The Japanese Self in Cultural Logic (review)

The dust jacket of the volume under review best announces the book's gist:

The self serves as a universally available, effective, and indispensable filter for making sense of the chaos of the world. In her latest book, Takie Lebra attempts a new understanding of the Japanese self through her unique use of cultural logic. She begins by presenting and elaborating on two models ("oppositional logic" and "contingency logic") to examine concepts of self, Japanese and otherwise.

"Oppositional logic" is what we are used to in the West—the bimodal, Aristotelian logic. Lebra's "contingency logic" is elaborated throughout the book and is too complex to present in the space available here. Suffice it to define it as being conditional and "involv[ing] fortuitousness, uncertainly, unpredictability" (p. 9). Her theoretical model for the self is distilled in figure 3, termed a "social map" (p. 39), in which omote ("front zone") is contrasted with ura ("back zone"), and uchi ("interior zone") with soto ("exterior zone"). Chapter 2 elaborates on omote and uchi, chapter 3 on ura and soto, and chapter 4 on the contingent relationship between uchi and soto. In her definition,

omote combines distal and normative, qualities that result in civil attitude [sic] toward an outsider; uchi combines closeness and conformity to rules; ura grants anomic license in close relations hidden from public view, as in a private room or home; soto implies open hostility or disorderly behavior toward an outsider.

(p. 40)

The self, then, juxtaposes these qualities depending on where it finds itself. Sporadic intrusion of one zone by its opposite, in Lebra's contingency logic, as in ura secrets being exposed in the omote zone, makes her model come alive, so to speak, as life is full of such contingent examples. Chapter 5 explores the cosmological layer. Some may well doubt whether the same Japanese self Lebra depicts using this model is valid throughout Japan's historical past, but she cites examples from Kojiki, Dōgen, Hideyoshi, and Chikamatsu to assure us of the model's millennial, if not eternal, applicability.

One characteristic of Lebra's analysis, foreshadowed above, is that she focuses on words. Her analysis is primarily of linguistic expressions. Thus the primary orientations of her model are defined as omote, ura, uchi, and soto. Her illustrative materials and derivative concepts are also largely taken from Japanese words and discourses, such as miuchi or uchiwa from uchi, kizukai (courteous sensitivity) in omote behavior, etc. How accurately such expressions reflect (nonlinguistic) behavioral reality is another question. Another caveat is that Lebra is dealing with the Weberian ideal type, not with statistical tendencies of Japanese behavior. A reader may well be able to find exceptions to her assertions. But since she focuses on normative behavior, exceptions per se are not relevant (although it would have been desirable to relate her model to statistical data).

In the epilogue, Lebra launches an all-out attack on nihonjinron critics. She objects, among other things, to the criticism that nihonjinron, using terms such as tateshakai and amae as a cover-all, essentializes characterizations of Japanese culture, society, and people as being homogeneous. She defends nihonjinron as follows:

Such a shorthand may well be understood as the forest that is visible only at a distance, behind the individual trees. Unlike critics who insist that we should be more attentive to each and every tree, I think it is necessary to first construct a forest in which to situate the trees.

(p. 270)

But how can a forest be first constructed without trees? Construction of a forest before planting trees is like deciding on the shape of a culture without carefully looking at its contents, which is precisely the problem with nihonjinron. Lebra's irritation with nihonjinron critics seems to stem in large part from her firm belief that "objective" knowledge is possible (p. xviii) and that nihonjinron is objective whereas anti-nihonjinron is not. At least in the human sciences, however, knowledge, using the term in its broad...