Why Is Japan So Different? A Language Without a Subject

Though one cannot generalize too sweepingly, most would agree that in linguistic spheres whose grammar sets up a grammatical subject, a culture of the head comes to the fore. Even in English, whose structure changed markedly in the modern era, the "subject–copula–predicate" sentence must be governed by the subject.

In the structure of the Japanese language, however, there is neither a subject nor a copula. This is the single greatest difference.

A "culture" born from a language that possesses a subject moves naturally toward objectifying its various cultural forms, a tendency deeply rooted in the fact that its linguistic structure holds a subject. Japanese, by contrast, lacks a subject altogether, and so the impulse to set culture up as an object rarely arises of its own accord. There is, for instance, no Japanese word equivalent to "counterculture." This shows that within the space of the Japanese language, culture is not objectified.

What, then, is this bunka born not from the head but from the belly? I take it to be "action in actual, everyday life." What demands care here is that the agent of action in a language of the subject is subject-centered, whereas the agent of action in Japanese is predicate-centered.

It therefore needs to be discussed across a wide field, and I take it up as one role that those living in the realm of the predicate can fulfill toward the world. As a first step in thinking through the concepts of bunka and culture, I propose this: Japanese bunka is Japanese bunka, not "Japanese culture."

For those who have visited Japan, I think this sense touches the heart of that hard-to-name "Japaneseness."

Bunka and culture are not equal.

This difference—this fundamental rift—still stretches today between places whose languages are built on different structures. Occupying the middle ground that compromises in the gap, a position that can truly be called between East and West, are China and India, while Japan stands somewhere else altogether. Japan is a place of its own that does not fit even within the category of "the East."

Today great numbers of Western tourists visit Japan, and while the weak yen plays a part, my own reading is that many people from lands that spent the modern era heightening languages of the subject are drawn to Japan by a predicate-centered sensibility.

English in particular, now the world's standard language, belongs to the subject-based realm of language, a realm different from Japanese, a predicate-based one, and so the way of understanding is turned around.

Seen in this light, contemporary Japan is neither statism, nor ethnic nationalism, nor emperor-ism, nor civic nationalism, nor socialism.

Society-ism is the only reality. In a sense, all the political ideologies that ran through Japan's modern trajectory from the prewar into the postwar era were ultimately absorbed into making society itself the end, and served merely as preparation for it.