J a p a n e s e    C u l t u r e

Whose circle is this?

The Japanese phrase "become one circe," (一丸となる) refers to a group cooperating to the utmost degree, as if as one organism.

The North Saga High School (佐賀北高校) Baseball team did just that, and went on to achieve a breath-taking win in the 2007 summer Koshien Baseball tournament over much bigger, expensively coached opposition . The "Saga-Kita" team had a ritual that they performed before and some times after, "play ball" where they would get into a huddle on the mound and point at the sky. The meaning of this was to them that they would become as one circle, as one mind. They were so good they bring tears to my eyes.

Arimasa Mori says that the "experience" (keiken) of the Japanese always presupposes another. I am not sure I agree but, if this experience is the same as that referred to by Kitaro Nishida ([junsui]taiken) then I can see how "becoming one circle" may be more than just a metaphorical possibility. As Nishida argues, "pure experience" is "completely contradictory" since the primal place, or circle, is both oneself and the world, and therefore also ones team-mate.

Saga-Kita are playing again in this year's Koshien Tournament, once again as a result of becoming "one circle（一丸)."

Labels: collectivism, culture, nihonbunka, occularcentrism, specular, 日本文化, 集団主義

In response to a student question about why it is that a tick (or check ✓) mark often means bad in Japan, where as the the Japanese symbol for right or correct is the circle I listed some of the many ways in which Japanese use circles to represent, the good, the true, self and I believe mind, which is the origin of the utilisation of this sign.

The mirror of the Sun-Goddess, which she carries, represents her, is her or her mind, is eaten to ingest her, contains (in the form or Enma's mirror) ones whole life, represents Japan as its flag, its families in their crests, themselves in their seals, is used in numerous postive expressions for completeness and the absense of imperfection, is found emphasised in the faces of infants characters, and is the meaning of the word "yen."

To express good Americans use a circlular sign in the form of an okay sign. The Japanese use this sign as well as that made by making a circle using their arms surrounding their head. They also sit in circles, give people circular cards for their signature and all the other things in the image above which I will explain with reference to Nishida's place, or mental mirror (Heisig) which Westerners may understand as the visual field (bottom right) but in fact it remains, as ones heart, even when ones eyes are closed.

Third Row Image Credits
Mori Ranmaru kamon by aikao
Japanese flag by wisegie, on Flickr
Hanko ~ Japanese Signature by Jason Michael, on Flickr

Labels: japan, japanese culture, nihobunka, specular, 日本文化

I will probably update my previous blog entry retitled as "Empire of the Sounds" since there is a lot to suggest that sounds mean more in Japan. In addition to the last post one might also mention the gangs of motorcyclists (Bousouzoku) that define themselves by their ability to make sounds, the prevalence of beefy exhaust pipes even on low power cars suggesting that the ability to make a noise means almost as much as being able to have the ability that comes with it. Then there is Tsunoda's research which argues that Japanese hear music and insects with the same part of their brain with which they process language, which he claims suggests that the Japanese hear more meaning in these sounds. Then there are the sirens that mark meal times, the song (a Japanese version of Auld Lang Syne) that marks the end of the business day, the prevalence of shop theme-tunes such as "Oh Happy Friend, Let's go Shopping...Mr. Max, Mr. Max, Mr. Max" which drive me insane, the tune playing pelican crossings, the Throat Pride (nodo jima) programme, and Fried Potatoe vending trucks.

However, if sounds were really meaningful, if sounds were felt to be imbued with self, then Japanese people would not be able to walk past these endless loop tape recorders that I still find rather arresting. "Someone is speaking to me"" I think, and stop.

Continuing with some phenomena that do not conform to the Nacalian, Japan as ocular-centric culture theory proposed on this blog, Tanaka's recent research on incongruent expressions of emotion in voice and facial expression is even more damning.

Tanaka and colleagues (Tanaka et al., 2010) first videoed a Japanese (as shown above) and Dutch woman say a linguistically neutral phrase ("is that so", "sou nan desuka") in a happy and angry voice. They then created voice-face incongruent stimuli by swapping the sound track between the two videos. Dutch and Japanese subjects were then asked to judge the emotion of the face (and ignore the voice) in the face task (left hand side of the graph) and to judge the emotion of the voice (ignoring the face) in the right hand side of the graph. The time to judge the emotion in the voice-face congruent video was substracted from the time to judge the emotion in the incongruent video, giving the extent to which the back-channel, to-be-ignored information (voice, or face) slowed the subjects responses. The above graphs show the size of the error that the ignored channel resulted in.

As can be seen, both groups found the voice more difficult to ignore but, the Japanese found it far more difficult to ignore voice than face. And the Dutch were significantly worse at ignoring faces and very significantly better at ignoring voices than Japanese.

Upon a straightforward Nacalian interpretation (that Westerners are logo-phono-centric, while Japanese are visio-centric), these results should have been reversed. These results would seem to agree with those of my previous post regarding the McGurk effect, which shows that Japanese are less effected by facial information, and more attentive to voice, when interpretting phonemes. Taken together with Ishii's research, which showed that Japanese pay more attention to voice than words, one might conclude that Japanese cultural communication is centered upon tone of voice: an oral culture.

I can think of other anecdotal evidence to support this view.
1) The Japanese are fond of stage plays featuring their (super) heroes, such as bean-bread-man (Anpanman), Power Rangers (supa-sentai), Ultraman, and Masked Riders (Kamen Raida-). When these plays are performed the stage actors dress up in the appropriate costumes and masks, and then mime to a audio recording of the authentic voice actors voices. I do not know of a similar genre of drama in the West, but if there were to be a play of Batman, Superman, Spiderman, or The Incredible Hulk, I presume that the viewers would be satisfied with seeing costumed actors play these heroes parts and would not mind if these actors used microphones to voice their own words rather than demanding that they mimed to the voices of the actors that play these parts in recent movies featuring the same heroes. The Japanese demand for vocal miming on the part of the stage players, suggest again that if the voice is different then the self or persona of the hero is different. At the same time it is notable that even the "authentic" heroes of Japanese TV programs, partly as a result of their faces or masks having NO MOUTH, are miming to voice actors themselves.
2) I feel that more traditional, or more-Japanesey- Japanese speech presentations, by older Japanese, who while remaining fairly straight faced use their tone of voice more than I was used to in the UK.
3) Similarly non-Japanese that have been acculturated to Japanese culture, use more vocal intonation than I am used to in my Western upbringing. I get this feeling when I watch David Spectre and the two Kents (Kent Derricot, and Kent Gilbert) all of whom, especially since they appear Western having Western faces, sound strange to me, or appropriately Japanese to me in that they vary their vocal intonation greatly.
4) When watching Western movies dubbed into Japanese the extent to which the Japanese voice actors vary their intonation far more (it seems to me) than the Western actor is striking. I had interpretted this (to my ears) excessive vocal intonation on the part of dubbing voice actors to Japanese perceptions of Westerners being more unihibited, and this may be part of the reason for this phenomena, but perhaps also the dubbing voice actors are simply giving the Western actors a more typically Japanese vocal-expressive range.
5) Again when watching Western movies dubbed into Japanese, the males are given deeper voices (especially if they are strong) and the women are given more 'feminine' higher voices exentuating their gender differences in voice.
6) Japanese men and women at least in the media, especially evident in period dramas (jidai geki) and Yakuza movies, and perhaps in real life tend to speak in more gender differentiated -- deeper for men, higher for women -- voices. I am not sure if Western men have a tendency to gender-neutralise their voices, or if Japanes men have a tendency to speak in deliberately more macho tones, or bothy. Certainly young (but not necessarily older) Japanese women have a tendency to speak in higher voices in order to be attractive, at least so it seems to me.
7) Japanese female shop assistants (I am not sure about the men) raise their tone an octave in an attempt to make their voice more polite and appealing. I find this affectation somewhat too self-debasing. I find myself wanting to say "No, please do not go so far as to alter your voice. I don't want you to be so ingratiating. Be your own voice. I am not so grumpy and authoritarian a customer as to require this degree of self-debasement."
8) The Japanese are more fond of singing, in the form of Karaoke, as a post alcohol consumption, probably courting, pleasure activity and this of course results in their using their voice as a means of self expression (whereas Westerners are more likely to dance in similar situations for similar reasons).
9) The Japanese use 'stomach drama' (hara-gei) to convince others of their point of view or their sincerity. This is something I have read. I am not sure if or when I have witnessed 'stomach drama', but the use of extreme vocal intonation in this form is well documented.
10) Japanese emotive expressions, such as those expressing cuteness (kawaii--) or delisciousness (oishii---) often sound to my ears as being over-the-top in their use of vocal tone.

