I have often enjoyed running my
perceptive system off-road. My most unpleasant drive went through an illegal
reggae party in a field near Oxford. It was all chilled until a police
helicopter passed overhead, cutting through the bass-line, illuminating
hundreds of scowling faces and middle fingers with a spotlight. The DJ dropped Sound
of da Police, and everyone started shouting
whoop-whoop. The chopper passed
soon enough, but then I noticed a stone in my boot. I took off my boot, shook
it out, and put it back on again, and continued chatting to a Northern girl I
had met, but the stone came back. As I took my boot off again, a thought
flashed urgently into my mind: These boots are ugly! Then: And my shirt too!, quickly followed by: Is my haircut wrong?
I dismissed the ideas, but I was
on a roll; Why is this girl talking to me, I
thought, with my silly haircut and ugly clothes? I had bombed way too much amphetamine, and the
games were beginning, but these were not the games I was used to. She was
freaking me out. Apparently she was Mark Morrisons dealer, out on parole for
some hideous act of violence, so I wandered off in my ugly, stony boots to look
for someone less creepy; but strangers were looking at me askance. They were
pointing at me and whispering my name; they were following me around the field
and plotting against me. Within minutes I was cowering on the grass, surrounded
by hostiles jeering at me.
My friends decided it was time to
take me away, but they were not my friends anymore. I trusted only one of them
enough to walk with him. The others walked a tactful distance ahead, but there
were footsteps behind me, clear and distinct. As the sun came up it cast
sinister shadows amongst the trees, enemies waiting to ambush me who vanished
when I looked straight at them. I had to go straight to work at Yellow Pages in
Slough, typing endless puns into a computer: Sheds you could just DIY for! It was a bad enough job straight, but full of dirty
drugs it was torture. At one stage, I looked up to see an advert on the screen
detailing my many faults instead of what I had typed.
The hallucinations continued
until the following day, the paranoia for over a week, and then it passed,
thank God, because it is hellish. I emerged with two valuable insights. One is
that speed is shit. The other is that the scene we see is tinted by what is
going on inside our heads. The nervous system finds what it is primed to find.
I was expecting ill fortune and found it everywhere, but no brain is free of
expectations.
Take another look at the sign at
the beginning of this chapter.
This fools even many who learn
English as their second language.
Count the words.
We read between the lines and construct
the lines themselves. We are all familiar with seeing something out of the
corner of the eye, which disappears when we look at it. You dont have to be
schizophrenic or on drugs to see things, as an American Medical Association
textbook notes: transient hallucinatory experiences are common in individuals
without mental disorder.[1]
Drivers swerve and crash for transient hallucinatory experiences. Conmen live
off them.
What we call a hallucination is a
false interpretation of the data, but the normal interpretation is never
correct. It is, at best, a better guess, a theory as yet unfalsified. Deprived
of light, subjects start hallucinating within hours.[2] Overwhelmed
with speed, we start hallucinating within seconds of the police passing
overhead. Neurones fire constantly, messages from the retina merge with echoes
of memory, and the brain creates the visual scene from a mass of maybes, a stew
of neurotransmitters spiced with cortisone and caffeine, hopes and fears. The
mind navigates through educated guesses. We jump from conclusion to conclusion,
constantly mistaking our neurones for our wives and our hats, and we are taken
in by the illusion - until it collapses.
As I edit my book, my brain is
busy editing reality. Sometimes I type a word, and a split-second later the
automatic spell-checker amends it with a flash as the letters switch, but I
have no idea what the error was. It looked fine to me, a proper, meaningful set
of letters, not a vague grey smudge, but the area was undefined by my brain. It
was a patch of assumption with all the reality of reality. Other times I can
sit starting at a word like responsiblity for ages, with no idea why it is
underlined in red. Back at the Hellish Yellowish Pages of Slough, my tormented
brain edited the entire screen.
I stopped
taking speed, but continued fiddling with my nervous system until I took the
ultimate trip, by taking my brain to Japan. It is a terrible confession, but
even after living there for six years, Japanese all look pretty much the same to
me. It is almost impossible to find a Japanese friend in a sea of bodies a foot
shorter than you, 90 percent of whom have straight black hair in a sensible
cut. The funny thing is, Japanese think the same about us. Relaxing in a hot
spring in a Japanese backwater, an old farmer waded over through the scalding
water. He looked at the three of us in turn, a well-built and well-fed
Anglo-Saxon with a wisp of sandy hair on his balding head, a lanky Australian
with thick eyebrows and dark curly hair, and a freckly Jewish skinhead. He
asked if we were brothers. We explained our diverse roots. Aah, he said,
shaking his generic head. You foreigners all look the same!
