• Author / Uploaded
• jdjjdjdj

Citation preview

The Stuff of Dreams, Fading: Ikigai and "The Japanese Self" Author(s): Gordon Mathews Source: Ethos, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Dec., 1996), pp. 718-747 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/640520 . Accessed: 23/06/2014 21:01 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Wiley and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethos.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Fading:

Stufof Dreams, Ikigai

and

"the

Japanese Self' GORDON MATHEWS In this article I dispute the view offered in recent analyses that "the Japanese self' is profoundly sociocentric, to argue, from a phenomenological perspective, thatJapanese selves must be seen as both a part of and apart from their existing social worlds. On the basis of intensive interviewing of adultJapanese of various ages, I depict "theJapanese self' as culturally shaped at three levels: a deep level of the taken-for-granted, at which selves do not comprehend their shaping; a middle level of shikataga nai-"what can't be helped"at which selves comprehend but cannot easily resist their shaping; and a shallow level of the cultural supermarket, at which selves pick and choose who they are from a vast arrayof potential self-identities and self-justifications. This three-tiered model enables us to conceptualize the processes through which culturally shapedJapanese selves culturally shape themselves over the lifecourse. Japanese selves' key motivation in their shaped shaping is to be found in ikigai, broadly defined as "that which most makes one's life seem worth living," most often expressed as family, work, or personal dream. Selves shape themselves and formulate and justify their ikigai over the lifecourse so as to maintain the sense that life within their real or imagined social worlds truly is worth living. By considering the self s cultural shaping through ikigai, we can come to a Ethos24(4):718-747. Copyright ? 1996, American Anthropological Association.

718

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THE STUFF OF DREAMS, FADING

719

broad understanding of a diverse range ofJapanese selves. We may also have a framework for understanding the shaped shapings of selves of other contemporary societies as well. ANTHROPOLOGICALDEPICTIONS OF "THEJAPANESESELF" What is "the Japanese self"? If there is one point that most anthropologists of Japan seem to agree upon, it is that "theJapanese self' is contextual and sociocentric. To take just a few examples, Takie Sugiyama Lebra has written (citing Shintaro Ryu) that "the Japanese individual seems to feel really alive only when in a group" (1976:27); RobertJ. Smith has written that in Japan, "the identification of self and other is alwaysindeterminate in the sense that there is no fixed center from which, in effect, the individual asserts atlnoncontingent existence" (1983:81); and David W. Plath has written that while "the American archetype ...

seems more

attuned to cultivating a self that knows it is unique in the cosmos, theJapanese archetype [seems more attuned] to a self that can feel human in the company of others" (1980:218). These analysts do allow for a Japanese self that is, in Smith's words, "not entirely sociocentric" (1991); as Lebra has written, "we know thatJapanese are as concerned about maintaining the individual's independence and freedom as are other peoples" (1976: 156). For all their different cultural shapings, Japanese do indeed have separate selves, as do other peoples, these scholars say; but more recent writings call such a self into question, in stressing the otherness of "theJapanese self' as compared to "the Western self." Esyun Hamaguchi (1985) labels theJapanese self kanjin,aJapanese term of his coinage meaning "the contextual," as opposed to the Western kojin,"the individual";social scientists studyingJapan have not understoodJapanese selves, he argues, because of their immersion in "methodological individualism,"causing them to seeJapan only through "the emics of Euro-American societies" (1985:291). Dorinne Kondo, in the theory surrounding her ethnography of Japanese workers (1990), writes of"seemingly incorrigible Western assumptions

about ...

the boundedness

and fixity of personal

identity" (1990:26). "Contemporary anthropologists," she writes, "myselfincluded, are in the process of grappling with the difficulties and paradoxes of demonstrating the cultural specificity of

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

720

ETHOS

selfhood, thereby de-essentializing the category" (1990:37). Nancy Rosenberger, in her introduction to her edited volume, Japanese Senseof Self, criticizes Lebra, Smith, Plath, and indeed all previous generations of Japan anthropologists, for "the ideology of the individual which is embedded in their theories and common sense views" (1992:4). Lebra, she writes, "seems to be searching for an essential core of individuality that fits with Western theory" (1992: 9); Plath "presents the Japanese self as a product of relationships, but remains within Western theory of the individual by emphasizing consistency" (1992:11); Smith too "does not escape hints of the Western essential self with individualistic drives" (1992:10). Her volume, she writes, presents "Japanese people who are not essentialized individuals" and thereby emphasizes "the multiple and changing positions that constitute self" (1992:13, 14). However, these scholars' assumptions about Western selfhoodor at least about Western theories of selfhood-seem problematic. Spiro (1993) discusses the epistemological flaws in arguments that "the Western conception of the self " is peculiarly individualistic in the context of world cultures; Murray (1993) shows that "the Western concept of the self" is more complex and variegated than the lone, isolated straw man constructed by critics of that self. Indeed, both Kondo and Rosenberger cite Derrida, perhaps the leading theorist of poststructuralism, Western theory that resolutely denies the essential nature of the individual. If, as they assert, earlier anthropological theory elevated the separate, autonomous self, assuming that self to be essential and universal (a charge I do not believe to be valid for the anthropologists of Japan we have discussed'), contemporary poststructuralistand postmodernist theory evaporates that self. For Kondo and Rosenberger too, Western theory may underlie their vision of "Japanese self'-Japan and its selves being merely an "empty signifier" for the play of Western theory.2

This leads to a fundamental underlying question. Could it really be thatJapanese lack bounded senses of personal identity, essential cores of individuality, as these scholars say?It is indeed the case that the Japanese language has no equivalent to the invariant English I:Japanese personal pronoun equivalents linguistically create an ever-shifting field between self and other (Kondo 1990:26-33; Smith 1983:81). It is also the case that, as Lebra has discussed (1984:294-295), and as my own research indicates (Mathews 1996:

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THE STUFF OF DREAMS, FADING

721

145), Japanese life histories tend to emphasize personal interdependence more than independence, while American life histories emphasize independence more than interdependence; this seems to reflect a greater degree of cultural emphasis on the selfs interdependence in Japan and independence in the United States (Markus and Kitayama 1991). Japanese senses of self are indeed culturally shaped, as the contributors to Rosenberger's volume (1992) demonstrate;Japanese senses of self are indeed implicated in power relations, as Kondo (1990) emphasizes. And yet I have never met aJapanese person, and I am confident that no anthropologist has ever met aJapanese person-at least outside a mental institution or possibly a Zen monastery-who claims to have no coherent, separate self. Examining selves as if from an Olympian height, it may indeed be that the sense of having a bounded, coherent self is but an "illusion of wholeness" (Ewing 1990). It may also be true that the mass-mediated, postmoder self discussed by so many analysts (for example, Gergen 1991; Narita 1986) has become fragmented as compared to selves in past ages.3 However, in the anthropological analysisof selves,Japanese or otherwise, surely the phenomenological experience of those selves, as selves experiencing themselves as both a part of and apart from other selves, must be taken seriously. Selves' experience of their lives cannot be dismissed by analystswho claim to know those selves better than they know themselves. In this article, I discuss how a few dozenJapanese explained their lives and selves to me. In 1989-90 in a northern Japanese city, I interviewed, for five-to-ten hours each, 52 people from all walks of life about their work, family, life stories, religious beliefs, hopes, fears, and ikigai, their sense of what makes their lives seem worth living.4What I discovered from these interviews inevitably involves not self but self-presentation-I have no transparent windows into these people's minds but only their words, comprising texts (Goffman 1959; Watson and Watson-Franke 1985:46-50). Nonetheless, the leap from constructed texts to other selves is necessary if other selves are to be taken seriously in their own phenomenological reality. This leap may entail the danger of ethnocentricity, but not to leap is even more ethnocentric: to "de-essentialize other selves" may be to deny our common humanity.

