shown to correlate with self esteem. This has been shown in self-drawings, but also in drawings of other things. As demonstrate by Bruner and Goodman's work on the size of drawings of coins by rich children (who draw coins small) and poor children who value them and draw them big, people draw things that they think are big, and unimportant small .

Looking at their linguistic self representations, such as responses to the self-esteem scale, US respondents are about 1605 more self confident, self-valuing, than Japanese. Looking at response to this self-drawing test, the Japanese are about 160% more self-valuing as US respondents (Japanese average drawing size 18.4cm, US average drawing size 11.87).

The problem with this is that, as Derrida explains, we Westerners (and perhaps the Japanese too) are keen to believe that our own form of selfing is the only way to form a self. McAdams, Dennet, Pinker are keen to reassure us that self-narrative selves are hard-wired, that humans, where-ever they are are "homonarans" "The story-telling animal." But alas, the Japanese don't give a flying futon for narratives. They are not ego involved in their narratives.

The problem with the Japanese is that they force us to become aware that there are other ways of 'selfing', that self-narrating is contingent, that we do not have to do it. We nail ourselves to our narratives, but the Japanese are living proof that we did not have to.

Bruner, J. S., & Goodman, C. C. (1947). Value and need as organizing factors in perception. The journal of abnormal and social psychology, 42(1), 33. Retrieved from psycnet.apa.org/journals/abn/42/1/33/
La Voy, S. K., Pederson, W.C., Reitz, J.M., Brauch, A.A., Luxenburg, T.M., & Nofsinger, C.C. (2001). Children’s drawings: A cross-cultural analysis from Japan and the United States. School Psychology International, 22, 53-63.

Labels: culture, japan, japanese culture, mirror, Nacalian, nihonbunka, Shinto, specular, theory, 日本文化

A mock-up of a Japanese Wide Show (current affairs and entertainment program) emphasising the features that demonstrate Nacalian theory of Japanese culture: that Japanese culture is predominantly visual or imago-centric.

1) The faces of the commentators are seen displayed during the parts of the current affairs program that are filmed on location, so that viewers can SEE the expressions, and see the feelings that are being felt. (c.f. the face, in the top right hand corner)

2) The Japanese is given subtitles so that the viewers can *see* what is being said.

On the other hand, in the West, the viewers are provided with copious amounts of canned laughter so that so that they can know when to laugh. The principle is the same - the folks at home need to be told when to laugh - but while Japanese are stimulated by visual images, Westerners are comparatively "(logo) phonocentric" (Derrida, 1998).

In some Western News shows there are also teletypes providing extra linguistic information rather than a subtitles to what the presenters are saying. The majority of Westerners do not need to see what is being spoken, but they do like to feast upon as much linguistic information as possible.

Derrida, J. (1998). Of grammatology. JHU Press.

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

It is nothing new. Japanese people who have been abroad marvel at the extent to which Europeans debate, hold dialogue about everything, with everything, even with themselves. And some of them, , such as the authors of this book (Kitagawa and Hirata, 2008) wish to re-import this love of language back to Japan. They lament (in an almost direct emulation of Nakajima) that "Japan has no Dialogue."

Heejun Kim demonstrates however, that language actually gets in the way of East Asian's thought. When encouraged to think and talk Americans perform better. When encouraged to think and talk Asians perform worse. This suggests that Asians are not thinking in language.

When encouraged to think and talk nonsense (e.g. "a, b, c, a, b, c"), and suppress linguistic thought, Japanese are not so put out. They can automatise speech, put it on the back burner. When Americans suppress linguistic thought they almost find it difficult to walk. Western thinking is in language. Japanese thinking is not. It is elsewhere.

But the Japanese, with their endless love of things foreign, attempt to get all that chin wagging brought here. When they succeed, the Japanese will be a pale imitation of the great white whisperers. You are doing it aren't you? Whispering to yourself.

Don't do it Japan! Believe Kim (2002) and repent.

Kim, H. (2002). We talk, therefore we think? A cultural analysis of the effect of talking on thinking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. www.psych.ucsb.edu/labs/kim/kim_2002.pdf
Kitagawa, T & HIrata, O. 北川達夫, & 平田オリザ. (2008). ニッポンには対話がない―学びとコミュニケーションの再生. 三省堂.
Nakajima, Y. 中島, 義道. (1997). 「対話」のない社会―思いやりと優しさが圧殺するもの. PHP研究所.

Labels: japan, japanese culture, lacan, logos, theory, 日本文化

Over the past 20 years or so there has been a lot of talk about how Japan needs to bring more sexual equality --in the Western sense of giving women more power -- in order to increase the birth rate, reduce divorce, and increase or lower the age of marriage. It has not worked.

It seems to me however that conversely if the Japanese want to invigorate the family the Japanese would need to bring back "Dansonjouhi." Dansonjohi (男尊女卑） means, literally "respect men, abase women", which makes it sound very nasty. Nasty or not Dansonjouhi is a "benevolent sexism" (Glick and Fiske, 1996) like chivalry or  "ladies first" except in the opposite direction. In Japan, traditionally, the women put "men first". To espouse Dansonjohi is thus, to be suorlavihc, chivalrous in reverse. 

The traditional Japanese benevolent sexism was "men first," as opposed to "ladies first" because in Japan women hold the structurally dominant position. In the West "Man" means "human," and women are "the second sex" (De Beauvoir, 2010). The reverse is true in Japan. "Watashi" (in red letters in the image above) is a female first person pronoun used by everyone. When Japanese men want to refer to themselves in formal situations, they have to refer to themselves as a woman. If they use a male first person pronoun (ore, boku) they sound uncouth or infantile.

The centre and building block of Japanese society is the family (Nakane's "ba", 1967). The pre-eminent Japanese interpersonal emotion (Doi's "amae," 2001) springs from mother-child relationships. The Japanese super ego is an internalisation of the mother not the father (Kozawa, 1932; Okonogi's "Ajase complex", 1991, 2001).  The best Western theory of the Japanese self (Markus & Kitayama, 1991) was originally a theory that Hazel Markus and Susan Cross had about their own female selves (Markus & Cross, 1990). Japan's most famous psychologists, argued that the archetypal Japanese is Mother (Kawaii's bosei genri, 1989).