Apparently we all sound the same
too. My friend once phoned up a Japanese theatre to book tickets, and chatted
to the receptionist about upcoming productions. When he arrived to pick up the
tickets, presumably with a konnicIhwa!
every bit as camp as the tap-dancing, drag-wearing trapeze artist he is,
the receptionist took one look at his black face and said sorry, no Engrish.
He is American, and he was speaking Japanese. He had lived there for decades,
and like some other singers, his Japanese accent was near perfect. He had
fooled her over the phone, but now the scene before her eyes blocked her ears.
She couldnt understand a word he said, so he went to the phone box across the
road and telephoned. She recognised his voice immediately and began chatting,
so he asked her to look across the road at the foreigner waving at her. With
her preconception dismantled, he was finally able to pick up his tickets.
We navigate through the visual
cortex, and touch the world through the padded gloves of our nervous systems,
which is why a kiss from a Thai princess tastes sweet as mango, until you
realize this mango is a man. Our labels are not what they refer to; there are
no smells to smell, no sights to see. What we perceive is not a copy of the
environment but a dialogue between mind and environment, and different brains
tell different stories. Elderly or unfit observers, for example, tend to
overestimate the slope of a hill, as do people carrying heavy bags, whereas
healthy young people underestimate. The world is warped by our expectations of
how we might react to it,[3]
which is why victims of a hold-up usually overestimate by three to four times
the calibre of the gun pointed at them, and they remember people who were
nearby as have being further away.[4]
Whatever looms large in the mind
grows larger, so a zit dominating a teenagers thoughts also dominates the
mirror, and an anorectic too weak to walk sees flab spilling out of her
wheelchair in the mirror. A Japanese woman who looks pretty much the same as
most others can morph into a figure of unsurpassable beauty as you discover her
charms, but a few years on, when you are sleeping on the sofa at night and
dodging crockery by day, other beauties emerge from hibernation. We might
suppose that our decisions are rational, based on the evidence before us, but
between the retina and the observer is the sea of the unconscious. We are much
more likely, for example, to take the cable car if the hill seems like 25
degrees rather than 15. We might feel more disposed towards picking flowers if
they are for the most beautiful woman in Japan.
The ideas of others also
influence the picture. Subjects answering easy questions on the lengths of
lines are extremely susceptible to peer-pressure. Control groups tested alone
almost never make mistakes, but when actors pretending to be subjects answer
incorrectly before the subject, her error rate climbs to 37 percent.[5] Brain scans
reveal that the false answers heard activate areas of the brain involved with
spatial awareness, suggesting that what we hear directly influences what we
see.
The scene is skewed, and it is
also edited, as shown by experiments into inattentional blindness. In one,
subjects watch a one-minute video of a basketball game, counting one teams
passes.[6]
After 35 seconds, a woman in a gorilla suit walks onto court, turns towards the
camera and thumps her chest as players pass the ball around her, before walking
off again. Despite a nine second cameo, nearly half of the subjects fail to
notice her. We see what we are paying attention to. All control subjects
watching without counting notice the monkey business, but when engaged in the
more difficult task of counting both teams passes, subjects are even more
likely to miss it. In another study a man asks a pedestrian directions, and as
the unwitting subject is replying, two men carrying a door pass between them.
The second workman switches places with the questioner, and listens to the directions.
50 percent of subjects miss the switch.[7]
Nerve signals for unnoticed
objects arrive at the visual cortex along with signals for noticed objects;[8] the editing
takes place at a higher level. Subjects concentrating on crosses flashing up on
a screen often miss an unexpected circle, but a meaningful object is more
easily noticed. The subjects name is noticed than a circle, but not if one
letter is incorrect.[9]
Smiley faces are seen more often, but moody faces are missed as often as circles.
Presumably patterns falling on the retina are coded and compared with templates
in the memory, and more familiar forms pass into the conscious mind. When it
comes to smiley faces, you know the score.
A similar process doctors the
information passing through our ears, accounting for the familiar experience of
hearing ones name jump out from the noise of a crowd. At first, Japanese
sounded to me like a stream of kis, tas and sos,
but the question nani? (eh?) and
the compound da-n (isnt it)
jumped out at me, because both sound like my name. In the Amazon, the
sound that stood out was gringo. I
could be daydreaming on the edge of a conversation, with no idea of the
subject, and then someone would drop a gringo, and I would become present. I could often remember
the last few Portuguese words before gringo as well, and have a vague idea of the theme. Whilst
daydreaming, the words were going into my ears and hanging around below radar
for a few seconds, before being lost. As soon as the magick word focused
my attention, however, my consciousness gathered together whatever information
was in my brain, and made the best sense it could.