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

722

ETHOS

THE CULTURAL SHAPINGS OF SELF What does "self mean? Melford Spiro has recently discussed "the lack of terminological and conceptual clarity"in social scientists' uses of the term (1993:113). Many anthropologists, he writes, assume that cultural conceptions of self are isomorphic with actors' own senses of themselves (1993:117, 119), and "viewthe self itself, not only conceptions of the self, as whollyculturally constructed" (1993:110, emphasis in original); he sees these assumptions as unwarranted. Extrapolating from Spiro's argument, I define self as "locus of consciousness": I maintain that selves of different cultures, despite their different cultural moldings, may be compared as physically separate consciousnesses experiencing the world in part through that separation. Selves are constructed and construct themselves through cultural conceptions; but while cultural conceptions of self clearly shape subjective awareness of self, they do not determine that awareness-selves use an array of cultural conceptions to comprehend themselves and their experiences, but use those conceptions with varying degrees of self-awareness and critical distance, and manipulate those conceptions for their own self-defining and other-defining ends. There is no single cultural conception of self in contemporary complex societies such asJapan, but rather an arrayof overlapping and often contradictory conceptions that selves may use in various combinations in constructing themselves. Recent analyses of "the Japanese self' (Bachnik 1994; Doi 1973, 1986; various of the contributors to Rosenberger's 1992 edited volume) use terms in the Japanese language-uchi/soto, amae, omote/ura, tatemae/honne,ki, kejime-to set forth models of "theJapanese self," but for the most part leave aside questions of distribution and of agency. Do these different models apply to all Japanese selves? To most selves? To some selves more than others? To what extent do these models presumably operate at a fully conscious level, and to what extent at an unconscious level? To what extent do people choose these structures, resist these structures, or unthinkingly imbibe these structures? In an attempt to delineate more clearly someJapanese experiences of self, allow me to offer a phenomenological theory of the cultural shaping of self, a theory exploring how selves-in Japan, and perhaps in other contemporary mass-mediated societies as well-comprehend and seek to manipulate their culturalshaping.5

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THE STUFF OF DREAMS, FADING

723

There are, broadly speaking, three levels at which selves are culturally shaped. The deepest level is the taken-for-granted level; at this level, exemplified by language and by embodied social practice, selves are shaped beyond their comprehension. Language is prior to consciousness and fits consciousness within its patterns. By the same token, the unquestioned social practices encompassed in Bourdieu's term habitusare at this level: Selves of a given society create that society, and society creates selves through social processes that selves are at most only dimly aware of: "It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know" (Bourdieu 1977: 79). The aforementioned Japanese terms said to comprise "the Japanese self' presumably operate for the most part at this level: shaping selves who then may invoke these terms as the natural structure of "theJapanese self." The second, middle level of the cultural shaping of self is what I call the shikata ga nai level. Shikata ga nai is a Japanese phrase meaning "it can't be helped," "there's nothing that can be done about it."This is the level of social practice and cultural norms and expectations at which selves have considerable awareness of, although little control over, how they are shaped. The pressures of this level are experienced as external to the self: these are the pressures of, for example, having to go to school, get married, bear children, go to work each day, pay one's taxes, be polite to one's boss and in-laws, and generally worry about the opinions of others, regardless of one's own feelings about these matters. Of course, some selves resist in various forms the pressures of shikata ga nai, but most accede to most of these pressures, with varying degrees of willingness or unwillingness, believing that "thisis the way the world is," and thus the way that one must act within the world. The third, most shallow level of cultural shaping is what I call the cultural supermarket: this is the level at which selves actively use culture to shape and justify their senses of themselves. At this level, selves comprehend themselves through their various personal choices from the array of mass-mediated ideas "in the air" of their cultural world. Most selves choose self-definitions relatively "close to home"-choices at this shallow level that more or less harmoniously fit the moldings of the deep and middle levels-but some do not. Indeed, choices from all over the world are available to the self at this level, although self-definitions that radicallyconflict with the

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

724

ETHOS

moldings of the deep and middle levels are chosen at considerable risk to the self in its relation to its social world, not to mention its own psychological well-being. At this shallow level of shaping, selves may be thought of as cultural consumers and creators, and as creators of self. These levels of the self may be summed up as (1) deep shaping taking place beyond the selfs control and comprehension; (2) middle-level shaping taking place beyond the selfs control but within its comprehension; and (3) shallow shaping taking place with the selfs control and comprehension. Each of these levels shapes the levels above it. On the basis of the deep level of cultural shaping, selves more or less accept the middle level of shaping; having been shaped at these two deeper levels, selves at the shallow level culturally shape themselves. Alternately-in different spatial arrangement-these levels may be visualized as (1) shaping from underneath the self, setting forth the conditions for self-consciousness; (2) shaping from outside the self, by the structures of the world external to the self that the self must more or less fit; and (3) shaping from within the self, by which the self chooses ideas from the world by which to shape itself. My sketch of these levels is crude but heuristically useful in understanding the cultural shapings of the Japanese selves I interviewed. The taken-for-granted level was implicit in the people I spoke with in their use of theJapanese language and in the assumptions that seemed to underlie many of their self-presentations, about such matters as ancestor worship, gender roles, the raising of children, 'Japaneseness," and general human relations-their sociocentrism. However, the limitations of the interviewing process, as well as the strictures of my phenomenologically based approach (whereby I avoid as much as possible any conjecture about my informants beyond what they themselves told me) make it difficult to get at the taken-for-granted. The Japanese language, with its shifting personal pronoun equivalents and levels of politeness, may construct within its speakers a linguistic self-in-context not to be found in, say, native speakers of English; and indeed, the personal accounts of many of theJapanese I interviewed seemed to show a taken-for-granted sense of self in social context found only rarely in the accounts of their American counterparts (Mathews 1996: 210). However, the relation of language to consciousness is problematic. To what extent do the grammatical patterns of theJapa-

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THE STUFF OF DREAMS, FADING

725

nese language shape the awareness ofJapanese selves, and to what extent are those patterns finally undetermining of that awareness? For what it is worth, some of theJapanese I interviewed told of how they detached themselves from the language they had to use. For example, a construction worker told me of his boss, "I call him shacho [company president] and speak deferentially to him, but I don't have any respect for him at all." Similarly, some of those I spoke with indicated that cultural concepts such as uchi/soto and omote/ura channel their behavior but bear little relation to who they sense they are; as several said, "Yes,I behave with others in accordance with those ideas, but they don't relate to me." These statements indicate that the taken-for-granted may be consciously manipulated-and of course, as evidenced by that very fact, is no longer taken-for-granted. Bourdieu writes of the "self-evident and natural order" created through habitus, "which goes without saying and therefore goes unquestioned" (1977:166). The people I interviewed often used such words as natural (shizen na)-"It's only natural to feel oneness with the company"; "It's natural for men to go to out and work and women to raise their children"; "ancestor worship is natural-it's what we do as human beings"-but if they truly felt the "naturalness"of these practices, they never would have asserted it but would let it go without saying. These people asserted "naturalness"in those areas that they felt to be under challenge. Many young people do not feel much corporate loyalty inJapan today (Sengoku 1991); manyJapanese women have careers outside the home (Iwao 1993); senses of the ancestors may be weakening (Morioka 1984, Yanagawa 1977); and as the people I interviewed were well aware, the "naturalness"of their Japanese world may be very different from the "naturalness" of their foreign interlocutor. The level of shikata ga nai was more accessible to me in my interviews; indeed, like the realm of social reality it signifies, it was all but unavoidable. Some of the people I spoke with, such as the defenders of "naturalness"quoted above, fully accepted various of the dominant practices, norms, and expectations of their world; but others questioned these practices, norms, and expectations, although they mostly ended up adhering to them. As a woman in her thirties said about pressuring her son to study, "Japan is a society based on school credentials. Maybe that's bad, but that's the trend of Japanese society, and we have to flow with it." As a

