頭のカルチャーと腹の文化: 主語の言語と述語の言語The Culture of the Head and the Bunka of the Belly: Languages of Subject and Predicate

This time, I would like to discuss the differences between the Japanese notion of bunka (文化) and the concept of culture that came from the West.

Recently, I have begun to suspect that in Japan, bunka and culture might actually be separate things.

Since the start of Japan’s modernization in 1868, the Japanese word bunka has been used as the translation of the imported concept of “culture,” and it is still used today. The source of that imported concept was not the English culture but the German Kultur.

Go back further and bunka, a Japanese concept taken from the Chinese classics, underwent its own kind of mixing by way of Germany. Even now, people in Japan use bunka and culture differently in daily life, without noticing or intending it.

Japan has many concepts one could call modern Japanese, born of crossing with Western ideas. Because Western concepts had to be rebuilt for Japanese use in great haste, there was no room to examine the original meaning of each one.

As a result, concepts of Western origin flooded in, yet what they were was hardly ever asked, and they were left alone.

So what is the difference between bunka and culture? What do people in Japan grasp in the mind that lets them tell the two apart?

Put plainly, one can think of it as a “language of the head,” structured by logic, set against a “language of the belly,” carried out in action.

An easy example: seppuku became known abroad through samurai films, but it is not a special concept that can be reduced to the dignity of the warrior. Rather, the essence of Japan lies in a culture of the belly that runs through its history.

It is hard to generalize, but many would agree that in cultures built on languages that set up a subject, the culture of the head comes to the fore. In English, for example, whose structure changed greatly after the modern era, a “subject, copula, predicate” sentence must be governed by the subject.

However, in Japanese linguistic structure, there is neither a subject nor a copula. This is the greatest difference.

A belly-oriented language culture places utmost importance on intuition, whereas a head-oriented language culture places utmost importance on logic. One could say that philosophy and science can only be born from the latter.

Here, culture born of a language with a subject tends to objectify cultures in many forms, and this comes strongly from the language holding a subject in its structure.

Japanese, by contrast, has no subject, so the movement to set culture up as an object arises only rarely. For example, Japanese has no equivalent of “counterculture.” This shows that in the place of the Japanese language, culture is not objectified.

I think this is one reason culture, or counterculture, rarely arises in Japan. At the same time, bunka that follows the structure of the Japanese language has been created abundantly.

So what is bunka, born not of the head but of the belly? I consider it to be “action in actual life.” What needs care here is that the agent of action in a language of the subject is subject-like, while the agent of action in Japanese is predicate-like.

In culture, context is emphasized, and any content generated from it is regarded as a product of a subject’s intention. In bunka, however, there is originally no concept of context, and therefore not even the notion of content generated from it.

From my own experience, I have noticed that when I speak in Japan about the importance of context, it is hard to get across. A typical misunderstanding is to assume that “context” merely means the background to the content—this understanding has become widespread in Japan.

But this interpretation is confined to a linguistic sphere where content is discussed in a subject-oriented manner. Within the framework of Japanese, it would be much more fitting to understand that a predicate-like “place” called “context” automatically generates what we call “content.”

This shows that, in the place of the predicate, there was never the view that a subject’s will generates content. Here lies the essential core of how culture and bunka come into being differently.

For example, in European history the guild, a professional group, played an important part in generating culture within the linguistic domain of the head. Japan has no professional group equivalent to the guild. True, it may be possible to identify certain historical Japanese groups that resemble guilds, and indeed many such interpretations exist.

But such a view is empty because it is so unaware that the structure of the Japanese language itself has no subject.

The absence of a subject in the language means there is no entity corresponding to “agent,” “subjectivity,” “ego,” or “self.” From this fact alone it is plain that Japan is hard to discuss with concepts that presuppose a subject.

Here, the people of the archipelago who came before us created bunka, not culture. Naturally, there was no subjective awareness among them that they were “performing culture,” because bunka is simply everyday, lived action.

It was around the 1960s that people in Japan first began to be strongly conscious of the the creator’s subjective intention. This came as a new current in reaction to the artists who had unconsciously accommodated wartime ideologies. As one can infer, the problem of “subjecthood” in Japan is extremely new.

What’s more, at that time, even as people were grappling with subjectivity, they failed to understand that the Japanese language itself lacks a subject. They began from a large error of not understanding it, and so their struggle with the problem had no effect. Astonishingly, it was not outsiders but the Japanese themselves who tried to see Japan within the bounds of concepts that presuppose a subject.

Because bunka arises from what everyone actually does in daily life, when we who come later look at history with our heads we can certainly say that particular techniques and ideas are there, but that is only an arbitrary after-the-fact reading and cannot be generalized across history.

This difference, this essential rift, still lies open today between places whose languages are built differently. The position that truly lies between East and West, mixing in that gap, is occupied by China and India, and Japan stands somewhere else. Japan is a place of its own, one that does not fit even under the word “Eastern.”

Many visitors from the West now come to Japan, partly because of the weak yen, but I see something more in it: many people from lands that raised subject-based language to a high form in the modern age are drawn to Japan by a predicate-based sense of the world.

This is an issue of greater significance than most imagine, and a truly 21st-century problem.

So this must be discussed widely. I take it up as one role toward the world for those who live in the realm of the predicate, and as a first step I propose that, when we think about the concepts of bunka and culture, Japanese bunka is bunka and is not “Japanese culture.”

For those who have visited Japan, I think this speaks to the heart of the “Japaneseness” that is so hard to put into words.

Bunka and culture are not equal.

From that standpoint, if you look again at your own experience in Japan, a new realm that you could not see before will surely open. I hope you will discover Japan there, fully.