The sense filter is a survival
mechanism, noting relevant details whilst screening out unlikely gorillas, and
it is a major factor in the construction of a mind. The world we experience is
skewed, and so are our memories. We preferentially remember what we would like
to be true. This is why we overestimate our charitable donations, office
attendance, and past salaries, but underestimate the amount of alcohol we
bought.[10]
Why is this the case?
The short-term memory stores a
large amount of information. Long-term memories are formed, however, under the
influence of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine, which are
released when we are happy. This is why we can cram for an exam, and then
forget everything about the periodic table within months, whilst remembering
for decades every word Madonna ever sang. Forgetting is intrinsic to the brain,
and serves an important function, making meaningful comparison and
generalisation possible. For example, we might read fifteen stories of car
thefts, and remember that about a third happened in Peckham, whilst forgetting
that a third were makes ending with the letter A. We would probably take care
parking in Peckham, but not worry too much about buying an Astra, a Mazda, or a
Toyota.
What is important to one person
may be insignificant to another. I had a friend at school who was pretty stupid
by most indexes, but he knew the scores and scorers of every World Cup final,
semi-final, and quarter-final ever played, as well as most of the team members.
Personally, I have never been able to remember numbers unless they are related
to something I am passionate about. I can remember what years various comets
passed, but exchange rates and appointment times go in one ear and out the
other, and I know neither my sisters birthdays nor my waist size. My father,
by contrast, is a die-hard accountant whose brain soaks up numbers like a
sponge, but he failed to learn even the simplest Japanese phrase when he
visited me, because he will run a mile rather than communicate with a stranger.
I had to shout at him for days to make him remember itadakimasu (I humbly receive), without which one cannot receive
even a biscuit without insulting the host. Both father and son are, of course,
extremely conceited, but there is more to it. Information that slots
comfortably into the brain passes into the long-term memory and becomes
part of your reality map. That which bores us, confuses us, or makes us feel
uncomfortable, however, is lost.
Our minds are climbing frames,
and we manoeuvre around them along monkey bars built according to the
categories in which we think. The shape of the frame is partly environmentally
determined, and different cultures are drawn to different bits of the scene.
When spotting differences between computer-generated airport scenes, Americans
are drawn to the colour of the helicopters rotor and other foreground
differences. Japanese, however, notice more background details, such as the
shape of the control tower, and spatial relationships between aircraft.[11] With scenes of
moving fish, Americans usually begin with the movements of the biggest or fastest
fish, whereas Japanese describe the location first (it looks like a pond) and
go on to describe 60 percent more background features. Afterwards, when shown
still shots, Japanese take longer to, and are less likely to recognise a fish
against a novel background rather than the original background from the clip,
but it makes no difference to Americans.[12] It appears that the Japanese mind
codes items along with their background, whilst Americans tend to isolate
objects.
The degree to which an object is
bound to its background is called field-dependence, and psychologists have
found differences between Easterners and Westerners, and also between
urbanites, farmers, and hunter-gatherers. Field-dependent people behave differently
as well as see differently. They sit closer together, socialise more, recognise
faces better, and remember more social words from a list, such as party and
visit.[13]
The Japanese eye focuses through
a broader lens, and this is reflected in the culture. Haiku poems always include a reference to the season, to
put the splashing frog in context, and a letter typically begins with a
reference to mounting snow or the scorching Tokyo summer. In sui-boku-ga landscape art, there is always an object painted in
high definition, a traveller or lonely temple juxtaposed against softly
rendered mountains and waterfalls. There is no tradition of still life in Japan,
where things do not make sense in isolation.
Field-dependence also finds its
way into school. Japanese history teachers typically begin with the context and
chronology leading to the war or revolution, whereas American teachers usually
state the outcome and work backwards through causal relationships: The Thirty
Years War occurred for three major reasons Whereas American students are
asked why questions twice as often as Japanese, Japanese are asked how
twice as often, encouraging them to think about how politicians and peasants
felt about the situations they were in.[14]
The tight bond between individual
and group also manifests in the workplace. On the only Sunday I went to my desk
at City Hall (to pick up a forgotten key), several of my colleagues were in
their ties, at their computers, playing solitaire. Japanese habitually
sacrifice their time without receiving overtime pay; they arrive early, stay
late, and usually take only half of their paid leave. Anyone so presumptuous to
take all of it might be ostracised, and would hijack any prospects of
promotion, but no one flinches at giving up several precious days to attend the
annual section outing, which is optional in theory only.
The regular company parties are
also practically obligatory, and the same field-dependent mind goes drinking,
along with the entire taxation section, for example. No one brings their
spouses, who are not part of the group, and the feast begins with everyone
sitting on the floor, each member behind a knee-high table laden with little
dishes of prawns heads, mushy seaweed, gooey mountain potatoes, raw jelly fish
salad, and various other slimy things. The Western equivalent would be a
buffet, where everyone chooses what they want, but in Japan everyone eats the
same meal, and if they dont want the raw squid, they keep quiet about it. This
puts everyone in the same boat, and also avoids the problem of shared plates. A
Japanese would rather starve than do something so outstandingly selfish as eat
the last slice of pizza.
