Japanese Communication: Language and Thought in Context

11 Centrality of Scene: The World as a Relational Place

171 11 Centrality of Scene: The World as a Relational Place Same Scene, Different Expressions In Japanese the scene often assumes primacy when describing an encounter, event, or phenomenon. This contrasts with English, where the focus is on an agent, an actor or doer who initiates some action within the scene. In order to explore this line of thinking further , let us try an example. Picture the plains of Nebraska, where a farmer hears a distant cry of birds and looks up to the sky. He or she notices sandhill cranes flying in formation over the gray autumnal prairie. How will he or she express this scene? For Yamabe no Akahito in eighth-century Japan, the image of the crying cranes flying over the water is etched in his waka appearing in Man’yooshuu, a waka anthology. Wakanoura ni shio michi kureba Kata o nami Ashibe o sashite tazu naki wataru. As the tide flows into Wakano Bay The cranes, with the lagoons lost in flood, Go crying toward the reedy shore. The critical part of the poem is tazu ‘crane(s)’ naki ‘crying’ wataru ‘go across.’ Yoshihiko Ikegami (1981, 1988, 1991) explains the difference between what is expressed in the original and in its English translation: “Faced with a scene in which a crane (or group of cranes) is (are) flying from one side of the scene to the other, we can either concentrate on the moving object(s) in the foreground 172 Japanese Thought in Context (i.e., the crane[s]) and see the situation in terms of the change in locus of this “individuum,” or we can concentrate on the whole scene and see the situation in terms of the change in state brought about as the flying crane(s) shift position in the whole scene” (1988, 2; italics in original). The Japanese expression tazu naki wataru creates the image that the scene as a whole changes rather than stressing the movement of the crane(s) itself (themselves). Ikegami (1991, 287) summarizes this interpretation by the expression “focus on the whole event” in contrast with “focus on the individuum.” The shifting state of the scene portrayed in the Japanese poem does not quite survive in the English translation “The cranes, . . . go crying. . . .” The English translation portrays the cranes as agents, and their movements become the focus of attention. These differing ways of describing an event represent the figure-ground dichotomy in human perception. As Ikegami (1988, 2) states, we “can see a situation in such a way as to let a figure emerge from the background or in such a way that the figure merges with, or is submerged in, the background.” In the poetics of Yamabe no Akahito, the figure merges with the background. Ikegami (1988, 9) goes a step further and states that in Japanese texts “an individuum is not seen in isolation; it is not clearly separated from what it stands contiguous with. It is merely a part of a larger whole, with which it may become merged to the extent of losing its identity.” This statement echoes many rhetorical and philosophical statements made about Japanese literature and culture . And in the example of classical waka poetry we see a similar effect—the event is interpreted as a change in state, rather than as a sequence of actions. Tetsuo Anzai (1983), following Ikegami’s discussion , states: “In English, when interpreting a situation, there is a strong tendency to focus on the agent of the mono ‘object,’ analyze the event in terms of a cause-and-effect relationship, and conceptualize it as such. On the other hand, the strong tendency in Japanese is to interpret the whole situation as a koto ‘event’ and capture the relationship between that event and the human beings from the point of view of the observer/speaker” (1983, 105; my translation). Following Ikegami and Anzai, I refer to the difference between Japanese and English as scene-orientation versus agent-orientation. For Japanese people, the scene of an event as a whole assumes the primary focus of attention (in comparison to English, where the agent is the primary focus). Nominalization and nominal predicates Centrality of Scene 173 function in a similar way: Clausal information is captured by a region, which often coincides with the scene. Viewing reality as scene-oriented promotes the worldview that the scene holds various contextual and interpersonal relations in balance. This tendency to see the...