Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago, Herodotus, on visiting Egypt, was astonished by practices that were at odds with those he had been able to observe elsewhere. The Egyptians, he wrote, behave in all things contrary to other peoples. Not only do the women engage in trade while the men remain at home and weave, but the men begin the weft at the bottom of the loom, not at the top as in other countries. The women urinate standing up, the men squat. I shall not go on with the list.
Closer to our own time, in the late nineteenth century the Englishman Basil Hall Chamberlain, a longtime professor at the University of Tokyo, gave the title “Topsy-Turvydom” to an entry in his book Things Japanese, which takes the form of a dictionary. As he explained, “the Japanese do many things in a way that runs directly counter to European ideas of what is natural and proper. To the Japanese themselves our ways appear equally unaccountable.” A series of examples follows, echoing those cited by Herodotus twenty-four centuries earlier in reference to a different country, similarly exotic in the eyes of his fellow citizens.
No doubt the examples Chamberlain provided are not all equally convincing. Japanese writing is not the only one in the world that is read from right to left. It is not only in Japan that the address on a letter gives the name of the city first, then the street and house number, and finally, the name of the addressee. The difficulties that dressmakers during the Meiji period had when trimming European-style dresses do not necessarily reveal a trait of the national character. By contrast, it is striking that these same dressmakers threaded their needles by pushing the eye over the thread, which was held still, instead of pushing the thread into the eye; and that, while sewing, they pushed the fabric onto the needle instead of sticking the needle into the fabric, as we do. The ancient Japanese mounted their horses from the right and backed their animals into the barn.
Foreign visitors are astonished that Japanese carpenters saw by pulling the tool toward them and not by pushing it away as we do, and that they similarly manipulate their “drawknife,” a two-handled knife used for planing and thinning out wood. In Japan, the potter sets the wheel in motion with his left foot, clockwise, unlike the European or Chinese potter, who sets it in motion with his right foot, counterclockwise.
Indeed, these practices do not simply differentiate Japan from Europe: the line of demarcation runs between insular Japan and continental Asia. In addition to many other elements, Japan borrowed from Chinese culture the crosscut saw, which cuts by pushing; but from the fourteenth century on, saws that cut by pulling, invented in Japan itself, supplanted the Chinese model. And the drawknife that is pushed, which came from China in the sixteenth century, gave way a hundred years later to models that the user pulls toward himself. How are we to explain the characteristic that all these innovations have in common?
We might attempt to solve the problem case by case. Japan has little iron ore, and a saw that is pulled requires a thinner piece of metal than the other kind: reasons of economy, therefore. But would the same argument be valid for the drawknife? And how could it be applied to the different ways of threading a needle and of sewing, which, however, proceed on the same principle? To find a specific explanation in each instance, we would have to engage in extravagant flights of the imagination, and we would never be done with it.
A general explanation comes to mind. If, in the work they perform, Japanese men and women move toward the self, inward and not outward, is it not because of their predilection for squatting, which allows them to reduce their furniture to the bare minimum? In the absence of workshop furniture, the artisan must support himself. The explanation appears so simple that it has been invoked not only for Japan but also for other regions of the world where similar observations have been made.
In the mid-nineteenth century, J. G. Swan, a prosperous Boston merchant who decided one day to abandon his family and (as Gauguin would later do) seek primitive simplicity far from home, noted that the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest in the United States, already very acculturated in their use of knives, always cut toward themselves, as we do to cut a quill pen, he said, and did their work squatting on the ground whenever they had the opportunity. There is no question that there is a connection between one’s working posture and the way of handling a tool. It remains to be seen, however, if one explains the other—and if so, which one?—or if these two aspects of a single phenomenon have a common origin we might discover.