Before the festivities begin,
everyone sits in stony silence as highly formal speeches are made, invariably
beginning with falling autumn leaves or spring cherry blossoms. The
superintendent praises his staff, the new recruits express their enthusiasm to
fit in, and then the drinking begins with a chorus of kampai! Everyone fills their neighbours glasses, which are
tiny, so everyone is constantly checking and refilling the glasses around them.
Only an alcoholic or a foreign barbarian would fill his own.
Within an hour, nearly everyone
is trashed, partly because workmates constantly encourage each other to drink,
but also because Japanese livers lack an enzyme that breaks down alcohol. With
red faces, trouser legs rolled up, and ties around heads like the warriors of
old, the section chief is tossing soy beans high in the air and catching them
in his mouth, the quiet code-writer is professing undying love for a married
secretary, the vice-section chief is jabbing his fingers into the foreigners
bum and shouting kanchou! (enema!).
The norms of polite Japanese society dissolve in alcohol, and everyone gets
silly together. For foreigners cursed with alcohol dehydrogenase, it can be a
constant effort to direct the attention of ones rapidly sliding peers towards
ones empty glass, in order to be at least a little tipsy by karaoke
time. Someone will almost certainly sing Oh Danny Boy if that is your name, and if it is Christmas you can
bet it will be a white one. The other Engrish sing-along favourites are The
Beatles and The Carpenters, as they have always been and will always be. The
party ends with a ritual of synchronised rhythmical clapping:
The final clap is exquisitely synchronised, and then the
hardcore move on to a hostess bar. By the following morning, all is forgotten,
including whatever happened at the hostess bar or the seedy Chinese massage
parlour afterwards. The shared secrets of the previous evening are never mentioned
again, save an oblique reference to Suzuki-sans likely headache. Boundaries
dissolve and coagulate again, all Japanese together in the alchemy of union.
There are various reasons why the
individual melts into to the background in Japan. Life was hard in a land with
almost no natural resources besides the sea, where the snow reaches to the roof
in winter, and rivers of sweat run in summer, where earthquakes, volcanoes,
typhoons and tsunamis periodically wrecked villages. Japanese were repeatedly
forced together to save themselves and rebuild their lives. There is just not
enough space for millions of individuals, where the workable land forms a thin
steep strip between the sea and sharp mountains, and the samurai at the top of
the slope controlled the water pump. An argument between neighbours could end
with one cutting off the irrigation to the others rice fields. The culture is
geared towards reducing friction in this tight space. Doors slide open,
everything is miniaturised, and Japanese arrange their belongings and bodies
with exquisite neatness. Space consciousness is learned early. My Japanese
friend would chastise his young daughter for letting her leg protrude from the
cross-legged position at dinnertime, but he laughed at her noisy burps.
The uprights of the linguistic
frame go in first. Japanese mothers tend to model social routines with their
babies, exchanging toys, greeting and thanking twice as often as American
mothers, who name the piggie and the car twice as often.[15] The
consequences can soon be measured. In one study, subjects were shown a cork
pyramid, and told look at this dax.
They were then asked which of two trays contained the dax, and the answers were different, even before the age
of two. Americans tended to choose the tray with a plastic pyramid,
assuming that dax was the name of the
shape. Japanese, however, usually understood it to be the material, and chose
the tray containing a cork object.[16] Western toddlers learn nouns
(referring to objects) much faster than verbs (denoting relationships between
objects). East Asian kids learn verbs and nouns at the same rate, even though
the noun is a simpler concept.[17]
This is partly due to how they are taught, but also due to the architecture of
the languages.
As a child learns how to climb
around the conceptual world, she is laying down neuronal networks reflecting
the structure of the language. The laws of grammar guide monkey bars into
place, dictating how a noun works with a verb, and just what can be done with
the universe. In Indo-European languages, the noun is much more prominent and
contains more information, so the object is more accurately defined. In English
or Spanish, an egg is different to eggs, but in Japanese a plural
modifier (like -s) is rarely used, and there are no articles like a, an,
and the. A Japanese noun is generally the same whether singular, plural, or
general. The same phrase can mean there is a dog here, there are dogs here,
and dogs exist, depending on the context. Possessive pronouns are also left
out most of the time, so my job can also mean our job, or work generally.
Okusan ga imasu ka? means essentially wife-existence-question? Face to
face, therefore, it usually means are you married?, but when someone phoned
me up and asked, I replied hai
(yes), which was followed by a long pause. Eventually the speaker asked if she
could speak to her. She had meant is your wife there?, but I had stupidly
missed the contextual cues. Had I been an Arab, I might have understood do you
have any wives?