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

726

ETHOS

sarariiman(company employee) in his thirties told me, "I guess I don't like my work, but ...

since you have to work anyway, you

might as well work hard." These two people, along with a number of others I interviewed, did not fully want to define themselves in terms of the popularly defined social roles of "education mother" (kyoikumama)or "corporate warrior"(kigyosenshi),but they felt they had little choice but to behave as if they did so define themselves. Some of the social pressures of the shikata ga nai level are resistible, if one is willing to pay the price. A calligrapher in his sixties punctuated our interviews with the statement, "Jibun no yaritai kotooyaritai. Hoka no hito wa do de mo ii. "("I want to do what I want to do! I don't give a damn what other people think.") He had once been a company employee but quit to pursue his ikigai of art, despite the amazed protests of his boss and coworkers. Later, his wife had supported him while he studied calligraphy; when she was hospitalized for a year with kidney disease, he continued to study, despite the protests of his relatives and friends ("Don't you care about your wife and children? Stop being so selfish!"). He has consistently flouted the strictures of shikata ga nai and has suffered decades of obloquy accordingly. (His eventual success in his chosen path has softened the voices of criticism, though I still heard some from hisJapanese acquaintances: "Whatare you interviewing him for? He's weird!") He was one of the few exceptions among those I interviewed: a person largely unbound by shikata ga nai. The level of the cultural supermarket was also ubiquitous among those I spoke with. In Japan, as in other contemporary complex societies, there are an extraordinary arrayof cultural ideas available for one's personal appropriation. Confining ourselves to popular books byJapanese authors in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one could read tracts urging the definition of self in terms of company (Saito 1990) and family (Niwano 1969, now in its 16th printing), or emphatically not in terms of company (Kobayashi 1989) or family (Yoshihiro 1991), but in terms of one's individual growth; one could read books emphasizing the definition of self in terms of leisure and consumption (Yamazaki1987), or railing against that definition (Hirooka 1986, Sengoku 1991); one could also read tracts urging the definition of self in terms of the spirit world beyond this one (Tanba 1988). Television, movies, newspapers, and magazines contain a similar multiplicity of potential self-defi-

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THESTUFFOF DREAMS,FADING

727

nitions from both Japan and abroad, a variety of which were used

by the people I interviewed. To give just a few examples, a sarariiman in his forties justified his devotion to company in terms of hisJapaneseness; ifJapanese companies can continue their success in the world, "wemay really be able to say we're superior as a race [jinshu]."A managementtrack corporate employee in her thirties justified her devotion to her work in terms of the American feminism and French existentialism she had read. An insurance company employee in his forties found himself neither through work nor family, but through his dream of self-realization, although he could not imagine what that might consist of. An elderly woman conceived of herself as an ancestor soon to be worshipped, while another, a Catholic, sought only to be united with God. More extremely, I interviewed a dentist in his late thirties whose office was decorated to resemble an American Wild West saloon; he wore cowboy boots to work and had a beard, grown, he told me, to look like that of a Western sheriff; and I interviewed a biological man in his thirties who culturally chose to be a woman, working as a hostess at a transvestite bar and attending our interviews in a miniskirt. These people, and indeed all those I interviewed, formulated and justified themselves through their choices from the cultural supermarket. We can see from the foregoing examples thatJapanese indeed have separate selves, at least insofar as they explained those selves to me in our interviews.6Self-identity seemed for these people to be a function of all three of the levels we have discussed. On the basis of a cultural shaping of self that is prior to self, these people experienced themselves as fitting or resisting the structures and strictures of the social and institutional world they found themselves within; and they justified, legitimated, or dreamed beyond those selves with all the cultural materials they could bring to mind for that task. But the question remaining from all this is, what motivated these people in shaping themselves as they had? What motivated them in their lives? What made them tick? To try to answer this question, let us now consider ikigai in Japanese lives. THE 'JAPANESESELF"AND IKIGAI Ikigaiis aJapanese word defined in dictionaries in such terms as Ikiru hariai, yorokobi,meate(something to live for; the joy and goal

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

728

ETHOS

of living). (Nihongo Daijiten 1989:96); it may be broadly conceived of as "that which most makes one's life seem worth living." Ikigai surveys (for example, as reported by Lebra 1984:162; Mita 1984: 59-66; and Plath 1980:91) consistently show that a dominant ikigai of men is work; the dominant ikigai of women is family and children.7 However, there seems to be considerable ambiguity in Japan as to what ikigai is and should be. Ikigai is a topic of considerable interest in Japan today. Bookstores may carry a dozen or more tracts on ikigai; during an 18-month period in 1989-90, the period of myJapanese research, four major Japanese newspapers ran some 50 articles on ikigai. Analyzing these articles, two reasons for the contemporary concern over ikigai stand out. The first is Japan's aging: with Japan's life expectancy now the longest in the world,Japanese may have several decades to live following retirement from work or the departure from home of children. Having thus outlived their social roles, many old people seem to be at a loss over how to find new ikigai by which to live. The second is Japan's affluence. Having labored singlemindedly to rebuild Japan from ashes to economic superpower, many Japanese now seem to question whether working intently for one's company or family is truly sufficient to base a life worth living on. Underlying these reasons for Japanese concern over ikigai is a dispute over what ikigai means. Some commentators explicitly define ikigai as jiko jitsugen, "self-realization" (Kobayashi 1989). Others (Niwano 1969) implicitly define ikigai as ittaikan:"sense of oneness with'-'['or, more broadly, as'] commitment to group or role." Advocates of ikigai as ittaikan hold that one's company or family and children should be one's ikigai (Niwano 1969), the source of one's fulfillment in life; advocates of ikigai asjikojitsugen stress that merely playing the social role of employee or mother cannot provide one with true ikigai (Kamiya 1980; Kobayashi 1989). This dispute over ikigai is finally a dispute over "theJapanese self and how it should be defined. Should self be coterminous with one's role in company and family?Or is there a self underlying role, a self more fundamental than role? Is self to be located in one's relation and commitment to one's group, or rather in the pursuit of one's own individual dream? This,judging fromJapanese media week after week, year after year, is the fundamental conflict over self now being waged in Japan-a conflict curiously ignored in the