Whatever the fate of my Nacalian theory, the research by Tanaka, Sekiyama, and Ishii, point to cultural differences in sense (oral/visual) or channel (oral/visual/linguistic). As such I find them very exciting: a break from the individualism vs collectivism mold. This genre of reseach raises the possibility that Japanese have a different type of communication, and a different type of non-logocentric, individual self.


Image top from monthly spotlight, Image bottom from (Tanaka et al., 2010, p1261)

Tanaka, A., Koizumi, A., Imai, H., Hiramatsu, S., Hiramoto, E., & De Gelder, B. (2010). I Feel Your Voice. Psychological science, 21(9), 1259.

The McGurk Effect (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976) refers to the tendency for visual-speech (lip movements etc) to effect the sounds that we hear. As shown in the above video, Japanese people area also susceptible to the effect but, as comparative research (Sekiyama & Tohkura, 1993; Sekiyama, 1997) has shown, Japanese and Chinese are more auditory and less visual than Americans! The Nacalian theory - that Japanese are visio-occular-centric as opposed to logo-phono-centric - is thus disproved, game, set, match? Very possibly.

Some possible explanations for the weaker McGurk effect among Japanese include
1) The Japanese are more auditory than Westerners (c.f. Ishii, Reyes, & Kitayama, 2003)
2) The Japanese move their face less when speaking due to the nature of their language (unlikely due to experiments comparing spanish and Japanese)
3) The language has more tones (Sekiyama, 1997)
4) The Japanese move their faces less during speaking for cultural reasons.
5) The Japanese watch faces less, or in other words they are less "face-aversive" (Sekiyama, 1997) for cultural reasons.

I lean towards the latter two explanations - both of which seem true - but neither bode well for Nacalian interpretations of Japanese culture. Why do the Japanese move their faces less, and look at others faces less if they are really a visually sensitive culture?

Possible reasons for the apparent lack of attention to, and lack of facial information include
1) That the Japanese are paying attention to a different part of the face - eyes - rather than mouths, as demonstrated by Yuki's research (Yuki, Maddux, & Masuda, 2007).
2) Relatedly, that the Japanese do communicate with their face but not linguistically, and that their face is reserved for displaying  purely visual, not language-supplemental, information. Consider for instance the close ups of people eating food shown so often on Japanese TV, or the insets of Japanese television personalities faces showing reacting non-verbally to the image on the screen.
3) That the Japanese identify more strongly with their faces and wish to maintain an unchanging persona or mask (Watsuji, 1937) for the sake of visual self-consistency. I claim that the Japanese are into visual self-consistency, and even a visual self-enhancement of sorts, in a big way.


Bibliography
Ishii, K., Reyes, J. A., & Kitayama, S. (2003). Spontaneous Attention to Word Content Versus Emotional Tone. Psychological Science, 39–46. Retrieved from http://php.scripts.psu.edu/users/n/x/nxy906/COMPS/indivdualismandcollectivism/culture%20lit/to%20print/Kitayma2003threecultures.pdf
McGurk, H., & MacDonald, J. (1976). Hearing lips and seeing voices. Retrieved from http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v264/n5588/abs/264746a0.html
Sekiyama, K. (1997). Cultural and linguistic factors in audiovisual speech processing: The McGurk effect in Chinese subjects. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 59(1), 73–80. Retrieved from http://www.springerlink.com/index/E867017U7J708970.pdf
Sekiyama, K., & Tohkura, Y. (1993). Inter-language differences in the influence of visual cues in speech perception. Journal of Phonetics. Retrieved from http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1994-12869-001
Shigeno, S. (1998). Cultural similarities and differences in the recognition of audio-visual speech stimuli. Fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing.
Spencer-Rodgers, J., Boucher, H. C., Mori, S. C., Lei Wang, & Kaiping Peng. (2009). The Dialectical Self-Concept: Contradiction, Change, and Holism in East Asian Cultures. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35(1), 29–44. doi:10.1177/0146167208325772
Thompson, M., & Hazan, V. (2010). The impact of visual cues and lexical knowledge on the perception of a non-native consonant contrast for Colombian adults. Retrieved from http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/19505/
Yuki, M., Maddux, W., & Masuda, T. (2007). Are the windows to the soul the same in the East and West? Cultural differences in using the eyes and mouth as cues to recognize emotions in Japan and the United States. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
和辻哲郎. (1937). 面とぺルソナ. 岩波書店.

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

A genkan is a entrance hall, at a slightly lower level to the rest of the house which is raised, where people take off their shoes before entering the home. It is also used as a place to display ornaments and sometimes as a place to briefly entertain casual visitors. It is not uncommon for householders to kneel in the corridor just beyond their genkan, while their visitor stands on the lower genkan floor.

To make casual visitors feel more comfortable, this (very unusual) home in a Buddhist temple's grounds has a three piece suite in the genkan, so that the monk can entertain without allowing visitors into the home.

The home is considered more private in Japan and entrance to other people's homes is more often avoided. House parties are a rarity and generally limited to extended family members.

Entrance to another persons home, and the further one enters into that space, implies a greater degree of social intimacy. Nakane (1972) argues that Japanese groups, including the family, are considered to be bound together not by virtue of shared concepts such as common goals, or mutual love -- though of course they usually love each other -- but by their membership to, and ability to enter a shared frame, or place, such as the home. Family members refer to each other as "our place's bride' (uchi no yomesan) 'our place's granny," (uchi no obaasan), or "our place's leader" (uchi no danna) meaning husband or patriarch. Marriage ceremonies are said to take place between homes or houses in a way reminiscent of marriages between European aristocracy*. Entering a Japanese person's home, to its depths at least, implies that one is a member of the family (see Bachnik and Quinn, 1994). These customs are indicative of the way in which the home is considered to be a special, semi-sacred space centred around the household altars (kamidana and bustudan), and as such an important vector of social cohesion.