These people are incorrigibly
contextual. Inu ga suki means
dogs-likeable, and therefore I like the dog / the dogs / and dogs
(generally) but the I is implied. An I word can be included: Watashi
wa inu ga suki, but it
is usually only used to make a point, perhaps defending your canine friends
after someone had been rude about them: Well I, however, like dogs!
But only an ill-mannered Japanese would be so rude as to directly contradict
what has been just been said. A contradiction is used almost exclusively for
denying praise.
When I does appear, the word
changes according to the context, according to where you are, how drunk you
are, and to whom you are speaking. Watakushi is very polite, and generally reserved for public address. Watashi
is also polite, used by men speaking to
superiors or customers, and by women most of the time, unless they are with
their friends or want to sound young and ripe and delicious, in which case they
might say atashi. A love letter
written by atashi is about a
million times more fun than one from watashi. Children often use boku, and men sometimes use it as well, but or is more common when speaking on a level. I once
heard a drunk woman saying or to
her boss at a party, implying proximity, but it would have been an outright
insult in the office. Ora is used
by very drunk men, angry men, and men who were born in barns. Old men use war, washi,
or ashi depending on the part of
the country, and there used to be many other Is, including sessha for samurai, and a chin used exclusively by the emperor. A farmer so
insolent as to address a noble with sessha might be cut down in the street. Etiquette was
serious business in Japan, and samurai could reward infractions with the
blade.
You is equally variable, from
the formal anata, through kimi to oma,
which schoolboys call each other, but might get you fired if you said it to
your boss. Japanese prefer to use someones name or a title such as
vice-superintendent, even when speaking directly to them. The context also
modifies the verb. To eat, for example is meshiagaru when offering politely, itadaku when receiving politely, taberu normally, and ku informally.
A Japanese is put in her place
several times per sentence, and generally that is where she stays, making for
some fascinating psychology. Etiquette stalemates are not uncommon, where all
four cars grind to a polite halt at a crossroads, for example, or two Japanese
each spend so long trying to allow the other to leave the elevator first that
the doors close. The Japanese I melts into the background, but I am so
important in the west that I merit a capital letter. Japanese are certainly
not into I enough to fight about it. In northwest Brazil, where the people
may be the most egotistical on the planet, there was a ruck almost every night
I went out, and at carnival in Rio Branco, I saw six within an hour. Besides
sumo, I saw only three fights in six years in Japan, two of which were drunken
brawls amongst Irish and Americans. The other began quietly at 3am, when a
teenager approached my friends and I as we sat on park swings. Whereas most
Japanese wear blue jeans and T-shirts to relax, members of various subcultures
nearly all conform to an internal norm, whether rockabilly fiends in winkle
pickers or Goths wrapped in bloody bandages. This guys bandana and big black
trousers identified him as a motorbike gang-member. He apologised with a slight
bow, and asked for our cooperation in vacating the park, which was about to be
used. Shortly afterwards two gangs appeared. The daddies exchanged insults and
punches, and then the reds and blues piled into each other for a scuffle. No
one was seriously hurt, and the winners spent the rest of the night marching
around town, waving wooden swords and displaying their scratches.
On the rare occasions where
Japanese fight, it is a collective affair, the extremity being in war, when the
I is completely consumed by the collective. Kamikaze dive-bombers were by no means exceptional in
Japanese culture. There is a festival in Aizu-Wakamatsu commemorating the young
samurai who looked back from afar to see their castle burning, and all committed
suicide together in shame. As it turned out, it was a granary that had
caught fire, not an act of war, but these rather stupid romantics passed into
folklore all the same, and are remembered today with full honours and grilled
squid on sticks.
Japanese grammar hides and
protects the agent, as when a party hostess sees broken crockery and asks what
happened. The Japanese answer would usually be sara ga ochita (the plate fell), whereas the English
equivalent either suggests a question (someone dropped a plate) or singles
out the denizen (Dom dropped the plate the fuckwit). Forcing Dom into the
Japanese answer would sound malicious or childish, and few Japanese would be so
nosy as to enquire after the guilty party. Japanese fuzziness also goes beyond
the subject. They prefer to leave undefined and open as little as possible. The
most common word heard in Japan is sumimasen, used for excuse me, sorry, and thank you. It literally means
does not finish, implying there is something remaining to be done, some debt
to be repaid, some development of the story. Shimatta! (literally it is closed!) is the equivalent of a
curse word. It is exclaimed when someone spills his noodles, and is tagged onto
a verb when something goes wrong, as in okusan ga kaete-shimatta! (Oh shit, my wifes back!).
