Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture

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44 Takami Kuwayama

This last point deserves some related commentary. Many of Japan’s emic

concepts originally appeared in books and articles belonging to the nihon-

jinron genre. As Befu

pointed out, they are for a general readership, rather

than being purely academic works. As such, few people expect them to be

subjected to rigorous scholarly analysis. Nakane seems to have been well

aware of this, which probably explains why she completely re-wrote her

book for the English version: it is in fact far more technical than the Japanese

original. Also at issue here is the national background of the assumed audi-

ence. The degree to which a language is associated with a particular national

or ethnic group differs, depending on how widely the language is spoken

in the world. Obviously, the smaller the speech community, the stronger

the connections between language and people. Japanese is on the strong

side of this link, even though it is the native language spoken by more than

120 million people. Of course, no country is completely homogeneous, but

it is safe to say that Japan has a stronger national unity than do multi-

ethnic countries, especially those that are made up of comparatively new

immigrants. The point is that under these circumstances, Japanese authors

are able to communicate their ideas by drawing on a commonality among

readers that is hardly expected in immigrant nations. In the terminology of

Edward Hall,

in Japan’s ‘high context’ culture, it is not necessary to say

much to evoke sympathy among the audience/readership.

Misconceptions of ‘the West’

Japanese scholarship has been strongly inﬂuenced by Western Europe and

the US since the onset of modern times, that is, since the Meiji Restoration

in the mid-19th century. The Japanese reaction to these countries, which

are frequently collapsed into a single category called ‘the West’, has been

both positive and negative. On the one hand, there is a strong attachment to

Western theory and methodology because Japanese scholars have worked

very hard to master them. On the other hand, there is deep-seated resistance,

as well as resentment, against Westerners for having dominated Japan. In

Japanese studies, these ambivalent feelings have often given rise to a cate-

gorical rejection of Western theory, followed by a bold, yet rather reckless,

claim that only Japan-made theory – what Hamaguchi

called ‘emics inher-

ent to Japan’s culture’ – can fully explain Japan. There are, however, many

misconceptions in such claims.

These misconceptions relate to the generalised notion of ‘the West’

which typically occurs on two levels – social and academic. First, on the

social level, the many differences that exist between Europe and the US are

Emic conceptions 45

practically ignored. To give just one example, the fact that many Euro-

peans are multilingual has generated among them more respect for different

styles of speaking and writing than among monolingual Americans. This

difference is clearly observable at international academic meetings, but it is

too often overlooked by the Japanese. Also, within Europe, there are obvi-

ously numerous regional variations between Western and Eastern Europe,

between Northern and Southern Europe, as well as between Continental

Europe and Great Britain/Ireland, all of which are characterised by differ-

ent histories and cultures. Furthermore, although much of Europe is united

by Christian faith, the distinction between Catholicism, Protestantism, and

Orthodoxy has far-reaching consequences. This becomes obvious when we

recall that Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

was an attempt to explain in religious terms the differences in economic

development between the regions north and south of the Rhine. All of this

is well known among Japanese intellectuals, but it is easily forgotten when

Japan’s emics are emphasised, as opposed to ‘Western theory’.

On the academic level, the generalised West has been held responsible

for its alleged failure to clarify the interpersonal quality of the Japanese

character. A major paradigm in the study of this subject centres on the

dichotomy between Western individualism (kojinshugi) and Japanese col-

lectivism (sh

udanshugi). Putting aside the conﬂuence between Japanese and

Western scholars in the formulation of this dichotomy,

many Japanese,

most notably Hamaguchi, have argued that Western social theory has limi-

tations because it is ultimately based on the view of each person as an indi-

vidual, which, etymologically speaking, means ‘not divisible’. This Western

conception is alleged to have fatal errors in explaining the Japanese view

of each human being as ‘inter-person’ – the kind of self that realises itself

between person and person.

The validity of this argument is not the point here. Rather, it is the

unquestioned Japanese belief in Western individualism, and the ensuing

identiﬁcation of Western social theory with individualistic theory alone,

that is at issue. A careful review of the relevant literature unmistakably

shows that the relationship between individual and society has been con-

ceptualised by Western intellectuals in many different ways and that individ-

ualistic theory is only one of them, although it has certainly received much

support. To give just a few of the most notable examples: Emile Durkheim,

in Division of Labor, emphasised the collective nature of human groups,

and was adamantly opposed to the utilitarian view of society put forth

by Herbert Spencer. Similarly, Harry Stack Sullivan propounded an

46 Takami Kuwayama

interpersonal theory of psychiatry, in contrast with Sigmund Freud’s ego

psychology. As Sullivan remarked, ‘You will ﬁnd that it makes no sense

to think of ourselves as “individual”, “separate”, capable of anything

like deﬁnitive description in isolation, that the notation is just beside the

point . . . For all I know every human being has as many personalities as he

has interpersonal relations’.

