The Japanese Self in Cultural Logic

2. Social Self in Front and Interior Zones: Omote and Uchi

In the next four chapters I mobilize the logical scheme of opposition and contingency spelled out in chapter 1 to analyze various facets of self. Although both logical modes are relevant to each chapter, the binary and ternary modes of binding contingency most strongly motivate the social self (the subject of chapters 2 and 3), while the reflexive inner self and cosmological self, the subjects of chapters 4 and 5, are more congruent with the unitary mode of unbinding contingency. The social self is contextualized more, though not exclusively, in space, whereas the introspective self is traced more in time. Sociality Students of Japan have long identified sociality, whether in terms of interaction, communication, relationality, mutuality, or role and status, as culturally salient. For example, these observers have noted that Japanese people tend to be on/giri (indebtedness/obligation) bound (Benedict 1946), amae prone (Doi 1971), rank/group oriented (Nakane 1967, 1970), concerned with sekentei (the awareness of how self appears in the eyes of the community) (T. Inoue 1977; K. Abe 1995), and hanging between persons (Watsuji 1962; Kimura 1972; Hamaguchi 1982, 1998; Odin 1996). I will attempt to bolster the sociality focus by modifying and recontextualizing what decades ago I discussed as “social relativism” (Lebra 1976). Sociality does not necessarily mean compliance with social demands and rules; it may amount merely to sensitivity to (or even irritation with) pressures to comply. This broad sense of sociality can be seen in the results of a study by Akiyama Hiroko (1997), in which 2 Social Self in Front and Interior Zones Omote and Uchi American and Japanese respondents rank-ordered a list of “sources of daily stress (hassle).” The Japanese list strongly featured human (interpersonal or social) relations, whereas the American list focused more heavily on financial concerns. These differences suggest not only where people focus their attention, but also where they find their pleasure: if sociality (or the making of money) did not have some rewards, people would put less effort into it and so feel fewer stresses associated with it. In the case of Japanese society, then, sociality brings important satisfactions, but it also can hook people with undesirable obligations beyond their personal ability to control. This tendency to social engagement accounts for the “myth” of Japanese nonlitigiousness. As Haley (1991, 116) explains, “The Japanese may be more successful in avoiding litigation because of social arrangements and values more conducive to mediation as a means of dispute resolution rather than simply an aversion to litigation.” Indeed, Japanese become no less involved in conflict and dispute than do Americans; the difference is that they rely more heavily on social resolutions, which I see as guided by contingency logic, than on litigation , which is driven by opposition logic. Social reality is fluid, to some extent technologically created and delivered via the mass media and cyberspace. No doubt virtual reality influences and reshapes social life, as will be touched on in the next chapter, but it is unlikely to wipe it out entirely. If sociality is found to be missing, that situation will be taken seriously, and serious efforts will be made to reinstall it. The Fourfold Zonal Division of Social Self Among European sociological models, Japan might seem to be best exemplified by Durkheim’s (1961) transcendentalized “Society.” From the viewpoint of the individual, however, I find a closer kinship between the socially contingent Japanese self and American pragmatism as theorized by Peirce, James, Cooley, Dewey, and above all G. H. Mead (as discussed in the prologue) in response to European transcendentalism . Jane Bachnik (1994), for example, draws on the linguistic pragmatism of Peirce and Silverstein in her analysis of the Japanese self. She centers her argument on the semiotic notions of “indexicality” (as opposed to referentiality) and “contextuality” (as opposed to semantic essentialism), stating that the most thorough way of elucidating the indexicality of Japanese self is to focus on the multiplicity and shifting of self within the social context. In this chapter and the next, I will show how the social contingency of Japanese 38 THE JAPANESE SELF IN CULTURAL LOGIC self is much more complex and multifold than Bachnik’s comparatively limited linguistic model. DISTANCE AND CIVILITY: A NEW INTERPRETATION OF SOCIALITY I begin by proposing a two-dimensional “map” of sociality (Fig. 3), which describes how self perceives, evaluates, and acts on other— and vice versa. Let me explain how this diagram works. First...