At the very least, at a concrete level, the sleeping arrangements (Caudill & Plath, 1966; Shweder, Jensen, & Goldstein, 2006) are designed to facilitate mothering more than the satisfaction of male desire, and Japanese women control family finances.

In return for this structural control, or cultural power, Japanese women (and Western men) used to put their partners first, in a rather matronising (patronising) way*, by carrying their bags, letting them sit down on trains, putting their clothes on for them, giving them freedom, and not nagging them.

Now however Japanese women (influenced by Western culture) want to keep their cake and eat it. They want to keep all the structural power, their centrality within the home, the power over their children, their financial control and at the same time be treated like a Western wife. This is a bit like a British guy refusing to be a gentleman (e.g. going to snacks or worse). As Stan Lee says, "With great power comes great responsibility."

Notes
* It has been shown that Western male espousal of the "Ladies First" doctrinaire correlates with a dim view of the state and abilities of women: women are put first because they are thought to be the weaker, second sex, in Western society (Glick & Fiske, 1996). This does not prove that Chivalry or Ladies First are nice, or nasty, but they refer to attitudes and behaviours that compensate for the underlying structural imbalances of power. One can argue that the structural imbalances should be taken to task and the compensatory "benevolent sexism" be reviled but, that may require a greater restructuring, or even abandonment, of the family. It has also been shown the benevolent sexism correlates with life satisfaction (Connelly & Heesacker, 2012).

Bibliography
Beauvoir, S. de. (2010). The Second Sex. (C. Borde & S. Malovany-Chevallier, Trans.) (1ST ed.). Knopf.
Caudill, W., & Plath, D. W. (1966). Who Sleeps by Whom? Parent-Child Involvement in Urban Japanese Families. Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes.
Connelly, K., & Heesacker, M. (2012). Why Is Benevolent Sexism Appealing? Associations With System Justification and Life Satisfaction. Psychology of Women Quarterly. Retrieved from http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/08/17/0361684312456369.abstract
Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (1996). The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism. Journal of personality and social psychology, 70(3), 491. Retrieved from http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/70/3/491/
Markus, H., & Cross, S. (1990). The interpersonal self.
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 http://www.biu.ac.il/PS/docs/diesendruck/2.pdf
Shweder, R. A., Jensen, L. A., & Goldstein, W. M. (2006). Who sleeps by whom revisited: A method for extracting the moral goods implicit in practice. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 1995(67), 21–39. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cd.23219956705/abstract
Kawai, H. 河合隼雄. (1989). 父性原理と母性原理. 第三文明社.
Kozawa, H. 古沢平作. (2001). 罪悪感の二種類. In 小此木啓吾 & 北山修 (Eds.), 阿闍世コンプレックス. 創元社.
Okonogi, K. 小此木啓吾. (1991). エディプスと阿闍世. 青土社.
Okonogi, K.小此木啓吾, & 北山修. (2001). 阿闍世コンプレックス. 創元社.
Nakane, C. 中根千枝. (1967). タテ社会の人間関係. 講談社.
Doi, T. 土居健郎. (2001). 「甘え」の構造 [新装版] (新装.). 弘文堂.
Kitayama, O. 北山修. (2005). 共視論. 講談社.

Labels: culture, feminism, japan, japanese culture, nihonbunka, reversal, theory, ジェンダー, 日本文化

Derrida shows how Western philosophers present us with sullied signs such as foot prints (Husserl), speech acts (Austin), and writing (Plato), and then once making it clear how these 'pharmacon' are signs sullied with the image, the Western philosophers then claim that there are pure signs: those of the inner voice of the soul, unsullied by the visual world, which are present to the ideas that they represent. Derrida argues that we do this to preserve our sense of self as signed by our 'self-narration,' which to Derrida is really a sort of 'auto-affection:' "listening to ourselves speak".

The same deconstruction may perhaps be applied to Western feelings towards dolphins and whales. Their "song" is another imperfect language, a pharmacon, that serves to purify our own. Perhaps Hitler is used in a similar way. Hitler is human. But Hitler was evil. Therefore there are good humans. But these real world examples are just an aside. Is there a Japanese cultural equivalent of deconstruction?

It seems to me that the Japanese, like their super heroes, want go in the opposite direction. Performing a Nacalian inversion of Derridean deconstruction, I propose that Japanese artists present to the viewer images that are sullied with signs, that is to say images that invite, come complete with, misinterpretation. Japanese artists show us gravel gardens that look like inland seas. Or drawings of rocks that turn out to be mountains. Or ink drawings that are so sparse that though we provided the interpretation ("that is a branch") we are brought back to the reality of the ink and paper. They show us room interiors that again, play with our sense of scale. And finally Haiku poetry never tires of presenting an image (such as an old lake) with a interpretation (that a frog has jumped in) that turns out to be no more than interpretation - whammy - all there was was the sound of the water. There are no end of haiku that show us images tainted with (mis)interpretations: snowflakes that turn out to be cherry blossom, or cherry blossoms that turns out to be snowflakes. Even Ezra Pound seemed to be aware of the trick, when in "In a Station of the Metro," he confounds petals with his apparition of faces. To achieve the Japanese image-purifying affect however, he need to title his haiku "A walk in the woods." In all cases the Japanese artists shows us tainted, sullied, images, in order to purify the image or place which, according to Nishida, is both self and world. This is Japan Dconstructed.


Western philosophers present their readers with signs sullied with the image, to purify the sacred sign: the holy living logos. Japanese artists, who are also philosophers, present their viewers with images sullied by signs, to purify the sacred image, its space or place: the mirror in their minds.

Image bottom left: Japanese house traditional style interior design / 和室(わしつ)の内装(ないそう) by TANAKA Juuyoh (田中十洋

Labels: culture, japan, japanese culture, superhero, theory, 日本文化

Freud's triparite division of the pysche into the super-ego ("over I"), ego ("I") and Id ("it"), translated into Japanese.

I believe that this tripartite division of the self applies to the Japanese too, but some (e.g. Kishida Shu) believe that the Japanese do not have a supereg. Not being a monotheistic society, and being instead collectivists, the Japanese equivalent of the super-ego is other people. Instead of guilt (or fear of god 対神恐怖症) the Japanese have social phobia (fear of other people 対人恐怖症）.