Notes
* see e.g. the marriage between the House of Burgundy and the House of La Marck

Bibliography
Bachnik, J. M., & Quinn, C. J. (Eds.). (1994). Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society, and Language. Princeton University Press.
Nakane, C. (1972). Japanese Society (1st pb ed.). University of California Press.

Labels: nihobunka, nihonbunka, 日本文化

I recently argued that Japanese gardens, top left, and interiors, middle left through the use of trickery encourage Japanese to see space as the primal space (Nishida, Watsuji) that is devoid of scale and conceptually unextended, as the pure experience where the world and the heart meet.

Additionally bottom left, it is well known that Japanese love to go and see the passing of time, autumn leaves, and spring cherry blossom, or fields were once great castles stood. This may very Buddhist, and profound of the Japanese but it is worth bearing in mind that not only do they pay attention to the "A series" of becoming, but also to "B series" objective points in time related to the seasons, and specific dates. Time is out there.

Westerners, on the other hand, like to emphasise the extensiveness and exteriority of space with geometrical patterns in gardens, white celings and bay windows in their rooms. Space is seen as extended, complete with the concepts, the symmetry and geometry, that keep it so.

Westerners like spatiousness, big rooms, big views, big spaces. But they are conflicted because at the same time they want to preserve the past in their rooms and in their cityscapes. Westerners like to present time as if it were stationary, as if the past is is in the here in now.

Space is the medium of the self as image and mental mirror (Heisig, Nishida). Time is the substrate of the self-narrative and language as thought (Derrida, Kim).

Addendum
The above is not right. And it is a make or break post.

Conventional wisdom has it that the Japanese are (Buddhist) relativists, and that Westerners are the objectivists that believe in the world and the world and themselves, due perhaps (though scientists would not agree) to their belief in a third person, an Other.

And I too thought/think that the Japanese fondness for scale trickery and their fondness for the changes in nature were both indications of a tendency towards anti-objectivity, and relativism.

But if that is the case, then my argument that the Japanese are like Westerners but in a different modality or channel, that they have a different kind of Other, a different kind of objectivity, would have to be rejected.

Because space is surely the plane, substrate, or place of the visual (self) and time is argued (by Derrida especially) to be the modality, medium, or (dare I say place? topos, axis?) of the phonetic narrative (self). Place is where vision takes place, time is where phonemes unfold. If so then attitudes towards space and place should exhibit a similar "Nacalian" reversals (if such exists) as between word and image. Attitudes to space and time would or should be related through a meta-Nacalian reversal.

I am having a problem seeing any such reversal. It still looks to me rather like Westerners are being objective, and Japanese are being relative, about both space and time but I hope not.

I was wrong to say that Japanese are into the B series of time. First of all, they use period names for dates rather than relating everything to a year dot. The period names encourage, I believe, a before after view of time rather than some objective temporo-cartesian coordinate (X years AD).

So okay, Westerners are into the year dot, the B series of time, whereas (other than Mecca and Jerusalem) there is little in the way in the West to speak of or identify a "B series of space". Our Western God is omnipresent. Japanese gods on the other hand have a "place dot," or many scared space that dot, anchor and objectify the space. On this basis it is Western, or at least Newtonian, space that is "indexical" (before me behind me) related to a inertial, three dimensional frame of reference.

But then this goes against
(1) Bachnik and Lebra's theories regarding the "indexical", relative nature of Japanese space perception, emphasising inside (uchi) and outside (soto), front (omote) and back (ura).
(2) The destruction of scale in Japanese plants (bonsai), gardens (zen gravel gardens), and interiors (if my observations regarding the tricks used to destroy perspective are correct).

Other observations
How should a comparison of Japanese and Western space and time perceptions be approached?

A) By considering the ways in which space and time perceptions inter-penetrate and dominate, arguing that the Japanese have a spatial view of time, and Westerners have a temporal view of space, perhaps.

Japanese time perceptions don't have the year dot but they have a sort of C-series, or rather C-loop, in that the fleeting nature of cherry blossom is not seen as solely a purely Heracleatean flux but as something that will repeat. Perhaps it could be argued that this cyclical view of time results in a the creation of a "time-space." the seasons of the year. Do Westerners have a temporal view of space? Does the geometry and regularity of Western gardens and architecture reflect the tick tock of a clock?

B) From the point of view of a conceptual abstraction capable of framing both time and space. E.g. by abstracting the "A series" and "B series" to apply to space as well as time? Or the use of words such as "flow" and "repetition," and "reference point" that may perhaps be applied to time and space?

The geometric gardens and Neo-georgian cityscapes emphasise the "flow of space" as cherry blossom emphasise the flow of time? Geometric gardens and cherry blossom may also emphasise a repetition. And finally, perhaps in both geometrical gardens and cherry blossom there is an absence of a spatial or temporal reference point respectively. How?

Do antiques present any sort of "trick" corresponding to the scale destroying 'trick' of gravel gardens, bonsai trees and Japanese interiors? Does "Neo-Classical" Georgian architecture of Bath present a similar sort of dillema: instead of an unanswerable "is this big or small", "is this old or new."? Does neoclassical architecture, or do shiny polished antiques forces their viewers to suspend judgements of time? Is there a British Zen!? I have never felt that Bath architecture was in any way Zen when I lived there but perhaps to a Japanese visitor it presents a similar "vortex" of conflicting, interpretation defying, agelessness.

If so this would help me to understand Japanese architecture. Japanese architecture confuses me, creates in me a vortex of trickery, but I am sure that Japanese that are used to it have suspended judgement already. To them it is peaceful, as Bath architecture was to me. Perhaps when I lived in Bath I had already suspended judgement as to whether buildings are old or new. Bath architecture was old AND new, as bonsai trees and gravel gardens and big and small.

If bonsai trees and Bath architecture are both a trick then, both should leave a pure experience of something. I can grasp, however fleetingly, the way in which Japanese architecture makes me "see the light," "the purity of experience" through "cessation" of interpretation. But what does Western architecture make anyone see (or hear?). Am I too anti-Western, anti-temporal. "Cessation" sounds profound, but is a very anti-temporal term. Perhaps "purity" is also linked with space. It is certainly linked with Shinto.

When Husserl and Nishida engage in 'bracketing' they experience different things. Nishida stopped (with all the anti-temporality that that implies) interpreting and saw the place/space/mirror. Husserl on the other hand discovered (with an implied anti visio-spatialness) the transcendent the "irreel," "forms". I have always been dismissive of the latter, dismissed Plato's spelunking satori as mere myth. The forms are fantasy, mere words, I thought. Or again I may have been too keen on vision. When Nishida or Zeami experience their place or flower, they might be the first to admit that there is nothing to see.

I need to change my title, which is now, "Japanese Space Unextended & Western Time That Does not Flow." Japanese space is still in some sense extended (how can space not be) but scale, big small, this in front of that distinctions are lacking. Western time, or at least the antiques, are old but here still, past but present. They both (Japanese space and Western time) lack something, and have something gained. Space-less Space and Timeless Time? I will go for that.

Anyway, am I an old structuralist dog chasing something or just a waffler?

