Amae
May 21, 2007
Amae(ru) is according to Dr. Takeo Doi a word that cannot be directly translated into English. Doi starts out by making a Sapir-Whorf hypothesis based observation that any word that exists in one language but cannot be expressed easily in others, refers to a phenomena which is culturally important in culture of the first language, but not so important in the culture of the others which lack a means of its expression.
It is very true that Amae(ru) does not translate well into English. I would use "(to) fawn upon" or perhaps "to be a baby," or "to be cute." It refers to the action and emotional state of mind of a baby towards its mother (care giver). By "emotional state" I mean that it involves the expectation, need or desire to evoke the love in the other. Another way of putting amae(ru) is "passive love" i.e. feeling and behaving in such a way as to be loved (by a parent). It does not refer to being sexy, flirting or pouting or all the other ways of attracting eros (i.e. being "erotic" ?) but ways of attracting what C.S. Lewis calls "affection," the love of parents towards children. So amae is anticipating, and behaving in such a way as to receive love, affection, or induldence. The last word is moot too since the active form of amae in Japanese, amayakasu is usually traslated as "to indulge". One of Doi's most accessible examples is the behaviour of a puppy. A puppy (or an older dog, since dogs are always children to their masters) might roll on its back and wait for its belly to be stroked. Or it might come up to you wagging not only its tail, panting, and looking you in the eye. This is partly just being happy to see you but it is also a call for affection.
On top of the fact that Doi's insight regardign Amae started from a Sapir-Whorfian insight, it has a yet stronger relationship with language, or rather the lack of language. This connection can be approached in two ways.
First of all Doi's first, and for me most memorable, example of amae, is from when he arrived in the USA and visited a friend. His friend put some cookies or something on a table and said "If you are hungry, please help yourself." Coming from the culture of "amae," Doi felt put out. He was hungry, but he was in an amae frame of mind. He did not want to say, "Well I don't mind if I do," and tuck into the cookies. He wanted his host to actively perceive ("sasshi") that he was hungry and give him a plate of cookies. He wanted to be mollycoddled. The word "mollycoddle," not so common in English, helps us to understand the term amae. Some one who wants to be mollycoddled does not articulate their desire but hopes by their person or their actions to elicit indulgence from an other without the use of language. As soon as they put their desire into language they are putting themselves on an equal footing, as another separate desiring individual - but the person who "amaes" (if I am allowed to conjugate the verb) wants to merge (Doi argues) with the other.
This brings us on to the second connection between amae and the absence of language. Doi, argues that amae is the desire to merge with the other, as if (?) still not an independent entity, and puts forward a theory of individuality (quite common these days among narrative psychologists) that says that being an individual is to linguistically articulate oneself and ones desires. To amae is to refuse to go down that path to linguistic self-hood.
Endo Shusaku is possibly Japan's most famous Christian. Not only was he a Christian but also, as mentioned above, he tried to define a sort of Japanese Christianity. Indeed, Endo Shusaku attempted to take the best of Christian and Japanese culture to propose a more Japanese, and in a sense an even more Christian version of Christianity! In perhaps his most famous book ("Silence") Endo Shusaku raised the question of the martyr, the person that sacrifices themselves for others. The Christian bible tells us, "There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend." However, Endo suggests that there is greater love. Endo seems to come to the conclusion that the ultimate "martyr" could and would lay down his life for another, but ultimately she would also refrain for doing so, even if it meant rejecting all that she had lived for, if she felt that she would be held as an example, and thus encourage friends to lay down their lives as well. Putting it as tritely as this does not do service to Endo's sentiment but, Endo argues (successfully judging by the rave reviews from Western Catholics at Amazon.com) that sometimes it is even more difficult to *live on*.
Living on, even when this means not being entirely true to ones beliefs, is close to the philosophy of the Bodhisattva, such as. Kannon. A Bodhisattva is someone that could throw off their ego and reach nirvana/satori but decides to hang around, at the brink of satori, in the hope, working towards the day when, all other sentient beings reach nirvana/satori too.
