Other scholars have argued that this outlook may also be encoded in the Japanese language itself. The anthropologist Robert J. Smith noted that the Japanese language demands that you encode people’s relative status in every sentence, while the language lacks ‘anything remotely resembling the personal pronoun’. Although there are many possible ways to refer to yourself, ‘none of the options is clearly dominant’, particularly among children. ‘With overwhelming frequency, they use no self-referent of any kind.’ Even the pronunciation of your own name changes depending on the people with whom you
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