7. Where there’s no ‘will,’ there’s no way
By SHIN-ICHI TERASHIMA
Foreigners have made a point of telling me that the Japanese seem unable to express any opinions of their own. If that is true, how can our educators help their pupils develop an opinion-forming faculty? The emphasis on the cram-learning of facts is undoubtedly a major weakness in our philosophy of education. Memorized knowledge is not in itself a vehicle for making judgments, and an endless accumulation of information tends to become both the means and the end of study. Thus students conclude that study is a dangerous thing, much less valuable than getting on with a career.
The general lack of opinions means there is little discussion or intellectual leadership among the Japanese. Even university researchers tend to aim at formulating some generalized statement in their publications. This helps explain why higher education is not effective in this country. Although there are many colleges abroad suitable and ready to receive young people, most Japanese students make no effort to apply to them, because their main aim in life is to achieve high status at home. The Japanese mentality allows little room for the consideration of other intellectual dimensions, preoccupied as it is with dreams of ascent through the hierarchy.
In Japanese, there are no auxiliary verbs equivalent to the English “will” or “shall,” because there is no future tense that requires such verbal adjuncts. Traditionally, the Japanese have no intention and no point of view that needs to be expressed in terms of a future tense. They see their aims in a real or immediate form.
“It
is the way of the world that ….” (“Yononaka wa ….”) is a classic Japanese
utterance, similar to the English phrase “Generally speaking ….” If need be, we
can term this Japanese way of uttering things a “real tense” comparable to the
English simple present tense. To formulate this kind of statement, the Japanese
have to memorize many facts unerringly as yononaka at school. The discourse
runs: “So-and-so declared such-and-such to be the case, and then some other
person holds a different view….” And so on. Yononaka is considered the only
source of truth in our society; consequently, for the Japanese, the truth is
never universal. This form of discourse is used for general statements, and the
hierarchical structure existing in
So, lacking a future tense, the Japanese only believe in the present reality, “utsutsu,” what is right before our eyes, i.e. something that corresponds to the present tense. If someone says anything that eliminates considerations of reality, “utsutsu wo nukasu,” he is regarded as absent-minded. It is therefore not surprising that notions of future and past tend to be seen as insignificant.
By eliminating close consideration of things past and future, we see ourselves as concentrating on reality. Those still concerned about their past affairs speak about them in the present tense Even the dead speak in the present tense when communicating through a medium. For the Japanese, the past is not a complete past, but the past surviving into the present. By the same token, the future is also present, though, of course, everybody understands that this logic is not convincing. Nevertheless, the Japanese feel very unsafe when imagining an unforeseeable future, and instead are inclined “to save money for a rainy day.” They believe salvation should be achieved in the real world and that saving money is for a specific purpose. Because everything must be stated in a tense conveying reality, people generally tend to resist talking about matters that lie in the future. They do not want to seem liars, are they will not believe a speaker who talks of another world in a future tense. Many foreign missionaries who came to this country failed for that very reason.
The Japanese are always waiting for the fiture to become reality in order to describe any actual change in the present tense. This is because they want to sense the atmosphere of the present “imayou.”
Another problem with the Japanese education system is that adults are inherently unable to teach rational thinking because of their own position in relation to their students. In Japanese, there is a grammatical hierarchy, and honorific terms are taught as a means of conveying deference. In fact, the grammatical hierarchy is not only a means of ensuring deference and general courtesy, but of constantly reaffirming a fixed social hierarchy. This hierarchy takes precedence over rationality. People are obliged to use “gomuri gomottomo” (yielding under protest), a practice that may be unreasonable but has to be accepted in daily life in the name of hierarchy and because it is the only way for decisions to be made in a world devoid of opinion. It follows that there is little sense of responsibility in society as a whole, which is what led to the development of a powerful bureaucratic system based on a hierarchy of superiors and inferiors.
Westerners
generally believe that human beings are bound to advance from barbarism to
ever-higher levels of civilization and that this constitutes human progress.
They can thereby see themselves transforming future aims into relativity. There
is an English saying, ”Where there’s a will there’s a way.” Since the Japanese
find it so hard to develop their own opinions, this proverb has to be altered
in
These
fundamental factors should be taken into consideration whenever
The