The essential foreignness of another culture

I read Michael Zielenziger’s Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation to see what he had to say about suicide in Japan. There were only seven pages on suicide, but many of his other topics were interesting: the hikikomori, attitudes of Japanese women towards marriage, an apparent obsession with Louis Vuitton accessories. The lecture-like chapters in the second-half of the book — on post-war Japan, how Korea is different, the role of religion – were disappointing. They seemed oversimplified and not sufficiently insightful.

My overall objection to the book, however, is the author’s eagerness to demystify the foreignness of Japan.

The cultural imperialism of the West

Zielenziger is an American journalist who lived in Japan for seven years. His book labels and diagnoses the current “dysfunction” of Japanese society and offers a prescription for recovery. Unfortunately he sees Japan through the eyes of a Western imperialist, an extension of the post-war MacArthur era.

Look at Korea, he writes. They’ve come around to Western economic ways. They’ve even adopted Western religions. Why does Japan insist on remaining distinctly different? Let’s face it. Western culture is going to dominate the world, and if the Japanese aren’t willing to give up their quaint and antiquated culture, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

This strikes me as disrespectful, insulting, and unenlightened.

The Big Clod vs. the alienated individual

One needn’t subscribe to the cliché of the inscrutable Oriental to appreciate the essential foreignness of an Asian culture. It helps, for a start, to acknowledge that language creates a distinct perspective on the world, including an understanding of how the world works at the most fundamental level.

One of my favorite experts on Chinese culture, Robert Fenwick, had this to say about why the world looks different to native speakers of Western and Chinese languages.

If you think of the relationship of human conditions/civilizations to the rest of the universe, it’s characterized — in Western languages particularly — by the religious traditions of the last 2000 years, which involve an encodification of language forms into a religious structure. The trinity form of the deity is a function of having a three-part language system where there has to be an actor, an actee, and an action. Everything in Western language is thought of primarily in a frame of a kind of pottery making: Someone has to be doing it. There’s a substance you’re working with. And there’s a process that carries you to the end product.

Chinese is not built that way. The notion of the Taoist concept of the universe is that it’s all one big lump. In fact, that’s one of the nicknames for the universe, the “Big Clod.” So all of the apparent differences between things are all limited views — a slice taken in time. The bookcase and the book, carpet and building, cat and dog food — these are only apparent differences. If you follow the molecules of the bookcase long enough, they will end up in a cat, some other time in a book, and some other time in dog food. The Chinese view of the place of humans in the universe is seamless. There isn’t a distinction between human life and anything else.

The spiritual concepts of Japanese culture have their origins in Taoism.

How Americans and the Japanese take photographs

Consider this passage from Shutting Out the Sun:

… Japanese and American students were given identical cameras and asked to photograph their best friend. The Americans tended to shoot extreme close-ups, zooming in to ensure that the face occupies the vast majority of the photographic field. The Japanese, by contrast, stepped back from the subject, and snapped pictures in which their friend occupied far less space in the frame relative to the background.

Such contrasting physical images neatly illustrate competing concepts of self. In America, a person exists alone, relatively indifferent to, or not necessarily affected by, his surroundings. In Japan, it is nearly impossible to portray a person cut off from his context. You might argue that in Japan, an individual shorn of his tangling vines of context, without a business card or a group to belong to, ceases to exist.

Yes, Americans emphasize the individual in ways the Japanese do not. And Americans may very well be more indifferent to their surroundings than the Japanese, who have a heightened sense of aesthetic beauty, context, and the ephemeral. There’s quite a difference, however, between not existing without your business card and the intuitive sense that human beings are seamlessly at one with the entire universe.

Ungrateful natives

When I taught traditional Chinese medicine, I would observe in each new class the struggle of Western students to accept the assumptions of a different culture. There was strong resistance, for example, to the idea that contradictory theories can comfortably coexist. To Western thinking, founded in Aristotelian logic and Enlightenment rationalism, this is disturbing. It does not trouble the Chinese mind.

One cannot simply apply Western ideas to an Asian culture – or to a Muslim one, for that matter — and expect the natives to be grateful for your advice. Ultimately, this is what troubled me about Shutting Out the Sun.

It’s a fascinating book, nonetheless, and I would recommend it. I learned a great deal. But I found myself longing for a discussion and explanation of the same subject matter by a native of Japan. Or by a Westerner who wasn’t afraid to acknowledge that one cannot ignore the essential foreignness of Japan without losing something of fundamental importance.

Update 7/31/10:
Can There Be a Global Bioethics? (First Things)

Ohuuki-Tiemey argues that the Western conception of “humanness” stands in contrast to how humanness is conceptualised in Japan. She argues that “rationality” is given a privileged position over “affectivity” and “emotionality” and is the hallmark of humanness in the West, whereas in Japan all three are considered of equal importance, hence the shedding of tears has always been considered a uniquely human behaviour. Lock and Honde similarly argue that the word “kokoro”, meaning “spirit”, is written with the character for “heart” and it is associated with the highly evocative, private, unique and most humane part of an individual Japanese, and that it is not equated with “person”. Thus “an individual cannot be declared dead until this ‘core’ of humanity, the kokoro, has ceased to function” and, as kokora is located in the chest, it is not surprising that “brain death” remains controversial in Japan but the harvesting of human organs from NHBDs [non-heart-beating donation] has been more readily accepted.

Resources:

Photo source: Homestay Japan

Michael Zielenziger, Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation

Robert Fenwick, Tong Shu Talk: Daily notes on the Chinese Astrological Almanac, commentary on calendar observances, and considerations of the ancient Daoist traditions in modern practice.