The Japanese Mind: Understanding Contemporary Japanese Culture

by Roger J. Davies

The style of conversation is almost always fixed from beginning to end depending on the human relationship. It is one-way, like a lecture, or an inconclusive argument going along parallel lines or making a circle round and round, and in the end still ending up mostly at the beginning.

Hako-iri-musume is an expression that may be translated as “daughters-in-a-box,” which refers to daughters who are brought up very carefully by their parents as if they were some kind of treasure. In the past, most people praised hako-iri-musume for their pure image, but recently this has been changing and is now felt to express an overly innocent or delicate female child.

Tekireiki, the right age to marry, has a disagreeable connotation because it is used to put pressure on women to marry. If they stay single and pass through tekireiki, they are often called urenokori, which usually indicates a situation where goods or vegetables are left unsold.

Recently, such men are accused of being sodai-gomi, meaning “large-size garbage,” because when they are off work they just loaf around at home.

The Japanese do not like to express themselves in a straightforward manner for fear that it might hurt others’ feelings, so they are usually careful about what they say and often use tatemae in order to get along well with others. For example, when a person is visiting someone’s house in Japan and it becomes time for supper, people will often say, “Won’t you dine with us?” But this is not really an invitation; rather it is a subtle hint that it is time to go home. To those from other countries, this may seem confusing, but for the Japanese, it is a natural way to interact socially. So the correct response to “Won’t you dine with us?” is “Thank you very much, but I am not hungry.”

On the other hand, women still tend to avoid eldest sons when they marry, because the eldest son has to take care of his parents in the ie system.

As a result, there is a constant emphasis on other people’s feelings in Japan, and parents try to teach their children from a very early age to be sensitive to this information. In Japan, people are expected to consider others first and foremost, and this is a prerequisite for proper behavior in society.

it is impossible to truly grasp the reality of nature because it does not like its true form to be understood. As a result, “nature returns to nature”; that is, although animals can live in the human world for a time, they cannot stay there permanently and will eventually have to return to their own world.

4. Case Study: Ms. Takeuchi is working for a newspaper company. One day, she answered a phone call to Mr. Kato, her boss, from someone from a different company. Since Mr. Kato was not in his office, she answered, “Kato-buchō wa gaishutsu-shite-orimasu” (“Mr. Kato is out just now”). Ms. Takeuchi’s senior colleague, watching this, criticized her, saying, “You should know better about the rules of politeness in Japanese.” Question : What was wrong with what Ms. Takeuchi said?