Still others (such as Dov Cohen) claim that the Japanese have an even greater tendency to see themself from the position of a generalised other (Mead's version of the super-ego) and conversely that this suggests that they are collectivists.

I claim that the Japanese super ego or generalised other is alive and well. It may be a litle weaker, or softer than the Western version. It may be more granular or polytheistic, but that it exists in, or watching, "the imaginary" as represented by the dancing fat lady and the eyeballs in Kyari Pamyu Pamyu's video. For this reason I have added a red eyeball, not in Freud's original diagram.

The Japanese do not share their psyche with a listening father, but with a watching mother or perhaps even a watched mother, まぶたの母. I need to think more about this latter point.

Labels: japan, japanese culture, Jaques Lacan, lacan, Nacalian, occularcentrism, self, specular, theory, 日本文化

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't get me wrong. I don't think that "collectivism" does not exist as an "ism" in Japan or that individualism is not prevalent as an "ism" in the USA. Nothing could be further from the truth. The name of Japan is sometimes "Wa" or "harmony," the Japanese call themselves "The Harmonious." And Westerners are always calling themselves individualists. Jeremy Paxman, possibly the most famous British television jouralist described the London Olympics opening ceremony in the following way:

"Whatever nit-picking worries anyone has about the Opening Ceremony (for me, it was the almost total absence of the golden thread of British history, the fight for personal liberty), it set a tone that was amplified throughout the games. Could a nation of cussed individualists ever bring off an opening show to rival the spectacular we saw in Beijing?" [my emphasis] (Paxman, 2012)

There can be no doubt that at the level of linguistic philosophy, the Japanese espouse harmony and cooperation, whereas Westerners espouse personal liberty and individualism.

How about in the real world? I find the Japanese to as individual as the English. The excellent review paper by Beth Morling (Morling & Lamoreaux, 2008), "Culture outside the head," however reaches the opposite conclusion, so I thought I had better see what it had to say.

The first paper reviewed paper I could download, claimed that since Japnaese adverts used more imagery and were less likely to mention the product directly, they were therefore colectivistic; trying to build up a relationship with the purchaser (Javalgi, Cutler, & Malhotra, 1995). I thought that this analysis was unfair. Readers of this blog (?!) would know that it is my opinion that Japanese use imagery because they identify with images and have a God (or generalised other) that looks rather than listens (Leuers & Sonoda, 1999b).

While clicking around on analysises of print media, however, I cam up with a result that made me pleased. Wang (2006) noted that Taiwanese magazines are Westernised and that collectivist messages (table page 73) and individualist messages (table page 68） are aboult equal at the linguistic level in adverts in Taiwanese and American magazines. Let us assume that this result is due to Westernisation.

However, Wang also noted that when it comes to photographs, Taiwanese magazines are more likely to show individuals (Taiwan 73.1%, US 59%) and correspondingly far less likely to show groups (Taiwa 26.9%, US 41%) (see table page 65). This is not at all unusual. Japanese magazines are lonely (or narcissistic). Their protagonists are displayed on their own.

This result mirrors that found in my research on autophotography (Leuers & Sonoda, 1999b: see Heine 2007, p213). Japanese autophotography displays not only more positivity, but more pictures of self, whereas American photos show more pictures of other people.

Having a look at some Japanese and American fashion magazines, it seems that the same pattern is repeated. American women want to be kissed and appear with men in US Cosmopolitan. Japanese women are more self-reliant and rarely show men in their magazines (or collages) because men's demands for affection are rather annoying (uzai).

Westerners are linguistically individualist since they consider themselves to be linguistic entities (narratives) and try to differentiate their narratives from those of others (largely unsuccessfully, see Leuers & Sonoda, 1999a). Japanese see themselves as their self-images, first and foremost their face (Watsui), and as seperate embodied existances they yearn for communitas and harmony which they express in their "let's make friends" philosophy of harmony (Yamagishi, 2002).

In any event, I do feel that at a personal level the Japanese are extremely self~possessed, self-reliant and difficult to push around. Anyone married to a Japanese woman should know that, but despite the fact that some famous cultural psychologists are, they do not reach the same conclusion. I guess that they presume that they have married an unusual Japanese. (You know who I am thinking of...Fat chance that he reads my blog).

Bibliography
Heine, S. J. (2007). Cultural Psychology (First ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.
Javalgi, R. G., Cutler, B. D., & Malhotra, N. K. (1995). Print advertising at the component level: A cross-cultural comparison of the United States and Japan. Journal of Business Research, 34(2), 117–124. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/014829639400116V
Leuers, T. R. S., & Sonoda, N. (1999a). Independent self bias. Progress in asian social psychology, 3, 87–104. Retrieved from httyp://www.nihonbunka.com/docs/independent_self.rtf
Leuers, T., & Sonoda, N. (1999a). The eye of the other and the independent self of the Japanese. Symposium presentation at the 3rd Conference of the Asian Association of Social Psychology, Taipei, Taiwan. Retrieved from http://nihonbunka.com/docs/aasp99.htm
Morling, B., & Lamoreaux, M. (2008). Measuring culture outside the head: A meta-analysis of individualism—collectivism in cultural products. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 12(3), 199–221.
Paxman, J. (2012, August 12). London 2012 Olympics: Who thinks Britain is rubbish now? Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/9469017/London-2012-Olympics-Who-thinks-Britain-is-rubbish-now.html
Wang, I. C. (2006). I‘ or’ WE"? A comparative analysis of individualism in Taiwanese and US print advertisements. Retrieved from http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0728106-154652
山岸俊男. (2002). 心でっかちな日本人―集団主義文化という幻想. 日本経済新聞社.

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

The notion of a "Dramaturgical self" originates in the social anthropology of Goffman (1959), in the Shetland Ilses off Scotland, where he argued that the Scottish villagers seemed to act, and define themselves, as if on stage. The notion of the dramaturgical self was subsequently used by McVeigh (2000) to explain the Japanese tendency to wear uniforms. McVeigh is right, in their use of uniforms, and in many other ways, the Japanese behave at times, from Western eyes, as if on stage.