More (thanks to Ms. Hajima)
Ryoutaro Shiba and Donald Keene point to similar differences but reach opposite conclusions in their discussion of the Japanese and Japanese Culture. They say that Europeans do not want to feel time (then why the obsession with antiques, even with rows of things evolving over time even), and are pleased if works are preserved completely as if it were made the day before. This is true, and great labour goes into preserving antiques I know as the son of a picture restorer. But at the same time, it is important that the antique is old. It is important to Europeans that an item looks both new and also it is important that it be old. In Japan however, very little importance appears to be given to preserving old things, or to age itself, with Ise Shrine and Japanese houses being rebuilt regularly. Donald Keene and Shiba also claim that Japanese prefer works that are broken a little or faded.


Top Left: Joueiji Temple Zen Gravel Garden by me
Top Right: Ham House Garden by neilalderney123
Middle 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)
Middle Right: "Prospect Park Place West Victorian brownstone interior dining room fireplace mantle by techpro12. Techpro12's blog has many similar images.
Bottom Left: 紅葉 (red leaves)by jasohill
Bottom Right: Bath Crescent HDR by alex_smith1

Labels: Nacalian, nihobunka, nihonbunka, 日本文化

Image* Hatsune Miku in Bangkok by Colodio (who retains copyright) isolated, only the right and side, rather badly by me.

Cosplay refers to wearing a COStume to play or mimic a cartoon (anime) or comic (manga) character. It is particularly popular in Japan where there are large events held periodically where costumed people like the lady above, get together. Cosplayers can also be seen in the Harajuku area of Tokyo, and all over Asia, and now the world, since Cosplay has spread out from Japan. In Japan it is far from being a widespread phenomena. It is the sort of thing that like dancing, the Japanese would not want to do badly. Cosplayers will go to considerable lengths to get their clothes, hair, make up and poses just right.

Cosplay is doubly visual. Firstly, cosplayers rarely speak but rather just pose, often for photographs. Their mimicry is a visual art. Secondly the object of their mimicry - the cartoon and comic characters - are particularly visual existences. I will argue that Japanese comics are more visual, hyper-visual when compared with Western cartoons and graphic novels in another post but here I want to suggest that cosplay is the predominantly visual mimicry of the predominantly visual.

These Japanese cosplayers are strange eh? I can feel "conformist," tripping off readers' lips, because isn't copying always conformism? Yes, copying is always to an excent conformism but please see the last paragraph. And futher, the Japanese are not, Asians are not, particularly conformist. Does this lady look conformist to you? Doesn't she look weird? She may still look conformist because she is not speaking. Without speech it may seem as if she has less personality than an endless loop tape recorder (see previous post) but, that is because Westerners are logocentrist.

Performing a Nacalian transformation, the Japanese Cosplayer in the imaginary is equivalent to the Western voice player, more commonly refered to as the impersonator*.

Back when I lived in the UK I used to mimic vocally a purerly vocal existence: "Mr. Angry" of the "Steve Wright in the afternoon" radio show. I was the UK equivalent of a Japanese Cosplayer. I was as conformist, but probably not as good. I would not have done it had I thought my mimicry would not be recognised however. My voice (like the appearance of the Japanese) is not something that one plays with lightly.

It seems to me that Western impersonators are Nacalianly transformed Cosplayers because they predominantly vocally mimic predominantly vocal existences. This is not to argue that Japanese cosplayers say nothing at all, or the Western impersonators do not change their appearance at all, but there is a strong difference in emphasis. The personality or self that is mimicked and does the mimicking is felt to reside in the face and appearance in Japan, and the words and voice in the West.

Please have a look at some impersonators on Youtube. You will see that not only do they change their appearance very little, but also that they choose particularly characteristic voices to impersonate. For that reason, Christopher Walken, and Al Pachino are comon favourites. Cosplayers choose characters that are easily visually recognisable such as Hatsune Mikku above. While the days of radio - such as the Goon show - are gone, and all characters these days have visual and verbal aspects, the characters that are impersonated in the West are defined, as Westerners are defined, above all by our words and voice.

Here are some Western cosplayers, Impersonators.







Finally it should be noted that to a degree Westeners are all impersonations, and the Japanese are all cosplayers, because the self is nothibng more or less than self mimicry, there is not self, no individual other than in this attempt at duplication. The self is created through an attempt to visualise oneself, or narrativally impersonate oneself into existance.

This post was inspired by a kind question from Mudakun.

Notes
*There are also impersonators in Japan, just as their are fancy dress parties in the UK but I argue that Japanese impersonation (monomane) even or especially rakugo, is extremely visio-imaginary. Please see this introduction to rakugo in English.

Labels: authenticopy, collectivism, individualism, Jaques Lacan, mime, mirror, Nacalian, nihobunka, nihonbunka, reversal, specular, 日本文化

Nakajima's great 'theory of Japan' (nihonron) regarding the 'loundness' of the public announcements in Japan is fundamentally the same as the Fundamental Attribution Error.

Professor Nakajima is a recently retired professor of Kantian philosophy. He is, I believe, highly Westernised. He spent a considerable amount of time in Germany, presumably speaks German, and studies and presumably loves one of the most Western of philosophers: Kant.

It takes leaving ones culture to know it. Normally ones own culture is so obviously-the-normal-way-of-doing-things that it is transparent. It is only those that have participated in other cultures that can see there own. Professor Nakajima was sufficiently deculturized to realise that public announcements of various sorts in Japan are strange.

Japan is awash with public announcements in the form of recorded or electronically simulated voices that blare out messages such as vending machines or cash dispensers that greet their customers, buses that announce that they are reversing, election trucks that blare out linguistically meaningless recordings of a politician thanking people for their support, and endless loop tape recorders that blare out the special offers in retail outlets as pictured in this photo. The endless loop tape recorder shown here stood at the entrance to a local electronics store endlessly shouting out the special offers on sale at the store.

In the first few years of living in Japan I used to stop in front of these endless loop tape recorders and attempt to understand what they were saying. One of the reasons that I did so was because my Japanese language ability was insufficient. But even when I was able to understand the language of the tape, I still stopped, and listened while Japanese store goers walked on by, seemingly oblivious. I found the endless loop tape recorder arresting, more worthy of attention, and very strange.

When I first arrived I arrived in Narita airport in Tokyo, I got on a horizontal escalator / conveyor belt walkway (what are they called?) and shortly before the walkway came to an end a voice came out at foot level warning me that the walkway would end. I picked up my feet as if I might step on the unseen announcer that must (I felt) be hiding underneath the moving hand rail. Shortly thereafter, when I first purchased a canned drink from a vending machine in Japan that spoke, I felt that there was a woman (in Japan it is generally a woman's voice) hiding inside the vending machine thanking me for my custom.

I am now used to all the depersonalised voices that one hears in Japan. It no longer surprises me when buses 'say' "reversing, reversing, reversing." It no longer surprises me when bullet trains 'say' "Please don't bring dangerous things onto this train."

Nakajima (brilliant though his observations are) explains this phenomenon -- the tendency for there to be disembodied voices in Japan and their strangeness -- using the same old same old collectivism vs individualism trope. He points out that private speech, such as by students in class, or by people using cell phones on trains (I am not sure if he used these examples) is repressed, not-allowed-in-Japan, and argues that speech is only allowed when it is a public, disembodied, announcement.