A Japanese friend and seasoned traveler told me one day that, in every city she visited, she could assess the ambient pollution by inspecting her husband’s shirt collars. No Western woman, it seems to me, would follow that line of reasoning. Instead, she would think that her husband’s neck was unclean. She would attribute an external effect to an internal cause: her reasoning would move from the inside outward. My Japanese friend reasoned from the outside inward, performing in her mind the same movement as, in Japanese practice, the dressmaker threading a needle, the carpenter sawing or planing wood.
Nothing sheds more light on the common reasons behind the little facts to which I have drawn attention than this example. Western thought is centrifugal; Japanese, centripetal. That is already clear in the language used by a cook. Unlike us, she does not “plunge” something into the frying oil but rather “lifts,” “draws out,” or “withdraws” (
ageru) it from the oil. It is clear, more generally, in the syntax of the Japanese language, which constructs sentences by means of successive determiners, moving from the general to the specific, and places the subject at the end. The Japanese, when they leave home, will often say something like
itte mairimasu, “going away I come back,” a locution in which
itte, the gerund of the verb
ikimasu, reduces the act of going out to a circumstance in which the primary intention is to return. And it is true that, in ancient Japanese literature, journeys appear to be painful experiences that wrest one away from that “interior,”
uchi, to which one always yearns to return.
Western philosophers contrast Far Eastern thought to their own by noting two different attitudes toward the notion of the subject. In various ways, Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism all deny what for the West constitutes a fundamental and obvious fact: that of the self, whose illusory character these Eastern doctrines set out to demonstrate. For them, every being is only a precarious arrangement of biological and psychic phenomena, with no durable element such as a “self,” merely an appearance destined to dissolve.
But Japanese thought is always original, and it distinguishes itself as much from the other Far Eastern philosophies as from our own. Unlike those philosophies, it does not annihilate the subject. Unlike Western philosophies, it refuses to make the self the obligatory starting point for any philosophical reflection, any project to reconstruct the world by means of thought. It has even been said that in a language such as Japanese, where the personal pronoun is used reluctantly, Descartes’s maxim “I think, therefore I am” is rigorously untranslatable.
Instead of making the subject a cause, as we do, Japanese thought sees it rather as a result. The Western philosophy of the subject is centrifugal; that of Japan is centripetal, placing the subject at the end. That difference in mental attitudes is the same as what we saw lying just beneath the surface in the opposing ways of using tools: like the gestures the artisan performs toward himself, Japanese society makes self-consciousness an endpoint. It results from the manner in which increasingly small social and professional groups fit one into another. The counterpart to the Westerner’s prejudice about autonomy is the constant need by the Japanese individual to define himself as a function of the group(s) to which he belongs, which he designates by the word
uchi. That term means not only “house” but, within the house, the back room, in contrast to those leading to it or surrounding it.
The secondary and derivative reality that Japanese thought concedes to the self cannot provide the center toward which one tends and for which one yearns. Within a social and moral system thus conceived, there is no absolute order, such as the one China was able to ensure by means of an organized cult of ancestors and the exercise of filial piety. In Japan the elderly lose all authority and no longer count once they cease to be heads of families. In that area as well, the relative prevails over the absolute: family and society are perpetually shifting their focus. The distrust of theory (tatemae) and the primacy given to practice (honne) can be attributed to that deep-seated tendency.
But if Japanese life is dominated by a sense of relativity and impermanence, does that not imply that a certain sense of the absolute must find a place on the periphery of individual consciousness, to give consciousness a framework it does not have within itself? That may explain the role played in the modern history of Japan by the dogma of the divine origin of imperial power, the belief in racial purity, and the affirmation of a specificity of Japanese culture vis-à-vis other nations. To be viable, every system needs a certain rigidity, which may be internal or external to the elements composing it. Is it not partly because of that external rigidity, so disconcerting to Westerners because it reverses their way of conceiving the relation between the individual and his surroundings, that Japan was able to overcome the ordeals suffered during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to find, in the flexibility preserved within individual consciousnesses, a means for the successes it now enjoys?