A Japanese sentence is not so
much a statement of the speakers opinion but part of a joint effort to form a
consensus. English dialogue (and to a degree, Western thinking) is a game of
point and counterpoint. We begin with a pronoun (I), so we know immediately
about whom we are talking. Next comes the verb (want), so by the time we get to
the noun (curry), we already know who, how, and what. Japanese works the other
way round. The noun (kar - curry) comes
first, followed by the grammar in a particle (o, in this case making kar the object), and the verb comes at the end. The
sense may be only loosely planned out when the speaker begins, and as his words
emerge, listeners make encouraging nods and noises to push the meaning
in the right direction, and frown or suck their teeth to skirt round an
etiquette abyss, such as having to disagree with a suggestion. As the sense
crystallises, the speaker can gauge how popular a curry would be, and choose a
different verb, or begin the verb and modify the grammar, which follows the
verb root. To eat begins tab-, but
the meaning is unclear until the final syllables. The speaker could state his
mind with tab-tai or tab-takunai
(I want / dont want to eat), or soften his
position to tab-t mo ii
(curry is fine with me). Tab-ru ki ga aru (I feel like curry) can be switched at the last
minute for tab-ru ki ga nai (Im
not in the mood for curry). If it is all nods and hais, he might go for kar o tab-y (lets eat curry), but he could also back out by
adding to wa omowanai (Im not
thinking about eating curry). Whereas English questions begin with
something like how or what, a Japanese phrase becomes a question right at
the last syllable, and the intonation changes almost as an afterthought: tab-masen
ka? (how about
curry?). The endings are theoretically endless. Kar o tab-y to wa
omotinakata ga yappari tab-tai to om nya ke do karai
mono o tabesugiru to tsum ga
yoku y ma, tsum ga iro-iro y nen na, kar ga suki ya shi, karada ni ii
shi (Curry, well, I wasnt thinking
about eating curry but then again, I feel like curry but, . well, I eat too
much spicy food according to my wife, but my wife [or wives in general] say
all kinds of things, dont they, and besides, I like curry, and it's good for
you)
This whole circus is often
avoided, however, because one Japanese may start a sentence, another continue,
leaving the end and the sense to a third, who may be male, older, of higher
status, or just more decisive:
Miyuki: Konya, (tonight)
Everyone: Hai (yes,
go on)
Miyuki: kar o
Kentaro: aah, ehhh yan, kar (oh goody, curry)
Sana: ii desu n (good)
Ri:
Ameeto-san no tanjobi ya shi (and its Ameets birthday)
Kato-san: Soshitara, kar ni shimashyo (Right then, curry it is)
It is much simpler in England,
and the curry is better, but a Japanese would never complain about the food,
especially if the honourable Kato had chosen it. The nature of the curry is
less important than how we all eat it together.
Many conversations begin with
either Ito-san or Sumimasen
ga the equivalent of Mr. Ito or
Well, and then enter a silent phase, where both parties nod and suck their
teeth as they come to a psychic agreement as to the subject. There is also a
huge amount that is not said, and should not be said; a direct question can be
as impolite as a direct contradiction. Asking for water in someones house may
embarrass the hostess, who should already know that you are thirsty. I
unwittingly sent dinner guests home on several occasions by asking about their
plans for the following day. It took a few abruptly snuffed out parties to
crack the code, but once cracked, it is an extremely efficient way to
clear your house. Misreading Japanese code, however, can be dangerous. I once
asked my ex if I could eat the last two bits of sushi in the fridge, and then
foolishly took her affirmative answer at face value. A three-day argument
ensued, ending with tranquiliser-induced catatonia.
This enormously complex paralinguistic
machine is geared towards preserving harmony, the most exalted Japanese virtue,
and it works. Japan is the calmest, most stable country in the world, the only
country that has never been through a revolution, where the same imperial
family stretches back to legendary times. It also means that foreigners are
hard pressed to get through a day without making some blunder. For their part,
Japanese find it frustrating having to explain to foreigners, word for word, exactly
what they mean. For them, the system does not appear to be a code. It is just
the way they climb around the monkey bars, but all communication is code,
whether words, gestures, or significant silences. We code our imagination to
send it, and the sounds and symbols push touch-pads on the receivers brain,
setting off a cascade of connections, which are determined, to a great extent,
by the culture the brain was incubated in (hence the outraged San Franciscan
quoted at the beginning of the chapter). As the explosive sushi shows, the
Japanese psyche is more attuned to sentiment than specifics. Objects, nouns,
and individuals melt into the background in Japanese language, culture, and the
subjective perception of reality.