[He does not note for instance that Western city-scapes are required to be uniform by planning permission rules or that Japanese fashion is the zaniest in the world]

Nakajima also complains (if this is the right word) of the loudness of these announcements which prevent private speech, or western style (Kim, 2002) "thought".

It seems to me that my issue with these endless tape recorders, and other linguistic public announcements is rather directly associated with the Fundamental Attribution Error.

The Fundamental Attribution Error refers to the tendency of people to assume that behaviours are the result of traits.

According to this theory, we, humans, have an erroneous tendency to believe for instance that if a person is late to a meeting then that is because that person is not a punctual individual.

Most of the research on the fundamental attribution error, however, concentrates on one behaviour: reading out loud from texts that are constrained. When Westerners listen to someone read out loud, then even if they know that the text that the person they are listening to is reading a text which that person has been forced to read, Westerners still believe that the person in question believes in the purport of the text. The text as read out loud is felt to be expressive of the mind, person, self, of the individual.

Japanese people however are far less likely to feel that a reading out loud represents the true feelings of the person that is doing the reading.

This difference is ascribed to the purported fact that Japanese are, and realise themselves to be, less individual, more collectivist, more context dependent. When a Japanese person hears someone reading a text then they do not assume that the text represents that person, merely that the person is (as is the case under constrained conditions) merely conforming to pressure, because social pressure is rife in Japan, and free self expression is not allowed in Japan.

This, the conventional interpretation is hogwash (false). The Japanese are as free to express themselves as anyone else, or more so. But the medium or mode of their self expression is Nacalianly different. That the Japanese can create cityscapes, products, images, fashion in such zany abandon testifies to this fact.

The reason that Westerners (and Westernised Japanese) find mechanically produced, or constrained speech to be representative of traits is because that we Westerners believe that we are speech, that thinking is speech, that the person is speech. The Western self is a narrative. The strangeness of these endless tapes that announce products, and other announcements produced by machines, are the same as the reading-out-loud used in Fundamental (!) Attribution Error research, and their potency can be explained in the same way.

Westerners believe that they are themselves narrations, speeches. Speech is thought. Speech is felt to be accompanied by (chimerical) ideas. Speech is felt to be the product of, the essence of a person.

And so, Westerner that I am, when I heard those mechanical/recorded/computerised voices in Japan, I presumed them to be, or desired them to be, from a person. Japanese public announcements expose the lie of my being: speech does not imply an existence, nor is it necessarily accompanied by an existence. Speech is just speech. There are no "ideas." Speech is noise. With regard to speech (but not to self-representational images) Japanese people realise this.

Labels: collectivism, individualism, japan, japanese culture, Jaques Lacan, nihobunka, nihonbunka, reversal, self, specular, 日本文化

This lady is a model. I told her how to pose. Half the models I employed were wearing clothes that they like, and the other half are wearing clothes that I gave them to wear.

[Free Condition] Lets say that the lady chose the blue top herself. Does she like the blue top she is wearing?

[Constrained Condition] Lets say that I told her to wear one of the tops that I had brought along. I passed her a blue top. Now, does this lady like the blue top that she is wearing?

My prediction is that more Japanese will answer that the lady likes blue, even under the second, "constrained" condition.

The fundamental attribution error refers to the tendency to infer traits from people's behaviour. If one sees someone behave violently, then there is a tendency to believe that person is violent, when in fact they may have been acting out of self defence. However most of the research (that I have read anyway) on the fundamental attribution error has focused on a single behaviour: reading out loud.

In the USA it is found that even if subjects know that the reader has been constrained, and forced to read a certain essay, they still judge that the reader believes that which they are reading lout loud.

The Fundamental Attribution Error disappears under the constrained condition in Japan. This is because, we are told, the Japanese are contextual, interdependent, and behave in accordance with the social rules and cues pertaining in the situation, rather than according to their traits. Japanese people are thus accustomed separate their "honne" (true feelings) and tatemae (social front). When they hear that someone has been constrained therefore, they do not fall foul of this "fundamental error," and just presume that the reader is reading what he has been told to read.

In accordance with the overall Nacalian theory presented by this blog, I predict that the above result may be an effect of the Western belief in the narrative self, the Western belief that speech is thought, the Western tendency to see the person in language. In other words, Westerners will be far more likely to make Fundamental Attribution Errors about speech acts. Visual self representation, such as clothing, and architecture is seen has being mere "context".

In Japan however, it may be the case that visual self-presentation is seen as being the self, the person. Thus if someone is wearing blue, then even if Japanese people are told that the person has been constrained, they will still have a tendency to believe that the wearer likes blue.

I will test this. By the way, the lady in the above picture brought the blue top along. I presume therefore that she likes blue, but I don't know. Image used in education with permission.

Bibliography
The above was based on a seminar presentation of previous research by Ms. Fujimura (Thank you!) based on the following excellent textbook of cross cultural psychology.
増田貴彦, & 山岸俊男. (2010). 文化心理学〈上〉心がつくる文化、文化がつくる心. 培風館.

Labels: individualism, japan, japanese culture, Nacalian, nihonbunka, reversal, self, 日本文化

According to my observation of how our Japanese gardener pruned our trees (such as in this photo), it seem to me that he usually pruned the main branch leaving the sub-branch to grow, reducing symmetry and straightness, and producing a 'more natural than natural' sur-natural effect. It is interesting that conversely in high European gardening and art that uses nature there is instead a reverse attempt to impose straightness (and other geometrical form) and symmetry to nature. Thus on the one hand one often hears in Japan that Westerners like to dominate nature, whereas Japanese prefer to reach a symbiosis with it, or even that they appreciate nature as it is. Japanese gardeners do not leave nature as it is, but rather instead control the nature of the garden to an idealised form (not unlike the Western idealised form, and no less controlled) of what they view nature to be. One attempts to impose conceptions and regularity on nature, the other attempts to remove those aspects of nature that appear to be conceptual or regular.

The above animation used an original photo "isolated branches," with kind permission by ecormany.

Labels: japan, japanese culture, nature, nihobunka, 日本文化

Photo by 田中十洋. First of all please look at his excellent set of photos of traditional Japanese interiors.

Through the use of a lot of rectangular spaces, such as the rice mats (tatami), and the squares in the sliding doors (shouji), traditional Japanese interiors at once emphasise perspective and depth but at the same time, due to the fact that these rectangles are of difference sizes, and additionally due to the inclusion of gaps in walls (ranma) and partitions, one is never sure whether one is seeing depth (through a gap for instance) or seeing something miniaturised.

(See for example the area of in the outer corridor see through the window in the wall, highlighted with a note on the photo page).

Hence Japanese interiors encourage their viewers to make incorrect spatial interpretation and so confuse - like walking into an Escher - that their viewers cease spatial interpretation altogether. This cessation leads us to see the interior as the primal space (Mochizuki, 2006), visual field (Mach, 1894), or mental mirror (Heisig, 2004) that is the purity of its experience (Nishida, 1979).

Japanese gardens also produce a similar Zen experience by confounding the viewers sense of scale, not using by using perspective lines and rectangles, but by using rocks and gravel that can and are interpreted as islands or an ocean respectively.