It also reminds me of "About Schmidt" a film I saw today, in which the hero, played by Jack Nicholson, doesn't say what he really thinks, what he really believes, but chooses a polite, positive *silence* for the sake of those that he loves (perhaps a controversial reading of this bleak, but real and interesting film.)
Putting Endo's question back in terms of a possibly non PC gender related question: "who loves more, the fathers that go to war -- perhaps to die -- to protect those they loves, or the mothers that refuses to go to war, and would rather live in slavery, and abjection, for the same reason?" I think that opinions are likely to be divided. I am afraid that my sentiment is on the side of the warrior, but one might argue that a true blue Shinto-ist would come out on the side of the mother.
Shusaku Endo is a very famous novelist. His books are even more popular among Japanese Christians, who make up less than 1% of Japanese Christians.
Takeo Doi is also, as far as I am aware, a Japanese Christian. It is concievable therefore, in my opinion, that Takeo Doi may have been in part, subliminally inspired by the novels of Shusaku Endo. This is however, highly unlikely since (as kindly pointed out by Maraku below) Doi makes no mention of Shusaku in Amae no Kouzou. Takeo Doi does however, suggest, in the first chapter of his seminal work, that the origin of the word amae may be related to the name of the deity at the top of the Japanese panthenon, Amaterasu Oomikami. This suggests to me a common sensitivity motivating Shusaku Endo's and Takeo Doi's realisation that Japan is a country of amae. To Japanese Christians as they both are, it may be striking that there is a strong difference between their own religion, as expressed in the Bible, and that of the majority of Japanese who are much more enclined to amaeru to, request indulgence of, their deities.
Thanks to VikingSlav for the first paragraph and inspiration for this article.
N.B.
I would like to apologize for an earlier version of this article that suggested a closer link between the work of Shusaku Endo and Takeo Doi. This suggestion was entirely my own and based entirely upon supposition and speculation. In any event, nothing can be taken from Takeo Doi's immense achievement of making the notion of amae available to generations of psychologists, some of whom use the theory to cure people. And incidentally, academically, I am of course not fit to wipe Dr. Doi's shoes.
The Passion of the Christ and Shinto Rites of Passage
December 27, 2004
I was very impressed with Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of The Christ.” Admittedly that is probably because I was raised in a Christian family and know the story, the background and consequences. I wept, but my Japanese wife fell asleep. You can see the trailer here.
A considerable part of the film showed Jesus and friends carrying large pieces of wood up a mountain. For part of the way Jesus was helped by someone else. So, two men carried a heavy piece of wood, while women watched and were mightily impressed.
This spectacle seems to have a lot in common with a lot of Shinto festivals
Etymology of Kami
February 14, 2004
The deities or spirits of Shinto are called kami but, while there are many homonyms (the words for "above", "hair", "paper", and "bite") the etymology of the word Kami is not known. For a long time it was though that it was from the word "kami" meaning above (written with the same character as "ue"). However with the discovery by a scholar, called Hashimoto in 1917, that there were more vowels in ancient Japanese, this theory was rejected.
The Vowels in Ancient Japanese
In Japanese today there are only 5 vowel sounds ("a, i, u, e, o," as we say in Japan) and till 1917 it was presumed that the same was true of ancient Japanese as well. However, Hashimoto noticed that there were clear rules for using two, distinct groups of characters to express what is today a single sound, "ko." The only, or at least accepted, explanation for this fact is that there used to be two different sounds. The same patterns were discovered for the vowel "i" and "e," meaning that there may have been 8 types of vowel in ancient Japanese, which we can write as: a, i1, i2, u, e1, e2, o1, o2.
These vowel distinctions were dying out quite rapidly. For example while there are two types of "mo" in the Kojiki (712), this distinction died out in the Nihongi (720, Nihonshoki) which was written only a few years later. And there are further complications in that some of the "extra" vowels are rarerly used, and then only in loan words. But it seems at least that a finer grade of vowel distinction did exist, and this enables us to make better judgements of etymology.
With the distinction, it became apparent that the "i" in kami = diety/spirit, and the i in kami = above are different.