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THE STUFF OF DREAMS, FADING

729

largely static analyses ofJapanese self in terms such as uchi/soto, ki, and kejime, but that was amae, omote/ura, tatemae/honne, of the people I interviewed. profoundly experienced by many There are countless examples from Japanese media pertaining to this conflict; allow me to discuss just one, a remarkable Rorschach-blot-like short-short story by Kuroi (1990). A man awakens to find a note on his wife's pillow: "Mitsuo: I can't stand this life. I'm leaving. Yoshiko." Shocked, he stumbles into the kitchen, only to find his wife preparing breakfast. He asks her what the note means, and is told, "Yoshiko's left, and Mitsuo's following her, crying and apologizing. I'm not Yoshiko, I'm wife; you're not Mitsuo, you're husband." Baffled, he goes to work; his best friend at the office, upon hearing his story, says, '"You're late. That happened to me five years ago." I showed this story to several dozen Japanese friends and acquaintances, who were sharply divided in their senses of the story's meaning. Some, often but not always younger, railed against the couple's loss of individual self; others, often but not always older, suggested that by losing their individual selves and accepting their roles, this couple had finally attained maturity. As noted above, this conflict over the nature of self was readily apparent in the people I interviewed. Some gave the standard opinion-poll responses to my ikigai questions, responses reflecting ittaikan and a role definition of self. A bank employee in his forties said, "My ikigai is my work.... I can't separate myself from the bank-I am what I am because of it, it is what it is because of me." A mother in her late thirties said, "Since I got married, my family has been my ikigai. Being for my family is being for myself and being for myself is being for my family." A few of these people expressed no doubt throughout our interviews about their ikigai, their merger of self and role, but others expressed hesitation. As the woman cited above told me, after asserting that her family was her ikigai, "I guess I sound like a very average person.... I've got to grow as an individual!" As a sarariiman in his forties said to me of his coworkers, "If you ask them, they may say that their work in the company is their ikigai, but theyjust say that because they have nothing else to say.... Maybe I'm like that too." A delivery truck driver in his twenties said, "People working at [big companies] are just cogs. They don't have selves." This man and a dozen or so others of those I interviewed explicitly conceived of ikigai in terms

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

730

ETHOS

of self-realization, a self-realization, however, that many saw as being all-but-unattainable. As an insurance man in his forties told me, "Ikigaiis a matter of living in this world with your own purpose. That's the ideal; if I look at my own life, it's far from that ideal. ... Will I find ikigai before I die?.... I'd say that the chance I'll find it is incredibly small." We will shortly discuss at length the ikigai of the people I interviewed, but let me first discuss ikigai more abstractly.It seems clear that ikigai, whether defined as jiko jitsugen or as ittaikan, is social. Self-realization may seem to imply self as opposed to others; but whether one lives for one's family or one's art, one's company or one's dream, one still is projected into a world beyond the self: the pursuer of self-realization seeks a self that will be more highly valued by others, by one's social world. Ikigai as ittaikan-generally company or family-tends to entail the selfs commitment to something in its existing social world. Ikigai as jiko jitsugen-generally personal dream, sometimes creative endeavor or religious belief (although this is ambiguous)-may entail the selfs commitment to an imagined social world, one that might come to pass in the future but that has not come to pass at present. It also seems clear that ikigai is individual. All commentators on ikigai in the Japanese books I have read, whatever conception of ikigai they advocate, stress this individuality: selves may be urged or cajoled by company, by family, or bybooks like theirs, to conceive of and pursue ikigai in certain ways and down certain paths, but this finally can only be the selfs own choice, not made for the self but by the self, these writers say. Both ikigai as ittaikan and ikigai as jiko jitsugen, as expressed by the people I interviewed, are matters of the selfs individual choice of deepest commitment to something in its real or imagined social world. Many of the people I interviewed seemed somewhat confused about the meaning of the term ikigai, reflecting the confusion in Japanese mass media over the term: the conflict between ittaikan and jiko jitsugen. However, ikigai defined simply as "that which most makes one's life seem worth living" was sensed by everyone I interviewed; all acknowledged something from the social world around them-family, work, creative activities, religious belief, love affairs, or the dream of having a mission in life (or for a few people a balance of several of these)-that made their lives seem worth living. IfJapanese selves were only individualistic, then they would

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THE STUFF OF DREAMS, FADING

731

not feel such ikigai; but if Japanese selves were only sociocentric, then these selves would "naturally"find their ikigai in the primary group and role to which they belong, rather than pursuing, rejecting, or agonizing over ikigai, as they so very clearly do. The term ikigai is a testament to the fact that the selfs commitment to its existing social world inJapan is not automatic, but must be earned. In terms of the cultural shaping of self, shaping at the deepest level in Japan seems to be directed in part toward "natural"commitment to one's primary group, but this shaping does not always seem to stick. Thomas Rohlen has discussed how the family is the model of social ordering in Japan. Japanese mothers, he writes (citing William Caudill), are "inclined to view the child as born asocial with the implied goal of child-rearing to be teaching the child to integrate with others, to become social" (1989:18). Subsequent Japanese institutions, such as schools and work groups, continue this emphasis but may be greeted with skepticism and resistance, since "among adults attachment is rarely as certain or as complete as it is between parents and children" (1989:31). The molding of the child within the family is at the deepest level of cultural molding, since, among other things, selves come to selfconsciousness as children only after having been in large part already molded. Subsequent molding, particularly molding of the self to feel one with the company-such as, for example, the corporate marathon described by Rohlen (1974) and the "ethics retreat" described by Kondo (1990)-attempts to replicate or reinforce this earlier familial molding but has varying degrees of success. If this later molding is successful, then selves will feel ikigai for their company or other large social group;8if it is not successful, then selves may feel ikigai elsewhere in their lives and view their relation to their companies as a matter of shikata ga nai. Ikigai as family and children seems less inherently problematic than ikigai of work in that it involves the actual replication of the family in a later generation rather than its metaphorical replication. As we will shortly discuss, the women I interviewed generally seemed more comfortable with the idea of family as ikigai than did men with work as ikigai. However, the conflict between ittaikan and jikojitsugen crossed gender lines. Most of the women and many of the men I interviewed in the prime of life seemed to find their ikigai in family and in company, respectively;yet, as noted earlier, many of these people had doubt as to the ikigai they held, expressing,

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

732

ETHOS

however hesitantly and vaguely, a longing for a different ikigai, a different world. The reason for this seems to lie, as we will now discuss, in the conflict between the self s different levels of cultural shaping in Japan, as expressed in the shifting pursuits of ikigai of the people I interviewed over the lifecourse.9 IKIGAIOVER THE LIFECOURSE I interviewedJapanese between the ages of 21 and 78 (assuming, as do mostJapanese commentators, that ikigai is a commitment of adulthood). Ikigai among those in their twenties sometimes involved the pursuit of present pleasures. As one young "office lady" told me, "Myikigai is travel. When I travel, I can get dressed up, and go to fancy restaurants and eat good food; I can go shopping, and can take pictures of myself in nice clothes." For most, however, it involved not present pleasures but dreams of what the self may become in the future. Sometimes these dreams were entirely within the conventional pattern of men living for their future success in work and women for the marriage and family they hoped to have. As a young sarariiman said, "Yes,I'd like to become kacho[section chief] and have a good life with my family; if I have a dream, that's it"; as a young, recently divorced woman said to me, "If all my dreams came true, I'd be married, have children, have an ordinary family life-just an ordinary [heibonna] life. That's all I want." Often, however, these dreams were not so conventional: the young government worker who dreamed not of marrying the man of her dreams-"If I find a man I like, maybe I'll get married, but I certainly don't dream about having a family"-but of writing a novel; the young bank employee who dreamed not of becoming an executive at his bank, but rather a rock-and-roll promoter: "I don't even want to think about the possibility that I might be here until I retire." These people had taken no steps to act out their dreams, but one young man I interviewed, a college graduate in his late twenties, had burned his bridges behind him. He had quit his leisure-consuming white-collar job to drive a delivery truck while studying to pass the exam to get into medical school and become a doctor. "Maybepeople think my dreams are impossible to realize, but I think they're quite possible. Some of my friends seem envious because I still have a dream, but my mother and other older people say, 'What kind of crazy things are you thinking! Get serious!'" In