Japanese poetry – particularly haiku – achieves the same effect by encouraging the viewer to make an interpretation before returning them to the purity of the experience shared with the poet. E.g. most famously in Basho's poem: “An old lake” (we imagine it), “Frogs jump in” (we imagine them), “The sound of the water” (wham!), we are told that the poet did not see any frogs, perhaps not even the ripples; the sound of the water was all there ever was: "frogs jump in" was only an interpretation. Pound (1914) recognises that Japanese poetry layers images in a "vortex" but he does not mention that both"hokku" example he cites, and even, though Pound may not have realised it, the poem he wrote himself ("In the Station of a Metro", see the paper online, p4), contain a misinterpretation in the vortex of images.

In all three cases (interiors, gardens, poems) the artist encourages the viewer or reader to make a interpretation, or draw to mind an image, that is not based in the pure experience, and by confounding it, leads the viewer back to the purity of experience, to the 'ecstatic' ‘thou art that’ (Lacan, 2002)

Afterword
Does Japanese architecture, gardening and poetry lead to a sort of enlightenment? I think that it may at once be a sort of enlightenment, and at the same time furthest from it. The experience of traditional Japanese house interiors for Japanese returns their consciousness to that state of transcendental meditation which corresponds to (and is directly opposite from) Husserl's phenomenological state (Husserl, 1960) in which Western consciousness removes itself from phenomena and attends only to an interior narrative. Husserl's transcendental meditation is a return to the self, to the purity of self narrative, to that "Ravine" (Ace Of Base, 1995) where there is only self and 'Other', or 'super-addressee'. The Japanese architectural interior likewise returns the Japanese mind to the purity of the mental mirror (Heisig, 2004) ’where to abide with their creator god’ (see Claire, 1986), the looking together (Kitayama, 2005), eye-in-the-sky (see Masuda, Wang, Ito, & Senzaki, 2012; Cohen & Gunz, 2002; Takemoto, T., 2002).

Bibliography
Ace Of Base. (1995). Ravine. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgBBFlvRdRc&feature=youtube_g...
Clare, J., Williams, M., & Williams, R. (1986). John Clare: selected poetry and prose. Routledge. Retrieved from books.google.co.jp/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Hebg8BrvCP4...
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
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%...
Husserl, E. (1960). Cartesian meditations: An introduction to phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. M. Nijhoff.
Kitayama, O. 北山修. (2005). 共視論. 講談社.
Lacan, J. (2002). The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience. In B. Fink (Trans.), Ecrits (pp. 75–81). WW Norton & Company.
Mach, E. (1897). Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations. (C. M. Williams, Trans.). The Open court publishing company. Retrieved from www.archive.org/details/contributionsto00machgoog
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.
Mochizuki, T. (2006). Climate and Ethics: Ethical Implications of Watsuji Tetsuro’s Concepts:‘ Climate’ and‘ Climaticity’. Philosophia Osaka, 1, 43–55. Retrieved from ir.library.osaka-u.ac.jp/metadb/up/LIBPHILOO/po_01_043.pdf
Nishida, K. 西田幾多郎. (1979). 善の研究 (Vol. 33). 岩波書店.Nishida, K. 西田幾多郎. (1979). 善の研究 (Vol. 33). 岩波書店.
Pound, E. (1914). Vorticism. Fortnightly Review, 1, 461. Retrieved from matthuculak.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/POUND%20Vortic...
Takemoto, T. (2002). 鏡の前の日本人. ニッポンは面白いか (講談社選書メチエ. 講談社. 

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

While the Japanese do not name their streets, other than the main routes with numbers, the Japanese do name the points on the map, the intersections, with signs that hang next to the traffic lights. Very few intersections are named in the UK (Hyde Park Corner, Clapham Junction being exceptions). If one wants to refer to an intersection one has to refer to it as the the intersection between two named streets.

Westerners name the streets or lines on maps give the doors on the streets numbers, but do not name the points nor plots of Land. Japanese name the spaces and places but rarely name the lines on the map, giving only a few of the roads numbers.

Points and places are given numbers, secondary to named lines in the West, lines are given numbers in Japan secondary to points and areas in space.

Attempting to summarize....

Japanese society is organized according to spaces
1) There are many geo-climatic theories that are thought to explain Japanese behavior
2) Japanese groups are organized according to spaces and those that are members of those spaces.
3) Shrines are the geo-locational model for the home and other spatial groups.
4) Lines are probably not felt to exist.
5) If there are signs on lines (streets/ boundaries between floors) then it is not to name the non-existent line or boundary but to refer to the surrounding spaces. Sometimes these signs are indexical (in the case of floor signs) and sometimes they are iconic (in the case of plot maps banchizu). Japan is no more "indexical" than it is iconic. The biggest difference is perhaps in whether the sign is thought to signify something visual (space, the place), or something conceptual. Western signs are thought to represent concepts. Japanese and Chinese signs are thought to represent things, and places that one can see (Hansen).

In Western society, space is thought to be empty. It is not used as an organization tool or structuring function, but needs to be organized by named lines. Space exists, is cognizable in so far as it is bounded by lines, and given coordinates, or a street number. The lines are themselves named. The lines are the ideas represented by the names, rather than spatial entities.

Labels: japanese culture, nature, nihobunka, nihonbunka, 日本文化

As previously mentioned, Ishii's (Ishii, Reyes, & Kitayama, 2003) research has demonstrated that Japanese pay more attention to tone of voice rather than verbal, linguistic message than Americans. Ishii and colleagues played conflicted verbal / vocal-tone words to US and Japanese and found that Americans reacted faster to the verbal message, whereas Japanese reacted faster to the tones.

Hence, if you tell a Japanese person that you are "happy", in a sad tone of voice, they are more likely to think you are in fact sad, whereas an American is more likely to believe that you are "happy". The Japanese use empathy or "sasshi" (Doi, 2002) to read people's faces and tone of voice and often ignore language as social pleasantry, or phatic communication.

More recently, Ishii (2011) has found that looking at schematic faces, like those pictured above encourages both Japanese and American's to focus more on tone of voice and less upon linguistic content. Faces bring us out of the world of language, into the world of sight and hearing. It is in this facial world where the Japanese usually live.

This contrasts with Oyserman's priming research (e.g. Kühnen & Oyserman, 2002) which finds that the most effective way of encouraging people to see the world in a more Western way is have them circle the pronoun "I".

As previously argued, "I" is to Westerners what face is to Japan.

Bibliography
Doi, T. (2002). The Anatomy of Dependence. Kodansha USA.
Ishii, K., Reyes, J. A., & Kitayama, S. (2003). Spontaneous Attention to Word Content Versus Emotional Tone. Psychological Science, 39–46. Retrieved from php.scripts.psu.edu/users/n/x/nxy906/COMPS/indivdualisman...
Keiko, I. (2011). Mere Exposure to Faces Increases Attention to Vocal Affect : A Cross-Cultural Investigation. 認知科学 = Cognitive studies : bulletin of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society, 18(3), 453–461. Retrieved from ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/10029590461
Kühnen, U., & Oyserman, D. (2002). Thinking about the self influences thinking in general: Cognitive consequences of salient self-concept. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38(5), 492–499.

Afterword
Do the faces look a little like their author?

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

Chomsky argues, convincingly to me, that to an alien from outer space, human language would appear to be dialects of the same single Earth language such is the similarity between the various national languages of the world.