Similar opinions were expressed by George

Herbert Mead, one of the founders of symbolic interactionism, who distin-

guished between two competing approaches to the study of self, one taking

the social process as logically prior to the individual, and the other taking

the individual as logically prior to the social process.

He supported the

former approach.

To these observations should be added the historical transformation of

concepts of individuality in the West. According to Peter Burke,

social his-

torical study has shown that the ‘mentality’ of 16th century French farmers

had many things in common with that of contemporary Chinese farmers.

Particularly interesting in our context is the emphasis on collectivity over

individuality among both populations. Comparable results are also reported

by Antoine Prost, who studied the transformation of the French family. As

Prost remarked, ‘The individual once was an intrinsic part of his or her

family. Private life was secondary, subordinate, and in many cases secret

or marginal. Now the relation of individual to family has been reversed’.

These ﬁndings suggest that in societies with the same or similar subsistence

basis, the self is conceptualised in similar ways, regardless of cultural dif-

ferences. At least, we can reasonably suppose that the individualised self

of the West had emerged in the process of modernisation, particularly in

connection with the Enlightenment movement.

Considering the above, we must say that Japanese emicists, despite their

contributions to the understanding of Japan from the native’s point of view,

have created a hypothetical enemy, a monstrous one at that, and they have

fought a ﬁerce war against it, while losing sight of their friends on the other

side.

Whose emics?

One question that has seldom been raised in the voluminous anthropolog-

ical literature on the issue of emic/etic is: ‘Whose emics are they?’ Earlier,

I pointed out that many of the communities studied by anthropologists

are small-scale, illiterate societies and that this explains why emicists have

been spared confrontation with local scholars concerning the authenticity

of their formulations.

The same fact explains why the internal diversity

Emic conceptions 47

of a culture has seldom been considered in devising emic concepts: most of

the communities that have been studied are too small to warrant a careful

investigation into social stratiﬁcation. Thus, whether or not there are dif-

ferent emics for different groups of age, gender, class, and region within the

same culture, and, if so, what kinds of internal dynamics are working, have

escaped the attention of most researchers. From the perspective of social

diversity and variation emphasised in this book, one particularly interesting

possibility is that the emics of dominant groups have been superimposed on

those of other groups, thus having been elevated to the status of the etics for

the entire culture, while having been presented as its emics in cross-cultural

comparison. As Yoshio Sugimoto and Ross Mouer stated, ‘The extent to

which, and the processes by which, the emic concepts of one subgroup are

superseded with the etic-cum-emic concepts of another subgroup, thereby

elevating an emic term to serve as the standard medium for society-wide

communication, would prove to be an interesting study.’

In Japanese studies, little has been said on this subject, but the multi-

plicity of Japan’s emics has long been recognised. Toshinao Yoneyama, for

example, took issue with Nakane’s characterisation of Japanese society as

tate (vertical) by pointing out the widely acknowledged differences between

north-eastern and south-western Japan in kinship and village structures.

north-eastern Japan, particularly in the T

ohoku region examined in detail

by Kizaemon Aruga,

human relationships are based on the d

ozoku,a

hierarchically organised group made up of one honke (main family) and a

number of its bunke (branch families). This group is united by common

ancestors, and the honke dominates its bunke, demanding both loyalty

and labour, while providing protection in times of need. In south-western

Japan, by contrast, the d

ozoku hierarchy is surpassed by the egalitarianism

of k

o, a local association which originally developed as a religious group,

but which began fulﬁlling economic functions at a later age, as was the

case with tanomoshi-k

o, the precursor of today’s credit unions. Yoneyama

maintained that Nakane’s theory is a half truth that only applies to the

mainstream of north-eastern Japan, centred on Tokyo. This scholarly dis-

cord partially stems from the differences in everyday practice between the

two regions: Nakane is Tokyo-based, while Yoneyama is based in Kyoto,

one of the centres of south-western Japan.

In terms of gender, study has shown that Hamaguchi’s kanjin orien-

tation is more strongly observed among women than among men.

