The Japanese Self in Cultural Logic

4. The Inner, Reflexive Self: Interiority and Exteriority in Contingency

The preceding two chapters have considered self in the social context, primarily in terms of its variability relative to shifting social spaces. Western readers might well be puzzled by this representation of Japanese self, which appears to lack a central, unified core. Along with the missing core is the apparent superficiality of Japanese self, which seems to be externally rich and internally poor. A person, conversely (whether Japanese or non-Japanese), who feels alienated from the Western obsession with a unified, centered, essentialized inner self, may find this outward-oriented self refreshing. I intend to address these differences in the present chapter. And yet my aim is not to set the interiority of self against exteriority. Quite the contrary, the cultural logic of contingency will now appear on center stage of our discussion. Toward Integration: Neither Augustinian-Cartesian nor Postmodern To complement the socially conditioned variant of self, this chapter looks at the self-reflexive self: self as subject and object at once. This inner, reflexive self (G. H. Mead 1934), centered and unified, appears much closer to the Western construct. As Charles Taylor (1989, 131) points out, “it was Augustine who introduced the inwardness of radical reflexivity and bequeathed it to the Western tradition of thought. The step was a fateful one, because we have certainly made a big thing of the first-person standpoint. The modern epistemological tradition from Descartes, and all that has flowed from it in modern culture, has made this standpoint fundamental—to the point of aberration.” If we apply one of the two subtypes of opposition logic, the Augustinian4 The Inner, Reflexive Self Interiority and Exteriority in Contingency Cartesian self exemplifies “asymmetric opposition” to an extreme, placing self at the center of the universe and marginalizing everything else in sharp opposition to that self. The Japanese self does not adhere to this model, however, for it never stands in total opposition to the outer world. Nor is Japanese self an embodiment of the postmodern self—the model unfettered by the Cartesian “mind,” but decentered, fragmented , and externalized. Dorinne Kondo (1990, 43) takes the postmodern point of view in her book Crafting Selves: “Through experimentation with multiple, shifting voices, I undertake a project to decenter and de-essentialize selves, focusing on the ways people construct themselves and their lives—in all their complexity, contradiction , and irony—within discursive fields of power and meaning, in specific situations, at specific historical moments.”1 To my mind, the postmodern position is not all that different from its target, Cartesian essentialism, for both are propelled by opposition logic. Japanese self is not devoid of center, unity, interior, and depth. It simply integrates what Westerners might say cannot be integrated, or at least not easily: exteriority and interiority, surface and depth, decentering and centering. It very much is a contingent construction. Decenter and Center in Contingency The logic of unbinding contingency admits the possibility that decentering does not necessarily preclude centering. Logical randomization overlaps the “unitary” mode of contingency, as we saw in chapter 1. Indeed, one might reason that the more decentered one is, the more centered as well. Likewise, direct correlation can obtain between external and internal, depth and surface, unity and fragmentation . If a Japanese person must present himself (or herself) differently depending on the constantly changing social context—which may cause him to appear decentered, with shifts and breaks in his identity —he must in turn be equipped with a central command key that instructs him to turn on the most appropriate response in the behavioral and linguistic repertoire and turn off everything else. Otherwise, 178 THE JAPANESE SELF IN CULTURAL LOGIC 1 Kondo (1990, 41), after praising Catherine Lutz (1988), who attacks Western essentialism, criticizes her “emotion words” and “scenario” whose “fixity,” “referentiality ,” and “self-world binary,” in Kondo’s view, subvert her enunciated antiCartesian position. In other words, Lutz is not de-essentializing enough for Kondo. it would be difficult to understand how a person could shift gears for his self-presentation “properly,” rather than randomly. Faulty functioning of this internal command key is indeed likely to produce a superficial ritualism, as when an Alzheimer’s patient replaces her rude outburst in the ura by polite omote behavior without understanding why. If the external enactment of self appears decentered, it is anticipated , steered, reflected on, stored, and reintegrated by the inner core of self. Two processes overlap: externalization of self to become...