While the word order of Japanese and English are so different, often back to front, the two languages have many similarities. The difficult part about learning Japanese was mostly to do with learning to think in a different word order, rather than to learn to think in a different way. The word order changes are difficult enough.

However, at the same time, there are also some areas, or some expressions, that required a different way of thinking. One of these was the translation of the English above, or in general:

What is ADJECTIVE about NOUN

The Japanese for this expression is (as given in the image above) is, transliterating:

What is the NOUN's ADJECTIVE place?

E.g. (transliterating) What is this blog's interesting place?

I found this expression in Japanese to be very difficult to use. It required not merely a word order shift but a change in conception of things and their attributes. What is a thing? What is an entity?

My Japanese learners of English find the English expression difficult to learn too. Fortunately similar expressions exist in English:

What are the NOUN's ADJECTIVE point?

What are the ADJECTIVE parts of this NOUN?

But these are rather unnatura, e.g.

What is this blog's interesting point?

What are the interesting parts of this blog?

My students of English use, or attempt to use, the above forms a lot. Perhaps I should encourage them to do so.

Nacalianly speaking, I think that these expressions reflect differences in what it is to be an entity.

The pronoun "about," such as in, "I am thinking about X" or "This is a story/book about Y" introduces a narrative. The question "What is ADJECTIVE about NOUN," assumes that NOUN is a narratival entity. Things or entities, (e.g. this blog, or a person) are concepts, or narratives. But the Japanese expression, "What is the NOUN's ADJECTIVE place?" suggests to me that Japanese speakers conceive of entities spatio-visually, as a collection of images. The Japanese question is asking for the image, out of the collection of images that forms that entity, that corresponds to the adjective. The English question is asking for the part of that narratival entity (the part of the narrative) that conforms to the adjective.

Japanese conceive of entities (including themselves) as mental scrapbooks of connected images or places, spaces. Westerners conceive of entities (including themselves) as stories, or narratives.

Labels: nihonbunka, 日本文化

Rather than put my name, or our family name on our house, we chose to mimic the western street number system and put the plot number (banchi 番地) on our house. My wife felt that having a family or (worse) householder name on our house would result in our house being more difficult to visit. My wife feels, rightly I think, that proclaiming ownership through the use of a householder name plate (hyousatsu　表札), makes the house more private, more requiring of the named owner's permission to visit, and thus more difficult to enter ("with a higher floor level" shiki-i ga takai 敷居が高い). This relates to the fact that traditionally in Japan house visitation (house parties, dinner parties, having people drop in) is less popular.

Japanese houses are more private. I used to feel that the fact that people slept on the floor, on the tatami mats in Japanese houses, made me feel that entering someone's house was a bit more like entering their bed. Or rather, since houses are the space, place or field ("ba," Nakane, 1972; Bachnik & Quinn, 1994) that defines the family group, entering a house is a bit like suggesting that one is a member of the family.

Our house is in an area called "Itoyone", plot number 1-6-7 hence the numbers shown in the above image. My mother kindly sent us house numbers from France, where house numbers are commonplace, due to their lack of availability in Japan. Alas, since house numbers in France are street numbers, we were unable to purchase the hyphens required for a proper rendition of "1-6-7."

Added to the fact that Japanese streets lack names, making houses difficult to find, most Japanese do not even put their plot number on their house, making houses even more difficult to find. It is fairly often the case that people of the same family name live in the same vicinity so even if one has the family name of the householder, or if there is a delivery to someone other than the household patriarch, it must make it difficult for delivery staff to know which house is the one to deliver to. There are detailed maps showing which plot is which number, but why make things so difficult for delivery people?

Calling all Japanese people, why don't you put your house plot number on your house? Do you want to make your house difficult to find?　日本の方へ、なぜご自宅の番地を表札に、あるいは表札代わりに示してくださらないでしょうか？

Japan is however covered (see Nakashima, 1999) in signs, relating to business, apartment buildings (with a considerable amount of Western influence), and temple/shrine names.

Bachnik, J. M., & Quinn, C. J. (Eds.). (1994). Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society, and Language. Princeton University Press.
Nakane, C. (1972). Japanese Society (1st pb ed.). University of California Press.
Nakashima, Y. 中島, 義道. (1999). うるさい日本の私. 新潮社.

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

In the UK homeowners are unlike to put their name on their home. UK houses bear the street humber or more rarerly the name of the house. The Japanese generally and traditionally put at least the family name and more traditionally the full name of the oldest male of the household, on a name plate for all to see. In this photo there are two name plates. The one at roadside shows the family name in ideograms, the one above the door shows the name of the patriarch in full. Putting ones name on ones house seems to me to be comparatively ostentascious, and to demonstrate one aspect - and one of the few verbal aspects - of Japanese individualism.

Another example here.

Unlike UK name plates which name the house itself, these name plates are not naming the house but the householder. It is rare even for Japanese houses to have the plot number (banchi 番地） displayed on the house.

In the case of both house names, and floor signs, it seems that Japanese may be less inclined to add the name of something to that thing itself, but rather, as Bachnik predicts (?), the signs point off, to something that is not present.

取り下げご希望がありましたら、下記のコメントかnihonbunka.coのメールのリンクからご連絡ください。


Bachnik, J. M., & Quinn, C. J. (Eds.). (1994). Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society, and Language. Princeton University Press.

Labels: collectivism, individualism, nihonbunka, 日本文化

Japanese floor signs are typically on staircase landings pointing (indexically; Bachnik & Quinn, 1994) to the floors above and below.

As my wife points out there is something a little strange about having signs on floors because people on the floors should, and generally do, know what floor they are on. It is only people who are moving between floors, using stairs (or elevators), who need to see the floor signs.

In buildings with elevators there is more need for on Western style floor signs on floors, since one can arrive at the floor by mistake when elevator doors open unexpectedly. But is my contention that even in bulidings with stairwells, we put our floor signs on the floor levels rather than pointing up or down on the landing between them.

Displaying signs on floors even though the information therein displayed is known to most who see the sign, reminds me of the particularly Western tendency to talk to oneself (Kim, 2002), an activity which, as Derrida (1977, p49) points out, is strange in that surely there is nothing that one can communicate to oneself that one does not already know. Nonetheless, Westerners seem to like to use words even in the absence of a need for communication as in the case of floor signs on floors. Perhaps (as Derrida argues in the case of self-speech) we find floor signs on floors reasuring.

Returning to Nacalianism, it seems to me that these Japanese floor signs are pointing to the visual aspect of the floors which are designated 3 below and 4 above. I.e. when one gets to the floor, and sees it, that is the 4th floor. These floor signs really are pointers from one place in the visual world to another.

But does a Western floor sign designate that which one can see, or a notion of being the 4th storey from the ground? Like the superflous words in our mind, perhaps Western floor signs are supposed to designate or refer to ideas, and in that sense Western floor signs may be symbols (Peirce, 1894) rather than pointers (indexes).

Bachnik, J. M., & Quinn, C. J. (Eds.). (1994). Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society, and Language. Princeton University Press.
Derrida, J. (1977). Limited Inc. Northwestern University Press.
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.
Peirce, C. S. (1894). What is a sign? Theorizing communication: readings across traditions, 177. Retrieved from www.semioticadelprogetto.it/download/CSP%20-%20What%20is%...