Language guides the mind, but
although the frame is also a cage, the bars can easily be bent. Japanese who
have spent a few years in the US score lower on tests of field-dependence, and
Americans become more field-dependent after a few months in Japan.[18] Minds can be
primed one way or the other. If Asian Americans describe an experience that
made them aware of their Asian identities and then watch a clip, they are drawn
to background details, and if they recall an event that called to mind their
American identities, they notice more foreground objects.[19] A bilingual
brain can be steered towards either English or Chinese cultural biases with
different sets of pictures, either Mickey Mouse, cowboys, and the US House of
Representatives, or dragons, temples and Chinese calligraphy. Afterwards, when asked why one
fish moved in front of another in a computer generated clip, the Mickey Mouse
subjects tend to describe the fishs motivation, whereas contextual factors are
more important to the dragon subjects. A third group shown neutral landscapes
give answers between the two.
The relationship between language
and thought, however, is not simple. When shown the words monkey, panda and
banana in their own languages, most English people group the animals
together, whereas most mainland Chinese put monkey with banana, focussing
on the relationship and the verb (to eat) rather than the category and the noun
(animal).[20]
Bilingual groups are more complex. Taiwanese lean towards the relationship when
tested in Chinese, and the category when tested in English. For Hong Kong
Chinese, however, the language makes no difference. In either Chinese or
English, they are more drawn towards the category than are mainland Chinese.[21] This is
thought to be because Taiwanese learn English later in life and use it in
limited contexts, so the world is represented differently in the two languages.
Hong Kong Chinese, on the other hand, are bilingual from a young age, and
assimilate the Western object-focussed perspective more thoroughly.
So are they Westernised by virtue
of their culture or their language, or by both? In fact, the question itself
derives from a distinctly Western viewpoint. Indo-European languages pull items
out of the background where they can be categorised, analysed logically, and
argued over, all of which leads naturally to scientific inquiry. In East Asian
languages, it makes less sense to dissect the world and seek causes, and East
Asian cultures are consequently much less scientific than Indo-European
cultures. The theoretical sciences (working out what does what, why, and what
else might be going on) are Western pursuits, and they have been since ancient
times. Centuries before Christ, Hellenistic biologists correctly proposed the
relationship between brain and nerves, and discerned the functions of both
sensory and motor neurones. Cosmologists had placed the sun at the centre of
the solar system, had a highly accurate measurement of the circumference of the
earth, and proposed the existence of the continent we now call America.[22] By contrast,
ancient Chinese innovations, such as planting crops in rows, papermaking, steel
production, and the magnet, show a gift for observation and practical
application. Perhaps a Chinese came up with the wheel whilst watching rocks
tumble down a slope, and muddy footprints inspired the printing press centuries
before Europeans invented it. Chinese theory revolves around relationships,
between yin and yang and the five elements. It is descriptive in a metaphorical
rather than analytical sense (although this does not mean it is less accurate -
it may be better suited to more complex fields, such as medicine).
Japanese, for all their technical
skill, invented almost nothing in the last 2000 years. A Japanese brilliantly
compacted the hi-fi into a Walkman, but the vinyl record, the cassette, the CD,
the minidisk, and the iPod were all invented by Westerners. Japanese show an
imitative genius, using, for example, technology based on the owls wing for
noise reduction on the bullet train. The Japanese also produced most of the
first walking robots, and part of this is down to careful observation of the
human body, and diligence in applying, miniaturizing, and perfecting,
technology to emulate it. A friend working for a Japanese electronics company
told me his firm buys foreign machines and pulls them apart to find better ways
to put them back together.[23]
When Japanese do discover things, the bias is often different. It was Japanese
primatologists who first recognised the complex social network amongst
chimpanzees, whereas Westerners had focussed only on the mother-child bond.
Original Japanese research, however, is rare. Despite generous science funding,
Japan produced only one Nobel laureate in the nineties, whilst the US produced
44.[24]
There are also very few lawyers
in Japan. Suing for uneven paving stones, chasing ambulances for compensation,
and divorcing parents is unthinkable in Japan. The Western gaze leads naturally
to litigation, isolating guilty parties and establishing motive and blame, but
nothing is so simple in Japan, and nor is it predictable. Surveys reveal that Japanese
expect changes of fortune and adapt better to them, whereas Westerners
generally expect their lives to become progressively better or worse in a
linear fashion.[25]
The world a Japanese sees is complex, and they dislike being in control,
whereas Westerners enjoy being in control, and dislike having to adapt.[26]
Japanese also mistrust logic.
Dont you use that logic with me! parents warn their children, and Japanese
rarely justify themselves if they are late. My co-teacher stood quietly and
hung her head one morning as the principle railed at her for arriving after
8.30am, even though she had no classes until 10. She never mentioned that she
had been organising her fathers funeral. There is no good excuse in Japan;
the word iiwak (excuse) has absolutely
negative connotations. What matters is us now, not late trains and sick cats,
and forgiveness depends on making an apology with the right sentiment and the
correct stoop.