This notion of the dramaturgical self nears the mark and veers away from it. These anthropologists are aware of the increased extent to which their subjects take care (Foucault, 1984) over visual self presentation *as if on stage* and in this awareness they are spot on. What they do not seem to realise is that such visual self presentations are self-consumed. Goffman was an acolyte of Mead who firmly insists that dramaturgical self representations are not self consumed, not for self but for others. Mead writes, in "Mind Self and Society, "(1967)

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

"If we exclude vocal gestures, it is only by the use of the mirror that one could reach the position where he responds to his own gestures as other people respond." p66

In other words, self views require mirrors whereas "vocal gestures" (linguistic gestures, self narration) do not. Westerners seem to find it very difficult to conceive of visual self presentation as anything but a presentation for an other, even though linguistic self-presentation is seen as purely self-expressive, not requiring any mirror, any audience. This assumption strikes me as being massively, Judeo-Christianly biased. In fact, language is radically external, for others, communicative, taking place in game (Mead,1959; Wittgenstein, 1973), and never entirely private (Wittgenstein, 1973, ¶243). Sure, one can do away with the particular other if one internalises the generalised other (Mead, 1959), the Other (Lacan, 2007, p.53), the superaddressee (Bakhtin, 1986, p.126) or one has a relationship with Yaweh.

I insist that the Japanese self is seen from the eye of an internalised Other, Amaterasu, a mirror in their heads (Heine, Takemoto, Moskalenko, Laseta, Henrich, 2008). However, in order to change the Japanese self it is therefore necessary to change ones self view, and integrate views of self from the eyes new others for example via drama practice (see "riken no ken", Yusa, 1987) and this motivates the tendency for Japanese to practice where they can be seen rather than in the privacy of their drama room.

We Westerners, however, like to practice our narratives in front of a presumed linguistically understanding public, as I am doing here, and as US students do in their debate clubs.

The process of restructuring of the self (as shown in the video) is akin to psychotherapy, which in the West is about narrating oneself or talking (Freud,1977) to a benign (Spotnitz, 2004) listener (Phillips), while in Japan it helps to get the client (those that want to restructure, and change their self) to express themselves visually e.g. using sand play (Kawai, 1969), collage (Imamura, 2006), movement (Tsuru, 207), potted images (Tashima, 1987), imaginative reflection on the past (Yoshimoto, I, 2007) and photography (Mukoyama, 2010 - referencing my research, under my birth name"Leuers") in front of a benign therapist-client shared co-gaze (Kitayama, 2005).

Video by generous permission of Gekindan Fue (Drama Club Whistle), Yamaguchi University.

Bibliography
Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. (V. W. McGee, Trans.) (Second Printing.). University of Texas Press.
Freud, S. (1977). Five lectures on psycho-analysis. WW Norton & Company.
Foucault, M. (1984). On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress. The Foucault Reader, 340–72.
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books.
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/~henrich/Website/Papers/Mirrors-pspb4%5B1%5D.pdf
Imamura, Y. 今村友木子. (2006). コラージュ表現-統合失調症者の特徴を探る. 創元社.
Kawai, H. 河合隼雄. (1969). 箱庭療法入門. 誠信書房.
Kitayama, O. 北山修. (2005). 共視論. 講談社.
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.
McVeigh, B. J. (2000). Wearing Ideology: State, Schooling and Self-Presentation in Japan (First ed.). Berg Publishers.
Mukoyama, Y. 向山泰代. (2010). 自叙写真法による自己認知の測定に関する研究. ナカニシヤ出版.
Spotnitz, H. M. (2004). Modern Psychoanalysis of the Schizophrenic Patient: Theory of the Technique. YBK Publishers, Inc.
Tashima, S. 田嶌誠一. (1987). 壷イメージ療法―その生いたちと事例研究. 創元社.
Tsuru, M. 鶴光代. (2007). 臨床動作法への招待. 金剛出版.
Wittgenstein, L. (1973). Philosophical Investigations (3rd ed.). Prentice Hall.
Yoshimoto, I. 吉本伊信. (2007). 内観法 (新.). 春秋社.
Yusa, M. (1987). Riken no Ken. Zeami’s Theory of Acting and Theatrical Appreciation. Monumenta Nipponica, 42(3), 331–345.

Labels: autoscopy, Jaques Lacan, nihobunka, nihonbunka, theory, 日本文化

The reference to Japanese culture is not till towards the end.

According to Lacan the real, imaginary and symbolic are related in like manner to the rings of a borromean knot (see this page) in which no one of the the three rings passes through the others, but the three rings are held together. Cutting any of the rings causes the knot to fall apart.

I have interpreted this to mean that we experience, or believe in ourselves (and the world) at the presumed intersection between the imaginary (that which we can see and imagine) and the symbolic (that which we can say). The borromean knot illustrates this "presumption" in the fact that the rings do not in fact intersect.

I have also related this presumption, and the failure to maintain it, to the anguish of characters in two scenes in David Lynch's movies: the scene in "Blue Velvet" (1986) were Ben (played by Dean Stockwell) mimes "In dreams" and the "Club Silencio" scene in "Mulholland Dr." (2001) where, Frank in the former, and Diane and Camilla in the later become visibly distraught to realise that the performer they are watching is lip-synching. I also read that Australia has outlawed lip-synching at "live concerts" (specifically those of Britney Spears) unless the tickets come with a disclaimer. Why should lip-synching be so distressing?

At the phenomenological level however, it can be claimed that (I have a reference for this claim somewhere, thanks to one of my seminar students) that sound can not come from vision and that experientially we are always, as it were, aligning an audio track with a visual track, and in a sense all performers are lip-synchers or ventriloquists, though in some situations we deem their voices and their images to be coming from the same place.

At the level of the "symbolic" and the "imaginary", however, I did not have any clear understanding of what Lacan was referring to.

Rather than being a "card holding Lacanian," I just find the most basic level interpretation of theories useful for interpreting Japanese culture, and rightly or wrongly, I tend to think that he the man, Lacan himself, was a ranting obscurantist! Even worse than me perhaps.

But I have been thinking about this knot a little more, while reading the Edgar Allen Poe short story that Lacan so recommends (The Purloined Letter). While I find Lacan's interpretation of this detective story almost impossibly opaque, the detective story itself is very instructive. Notably there are persona in the story who appear to be able to see and not be seen, and others to manipulate signs but not see, and an independence and interaction among these persona, which leads me to the following vague hypothesis, which may well have been what Lacan was saying all along.