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THE STUFF OF DREAMS, FADING

733

fact, the odds of his passing the examination to enter medical school through his study in his free time were so long as to be nonexistent (particularly in light of his recent marriage); but he dreamed on. At the deepest level of cultural shaping, these young people may have been more or less shaped toward commitment to primary group-women living for family and men for company. However, most of those in their twenties I interviewed seemed to see these present or future commitments to family or company as tinged with shikata ga nai: the selves they feel they probably will become, as against all the glamorous possibilities from the cultural supermarket as to the selves they might conceivably become. I have mentioned the multiplicity of cultural ideas in Japan as to what the self may become: one sees in the mass media frequent tales of celebrities, adventurers, criminals, saints; company men having extramarital affairs, or quitting their work to become Buddhist monks or science-fiction writers or racing-car drivers; their wives becoming business executives, or fashion designers, or poets, or international interpreters, or servants of the poor with Mother Teresa. Social norms and expectations are, however, far more limiting: men are to marryand work to support their families; women are to work for a few years, then marry, bear children, and nurture their families. The twenties are a time at which the cultural realm of dreams clashes with the social realm of norms and expectations-a time at which all the wonderful choices from the cultural supermarket clash with the constraining realm of shikata ga nai in all its power. Ikigai for those in their thirties, forties, and fifties tended most often to fit this standard mold of company and family. A few people I interviewed denied that they had ever had any dreams apart from their current ikigai, but most discussed such dreams as dreams foregone. Sometimes this was said with a sense of relative contentment. A mother in her late thirties said, "If I were twenty again, I might not marry-maybe I'd become a female executive!-but then, maybe if I worked for a company all my life, I'd wish I had a family. I think I took the best path." This woman also practiced modern dance and had wondered if she should devote herself wholly to dance; but recently her teacher had been hospitalized for stress:"Looking at her, I feel awfully lucky to have a family .... The only thing she has is dance." For others this passage of dreams was expressed with real regret. A sarariiman in his late thirties reflected

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

734

ETHOS

on the career he had not followed: "IfI'd taken the path of politics, I might have been a city assemblyman now. Then I'd have been able to say that the purpose of my life is to make this city a better place to live in. I can't say that now.... I didn't choose this company because I really wanted to work here. I chose it because it was the best of the companies that happened to be hiring, and I happened to pass the exam." A rock musician turned construction worker in his mid-thirties found his present ikigai in his family, he said (as did several of the blue-collar workers I interviewed),'? but his dream of music remained: "I like myself because I'm working hard for my family, but I dislike myself because I gave up music.... I'm not a bad father, I think-I'm supporting my family-but maybe it would be better for my kids if I showed them a father who's pursuing his dream." As I pointed out above, family as ikigai tended to breed less ambivalence than work. One reason for this seemed to be that women experienced more flexibility than men in their entrance into the realm of work and family as what they are to live for. The white-collar men I interviewed almost uniformly entered their companies in their late teens or early to mid-twenties, at latest. Women, on the other hand, tended to have married in their late twenties, following years of work (which they were not expected to make their ikigai); they sometimes did not have children until years after that. Their gradual assumption of family as ikigai was often seen as negotiable. One woman I interviewed, a mother of three in her late thirties, had put off having children for a year, during which she went (with her husband's reluctant agreement) to the United States to study English, fulfilling a lifelong dream. I talked to no man who was able to negotiate the ikigai of work, as this woman had negotiated her ikigai of family. As she told me, "Now my children are my ikigai; but I might not feel this way if I hadn't had the chance to go to America to study."11 This is one reason for the lesser ambivalence felt by women than by men toward their ikigai of family and company; but a more fundamental reason is to be found in the very nature of these ikigai. A mother in her thirties explained this as follows: "Some men realize that in their work they'rejust a cog [haguruma]in a machine, but others don't; they believe that they're essential, that without them the company couldn't survive. These men are being fooled. But family is different. It's not like a company: you can't simply

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THESTUFFOFDREAMS,FADING

735

exchange one mother for another; a member of a family is notjust a replaceable cog." This woman (reflecting Rohlen's view of the parent-child bond as the fundamental relation that institutions in Japan try but often fail to replicate) is saying that men's commitment to their companies may involve false consciousness; only women's commitment to their families is genuine. Her words are indirectly corroborated by those of the most work-committedJapanese sarariiman I interviewed, a man in his late forties: "Do I feel like a cog in the corporate machine? Well, of course I'm a cog-the bank is a big organization; what I'm doing could be done by others just as well as by me-but while I'm working, I believe that without me the bank couldn't survive .... You've got to believe that." Many

Japanese company workers I interviewed made similar comments, indicating that their work did not involve what they saw as their individual selves, but rather made use of them as replaceable cogs: as another sarariiman told me, "Even you could replace me at my work within a month."1 It is revealing, however, that the older company employees I interviewed feared not the loss of their individual selves-which, perhaps in line with Kuroi's short story, they had already given up-but the loss of role that comes with retirement. The work-committed sarariiman cited above said, "Mywife always tells me that those who don't have a hobby tend to go senile after they retire. I think I still have enough time to find some kind of hobby before then, but I have to prepare myself." He must find a self apart from work, he felt, or else he might lose all that remains of himself. The Japanese mothers I interviewed similarly felt doubts primarily in terms of the time-boundedness of the role that they played. A mother of thirty with three small children said, "Fornow my kids are my ikigai, but that's not enough.... If all you do is raise your kids, then you'll have nothing left when they grow up." A woman in her forties with two children in secondary school said, "Until they leave home, I live for my children. But after they grow up they shouldn't be my ikigai anymore; I shouldn't interfere in their lives." These women's remarks show that their worry was not that their true selves were not expressed in their role as mother, but that that role would eventually end. Both of these women had had difficulties in their marriages, but this seems not to have affected their primary sense of living for their children. Many youngerJapanese women do not share this sense; the Japanese birthrate has been

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

736

ETHOS

dropping over the last two decades and is now just 1.45 children per woman in her lifetime (Japan Times1994). Yet both Japanese media and my own interviews seemed to reveal women's general satisfaction with their ikigai of children, a satisfaction often not shared by white-collar men who may be viewed by women and to some degree by society at large as objects not of envy but of pity for their corporate enslavement (Iwao 1993; Takayama 1990). If the people I interviewed in their twenties expressed a conflict between the realm of cultural potentialities and the strictures of social pressure, people in their thirties, forties, and early fifties often expressed a merging of these realms. Generally, the cultural supermarket became, as they aged, the source not of conflict with their shikata ga nai roles, but ofjustification for those roles as those roles became, progressively, not an infringement on self but the very stuff of self. For some this shift was expressed straightforwardly, as in the above examples of people saying, in effect, "Igave up my dreams for the sake of work/family, but this path is after all the best path for me to take"-as if work and especially family were sufficiently powerful ideals of self as to require no culturaljustification. For others, however, these ideals seemed to require extrinsic justification. The female management-track corporate employee I interviewed justified her work in terms of her feminist ideals-"I work incredibly hard because I represent what women can do if they're given the chance"-but also through her readings of philosophy: "I work, really, for the sake of 'intellectual exercise.' It's not easy to study something that's a little beyond you, but once you master it, it builds your character.... Before you die, you have the chance to be conscious of your death, you want to feel that your life has been lived well. When I die, that moment when I recognize my own existence is all I'll have."She had read extensively in French existentialism and seemed to use ideas gleaned from her reading to justify having to devote herself to her work, which, she told me, she fundamentally detested. A male company employee used an ideal of masculinity to justify his life of work: "I've never said 'no' to any of myjob assignments.... I sacrificed my family a lot for my work. I like men who do that: manly man [otokorashiiotoko],like Western cowboys." Another older sarariiman justified his long hours of work in terms of his generation and theirJapaneseness: "People of my generation ... felt we could endure anything think-

