Japanese builds from the outside in
I am reading Three Simple Lines by Natalie Goldberg and she wrote about this incident where in her trip to Japan, her student Mitsue—who is also a friend and her guide in Japan— told her about someone who wanted to meet her but omitted the details. Goldberg wrote:
As we sit there, I ask Mitsue about the structure of the Japanese language. I know that this is somehow connected to why she told me so little at first.
Mitsue replies saying that
English builds from the inside out. Japanese from the outside in. The inside of Japanese is hollow, soft, empty of a personal self. You don't have to say everything. It can be ambiguous. Less is better. Least is best.
Jibun equals 'self'. Sometimes Japanese uses I, but not the concept of I. We think of another person and almost enter the other person's consciousness. We try to stand with the other's point of view. In the Japanese language we can even change what we are saying right in the middle if we see evidence that the other person doesn't like or agree with us. We want harmony. That is what matters.
I have been interested in language's role in consciousness and found this relevant in terms of how the structure of the language affects how we interpret the world and how we act in it.
Apparently these languages can be classified as pro-drop languages where pronouns may be omitted when they can be pragmatically inferred.