Perhaps the faculties of speaking and imagining can only appreciate themselves in their opposite? Like an invisible ghost that can see a blind man that can only speak of ghosts? This reminds me of "The Sixth Sense" and all those imaginary friends I wrote about on an earlier post.

I am not sure how to make this any more clear but perhaps it can be unpacked in to the following 4 assertions
A) Imagination can not imagine itself (c.f. Nietzsche's remarks on eyes not being able to see themselves)
B) Imagine only reaches a self perception via language (those trasformatory symbols that Jpanese collect)
C) Speech can not say itself c.f. Emile Benveniste's papers on the subject of utterance and the subject of enunciation. One of the two crucial papers by Benveniste can be found online.
D) The speaking subject of "utterance" can only represent itself by taking a detour via the image (as body visible)

I am not sure how to make the these four claims more persuasive but I find myself rather taken by the idea. The above would suggest a more divided self.

Random thoughts

1) People who have had their inter-hemispheric neural highway, the corpus callosum, cut cease to dream, and their right and left arms sometimes even fight each other. As per the last photo, Poe has considerable hemispherical asymmetry

2) Images in my dreams seem often to be rebuses as if my dream images are trying desperately to speak.

Finally relating this to Japanese culture

3) Proposition (A) above might be more unacceptable to Japanese who feel that they can imagine themselves without loss of fidelity, and proposition (C) more unacceptable to Westerners who, according to many (Bruner, Benveniste, MacAdams etc) narrate themselves into existence.

4) Lacan argued (see the aforemented page) the Western ego exists at the intersection between the symbolic and the real. Transposing Nacalianly, the Japanese self exists at the intersection between the (visio) imaginary and the real, as Nishida (see Heisig, 2004) argues.

[The above borromean knot is probably drawn from a Western perspective with the symbolic rather than the imaginary above the real].

Bibliography
Heisig, J. W. (2004). Nishida’s medieval bent. Japanese journal of religious studies, 55–72. Retrieved from nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/staff/jheisig/pdf/Nishida%20Medieval%...

Labels: autoscopy, image, japan, japanese culture, Jaques Lacan, lacan, logos, nihobunka, nihonbunka, occularcentrism, reversal, self, theory, 日本文化

Recently, Ma-Kellams, Blascovich, & McCall, (2012) have demonstrated that East Asians are less in touch with their bodies, less aware of their bodies, than Americans. What of the vaunted embodiment (Kasulis & Ames, 1992) of the Asian Self?

There is something about Hiroko, and other Japanese girls, that shows they can see very well (contra Mary, see Jackson, 1986). Hiroko above can see so well she can even see herself.

Japanese ladies looks doll-like (Gerbert, 2001), perfect, presented, visio-dramatologically, because, I claim, they are continually presenting themselves to the Eye-of-the-Other: the generalised visual other than they simulate, that looks with them (Kitayama, 2005) in their minds.

You can always spot Japanese people, even abroad in Asian, especially Japanese ladies due to this oh 'so perfect' self-presentation.

While the Japanese could not care a hoot about how their self-narrative is heard (Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999), they care oh so much about how they appear. The above photo was one kindly taken in the research my auto-photography (Takememo ne Leuers & Sonoda, 1999) which demonstrated that Japanese auto-photography is as positive as the self-narratives and self-descriptions of Americans. Permanently in a height state of objective self awareness, this subject is always presenting her self, as if she is on strings. (This subject's name is not really "Hiroko" and I have blurred her face).

Back to the research of Ma-Kellams, Blascovich, & McCall (2012). They found that Japanese were more easily deceived as to bodily information; when misinformed that their heart rate had changed (raced) they changed their perceptions of stimuli whereas Americans did not. Japanese were more likely to mis-attribute arousal and think a confederate sexy in a virtual version of the classic scary "rope bridge" (Dutton & Aron, 1974) type situation. Japanese were also less accurate at estimating their own heart rate.

Furthermore this insensitivity to the body of correlated with the "contextual" (read visual?) ability found among Asians summarised in my last blog post.

In other words, the better Asians are at judging the relative lengths of rods in frames, the worse they are at being aware of the inside of their own body. Ma-Kellams, Blascovich, & McCall (2012) claim that East Asians are being distracted by contextual information that they are processing.

I believe however, that they are aware of their bodies in their self-directed, autoscopic gaze and it is this that interferes with their "visceral perception" of internal bodily events. This explanation contradicts research that suggests that increased objective self awareness in front of mirrors reduces the placebo effect (Gibbons, Carver, Scheier, & Hormuth, 1979; Gibbons & Gaeddert, 1984), but this may be due to an excesss of OSA, or depending on the supposed effect of the placebo.

I think that there may be exceptions to the findings in that the Japanese may be hyper sensitive to bodily changes that present themselves visually, such as blushing, sweating and appearing overweight.

Bibliography
Dutton, D. G., & Aron, A. P. (1974). Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety. Journal of personality and social psychology, 30(4), 510.
Gibbons, F. X., & Gaeddert, W. P. (1984). Focus of attention and placebo utility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 20(2), 159–176. doi:10.1016/0022-1031(84)90018-0
Gibbons, F. X., Carver, C. S., Scheier, M. F., & Hormuth, S. E. (1979). Self-focused attention and the placebo effect: Fooling some of the people some of the time. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 15(3), 263–274. doi:10.1016/0022-1031(79)90037-4
Gerbert, E. (2001). Dolls in Japan. The Journal of Popular Culture, 35(3), 59–89. doi:10.1111/j.0022-3840.2001.3503_59.x
Jackson, F. (1986). What Mary didn’t know. The Journal of Philosophy, 83(5), 291–295. Retrieved from http://www.philosophicalturn.net/intro/Consciousness/Jackson_Mary_Know.pdf
Kasulis, T. P., & Ames, R. T. (1992). Self As Body in Asian Theory and Practice. (W. Dissanayake, Ed.). State Univ of New York Pr.
Kitayama, O. 北山修. (2005). 共視論. 講談社.
Leuers, T., & Sonoda, N. (1999). The eye of the other and the independent self of the Japanese. Symposium presentation at the 3rd Conference of the Asian Association of Social Psychology, Taipei, Taiwan.
Ma-Kellams, C., Blascovich, J., & McCall, C. (2012). Culture and the body: East–West differences in visceral perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(4), 718–728. doi:10.1037/a0027010

Labels: autoscopy, culture, eye, female, gender, image, japan, japanese culture, Jaques Lacan, mirror, nihobunka, nihonbunka, occularcentrism, specular, theory, 日本文化

The Japanese feel they can copy shrines, horses, food, and foreign countries in form of the popular foreign villages (gaikoku mura. See Graburn, Ertl, & Tierney, 2010; Hendry, 2000, 2005). Perhaps all this 'copying' started with a special mirror. With regard to shrines at least the Japanese claim it is not copying, but like "dividing a fire" (Norinaga see Herbert, 2010, p99) .

