Whereas Americans cultivate a self that is unique and interact through the force of their individual personalities, Japanese strive towards a mature individuality through which they can fulfill their humanity by caring and considerate interactions with others. Social conformity is not a sign of weakness but a tempered product of inner strength.
But the paradoxical divided priorities of required public expressions over private thoughts and feelings create a true dynamic internal tension in the Japanese. The great complexity and rigidity in etiquette and culture comes directly from the conflict between the expected behavioral façade and opinions one displays in public, Tatemae, and a person’s hidden true feelings and desires, Honne.
The Tatemae-Honne divide also has a name. Ninjō is the conflicted human emotions that inescapably spring up in conflict with the values of Giri social obligations. The potential conflict between Giri and Ninjō has been a frequent theme in Japanese drama and literature throughout the ages. The classic example of ninjō is a samurai in a clandestine love affair with an unacceptable partner (of low social class or from an enemy clan). The samurai becomes torn between the obligation to his feudal lord and to his personal feelings, with the only possible resolution requiring shinjū double love-suicide. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and the Aeneid resonate. The Japanese have a strong tendency to suppress their own feelings. That's the Japanese character. They kill their own emotions.
In Japanese mythology, the gods display love and anger and other human emotions, but the stories are parables, designed to demonstrate how empathetic behaviour that results in positive relations with others is rewarded, and how actions that are individualistic or antisocial are punished by ostracism.
In modern Japan, the complexities of Tatemae-Honne and pressures of an increasingly materialist society have created an almost schizophrenic schism. The reclusive adolescent Hikikomori who withdraw so completely from social life, into extreme hermetic degrees of isolation and confinement, use a surrogate army of emoticons in their outreach emails, to express in their confinement what they would be unable to communicate if they ever left their rooms. Even the first Portuguese Jesuit missionaries could see this coming.
‘The Japanese are in general of a melancholy disposition
and humor.
Moved by this natural inclination they thus take much delight and
and humor.
pleasure in lonely and nostalgic spots, woods with shady groves, cliffs
and rocky places, solitary birds, torrents of fresh water flowing down
from rocks, and in every kind of solitary thing that is imbued with
nature and free from all artificiality. All this fills their souls with the
same inclination and melancholy, as well as a certain nostalgic feeling
with the results there from.’
João Rodriques (1561-1633)
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