The Ancient Vowel Sounds Continue Today
With regard to to the "i" vowel, the distinction between two types of "i" continues in present day Japanese. It seems that second type of "i" was somewhere nearer an "o" or "u" sound! I am not sure how to pronounce an "i" similar to "o" or "u" but I think that it was probably a "ui" or "oi" sound as we shall see.
The distinction between these two vowel sounds continues even today. For example, while "hi" as in sun, and "hi" as in fire are often thought to be of related etemology, the two were in fact written as "hi1" and "hi2," with two different types of vowel. The word for tree "ki" is another example of the second type, which we can write as "ki2." Even today these "i2" words are sometimes pronounced as "o." For example the light/shadow (the pattern it throws) of a fire is written with the character for fire and shadow, normally "hi" and "kage," but pronounced "hOkage" (with emphasis added). Similarly the word for the shade of a tree is written with the character for tree and shade, normally pronounced "ki" and "kage" but here pronounced even today as "kOkage." Similarly the "leaves of trees," is pronounced "kO no ha" as opposed to "ki no ha," berries, as "kO no Mi" and the dappled sunlight beneath trees, "kO-more-bi" (tree-overflowing-sunlight) The same "i2" is also found to change to "u," as in the god of the moon "TsukUyomino-mikoto" where the first "tsuku" is written with the character for moon, normally pronounced "TsukI" -- the "ki" was pronounced as "ku."
Returning to "kami," in the ancient "Manyougana" notation (i.e. in a notation similar to that used in the ancient Manyoushuu poem collection of poem, but this is in fact from the explanations of names of gods in the kojiki) kami is written as 
, as well as the character used today 
In the form, the character for "mi" belongs to the i2 category. Hence, like other i2" words, kami is sometimes pronounced "kamu." For example, in ancient Japanese, "Kamikaze" (divine wind, and "suicide pilot") was pronounced "Kamukaze." The Ainu for "kami" is "kamui," and it is thought that this is close to the ancient Japanese pronunciation. This also explains why "kami" often become "kan" in compounds, such as "Kannazuki" (November, the month when all the gods go to Izumo) and kanzaki place name, since abbreviation of "u" ("dekinu" > "dekin," "desu" > "des") and changing m's to n's ("yomu" > "yonda") happens all the time in Japanese. So what of the etymology of "kami"? First of all it is clearly different to that of "kami" meaning "above," since the latter is written with a "mi" belonging to the first category of vowel "i1" so this explanation of the etymology of Kami is incorrect.
Since in ancient Japanese the word for hair (now also "kami") was "ka" (as in "shiraga" or white/grey hair) that etymological connection is also rejected. There is at the present time no accepted theory for the etymology of "kami." So let's make one!
Kami and Kami= Paper? used to think that kami as in paper, would be related since there is so much paper at Japanese shrines: the ziz-zap lighenting strips or shide, the talismen (fuda), and fortune sripts (omikuji). Additionally, as I have mentioned before, I think there is a philosophical case to be made for the assertion that paper and god have something in common -- paper is the place where the sign meets the world.
There are several theories for the etymology of paper, one of them being "kami" (spirit) but the most popular theory is that is it is derived from the Chinese word "kan" (as in shokan, meaning letter). So, the theory that kami is linked to paper is usually rejected.
Kami as "bite"
By chance one oft the leaders in computerisation of the Manyoushuu, Dr. Yoshimura, is at my Yamaguchi university. You can download a Japanese version of the Manyoushuu together with a program for searching within it from his website at by entering your name and your email address. This truly wondrous piece of software enable us to look at the use of kami in the ancient book of poems.
In the Manyoushu, kami is written using the single usual Chinese character that it has today (made of parts meaning "point" and "say humbly"), so it is difficult to see what the etymology of the Japanese word might be. However, it is worth noting that kami often appears in the compound "Kannagara," where "nagara" is translated as "being at the original essence of."
Hence the old name for Shinto (kami and mich or path) was "kan-nagara no michi" meaning "path following the original essence of god."