At least, when the Japanese see these "copies" they feel they are experiencing the same thing an authenticopy, or Simulacra (Baudrillard, 1995). I argue that they are the same thing to the Japanese because the world is the light. To borrow Heisig's words, the Japanese (or at least Nishida) believe the world meets the self at the plane of that "tainless mirror"(Heisig, 2004).

One can tell that the "copying" is visual because, for instance, the Japanese often like to change the size (Lee, 1984) or taste (Graburn, Ertl, & Tierney, 2010, p. 231) of the "copies". This matters not one bit in the plane of the mirror, where there is no size; get up close to a Bonsai and it could be a massive tree.

Westerners feel that the meanings behind their words are replicated in the minds of others (Nietzshe, 1888; Derrida, 2011) because the world, for Mary (Jackson, 1986), Dennet (2007) and I at least, is made of Logos: our dream of language made real. Occasionally some of us get out of our room and see the light, which makes us shiver.

So who are the copyists now, the word copiers or the light copiers?

Imai & Gentner (1997; see Imai & Masuda, in press or Genter & Boroditsky, 2001) showed Japanese and American children and adults, an image like the above. My version shows a half-moon shape made of plasticine and red playdough, and some lumps of plasticine. In the original experiment the subjects were told that the thing at the top was a "dax" and to bring the experimenter another dax. The Japanese were more likely than Americans to bring the pieces of plasticine. This is not surprising in view of the fact that Japanese nouns do not have plurals and need counters to refer to number, as English does for materials. The Japanese seem to be seeing the world as materials.

But then later Imai and her associates performed the same experimenters tried getting Americans (Imai & Gentner, 1997) and then Japanese (Imai & Mazuka, 2007) to "bring the same as this," again pointing to the green shape at the top, without giving that thatness a name.

Without a name, both the Americans and the Japanese were more likely to behave like the Japanese choosing more green plasticine rather than the red shape or entity, because they have got the words out of their heads to an extent. Imai interprets the data in a different way specifically rejecting the "perceptual" hypothesis. But I claim that deprived of words for a novel experience, both Americans and Japanese had started to see the light - or the colours that we anticipate Mary will enjoy so much - a little more clearly - hence the choice of plasticine rather than the half moon shape.

The floating world, the one that the Japanese believe in at the same time know (or are told) does not really exist is often referred to as "colour" (shiki) in Japanese Buddhism.

Being presented with these novel shapes is perhaps like a little journey, a minor tourism experience where the Japanese tourist wants to be given the name first, whereas the Western tourists wants to go and see the sights and give it a name afterwards.

Bibliography (thanks Zotero)
Baudrillard, J. (1995). Simulcra and Simulation. (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). Univ of Michigan Pr.
Dennett, D. (2007). What RoboMary Knows. Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism, 15–31.
Derrida, J. (2011). Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Northwestern Univ Pr.
Genter, D., & Boroditsky, L. (2001). Individuation, relativity and early word learning. In M. Bowerman & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development (pp. 215–256). Cambridge University Press.
Lee 李御寧. (1984). 「縮み」志向の日本人. 講談社.
Graburn, N., Ertl, J., & Tierney, R. K. (2010). Multiculturalism in the New Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within. Berghahn Books.
Heisig, J. W. (2004). Nishida’s medieval bent. Japanese journal of religious studies, 55–72. Retrieved from nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/staff/jheisig/pdf/Nishida%20Medieval%...
Hendry, J. (2000). Foreign Country Theme Parks: A New Theme or an Old Japanese Pattern? Social Science Japan Journal, 3(2), 207–220. doi:10.1093/ssjj/3.2.207
Hendry, J. (2005). Japan’s Global Village: A View from the World of Leisure. A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan, 231–243.
Herbert, J. (2010). Shinto: At the Fountainhead of Japan. Taylor & Francis.
Imai, M., & Masuda, T. (n.d.). The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts. Retrieved from www.ualberta.ca/~tmasuda/ImaMasudaAdvancesCulturePsycholo...
Imai, M., & Mazuka, R. (2007). Language-Relative Construal of Individuation Constrained by Universal Ontology: Revisiting Language Universals and Linguistic Relativity. Cognitive science, 31(3), 385–413.
Imai, Mutsumi, & Gentner, D. (1997). A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: universal ontology and linguistic influence. Cognition, 62(2), 169–200. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(96)00784-6
Imai, Mutsumi, Gentner, D., & Uchida, N. (1994). Children’s theories of word meaning: The role of shape similarity in early acquisition. Cognitive Development, 9(1), 45–75. doi:10.1016/0885-2014(94)90019-1
Jackson, F. (1986). What Mary didn’t know. The Journal of Philosophy, 83(5), 291–295.
Nietzsche, F. (1888)“Reason in Philosophy.” Twilight of the Idols. transl. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. Retreived from http://www.handprint.com/SC/NIE/GotDamer.html#sect3

Labels: japan, japanese culture, nihobunka, nihonbunka, occularcentrism, Shinto, specular, theory, tourism, 日本文化, 神道

First of all I am a Yoshinori Kobayashi fan. I often agree with his opinions and when I don't I am glad that he has expressed them. Secondly I do not hold copyright for any of the three images above, found by searching for the manga artists name on google images (here and here) and I am more than happy to cease and desist. 取り下げご希望でありましたら、下記のコメント欄かnihonbunka.comからご連絡ください。

Another reason why I like Kobayashi is because he presents a theory of self not unlike that found in Social psychology and Lacan: Having a self is not innate. One has a self by virtue of internalising self views of others, so self or individual is dependent upon other or "public" in his words.

It is a shame however that the takes the usual logocentrist position of the self being primarily structured by language. This enables him to take a more nationalist view of the self since he believes the self is formed in language, specifically the Japanese language, so the "public" upon which his self is dependent is the community of Japanophones, including some Taiwanese (who he admires).