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

Top left: A Western floor sign that is positioned on the floor, telling those that are there what floor they are on! (A bit like hearing oneself talking?)
Top Right: A Japanese floor sign that is positioned on landings pointing (indexing) to the floors above and below. These floor signs are indexes.
Middle Left: A Western street map superimposed with a street sign. The streets are named but spaces not. (Does space even exist? Do lines?)
Middle Right: A Japanese street map which doubles as a street sign (there are no signs on Japanese streets) with the spaces named, but the streets (mainly) not. Both the Japanese floor signs and streets signs in the form of neighbourhood maps are positioned away from that which they name, but while the former is indexical, a map is iconic (being isomorphic which that to which it refers)
Bottom left: A Western floor plan, with the distance between the walls marked or named. The lines matter, the space does not.
Bottom Right: A Japanese floor plan with the spaces named, sized, marked and named not merely as square metres, but as rice mats, as spaces, spaces spaces. These last two are not signs, but maps, but like in the case of the street maps, the Western maps emphasise the lines (walls, streets) and name them or the distance between them, whereas the Japanes maps name or give the size of the space itself.

Jane Bachnik (J. M Bachnik, 1998; Jane M. Bachnik & Quinn, 1994) is so clever one can smell it. But, I don't quite buy Pierce(1894).

Building upon Nakane's observation (Nakane, 1972) that place (or frield originally Nishida's "ba") is plays an important part in structuring Japanese society (Japanese people feel that they belong to places, e.g. houses) Bachnik argues that this corresponds to a difference in type of signifiers that people use to represent themselves. Focussing on the inside-outside (uchi-soto) distinction, Bachnik argues that Japanese signs are "indexical," one of Pierce's three types of sign.

Pierce (1894) argues that there are three types of sign: icons that resemble that which they refer to, indexes (or pointers) which have a physical connection to that which they refer to, and symbols (think language) which is connected to that which it refers only through usage (i.e. the connection is "arbitrary").

The thing I object to is the relativity, or subjectivity of the index but not of the symbol. According to pierce. The symbol we are told is not a "cline",or gradient, a somewhere to somewhere else. The symbol does not, we are told, require a point of view or context (because there is Yahweh?). Hence only the Japanese are relative, inter-subjective. Space we are told is relative. Pointing requires (as Bachnik quotes Doi), "a point of view".

But what of our self referential signs, such as "I"? I think therefore I am? Benveniste (1971) is right to say that "I" is only meaningful reference to you. But then as Mori says, Westerners assume that there is a third person, a thou, an Other, a super addressee that prevents the I from being at all indexical. If such magic is possible for linguistic first person pronouns, then it is possible for "pointers". Doi was a Christian. He believed in the third person of language, but he did not believe in the eye in the sky, even though he was Japanese.

Bachnik is right but there is something wrong with Pierce's definition of signs and indexes. The latter imply relativity no more than the former.

This is like shame and guilt. Benedict would have it that guilt is objective while shame is inter-subjective. If shame is also objective, or felt when completely alone, what is the difference? What is the difference between the sign and index?

My take, as always, Nacalianly, the difference depends upon whether one simulates a generalized ear or eye but I don't think that I have managed to explain the differences observed in the images above. Are there any other systematic differences between Japanese and Western signs? I am going to add house door signs.

Street sign image is Millfields Rd NE street sign , E5 by O, F.

Bachnik, J. M., & Quinn, C. J. (Eds.). (1994). Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society, and Language. Princeton University Press.
Benedict, R. (2006). The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1st ed.). Mariner Books.
Benveniste, E. (1971). Problems in General Linguistics. (M. E. Meek, Trans.) (Vol. 3). University of Miami Press Coral Gables, FL.
Nakane, C. (1972). Japanese Society (1st pb ed.). University of California Press.
O, F. (2010). Millfields Rd NE street sign , E5. Retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/sludgeulper/4882259125/
Peirce, C. S. (1894). What is a sign? Theorizing communication: readings across traditions, 177. Retrieved from http://www.semioticadelprogetto.it/download/CSP%20-%20What%20is%20a%20sign.pdf

Labels: japanese culture, nihonbunka, 日本文化

Maybe because I have been looking at traditional Japanese sightseeing maps (名所図会 Named-place-collection-Pictures, shown top right; Imao, 2005 ) which show views with names popping up out of them, at this mornings' open day, my son's kindergarten classroom looked rather the same: a space covered in the names, of the children.

Allison (2000) points out that Japanese children have to take a lot of kit to school, of a certain type, and she sees this as an example of the extent to which Japanese kindergarten's (over) exercise control of their charges and even their mothers. At the same time however she may not have mentioned that this kit is displayed around the classroom labelled with the child's name.  In my son's class there were
1) Named, individual registers of attendance, into which the children themselves affix a sticker (like a stamp) into a calendar on the days they attend.
2) A birthday poster showing who has a birthday on what day of which month.
3) Individually named shoe rack to store out-door shoes and slippers.
4) Individually named smock hook rack.
5) Individually named "lockers" without doors for the obligatory satchel. The satchel is the only uniform part of the children's attire.
6) A chart showing four class subgroups showing the insect themed groups, their members colour coded according the sex.
7) Named Children's artwork on the walls. This of course is common to UK classrooms.
8) A individually named change of clothes rack.
9) Individually named towel hook rack.
10) Individually named swimwear bag hook rack.
11) A rack containing the named individual drink flasks of all the children (I could imagine that all things that UK children bring to school are named, but then perhaps we might share the same source of drink. I have omitted this one from the collage.)

I can not remember my kindergarten classroom too well but I think that of these the artworks would have had names on them, lockers might have been numbered. I am not sure that my name would have been anywhere else on the walls or furniture of my kindergarten class. It seems Japanese children are encouraged to individuate themselves, their property, their hook, their lockers, using their name.

Names are very important in Japan (Plutschow, 1995), unlike words in general (have quotes), and are commonly included in self-descriptive Twenty Statements Test responses often near the top.  Lacan (2007) argues that we (Westerners at least) should attempt to have as far as possible a symbolic, narrative awareness of self, but also argues that identification with body-image is a minimal essential, the lack of which leads to psychosis. I get the feeling that names are equivalent in an Nacalian culture to the image of a body in Lacanian culture: that minimal self-representation in the other channel required for completing the 'Möbius strip' -- a feedback loop which is twisted in the sense that self-perception is not quite possible within either channel -- of self-identity.

Bibliography
Allison, A. (2000). Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (1st ed.). University of California Press.
Lacan, J. (2002). The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience. In B. Fink (Trans.), Ecrits (pp. 75–81). WW Norton & Company.
Lacan, Jacques. (2007). Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. (B. Fink, Trans.) (1st ed.). W W Norton & Co Inc.
Plutschow, H. (1995). Japan’s name culture: the significance of names in a religious, political and social context. Japan Library Kent, CT. Retrieved from www.getcited.org/pub/100168851
Imao, K. 恵介今尾. (2005). 日本地図のたのしみ. 角川学芸出版.

I have blurred all the names in the pictures other than those of my son.　息子以外に名前は全てぼこしています。

Labels: collectivism, individualism, Jaques Lacan, nihonbunka, 個人主義, 日本文化, 集団主義