"Nagara" is usually written with an ideographic kanji which elsewhere is read as "mani-mani" which means "as is" or "at the mercy of." The only occurrence of "mani-mani" in the modern dictionary of Japanese (alc.co.jp) is "nami no mani-mani" which means at the mercy of the waves. Hence "Kan-nagara no mich" might also be translated as "the path of putting yourself at the mercy of god"
However, and where my other wacko kami theory comes in, today the word "nagara" is usually put on the end of verbs, to mean "while doing." For example "Ongaku wo kiki-nagara benkyou suru" means "study while listening (kiku > kiki ) to music" . And indeed, this "nagara" also used in the ancient poems (manyoushu) both as one way of writing the "nagara" after "kami" and one way of writing the "nagara" after a verb "ii nagara" - while saying. Indeed the phonetic reading of "Nagara" is only used after the character for kami and after verbs.
So there is a possibility that "kami" was originally a verb. This brings us to the last homonym of kami, which is the noun form of the verb "kamu," meaning "to bite" or "to chew". So perhaps kami originally mean a bite or a chew? I am not sure which of the@vowels for "i" is is written with, since the word for chew does not appear in the manyoushuu.
It is difficult to come up with a reason why this should be. Why should a deity be a "bite"? It should be remembered that the gods of the imperial lineage were created from biting and crunching up, when Susano and Amaterasu met at entrance to heaven and bit and crunched up each other accessories! And biting was also the way that they used to make that religious nectar sake.
Alas, after writing this article I found that in the scene where Amaterasu and Susano bite things, the word "kami" for bite is written with a mi with vowel sound i1. So this, for the same reason that we rejected the idea that kami means above, it seems. The true etymology of kami remains a mystery.
Kami as Abbreviation of Mirror.
Women in Japanese Proverbs
January 10, 2004
There is a Japanese proverb which says (click for an image of the Japanese)
"Dawn doesn't break without a woman", or,
Japan is the land where dawn doesn't break without a woman. "
It refers to the Shinto myth in which the sun goddess, Amaterasu, hides in a cave and thus sends the world into eternal night, and means that Japan is the place where things don't go right unless there is a woman around. Thinking that perhaps the power of women might be expressed in Japanese proverbs I had a look around and came up with these:
One hair of a woman draws a great elephant
(or in the English tradition, more than a hundred yoke of oxen. )
Distant mountains move when wives speak.
But then looking on the Internet I found a paper on the subject in Japanese. There is also the famous book by Kitteridge Cherry
These argue, fairly convincingly, that Japanese proverbs about women tend to be damning. But at the same time they might testify to women's power.
For those that are interested in the position of women in Japanese (Shinto?) culture, here is as many as I could manage to translate.
Priest and Priestess Robes
April 26, 2003
Here are some links to some pictures of Shinto shrine priest and priestess robes On the site http://plaza18.mbn.or.jp/~relico/costume.html There is am who I am not sure what he is doing. And at this site explaining the various types of clothing (in Japanese) http://www.geocities.co.jp/HeartLand-Icho/9109/1-7.html there are diagrams. This site shows lots of clothes. It is the site of a shrine priest/ess clothing company. http://www.yusoku.com/ This page on the above site, shows you how to put Joue on by yourself http://www.yusoku.com/self.html Some high powered clothers in various colours http://www.yusoku.com/ikan1.html http://www.yusoku.com/ikan2.html http://www.yusoku.com/ikan3.html And shrine priestess wear can be viewed here. http://www.yusoku.com/miko.html The links page of the company above has all sorts of interesting entries including History of Kimono (in English) http://web.mit.edu/jpnet/kimono/index.html And some writing about Kimono http://www.geocities.co.jp/HeartLand-Icho/9109/eng1.html This is another company that sells Shinto Priest stuff of all sorts. Even the twin lintled gates. (In japanese and rather short on photos) http://www.annie.ne.jp/%7Eshin-ei/index.htm For Shinto Priest Stuff in General please also see the link list of sponsors of our "Shinto Online Network Organisation" Again, in Japanese. http://www.jinja.or.jp/kyousan/index.html
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