I wish he would be more Naclanian and to an extent at least universalising since it seems to me he has a autoscopic, specular self: a self created in the gaze rather than the ear, or rather linguistic recognition, of the other.

Not only is he clearly an excellent manga artists with command of images, and viewpoints, and can draw himself, looking at himself in a mirror from a viewpoint behind his own head but also he shows the most give away sign of having a self-in-the-visio imaginary; he draws his own representation in a very postive way. Please compare the two images on the left. The one above in the bottom corner of the manga on the left is Kobayashi's representation of Kobayashi. As you can see the graphic representation looks rather younger, perhaps even more handsome, than the eloquent reality.

This tendency of manga artists to represent themselves in a postive way is far from unique to Kobayashi. In all the self representations or jimanga (a painful pun on "self-manga" 自漫画, and "picture of which one is pround" 自慢画) that I have seen, all appear to be positive. And there is no reason why not.

These jimanga are just one of the many ways that Japanese express that which in language is called "self-enhancement" (Heine, 1999). We westerners have a far stronger tendency to self-enhance when we talk about yourselves. Confined to linguistic self-representations, the Japanese seem to have entirely realistic self-appraisals and comparatively low self-esteem. As my research on autophotography and numerous photographs here of Japanese visual self-representations, Kobayashi as other Japnaese have healthy visual self esteem.

Let is be noted that the Japanese have an autoscopic (Metzinger, 2009) self view, they can see themselves (as Koyahashi's manga on the right shows and see Heine, Takemoto, Moskalenko, Lasaleta, & Henrich, 2008) so their postive self-representations in the visual domain are for self-consumption, as is all healthy self esteem.

Bibliography
Kobayashi, Y. 小林よしのり. (2000). 新・ゴーマニズム宣言SPECIAL 台湾論. 小学館.
Kobayashi, Y. 小林よしのり(n.d.)「愛子さまが皇太子になれるよう皇室典範改正を」 .Infoseek ニュース. Retrieved from http://news.infoseek.co.jp/article/postseven_9592 (I can't find the reference to the manga)
Heine, S., Lehman, D., Markus, H., & Kitayama, S. (1999). Is there a universal need for positive self-regard?. Psychological review.
Heine, S. J., Takemoto, T., Moskalenko, S., Lasaleta, J., & Henrich, J. (2008). Mirrors in the head: Cultural variation in objective self-awareness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(7), 879–887. http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/Website/Papers/Mirrors-pspb4%5B1%5D.pdf
Metzinger, T. (2009). The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (1st ed.). Basic Books.

Labels: autoscopy, individualism, japan, japanese culture, manga, mirror, nihobunka, nihonbunka, occularcentrism, self, specular, theory, 日本文化, 自己視

Laura Nenzi (2008, p189) uses the above image by way of conclusion to her excellent book on travel in Japan. She writes "But dreams and aspirations (collective and individual alike) are slippery subjects that more often than not hide between lines or amid icons alread dense with meaning. Difficult to verbalize, difficult to grasp, they are impossible tricky for the historian to recover with any sense of certainty. Leave it then to Isoda Koryuusai (1735-1790) to come to the rescue of the text-bound historian with a mesmerizing image that, in the limited space of one woodblock print (19.1cm x 25.4com), concisely summarizes what countless travelers (as well as the historian in question) have spilled rivers of ink attempting to articulate (Figure 14). Dreaming of Walking near Fuji (1770-1773) captures and freezes in time the hopes and desires of two characters from the floating world...What the dream of movement meant to these two is clear: liberation from the everyday. Out of the house, away from all that is predictable and commonplace, they have finally achieved that state of complete disengagement that is the prerequisite for re-creation.
As the juxtaposition of movement and immobility in this image suggests, motion is, in a sense, the antithesis of order: it displaces what ought to stay put; it frees what ought to be contained." (p 187-188. Image on page 189, emphasis mine.)

Bearing in mind her subject matter - Japanese travellers who go to see sights where there is nothing to see - this is a fabulous choice of image to close with. Prof Nenzi is on the money, but I wish she had spilt a little more ink, at least in the interrogative. Do "collective" dreams exist? Can we share our dreams like these dreamers, in some way, in any way? Why are these Japanese dreamers dreaming autoscopically (Masuda,Gonzalez, Kwan, Nisbett, 2008; Cohen and Gunz, 2002) each seeing the image of themselves in their own dream - the dream is doubly double? From whose perspective is the dream seen? Perhaps the most important question for a theory of travel is, have the dreamers seen mount Fuji? And the million dollar question, bearing in mind the genre of the artwork, when they wake up will the erstwhile dreamers then share the same picture of the floating world.?

To be honest I can't answer these questions for myself let alone the Japanese. But at least, I think that there is considerable cultural difference at least in degree, and that these differences help explain cultural differences in travel behaviour.

The position of these (as Nenzi notes) sexually ambiguous lovers, reminds me of the cover of "The Postcard." (Derrida, 1987) which I consider to have been self, or intra-psychologically addressed. It is also reminiscent of the many pictures of the floating world that Kitayama (2005) uses to illustrate the, he argues, psychologically important trope of "looking together." Furthermore, if the Japanese are capable of autoscopy even when awake ( as my research, Heine, et al., 2008, shows), the picture may be illustrative not only of Japanese travel behaviour, but also of the Japanese self".

Image credits: Isoda Koryuusai, Dreaming of Walking near Fuji, 1770-1773. Woodblock print, ink and color on paper, 19.1 b 25.4cm. M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (The Anne van Biema Collection, S2004.3.23)

Bibliography Created by Zotero
Cohen, D., & Gunz, A. (2002). As seen by the other...: perspectives on the self in the memories and emotional perceptions of Easterners and Westerners. Psychological Science, 13(1), 55–59. Retrieved from web.missouri.edu/~ajgbp7/personal/Cohen_Gunz_2002.pdf
Derrida, J. (1987). The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. (A. Bass, Trans.) (First ed.). University Of Chicago 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. http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/Website/Papers/Mirrors-pspb4%5B1%5D.pdf
Kitayama, O. 北山修. (2005). 共視論. 講談社.
Masuda, T., Gonzalez, R., Kwan, L., & Nisbett, R. E. (2008). Culture and aesthetic preference: comparing the attention to context of East Asians and Americans. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(9), 1260–1275.
Metzinger, T. (2009). The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (1st ed.). Basic Books. (I have not read this but it sounded like Nishida and uses the word "autoscopy" so it is on my reading list)
Nenzi, L. N. D. (2008). Excursions in identity: travel and the intersection of place, gender, and status in Edo Japan. University of Hawaii Press.