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THE STUFF OF DREAMS, FADING

737

ing of those who died in the war-and in that spirit, we rebuilt Japan, maybe from a sense of guilt for those who died in the war." These people's justifications were deeply felt; still, their words seemed to justify that about which they sensed they had little choice. Of course, some of the people I interviewed in the prime of life did feel that they had had a choice and acted upon that choice. Many of the women who lived for their children expressed this sense, unlike most of their male counterparts. Beyond this there were a number of men and women who chose to withhold their deepest commitment to work or family and make that commitment elsewhere. A man in his forties I interviewed, a former hippie who now ran his own real estate office, found his ikigai not through his work or through his wife and children, he told me, but through his casual affairs with women he met in bars, through which he claimed he could recapture the freedom of his youth. This man's ikigai resistance to shikata ga nai was furtive; others' resistance was more obvious. I interviewed an unmarried teacher of traditional dance in her early fifties whose mother died in childbirth; dance is her ikigai, she told me, because in traditional dance she can appreciate and venerate the mother and family that she never knew in reality. I also interviewed several adherents to new religions such as Mahikari and Soka Gakkai, who steadfastly maintained that their religion was more important to them than work (although not necessarily family) could ever be; they said that they made no effort to hide their "strange" ikigai from their coworkers. Most unequivocal as a rejection of the standard ikigai was the Buddhist nun who quit her office job to have her head shaved, don an orange robe, and seek salvation for herself and her society: "Sometimes when I ride the trolley, the young office ladies point and laugh at me to their friends. That makes me really sad." There was also the transvestite, drawing the astonished stares of the people around him as he walked the streets in his miniskirt and his broad shoulders and conspicuous Adam's apple. These people, however, were the conspicuous minority. Most people I interviewed in their thirties, forties, and fifties more or less fit the standard roles of employee and mother, the standard ikigai of work and family-having given up their dreams, they remade themselves to fit their roled realities. In their late fifties and sixties, however, their roles too began to pass, a terrifying prospect for many. A sarariiman soon to retire

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

738

ETHOS

struggled to prepare himself: "I'll feel lonely when I retire; I have to learn to endure being separate from an organization, to face myself. I've got to learn to accept the fact that I won't have myjob, my purpose in life, anymore." He was an avid fisherman and had for many years chafed at the restrictions placed upon his life by the several companies he had worked for-"I've been working for the past thirty years for society rather than for myself, but now I'm sick and tired of living that way!"-but by this time in his life, his corporate life has become virtually all his life; when he is ejected from that world, will he find any self left to return to? "Ihave to kill myself in the organization.... I've sacrificed myself for the company, but the company trusts me and relies on me." Somewhat similarly, a divorced women in her fifties, who managed a tiny bar to support her teenage son, burst into tearswhen she discussed with me her future: "In five or six years, my son will leave me; he's everything to me. I'd be really happy if my son became independent, and had a happy life.... It'd be ideal if I could live with my son and his family. But I feel so scared.... I've been working hard for my son, but... I don't know if he feels any obligation for me. Probably he doesn't." An unsympathetic woman in her late twenties spoke of her parents as follows: "Myparents fight a lot these days. When we were small they were too busy with work and raising children to fight ... Myfather lived for his work, but that's winding down. My mother lived for raising her children-that was the most fulfilling time of her life, it seems; she always talks about when we were small. Now my parents fight because they have too much free time." Most of the elderly men and women I interviewed had managed, eventually, to come to terms with the loss or diminishment of their earlier ikigai of work or family, company or children. A woman in her late sixties was estranged from her son-in-lawand daughter; she loved her daughter from afar and busied herself by diligently picking up the trash in the park next to her bare apartment each morning, part of her present ikigai of "justliving," she said. A man in his late sixties sustained himself through memories of past eminence-"I once ran a factory with two hundred and fifty people under me"-and the few hours of part-time work each week that he continued to perform, his ikigai, he said. He lived with his wife and daughter and her family, but his dreams of family seemed to lie elsewhere. At the close of our final interview, he said: "There's

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THE STUFF OF DREAMS, FADING

739

one thing I haven't told you. There was a woman I loved. It was during the war, and I couldn't say that I loved her-I wrote her a letter once or twice. But she later married someone else; she died of tuberculosis a few years after that. I still keep her photograph in my desk drawer. I look at it sometimes late at night." Some old people I interviewed were able to continue fully pursuing their ikigai of their earlier years. The aforementioned calligrapher sought to continue his calligraphy until he dies: "If I had a year to live, maybe I'd drink a little sake,but I'd do a lot of shodo [calligraphy]! The other day I thought about what I'd do if I had cancer-all that came to mind was shodo." His wife, although bedridden and on dialysis,vowed to live on: "Ican't die, leaving my husband and my daughter and grandchild behind-not yet, anyway."These people's ikigai may indeed sustain itself until they die; but for most, their ikigai remained a shadow of their former years-having shed dream for role, the loss of role may leave only memories.13Having made the shikata ga nai level from outside the self the very stuff of self, justified at the level of the cultural supermarket, and perhaps sensed as "natural"at the taken-forgranted level, many of the elderly Japanese men and women I interviewed found themselves back at the shikata ga nai level: forced by the ways of the world to surrender their roled selves, and having no other selves left to which to return. At the close of their perceptive essay on old people inJapan, Misawaand Minami write, "Young people live for their future; middle-aged people are expected to live for their work or families. But old people have no such burden. Freed from their social obligations, they can live as they themselves desire" (1989:231). But, of course, to do so, they must have selves left; and as Misawa and Minami's essay describes, many old people plug away at their hobbies each day merely as a way of killing time (1989:210), having killed themselves.14 CONCLUSION What does the foregoing analysis teach us about "the Japanese self'? I have discussed how at a certain point in Japanese history (1989-90) young people tended to live for their dreams, middleaged people for their roles, and old people for their roles' remnants or their memories. Because my analysis is confined to a single point in the lives of people of all ages, I cannot saywith any certainty how

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

740

ETHOS

much the shifts in self we have seen are due to lifecourse-to one's changing sense of who one is as one ages-and how much to history: to changing senses of self in Japan, perhaps leading young people today to have different senses of self than young people of, say, 40 years ago. Both factors clearly are at work, and Japanese commentators debate their relative weight.15 However, although there are certainly many more varied models of self available from the cultural supermarket in Japan at present than 40 years ago, most of the older people I interviewed indicated that in their youths they too had held dreams that had been supplanted by the roles of their middle years, which in turn had become attenuated in their later years. "TheJapanese self,"it seems apparent, is not static but shifts in its sense of itself and of what it lives for over the lifecourse. This shift is clearly notjust a matter of the Japanese selfs sociocentrism, as if that self were a chameleon blending without resistance into its surroundings; rather, it is due to the self s often agonizing construction and deconstruction of its sense of commitment and thus identity over the lifecourse, before the passage of dreams and the strictures of reality. Ikigai is the Japanese selfs sense of what it lives for vis-a-visits own dreams and the pressures of others and the institutional coercions and encouragements of society at large. The shifts and constancies of ikigai over the lifecourse may be viewed as heroic, tragic, banal, or pathetic, but they are not mindless: they reflect selves' efforts to be selves as a part of and apart from others in a world in which they dream but which they cannot control. The broad shifts in ikigai over the Japanese lifecourse may be viewed as the processes through which the powers that be inJapan first manufacture and later discard Japanese selves. Japanese society, requiring workers and mothers for its ongoing production and reproduction, has devised a highly efficient system for the making of acquiescent selves, professing their deepest allegiance to its ends: the Meiji Era's Imperial Rescript on Education, with its claim of nation as family (Smith 1983:9-36) has its clear echoes inJapanese postwar claims of company as family (Kondo 1990:119-225). But it may also be that the very success of this system is what has led to its being challenged: Japanese affluence has led to the plethora of media images of alternative lives that people now have the financial means actively to pursue if they so desire;Japanese life expectancy, now the longest in the world, gives Japanese selves decades of

