charming attitudes to nature, callous attitudes to others – and how they connect

The fast-approaching summer holiday and, with it it, the prospect of spending some weeks in Japan have compelled me to intensify the reading and thinking on the subject, in this constant effort to understand the reasons why I — and scores of others — so repeatedly clash with the culture, and why it remains yet so fascinating to me.

Perhaps it has to do with my abiding, passionate interest in literature as the art which most insistently brings us face to face with ambiguities, contradictions, inconsistencies, and impossibilities, while at the same time rejecting easy solutions and closed endings. Literature as a hall of mirrors hung aslant where we can see and get to know ourselves and others in more bearable but also more revealing and complex ways. Japanese literature is particularly interesting in this respect.

But my current research and coming trip also have to do with a practical task, as I need to prepare a fairly substantial essay on Izumi Kyoka’s writings and thus to fully immerse myself, at some peril, in his たそがれ world, with all its disturbing hauntings and implications whose surface I have barely begun to scratch.

Hence, as a sort of preamble to the discoveries that lie ahead, I found the following reading most thought-provoking. It is a chapter on a book titled Asian Perceptions of Nature, and it focuses on “The Japanese Attitude to Nature”. The author explores numerous topics in this context, but what caught my attention was his reference to the ways in which the pervasive dualisms structuring Japanese thought — purity/pollution, omote/ura, honne/tatemae, uchi/soto — are (and have all too often been) so apt to be used for political manipulation and racial discrimination.*

Which has reinforced my perception gained over the years I lived in Japan: of how difficult, if not impossible altogether, it is for individuals unaware of the problematic workings and implications of these deeply ingrained dualisms — and most Japanese are clearly unaware of them — to relate to, understand, and come to accept other individuals who do not, who cannot share such mindset and values. It has also allowed me to understand better the recurrently callous and destructive attitudes the Japanese have adopted throughout their history towards the indigenous cultures of the regions they colonised and towards the minorities within their own country. This recent post on Debito’s blog is quite illuminating with regards to the topic, as well as this not so recent study by Yuki Tanaka.

And if until some decades ago Japan could get away with the above-mentioned mindset and attitudes and still maintain a certain international prestige, the intenser scrutiny brought about by the internet and the pressures of globalisation make such mindset and attitudes no longer sustainable.

With this in mind, back to Kyoka’s twilight, then…

 

*I take the liberty of reproducing the concluding paragraph:

The preceding analysis has attempted to put the Japanese attitude to nature within the broader framework of the basic ontological premises and conceptions prevalent in Japanese society. We have already touched on some implications of both these premises as well as of the conceptions of nature for some areas of behaviour. . . . But these premises and conceptions have much wider implications — for instance, among others, for the conceptions of political authority, of Japanese collective consciousness, and/or of the relations of the Japanese to other civilizations. Indeed, many of the features which were often held to be uniquely Japanese are closely related to these premises and conceptions.

—S. Eisenstadt, “The Japanese Attitude to Nature: A Framework of Basic Ontological Conceptions” in Asian Perceptions of Nature, ed. Ole Bruun and Arne Kalland (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996), p. 209.

 

Image source: http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/database/art/view.pl?id=114346

~ by Enigma on June 27, 2012.