Labels: autoscopy, image, japan, japanese culture, nihobunka, nihonbunka, theory, tourism, 日本文化, 自己視

I re-read Watsuji's brief essay called "Mask and Persona" today. The essay, with its emphasis on image of self, is one of the reasons why I have a Nacalian view of the Japanese. The essay is brief, and perhaps because it is brief, rife with potential meanings. Barthes would have liked it. Or would he?

Roland Barthes, a giant among Western thinkers, is famous for many things. One of the many things that he is famous for is his appreciation of texts, stories, novels, movies, that allow a plenty of space for reader interpretation. Barthes liked 'texts' that are rife with potential meanings.

Sometimes, I watch a movie and think, "er, what was that"? What did it mean? I am not saying that Barthes liked every bad B movie, but he liked movies (etc.) that are not obvious, that do not force their meanings down the throat of the audience, that allow the reader to interpret, that allow for a variety of different readings.

Another thing that Roland Barthes is famous for, in my own mind, is his belief that only the linguistic (phonemes?) can really mean.

Is he for real? Can be really be serious? Yes... as far as I am aware, he really thought that only language (again phonemes I think) can mean, much any way.

Barthes was great at looking at things and unpacking their meaning, interpreting them, giving images words. He felt, as the great Western tradition feels, that visual signs have meaning only in so far as they translate to linguistic meanings.

I confess that I am not sure why, or how, Barthes justified his belief that only language (phoneme) can mean. Here is my take on how he could think such a thing.

Before I attempt to explain Barthes' view, I should say also that he came to Japan and wrote one of the most famous, and one of my very favorite, books about Japan, and claiming that Japan is an "empire of signs," by this he meant that he could not provide words for the {visual} signs that he found in Japan, and thus he presumed that these Japanese signs are empty centered, meaningless signs for the sake of signs.

So, how could Barthes have presumed such a thing? And what is "meaning" anyway?

Generally in my blog I just report or permute, as in reverse, or otherwise shift the thoughts of clever people (Lacan, Nishida, Bakhtin, Heine, Kim etc) to fit Japanese culture as I see it, and do not attempt to say anything new, other than my permutations. But meaning (what is meaning?) has been getting my goat, so I would like to have a try.

Watsuji's essay "Mask and Persona" exposes the importance of face, and therefore mask, as a core, nexus of our appreciation of people, personality, or persona.

Watsuji points out that we are at ease with facial portraits (such as any one in the image above) of people, feeling them to be people, and do not feel these facial portraits to to be limbless. If on the other hand we see a picture of a torso or of a hand, we see that picture as lacking a face, as just a picture of a torso or of a hand and not of a person. It is only when we see a picture of a face that we see it as being a picture of the person.

This quantum break, between images of hands and of faces, is Watsuji argues, like the life or personality-imbued-ness, of masks used in Japanese drama such as Noh and Kagura. A Noh mask, like a face (unlike a fake hand or glove) can represent a personality, a person. In a way parallel to the separation of mask and actor therefore, the face like the mask has a life of its own.

Watsuji also argues that we always put a face to our perceptions of people. He uses the example of people with whom we have only had a linguistic relationship, such as by letter. He might also have used the example or reading a novel. He points out that even though we have only had linguistic commune with that person (or persona in a novel) we form a facial impression so strong such that we are surprised if the reality (or the film of the book) does not conform to our expectations.

If we read a book, and then seeing the film of the book, and we can often be surprised, jarred disappointed that the actor playing the lead character does not look how we expected them to be. Not only do we give faces to the persona in books that we read, Watsuji argues that we can't think of people that we do know and have me without calling to mind their face.

Now here is a thought exercise. If one reads a letter, email, or other linguistic missive from a friend, then does one, do you understand the linguistic meaning without recourse to any imagination, or more, do we rely on imagining the face or that person as they "say" their 'letteral'-linguistic meanings in order to give meaning to what they have said?

Both scenarios are possible, depending on many things, including the senders, with a continuum between the two. Some readers, may think only of the words expressed in the linguistic message. Some readers may read the words and then understand them by calling to mind the face of the person that said them. As argued by Watsuji since we create faces even for novel protagonists, everyone reads meaning straight from the words, and also from the images they create both, to varying degrees.

It seems to me that the degree to which we rely on our images of faces to understand the meanings of others words, and the degree to which we put faces to the words we read in novels, will depend on the extent to which we identify with our face or our words.

This I think provides an interpretation of Barthes assertion that only the linguistic has meaning. The reason why, for Barthes, only the linguistic has meaning is because Barthes (as most Westerners) predominantly identified with his narrative self. Barthes was for Barthes a narrative. Watsuji for Watsuji was however, predominantly a face.

One of the conditions for meaning is the integration of that which we are trying to understand with that which we think we are. To Barthes, Japanese visual signs were empty because Barthes did not understand, conceive of himself visually. To Japanese people however, the signs that Barthes failed to interpret were as they were, as visual signs, and like faces, replete with meaning.

This has three implications.

In that way, perhaps the sushi, the imperial palace, and the visual other signs that Barthes felt to be empty may be perceived as face. The imperial palace may be one of the 'faces of Tokyo.' A tuna sushi may be perceived as a face. I think that this can be tested experimentally.

The Japanese identifying as they may do with their faces may be especially motivated to maintain facial consistency across the life span, and or to see themselves as different people (young me, old me, ojisan me) at different stages of their lives. I think that the facial consistency can be observed in Japan, both in the flesh and in self characterisations, self-manga (jimanga is my pun) such as that of Kobayashi Yoshinori which always present the author as if he were a young man.

Japanese can and do identify with other faces, such as that of their emperor or the mascots that represent them (such as Kumano) as demonstrated in forthcoming research by Okida and Takemoto(2017).

Labels: image, japan, japanese culture, Nacalian, nihonbunka, self, specular, theory, 日本文化