This

ﬁnding is parallel to the assertions of Carol Gilligan, author of In a Differ-

ent Voice,

who criticised conventional theories of human development as

48 Takami Kuwayama

male-centric. According to her, these theories highlighted independence to

the neglect of interdependence. Generally speaking, before the postmodern

turn in the 1980s, culture was conceptualised as an integrated whole possess-

ing homogeneity and internal consistency. This coherent picture has been

shattered by postmodernists who emphasise cultural multiplicity, fragmen-

tation, dissonance, and so forth. It seems, however, that the pendulum has

swung too far in one direction. Culture may not be shared as much as used

to be thought, but it would be an exaggeration to say that there is no cultural

sharing at all among members of the same group, be it a state, nation, or

ethnic group. It is a matter of empirical research, rather than a particular

-ism, to investigate what ‘separates’ people, as well as what ‘connects’ them,

and to what extent.

Nationalism

A major paradigm in the study of Japanese character is, as noted earlier,

the dichotomy between Western individualism and Japanese collectivism.

In terms of intellectual history, its major source of inﬂuence has been the

discourse of family state (kazoku kokka), which emerged at the end of

the 19th century. From the beginning, Japan’s ‘familism’ emphasised the

welfare of the entire family over the wishes of its individual members. It

was contrasted sharply with the stereotyped individualism of the West,

which was frequently equated in Japan with selﬁshness. Before the end of

the Second World War, this contrast was politically manipulated in Japan on

numerous occasions in order to underscore Japan’s ‘spiritual superiority’

over its Western rivals. The climax came when this perceived dichotomy

was turned into a state ideology in Kokutai no Hongi (Fundamentals of

Our National Polity), a booklet drafted and published by the Ministry of

Education in 1937. It proclaimed, ‘Our country is a great family nation, and

the Imperial Household is the head family of the subjects and the nucleus

of national life’.

Two years before this pronouncement, the philosopher Tetsur

oWatsuji

wrote an inﬂuential book entitled F

udo.

It was ﬁrst translated into English

as Climate, but was later re-titled Climate and Culture.

This book con-

tains an archetypical analysis of Japanese collectivism in terms of ie (family

or house) and its related emic concepts. First of all, Watsuji regarded the

ie as signifying the totality of family, arguing that the ie takes precedence

over its individual members. As was preached in the prewar moral educa-

tion (sh

ushin), he maintained that ie members are both descendants of their

ancestors and are themselves ancestors to those who are yet to come. Thus,

Emic conceptions 49

the good name of the ie must be protected at any cost. Furthermore, Watsuji

contended that the Japanese ideal of aidagara (‘betweeness’) is crystallised

in the ie. This notion of aidagara was later elaborated by Hamaguchi in

the 1970swhennihonjinron was booming. Watsuji went on to argue that

in modern European capitalism each person is seen as an individual, and

the family is no more than a gathering of individuals to meet economic

interests, whereas in Japan the family has retained its strong solidarity even

after the introduction of capitalism. Watsuji explained this difference by

referring to a contrasting pair of terms now widely used in the study of

Japan – uchi and soto. He maintained that the Japanese regard the ie as

uchi (inside), a term synonymous with house, and that the world beyond

it is considered soto (outside). Within the ie/uchi, said Watsuji, the distinc-

tion between individuals disappears, and the family is united as a whole,

admitting ‘no discriminating aidagara’. By contrast, this intimate world is

strictly distinguished from soto – a distinction claimed by Watsuji to have

no parallel in Europe. In this way, Watsuji both eulogised the Japanese spirit

and emphasised its uniqueness.

For lack of space, no further details are

provided here,

but there is no denying that Watsuji’s discourse dovetailed

with nationalist propaganda before and during the Second World War.

After the war, Watsuji was criticised on the grounds that he had fanned

the ﬂames of Japan’s nationalism, but he was eventually awarded in 1955 an

Order of Cultural Merit (bunka kunsh

o), the highest honour to be conferred

on Japanese academics. Signiﬁcantly, Watsuji was not alone in interpreting

Japanese collectivism as having been derived from the ideal of ie. Similar

views were presented by many other leading intellectuals, including Kunio

Yanagita, who founded Japanese folklore studies in the 1930s.

Even today,

their views are echoed in the works of many writers, including Nakane, who

regards the ie as the archetype of Japanese organisations,

and the scholars

who collaborated in the preparation of a governmental paper entitled ‘The

Age of Culture’, which spelled out Japan’s cultural policy in the early

1980s.

Universality versus particularity

Japanese emicists are convinced that Western theory is incapable of fully

explaining Japan. This conviction has led them to set about formulating

alternative theory from the native’s point of view. Such undertakings may,

however, backﬁre when, for example, the Japanese attempt to apply their

insights to the study of other countries: their theory may be dismissed for

exactly the same reason as the Japanese have dismissed Western theory.

