Akira Mikami's Zo wa Hana ga Nagai and Kitaro Nishida's "Place"｜Japanization Is the Nullifying of the Subject

The thing we use most in daily life is also the thing we understand least, and it is in things of that kind, it seems to me, that an unexpected key to what comes next often lies. I mean language.

English cannot stand without a subject. Japanese, by contrast, can recount an entire life without once voicing one. The fact is so obvious to us that we rarely notice it, yet the structural difference between the two languages is not a mere quirk of grammar. It is a difference in the very way each of them grasps the world.

Think of rain falling. English says “It rains.” What falls is the rain, and yet the sentence has to open with “It,” a subject that is no one and nothing, because without it the sentence would not hold together. Grammarians call this an expletive, but what it comes down to is that English is built in such a way that it cannot perceive the world without a subject. Even if it has to fabricate a subject that does not exist, it must first set one up, or it can say nothing at all.

In Japanese, “Ame da” (it’s rain) or “Futte kita” (it’s started coming down) is enough. There is only the event taking place here and now, and our language is able to say exactly that.

Translate “I love you” as “Suki da,” and both the subject and the object vanish. Modern translation theory has judged this to be a flaw in Japanese, a form of vagueness, and linguists have gone so far as to declare, with perfect assurance, that in Japanese “the subject is hidden.”

Nothing has vanished, and nothing is hidden. The subject was never needed in the first place. What matters is not who loves whom, since the state of loving, suki, rises up in the place between the two people. Japanese is a language that grasps events as places and expresses them through relationship.

The trouble modern academia has had with the subject goes back to the Meiji era, but the decisive moment came with a single book published after the war. Its author was the linguist Akira Mikami (1903–1971). In Zo wa Hana ga Nagai (1960), whose title means “As for the elephant, the trunk is long,” he argued that Japanese has no need for the concept of a subject at all, and the academic world answered him with silence.

Why did the academy ignore Mikami and bury his work in silence? The reason is almost absurdly simple. He was not a professor of Japanese at a prestigious university, he belonged to no academic society, and at the time he was teaching mathematics at Yao Girls’ High School in Osaka, today’s Yamamoto High School. He was an outsider trampling on their territory, and for that he was met with silence.

How, then, would we put “Zo wa hana ga nagai” into English? First, we would have to settle on a single subject, either the elephant or the trunk. Four renderings suggest themselves, each followed here by what it says when read back literally.

① The have type. Elephants have long trunks. (The elephant possesses a long trunk.)
② The possessive type. An elephant’s trunk is long. (The elephant’s trunk is long.)
③ The partial-limitation type. The elephant is long in the trunk. (The elephant is long, as far as its trunk goes.)
④ The left-dislocation type. Elephants, their trunks are long. (The elephant, that one, its trunk is long.)

In other words, English cannot say “Zo wa hana ga nagai.” Mikami’s claim was that the Japanese “zo wa” is not a subject but a topic, the ground on which the talk is set, and that the predicate “hana ga nagai,” the trunk is long, arises upon it. Rather than a subject ruling over its predicate, as in English, an event appears upon a place. That was what he taught.

Overlapping with this is Kitaro Nishida (1870–1945), the great philosopher of prewar Japan and the towering figure of the Kyoto School. What Nishida did in “Basho” (Place), the essay he published in 1926, a hundred years ago, was at once simple and ferocious. He overturned Western logic from the ground up, the way one flips over a low dinner table.

Since Aristotle, the West has taken “that which becomes a subject and never a predicate” as the substrate of reality, and from there it built philosophy and, quite literally, the “world.” Whatever goes by the name of “the world” internationally today derives, without exception, from the West, and it fits almost none of the earth’s regions or peoples. Nishida turned this upside down and set at the foundation “that which becomes a predicate and never a subject,” which is to say place. The proof that the very root of the world differs between Japan and the West had already been given before the war.

From the logic of the subject to the logic of the predicate. He had rebuilt the heart of Western philosophy, and brilliantly.

This, I believe, is what the art we have called “Japanization” truly is. The Japanese did not simply accept what came from abroad. They brought to nothing whatever in it stood in the way as a subject, and then they created from the side of the predicate, from place. Throughout their history, the Japanese have carried out creation of this entirely new kind.

The Japanese reception of other cultures, then, is not a matter of taking in something that already exists and digesting it until it turns Japanese. It is, at root, an act of new creation. Only the Japanese can do this, and here, surely, lies the possibility of our people.

Today, the place where this capacity is needed most urgently is AI. The very term “artificial intelligence” lays bare, in Americanized form, a Western declaration that a subject called intelligence can be manufactured. That is why the West always tries to build agents, autonomous subjects, adding one more subject to the world. Given the ground they stand on, this is inevitable, and it is why they can speak of AI only within the binary of “AI and humans.”

AI will surpass humanity, AI will wipe out the human race, the singularity is coming. Every argument about AI made today is framed solely by the Western logic of subject and object.

Not a single millimeter of thought has gone into a path on which AI is not made a subject. Historically, the Japanese have possessed the art of treating AI not as a subject that thinks but as a place where thinking arises. Instead of “AI producing answers on its own initiative,” we would create a place where “answers rise up between ourselves and AI.” We would think of AI and humans not from their separation but from their non-separation. That, I suspect, would be an AI only the Japanese could make.

Once there are two subjects, the only possible outcomes are domination or subordination. Do humans use AI, or does AI rule humans? The whole of today’s debate sits inside this dualism. But treat AI as a place, and the question itself disappears. And the rise of China in AI calls history to my mind.

Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism all flowed into Japan by way of China, and in time they were Japanized. I find myself wondering whether AI, too, might open a path for the Japanese to Japanize it if we brought in Chinese AI rather than American AI. China has in fact established the technology to write operating systems, long dominated by English, in Chinese, and using the enclave of Hong Kong it has set off a revolution in AI. It is approaching a level at which the subject-bearing ambitions of the United States, NVIDIA and the giant data centers among them, become unnecessary.

If Japan leans toward anti-Americanism from here on and reconsiders its distance from China, AI may be re-created by the Japanese into an entirely new kind of being. Or else Japan, unable to transform the West, may tumble into a future of nothing more than friend and foe.

There is no doubt that every one of us now stands at an important fork in history.