Words do not command the same
faith in East Asia, and they interfere with East Asian thinking. East Asians
solve problems slower if they are asked to describe their thinking as they do
so, but it makes no difference to Americans. It appears that something like the
words themselves are the objects manipulated in Western brains, whereas Asian
brains work with something else, and consequently, the world is a more fluid
place.[27]
Change is fundamental to both
Confucian and Taoist philosophy. Perhaps the most important Chinese classical
text is the I Ching (The Book of
Changes), which describes the constantly changing relationship between yin and
yang, reflected throughout the microcosm and macrocosm in the fortunes of
empires and the lives of men. Another classic, The Tao Te
Ching, opens with a poem about language, noting that
understanding begins with words, but also that words limit something more
fundamental:
Tao is beyond words
and
beyond understanding.
Words
may be used to speak of it,
but they cannot contain it.
Tao existed before words and names,
before
heaven and earth,
before
the ten thousand things.
It is the unlimited father and mother
of
all limited things.
Therefore, to see beyond boundaries
to
the subtle heart of things,
dispense
with names,
with
concepts,
with
expectations and ambitions and differences[28]
Chiang-Tzu describes language as
a fraught tool:
The snare is the means to get the rabbit where you want it,
catch the rabbit and forget the snare. Words are the means to get the idea
where you want it, catch on to the idea and you forget about the words. Where
shall I find a man who forgets about words, and have a word with him?[29]
Chinese culture spread to Japan,
where Zen riddles express the same sentiment:
Words reach from edge to edge - how about it? [asks the abbot]
Shut up! the pupil says and slaps his masters face.[30]
The Word is completely different
in The Bible. It is both divine and
creative. Compare the opening of The Gospel of John (below) with the first chapter of The Tao
Te Ching (above):
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God All things were made by him; and without him was not any
thing made that was made.[31]
The two approaches are completely
different, and produce fundamentally different worlds.
In Australian aboriginal
mythology, the gods dream, and then sing the land and the animals into
existence. The word is formative, but as an intermediary between the dreaming
and the manifest, the formless and the formed. Aboriginal tongues have no words
for abstract categories, such as animal or tree; something is either a gum
tree or a eucalypt.[32]
Items are defined, but not categorised into families (when they are
categorised, it is often according to use, not resemblance - as certain
foodstuffs, for example). A wallaby looks like a little kangaroo, but neither
is a marsupial. A world made up of individual elements is very different to a
world of sets. Without sets, one cannot make generalisations about the
behaviour of all people of a tribe, for example, or all six-legged bugs, and
perhaps this is why antipodean cultures remained stable for tens of thousands
of years, with almost no evidence of either invention or tribal war. Indigenous
Amazonian languages and culture are similar in this respect. The Indian sees a
forest as a collection of individual trees, noted an explorer. He has a
special name for each individual species of palm tree; but any generic term to
denote the palm family is entirely lacking in his vocabulary.[33]
Genesis begins with a God solo, and in the next
chapter, man comes in, naming things. He soon looses his innocence, and spends
the rest of the symphony struggling to reunite with his Creator. Would God
that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his
spirit upon them! cries Moses, but union is denied all but a few until the
final chapters of Revelation. The
Tao Te Ching is quite different, and
anyone can be a Taoist sage as long as she remains sensitive, avoiding
extremes.[34]
For Lao-Tzu the best leader is one whose existence is barely known. Whereas
Biblical heroes part waters, build arks to float above waters, walk on water or
turn it into blood or wine, in The Tao Te Ching, water is an example to be followed, not an obstacle to be overcome:
The highest good is like water
which
benefits all things
and
contends with none
The sea is the king of the valleys and streams
because
it is willing to be beneath them.
One who wishes to lead the people
must
learn the art of following them.[35]
Whereas The Bible is an action-packed saga beginning with the loss of
innocence and guided all the way by the Almighty agent in the sky, The
Tao Te Ching has no agent, and no
story. It is a meditation on non-action, where innocence comes at the end,
along with perfect ignorance.
East Asian languages do not
isolate the agent, so it is rarely clear what is doing what. Hebrew draws the
agent out of its context, though in an ambiguous manner, as we shall see
shortly. In East Asian thought, it seems like things are happening, whereas in
Judaism God makes things happen, though his various names have different
natures, and act antagonistically towards each other. Indo-European tongues
carried the story forward, with more fixed grammars constructing more rigid
worlds. In contrast to Judaism, the Christian religion made much more of the
antagonism between God and the devil, and dualism has been the salient feature
of Western thought ever since. The forked tongue, and a forked tongued serpent
are discussed in the following sermons, as well as the worlds they whispered
into being.
In the beginning was the Word.
And at the end comes The
Apocalypse.