50 Takami Kuwayama

Since many Japanese emicists believe in the uniqueness of Japan, few such

attempts have ever been made seriously. But as long as Japan’s emic concepts

contain theory or something comparable to it, there should be a universality

that makes them applicable, however modestly, in non-Japanese contexts.

Here we have come to a critical point – the perennial issue of universality

versus particularity.

Japan’s emic discourse typically starts, as does anthropological emic

research, with language analysis. As a rule, this analysis employs one or

both of the following two approaches. The ﬁrst is to tap into native vocab-

ulary in order to discover a distinctive word or a set of words that presum-

ably expresses the ‘essence’ of the people being studied, as is illustrated by

Doi’s research into amae. Occasionally, terms like uchi and soto are used

by non-Japanese scholars as keys to understanding Japan. A representative

ﬁgure in this regard is Jane Bachnik, although her interpretations are inﬂu-

enced by the semiotics of Charles Peirce.

A second approach is to invent

new terms for the question at issue. Hamaguchi’s kanjin illustrates this

approach. The term ‘kanjin’ is made up of two characters, kan (between)

and jin (person/people), which, if arranged in the opposite order, signify nin-

gen (human being). Hamaguchi’s theory has had wide appeal for Japanese

readers because of the impact of this neologism. In just two characters, he

has made his point that the Japanese conceive of human relationships as

‘relational’ or as being formed ‘between’ person and person.

A major pitfall into which this kind of study falls is the rash conclusion

that because such and such words do not exist in other languages, they

must be peculiar to the people being studied. In Japan, this conclusion has

frequently been drawn from a casual comparison of Japanese with English

and a few other European languages at most. Thus, despite the signiﬁcance

of Doi’s discovery of amae psychology, the word ‘amae’ has rather hastily

been declared to be peculiar to Japanese. On this point, the Korean literary

critic O-Young Lee cynically criticised Doi, saying that there are in Korean

two equivalent terms for amae, origwan and unsok, which together convey

the subtle nuances of dependence far more elegantly than does ‘the simple

Japanese term amae’. Lee’s criticism partially stems from his dissatisfaction

with the Japanese tendency to look to the West to the neglect of the East.

Whatever the truth may be, we should remember, ﬁrst, that those Japanese

words that have been considered peculiar may in fact have parallel words

in languages not well known in Japan, and, second, that even if there are no

equivalents, the ideas themselves may be present in concealed or disguised

form, or indeed not verbalised at all.

Emic conceptions 51

This last point has been proven by Doi himself. While he struggled

to overcome the difﬁculties of applying Freud’s theory in the Japanese

setting, Doi came across the British psychiatrist Michael Balint’s writing

on ‘passive object love’ or ‘primary love’. Balint observed that ‘in the ﬁnal

phase of the treatment patients begin to give expression to long-forgotten,

infantile, instinctual wishes, and to demand their gratiﬁcation from their

environment’.

Doi interpreted this behaviour as ‘none other than amae’.

He became convinced of his interpretation when he found these words by

Balint: ‘All European languages are so poor that they cannot distinguish

between the two kinds of object-love, active and passive’.

In a later work,

Balint acknowledged the connection between primary love and amae.

Similar supporting remarks are to be found elsewhere. Eric Fromm, for

example, criticised Freud for having distorted his own discovery of the

Oedipus complex by interpreting it in sexual terms. In Fromm’s view, the

little boy’s attachment to his mother springs not from the desire to take her

sexually, but rather from the child’s desire for emotional protection, which

is secretly carried into adult life. According to Fromm, this desire is found

at the base of all neuroses.

Is it surprising that he [the adult child] carries with him the dream of

ﬁnding a mother again or of ﬁnding a world in which he can be a child

again? The contradiction between the loving of the paradisiacal child

existence and the necessities that follow from his adult existence can be

rightly considered the nucleus of all neurotic developments.

In this regard, I must mention that Doi overlooked the possible connection

of amae with the Catholic belief in the Madonna. For lack of space, a detailed

account is withheld here, but the ‘Madonna Complex’ as described by Anne

Parsons

in her study of southern Italy shows some signiﬁcant similarities

to amae. Doi could have noticed this connection when the semanticist SF

Hayakawa, a Canadian-born Nisei, asked him ‘if the feeling of amaeru was

similar to that experienced by a Catholic towards the Blessed Virgin’.

Unfortunately, Doi missed the importance of this question.

The foregoing argument suggests that amae is far from peculiar to the

Japanese. It is, rather, a widely observed phenomenon, the existence of which

has long been known even among Western psychiatrists. Until recently,

however, it has not been recognised as such due to language differences.