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THE STUFFOF DREAMS, FADING

741

potentially vital life once their social roles have ended. In terms of the levels of cultural molding of self, it may be that, generally speaking, the taken-for-granted level grows smaller, as the options available on the cultural supermarket level are perceived as ever more varied and ever more available. The taken-for-granted level then becomes the shikata ga nai level, through which self is constrained by forces it sees as being external to itself, and thus potentially resistable. How much shikata ga nai comes to be resisted-whether dreams of self will become lived selves for millions at some future point in Japan, or whether dreams will serve largely to make tolerable the ongoing strictures of shikata ga nai reality-is perhaps the pivotal cultural question facing Japanese selves and society today and into the future. The processes of the selfs cultural shaping over the lifecourse that I have described have implications beyond Japan; while the content of what I have discussed is particularlyJapanese, the larger processes are perhaps not. The selfs pursuit of a life that seems worth living through the shaped shapings of culture may be global in today's world; it also may be global that selves' dreams of youth, fueled by the possibilities of the cultural supermarket, are whittled down by the shikata ga nai imperatives of the society one lives in and the structural place one has come to occupy within that society (see Caughey 1984 for discussion of American youths' mass-mediated impossible dreams; see Brim 1992 and Levinson et al. 1978 for discussion of American, mostly male dreams and their fadings over the lifecourse). Walter Mitty reveries are inflated, then deflated, then with luck all but forgotten by one's old age, when dreams have gone past. Japanese society, in the rigidity of its social norms, the strength of shikata ga nai-and in the ongoing rebellion of some selves against those norms-may make this process particularly apparent; but it is true here as well as there, for me and perhaps for you as well as for them. GORDON MATHEWSis assistant professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

NOTES The research upon which this paper is based was conducted through a Acknowledgments. Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, 1989-90. Ideas for this paper were formulated while holding a postdoctoral fellowship at the Reischauer Institute ofJapanese Studies, HarvardUniversity, 1993-94. I am grateful to these institutions for their

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

742

ETHOS

support. I am also grateful to Yoko Miyakawafor reading and commenting on this manuscript. A much-abridged version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Washington, DC, April 9, 1995. 1. Lebra, Smith, and Plath are not, in my reading, guilty of placing an essentialized Western self upon theJapanese of whom they write. Ifanything, they are guilty of postulating an essentialized Japanese self. Who is "the Japanese individual" to whom Lebra refers? Is there a single "Japanesearchetype" of selfand maturity,as Plath indicates? I see a multiplicity of individuals, a number of competing archetypes. 2. It is interesting that Kondo and Rosenberger, apparently influenced by poststructuralism and postmodernism, offer arguments about the otherness of the Japanese self that parallel those ofJapanese advocates of Nihonjinronsuch as Hamaguchi, as well as Aida (1972). Nihonjinron, as discussed by Yoshino (1992), is a conservative discourse of cultural nationalism, describing the uniqueness of the Japanese; postmodernism in American anthropology, as depicted by Kuper (1994), paints itself as politically radical. The two movements thus make strange bedfellows. 3. It is, however, worth keeping in mind Hannerz's words (1992:35): "When it is claimed ... that identities become nothing but assemblages from whatever imagery is for the moment marketed through the media, then I wonder what kind of people the commentators on postmodernism know; I myself know hardly anybody of whom this would seem true." 4. I chose the people I interviewed-friends of friends and acquaintances of acquaintances-largely for their diversity. I suspect that some of the company employees and mothers I spoke with are more representative of contemporaryJapan than are the Buddhist nun and the transvestite; but I do not finally know what a "typical"Japanese person might be like,just as I do not know what a "typical"American might be like. Whenever I interviewed someone presented to me as "typical,"I invariably found key aspects of their lives to be uniquely personal, shared by no one else I spoke with. At the same time, however,Japanese readers of this manuscript have told me that most of the people portrayed therein are recognizable to them asJapanese types, parallelingJapanese that they themselves know. 5. My phenomenological approach is steeped in the writings of Berger and Luckmann (1966), Thomas Luckmann (1967), Alfred Schutz ([1940] 1978), and Schutz and Luckmann (1973). My formulation of the self's cultural shaping is, however, my own. 6. It is possible that the Japanese I interviewed "made up" selves in response to my questions-their sociocentric sensitivity leading them to present to me nonsociocentric selves. When I suggested this possibility to several of those I interviewed, they reacted with considerable indignation; but just as I cannot prove that the world of other people at large is not a figment of my imagination, so too I cannot prove thatJapanese people have, "like us," independent as well as interdependent selves. 7. This ikigai division reflects the stereotypical familial division of labor in Japan-one recent surveyshowed that 71 percent ofJapanese women agreed that "husbands should work outside the home and wives should mind the family" (cited in Amaki 1989:179). Many men say that their ikigai is family rather than work and company, as the surveys cited by Mita (1984:59-66) and Plath (1980:91) indicate (see also Minami 1989:129). However, judging from my interviews, by this they tend to mean that they work hard to support their families, rather than that they seek to devote more of themselves to their families rather than to their companies. 8. Books such as Kawakitaet al.'s Ikigaino soshikiron(An organizational theory of ikigai) (1970) and Noda's Ikigai shearingu:sangyo kozo tenkankino kinrOishiki (Ikigai sharing: the attitudes of workers in a time of industrial transition) (1988) discuss managerial strategies through which to win the worker's ikigai for the company. 9. In this article I give only brief glimpses of how dozens ofJapanese people I interviewed formulated their ikigai. For comprehensive personal accounts of nine Japanese and nine Americans describing what makes their lives seem worth living, see Mathews 1996.

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THE STUFFOF DREAMS,FADING

743

10. One reason why the blue-collarJapanese workers I interviewed found ikigai in family more than did white-collar workers may be time: unlike most of the white-collar workers I interviewed, many of the blue-collar workers tended to be at home with their families rather than off on company-related activities in the evenings. Several woman told me that their white-collar husbands were like geshukunin-boarders-so little were they at home. 11. Americans to whom I describe this woman often say, "Whata waste! She never used what she learned." But this women had never intended to be a professional at English, but only to fulfill her youthful dream before assuming her primary role of mother. American women with whom I have spoken sometimes seem to assume that gender equality means above all equality in the workplace, and thatJapanese women are oppressed because they lack that equality. However, with a few exceptions, the Japanese women I interviewed did not feel this way; as several mothers of school-age children said to me, in their own words, "Whywould I ever want to have to work as hard as my husband has to?" 12. If these men were wholly sociocentric-if their ikigai was felt solely in terms ofittaikan toward their companies-then their sense of being corporate cogs would not be perturbing to them, in that the essence of themselves would be their membership in their companies rather than their individual work in their companies. Of all the workers I interviewed, only one, the work-committed sarariiman cited in the text, seemed able to feel this way. 13. Men who must retire may often experience the loss of role more completely than women, for whom the role as mother may be attenuated in old age, but never altogether shed. Beyond this, the elderly men and women I interviewed who lived in three-generational families often seemed able to live by a newly roled self-that of grandparent-more easily than those who lived alone. 14. Surveys show that many old people say that their hobbies are their ikigai, but the Japanese books on ikigai that I have read, whether defining ikigai as jiko jitsugen or as ittaikan, consistently denigrate or deny the validity of hobby as ikigai. Only a very few old people I interviewed claimed to find ikigai in the pursuit of a hobby. 15. Sakurai (1985) and Sengoku (1991) maintain that Japanese young people are fundamentally different from their predecessors in earlier generations; and indeed, most people I interviewed overage 50 bemoaned the youngergeneration as being utterlydifferent from their elders. On the other hand, Minami (1989) convincingly argues that stages in lifecourse, not history, are the primary factor shaping attitudinal changes between generations.

