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Reviewed by:
  • The Japanese Self in Cultural Logic
  • Augustin Berque (bio)
The Japanese Self in Cultural Logic. By Takie Sugiyama Lebra. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2004. xxiv, 303 pages. $40.00.

Takie Sugiyama Lebra, known for her anthropological studies on Japanese women, Japanese organizations, and the status of modern Japanese nobility, presents this book as the culmination of her long career as a Japanologist. It can indeed be considered a synthesis, spanning a wide range of questions, including, in the end, the scientific status and raison d'être of Japan studies. Students will without doubt find in these pages an excellent introduction to this domain, offering sound assessments of its main issues together with deep and alluring insights.

Lebra explores here the self in its social, inner, and cosmological dimensions, which she endeavors to integrate into a logical model, presented as a cultural logic. This logic stresses contingency, in contradistinction to an oppositional logic (chapter 1). The social self comprises front and interior zones, omote and uchi (chapter 2), together with back and exterior zones, ura and soto (chapter 3). The inner, reflexive self does not oppose but combines contingently interiority and exteriority (chapter 4). Last, Lebra examines, as a cosmology, expressions of the self in mythology, religion, literature, and art (chapter 5). A substantial epilogue (pp. 255–80), focusing on [End Page 247] Nihonjinron debates, is written "In Defense of Japan Studies." The whole book is interspersed with concrete examples, making the reading clear and pleasant.

We start with a brief overview of the question of the self in anthropology. Lebra poses that "[George Herbert] Mead's 'I-and-Me' model comes closest to what I perceive as the Japanese self, though it does not totally overlap the Japanese case of selfhood" (p. xvii).1 This model asserts "that self emerges only through the internalization of others' perspectives and expectations. Mead struggled to link two sides of self: self as subject—'I'—and self as object—'me'—or the unique, individual self and the social self, susceptible to others" (p. xvi). In this view, the self embodies a temporal duality, in which "me" is viewed "as a memory of 'I' produced only after 'I' 's action" (ibid.).

In a word, the self is necessarily relational. This is the main trait that stands out from Lebra's presentation in the first chapter, "Logical Models for Self Analysis: Opposition and Contingency." Americans exemplify the former, "the merit [of which] lies in its simplicity and clarity" (p. 6). As an alternative to the oppositional model, Lebra proposes contingency logic, in which the related terms "come into contact and intersect" (p. 8). This is typically Japanese. For example, when Yamaguchi Toshio, a former labor minister, was accused of embezzlement, he both insisted on his innocence and deeply apologized "for having allowed himself to be suspected, which could have been avoided had his character been flawless. . . .In this ternary mode of reasoning, guilt and innocence were nonoppositional: both could apply" (p. 11). The Japanese put this ternary logic above the binary (oppositional) logic, which they often call "rikutsu: forced rational thinking" (ibid.), as shown by sayings such as yononaka wa rikutsu-dōri ni wa ikanai (rational thinking cannot be imposed on social order) (p. 12).

Lebra elaborates the ways this contingency can work: binding, unbinding, unitary in addition to binary and ternary. She concludes that "the Japanese self tends to communicate through trialogue or monologue more than the Western self, for whom dialogue is the most 'salient' communication style, as in debate" (p. 14). Analyzing (p. 20) the "unfolding terms for self" (as Japanese does not have, like the English "I," a single first-person pronoun), she stresses the Japanese tendency to "lococentrism" (p. 21) and to "hidden agency" (p. 23), "passivization and naturalization" (p. 25). These terms all express that the Japanese self does not pose itself transcendentally (like the "I," which remains "I" whatever the situation may be) but depends on the situation: "self and other [are] in [a] conditional and indeterminate contingency" (p. 28). The use of notions such as mono and koto tend to [End Page 248] express the same contingency logic. For Lebra, Indo...

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