From this, we may generalise and say that the absence of a word in a

particular language merely reﬂects the relative insigniﬁcance of the idea

52 Takami Kuwayama

expressed by that word. It is by no means proof that the idea itself is non-

existent in that culture.

This observation brings us back to the anthropological debate on

emic/etic. Among the many different formulations of the relationship

between the two concepts, that of Goodenough

is useful in consider-

ing the issue of universality versus particularity. He explained that when

linguists embark on describing the phonemic system of a new language,

they initially use etics, namely, the meaningful distinctions (e.g. whether

or not consonants are aspirated) that are already known from previous

research into other languages. And when unknown features are discovered,

they make a new distinction with which to describe them. This new dis-

tinction is then added to the existing pool of etics. In this way, the emics

of one language are explained, though incompletely, in terms of the etics

of other languages, which in turn are enhanced by those newly discovered

emics. As Goodenough maintained: ‘Emic description requires etics, and

by trying to do emic descriptions we add to our etic conceptual resources

for subsequent description’.

In sociocultural analysis, a major criticism of this kind of approach is that

the emics of Western society have been elevated to the etics of the world’s

society to such an extent that they are now taken as the yardsticks by which

to judge the non-Western world. Although this is a signiﬁcant point, we

must at the same time remember that there is no human group that is so dif-

ferent as to share nothing with other groups. As Befu aptly remarked, ‘While

our understanding of Japan increases as we engage in emic analysis and learn

of its unique aspects, at the same time etic comparisons help us to discover

how Japan is part of humanity’.

Instead of categorically rejecting Western

theory, then, we should use it in the study of Japan as long as it is useful – with

a full awareness that it has limitations, as does any other theory –

while simultaneously endeavouring to ﬁnd new insights that deserve to

be added to the world’s intellectual resources. In this way, we can at least

avoid the mistake of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Concluding remarks

In the modern world system, Japan has been subjected, as has almost every

other non-Western nation, to domination by Western powers. This his-

tory has generated among Japanese intellectuals both admiration for and

resentment against Western scholarship. On the one hand, they have vora-

ciously studied the Western ideas they admire, and on the other, they have

Emic conceptions 53

felt humiliated by not having received the respect they think they deserve

from the West. These ambivalent feelings are observed in the intellectual

community throughout the non-Western world, but are particularly strong

in Japan because outside the West, Japan alone has had the power to create

a modern empire of its own. The humiliation suffered by Japanese intel-

lectuals has generated a reverse discrimination against Westerners, resulting

in the tenuous contention that only the Japanese can understand Japan.

Japan’s emic concepts may therefore be seen as resulting from the attempt

to reclaim the discourse on Japan.

Parenthetically, it is only recently

that the presence of other Asian countries has been felt tangibly within

Japan. Intellectual exchange with those countries has at last begun after

a long interval of silence, but building sturdy bridges is a task for the

future.

Placed outside the centre of the ‘academic world system’, in the humani-

ties and social sciences at least, Japanese scholars have tried, whenever possi-

ble, to raise their status by claiming the originality of their research. The fact

is, however, that many of Japan’s emic concepts have emerged in response to,

or out of struggle with, Western theory. Indeed, Doi’s amae, Nakane’s tate,

and Hamaguchi’s kanjin may be considered ‘counter-discourses’ against,

respectively, Freudian psychology, modernisation theory (as opposed to

the study of indigenous social structure), and generalised Western theory.

Even Watsuji’s F

udo, which was presented before Japan’s defeat in the Sec-

ond World War, was stimulated by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger

and by the ‘climatology’ of Johann Gottfried Herder. Put another way,

they all engaged in dialogue with the intellectual giants of the West, instead

of starting from scratch. Thus, we may say that the foundation on which

modern Japanese theory is based has been provided by Westerners, however

insufﬁcient their theory may be when it comes to explaining Japan.

Considering the above, it would be appropriate to see the efforts of

Japanese emicists as ‘translation’. As already noted, translation is not sim-

ply a change of languages. Rather, it involves a creative process by which

new possibilities of the existing ideas are explored through the laborious

attempt to overcome the so-called ‘incommensurability’ between different

languages. When successful, it is like transplanted plants growing in ways

never imagined before. Similarly, to the extent that Japan’s emic concepts

have been stimulated, whether positively or negatively, by Western ideas,

they are not completely original. They are, however, contributions in their

own right, which should be commended for the new light they have thrown

on the study of Japan, thus opening new horizons of research.