tatemae & honne (1)

I know of no European who has lived in Japan for, say, four or five consecutive years and who doesn't feel bitterly disappointed at the hardships one experiences when trying to make friends with the "natives", especially with those Japanese that haven't lived abroad for a considerable length of time in recent years and are thus like the frog in the old proverb: they don't know the great ocean. [I no naka no kawazu taikai wo shirazu. / "A frog in a well does not know the great ocean", so it goes in a tentative translation]

Most of my European pals here tell me that they've simply given up (and the most cynical don't even try. Ever.), having developed too many antibodies against what they see as appalling, simply appalling displays of disloyalty, ungratefulness, duplicity, insincerity, cold-heartedness, hypocrisy, fickleness, back-stabbing - you name it - when they least expect them. That is to say, when they think they've finally crossed "the threshold" and made a native friend-indeed.

While I've had my fair share of personal disappointments over these past few years, the anthropologist-ethnographer in me tries to keep a sort of participant-observation stance in order to gain a better understanding of the above-mentioned baffling behaviours and thereby to avoid being dominated by certain... er... less positive feelings and becoming an embittered old hag way too soon.

What I mean by "the threshold" is that critical moment when you feel that the initial ice has begun to melt for good, and that you're on the verge of what we, stuffy old Westerners, associate with true friendship: intimacy, candour, sincerity, warm-heartedness, constancy, and so on. It's no doubt difficult not to expect these things when they form an integral part of your culture, even though in recent times, with the advent of professional friendship accountancy on social networking websites, the concept has become somewhat more fluid (but not for this dinosaur here, alas).

Well, the bad news is that it's a serious - though human, all too human - mistake to expect all these things in Japan, in a culture that has molded people into habits of behaviour, expectations, interpersonal relations and values that could hardly be more distinct from our own. If you're not willing and able to radically rethink and negotiate your approach to friendship (and most of the times I'm not, sorry!), then it may prove simply impossible to dwell in the threshold for too long, let alone to cross to the other side of it. When you're confident or detached enough you might opt to stay indefinitely in the twilight zone, maintaining a certain degree of wariness and scepticism, because you never really know when you're going to be given the cold shoulder or have the door slammed in your face. However, experience so far tells me that most Westerners living here for any considerable length of time burn out and end up by withdrawing altogether, becoming... embittered old hags, precisely. That's why so many, sensing the danger, decide to leave during those critical first years.

While piles and piles of books have been written on these and other Japanese peculiarities by experts from the most varied areas, explanations tend to fall short of reality, which remains as unchanging and disheartening (from our viewpoint, of course) as ever. There is, however, one interpretation that remains a classic, and for a good reason. Takeo Doi's The Anatomy of Dependence (1971), advertised in the front cover of the Kodansha translation as "the key analysis of Japanese behaviour", may have been criticised on manifold grounds over the years, but it remains an invaluable psychological study of recurrent forms of Japanese behaviour that make it so difficult for "us" to understand and come to terms with what often seem disturbing manifestations of some kind of multiple personality disorder, in comparison to which The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde doesn't sound, well, that strange...

When I was just considering how long it would take me to re-read and summarise Doi's intricate argument in a blog-friendly register, I came upon this excellent book by Michael Zielenziger, Shutting Out the Sun, that re-engages with and extends Doi's Anatomy in an attempt to make sense of another puzzling Japanese contemporary phenomenon, the hikikomori. Hence, cher lecteur, I'll leave you, without further delay, to a couple of illuminating passages from Zielenziger's book, which very much corroborate my own (fallible) perception so far.


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The concept of amae ["dependency"] was first proposed by the psychoanalyst Takeo Doi . . . . Doi argues that the craving between mother and son for close contact works to partially counteract individuation, and that while Western societies suppress these urges for dependency, Japanese society actively encourages them . . . . In a Japanese household the father is often absent and chooses not to share nearly as much of the child-rearing responsibilities as in a contemporary Western home. While such close mother-son contact is by no means unknown in the West, the fact that it is encouraged, not discouraged, within Japanese culture and can be reproduced in many social relationships outside the home, as between a young employee and his boss, makes the dependency seem far more intense.

To a Westerner, independence is, like freedom, a virtue or a moral imperative, while the word "dependence" conjures up negative images of welfare and drug use. In Japanese, however, freedom, or jiyu, is a concept laden with ambiguity . . . . [It can] denote an individual who willfully asserts the right to behave as he pleases despite the wishes of the group, of one who exhibits selfishness by putting his own needs ahead of others'. In a society that did not abandon feudalism until the mid-nineteenth century . . . and the Emperor was considered divine until 1945, the boundaries between state and divinity, state and nature, and society and self - ones that Westerners might take for granted - were never clearly differentiated. (p. 61)

Japanese simultaneously inhabit three worlds of dependence: the parent-child realm; the workplace, where dependence is an implicit element of the social contract; and the world of strangers in which mutual dependence does not exist. This construct explains why Japanese maintain a strong division between those "inside" or "outside" their specific family or group relationships. They lavish attention and deference on those inside their uchi, or house, and ignore the outside, or soto, as strangers - tanin, unrelated persons - and accord them no special treatment. The Western belief that all people should be treated equally whether uchi or soto - inside or outside the network - seems strange to most Japanese. In a deeper sense, they carry psychic double ledgers: one set for the outside world, and another held closely within . . . . Japanese acknowledge that there is a public face, or tatemae, visible when one speaks formally, officially, or to strangers. One expresses true feelings, or honne, only among the closest friends, late at night over a glass of sake or whiskey. "That a man's standard of behavior should differ within his own circle and outside it affords no food for inner conflict," Doi explains.

This separation between public and private is a reason why Westerners often feel that their Japanese contacts or business partners "don't tell the truth" during business negotiations. The Japanese are telling a truth, a contextual truth, but it is not universal truth as Westerners understand it. (p. 63)

Like one's own identity, truth in Japan can depend on the context: something is not always and universally true. Some psychiatrists believe that because the split between true feeling and public "face" is so deeply ingrained in the Japanese, they suffer far fewer cases of multiple personality disorders than do Westerners. "Because all of us Japanese grow up with multiple personalities, we almost never see this disorder in our patients," [said] the psychologist Yuichi Hattori. (p. 64)

Michael Zielenziger, Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation (New York: Vintage, 2006).

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One further note. Zielenziger omits a passage from Doi's book which is vital for the point I'm trying to make:

That a man's standard of behavior should differ within his own circle and outside it affords no food for inner conflict. This only holds true, however, so long as the outer dividing line is clearly defined; should it become vague, trouble occurs . . . . The uncomfortable thing is not an inner conflict arising from different standards of attitude and action, but being forced to make a choice and being unable to presume on amae any longer. [my emphasis]

Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence, trans. John Bester (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1973), p. 42.


And this is when the long-residing or "gone native" foreigner steps into the ambiguous threshold, and feels compelled to withdraw - or to stay at her/his own peril.

And this is why friendhips with "I no naka no kawazu" Japanese are nearly always so fickle, draining, straining, strained, requiring time, persistence as well as thick skin to withstand the constant slaps in the face, the back-stabbings, the tanin treatment, and the guts to slap back and give the little bastards a dose of their own medicine, when the the thing is really worth the trouble.

A country of half-opened doors indeed. Insular and narrow-minded to the core.


[To be continued...]