REFERENCESCITED Aida, Ytji 1972 Nihonjin no ishiki kOzo. (The structure of Japanese consciousness). Tokyo: K6dansha Amaki, Shihomi 1989 ChlkOnen josei no ikikata to byOri (The lives and afflictions of middleIn Gendaijin no raifukOsu (Contemporary lifeaged and older women). course). K. Misawa, E. Ochiai, Y. Yanagihara, S. Amaki, and I. Minami, eds. Pp. 153-186. Kyoto: Mineruva Shobo. Bachnik,Jane 1994 Introduction: uchi/soto: Challenging Our Conceptualizations of Self, Social Order, and Language. In Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society, and Language.J. Bachnik and C. Quinn, eds. Pp. 3-37. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

744

ETHOS

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann 1966 The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. R Nice, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brim, Gilbert 1992 Ambition: How We Manage Success and Failure throughout Our Lives. New York: Basic Books. Caughey,John L. 1984 Imaginary Social Worlds: A Cultural Approach. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Doi, Takeo 1973 The Anatomy of Dependence. J. Bester, trans. Tokyo: Kodansha International. 1986 The Anatomy of Self: The Individual versus Society. M. Harbison, trans. Tokyo: Kodansha International. Ewing, Katherine 1990 The Illusion of Wholeness: Culture Self and the Experience of Inconsistency. Ethos 18:251-278. Gergen, Kenneth J. 1991 The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York:Basic Books. Goffman, Erving 1959 The Presentation of Self in EverydayLife. New York:Doubleday Anchor Books. Hamaguchi, Esyun 1985 A Contextual Model of theJapanese: Toward a Methodological Innovation inJapan Studies. Journal ofJapanese Studies 11:289-322. Hannerz, Ulf 1992 Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press. Hirooka, Moriho 1986 Yutakasano paradokkusu (The paradox of affluence). Tokyo: Kodansha. Iwao, Sumiko 1993 The Japanese Woman. New York: The Free Press. Japan Times 1994 Birthrate Will Drop to 1.3 in 2011 from 1.45 ThisYear Think Tank Says. September 16: 1 Kamiya, Mieko 1980 Ikigai ni tsuite (About ikigai). Chosakushn (Collected Works of Kamiya Mieko), vol. 1. Tokyo: Misuzu ShobO. KawakitaJiro,Shigeru Kobayashi, and Kazuo Noda 1970 Ikigai no soshikiron: soshiki no naka no shudan to kojin (An organizational theory of ikigai: the group and the individual in the organization). Tokyo: Nihon Keiei Shuppankai. Kobayashi, Tsukasa 1989 'Ikigai' to wa nanika:jikojitsugen e no michi (What is 'ikigai'? The path toward self-realization). Tokyo: Nihon Hoso Shuppan Kyokai. Kondo, Dorinne K. 1990 Crafting Selves: Power Gender and Discourses of Identity in aJapanese Workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THESTUFFOFDREAMS,FADING

745

Kuper, Adam 1994 Culture Identity and the Project of a Cosmopolitan Anthropology. Man 29:537-554. Kuroi, Senji 1990 Asa no dekigoto. In Hoshi kara no ichi tstwa. Pp. 14-16. Tokyo: Kodansha. Lebra, Takie Sugiyama 1976 Japanese Patterns of Behavior. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1984 Japanese Women: Constraint and Fulfillment. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Levinson, Samuel J., with Charlotte N. Darrow, Edward B. Klein, Maria H. Levinson, and Braxton McKee 1978 The Seasons of a Man's Life. New York: Ballantine Books. Luckmann, Thomas 1967 The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society. New York: Macmillan. Markus, Hazel Rose, and Shinobu Kitayama 1991 Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition Emotion and Motivation. Psychological Review 98:224-253. Mathews Gordon 1996 What Makes Life Worth Living? How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds. Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press. Minami, Ikuhiro 1989 ChOnen dansei no seikatsu to ikikata (The ways of life of middle-aged men). In Gendaijin no raifukOsu(Contemporary lifecourse). K. Misawa, E. Ochiai, Y. Yanagihara, S. Amaki, and I. Minami, eds. Pp. 107-152. Kyoto: Mineruva Shobo. Misawa, Kenichi, and Ikuhiro Minami 1989 ROnenki no seikatsu (Life in old age). In Gendaijin no raifukosu (Contemporary lifecourse). K. Misawa,E. Ochiai, Y. Yanagihara, S. Amaki, and I. Minami eds. Pp. 187-234. Kyoto: Mineruva Shobo. Mita, Munesuke 1984 Gendai Nihon no seishin kOzO(The spiritual structure of contemporary Japan). 2nd edition. Tokyo: KobundO. Morioka, Kiyomi 1984 Ie no henbo to senzo no matsuri (Ancestor worship and the transformation of the household). Tokyo: Nihon Kitoku Kyodan Shuppankyoku. Murray,D. W. 1993 What Is the Western Concept of the Self? On Forgetting David Hume. Ethos 21:3-23. Narita, Yasuaki 1986 'KOkando ningen' o kaidoku suru (Interpreting the 'media-sensitive human being'). Tokyo: Kodansha. Nihongo daijiten (Japanese dictionary) 1989 Tokyo: Kodansha. Niwano, Nikky6 1969 Ningen no ikigai (Human ikigai). Tokyo: Kosei Shuppansha. Noda, Masaaki 1988 Ikigai shearingu: sangyo kOzOtenkanki no kinro ishiki (Ikigai sharing: the attitudes of workers in a time of structural transition in industry). Tokyo: Cho Koronsha.

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

746

ETHOS

Plath, David W. 1980 Long Engagements: Maturity in Modern Japan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rohlen, Thomas P. 1974 For Harmony and Strength: Japanese White-Collar Organization in Anthropological Perspective. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1989 Order in Japanese Society: Attachment authority and routine. Journal ofJapanese Studies 15:5-40. Rosenberger, Nancy 1992 Introduction. InJapanese Sense of Self. N. Rosenberger, ed. Pp. 1-20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenberger, Nancy R, ed. 1992 Japanese Sense of Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. SaitO,Koichi 1990 Hatarakizuki de nani ga warui (What's wrong with liking work). Tokyo: Manejimentosha. Sakurai, Tetsuo 1985 Kotoba o ushinatta wakamonotachi (Young people who have forgotten language). Tokyo: Kodansha. Schutz, Alfred 1978[1940] Phenomenology and the Social Sciences. R Williams, trans. In Phenomenology and Sociology. T. Luckmann, ed. Pp. 119-141. Middlesex England: Penguin Books. Schutz, Alfred, and Thomas Luckmann 1973 The Structures of the Life World. R Zaner and H. EngelhardtJr., trans. London: Heinemann. Sengoku, Tamotsu 1991 'Majime' no hokai: Heisei Nihon no wakamonotachi (The destruction of seriousness:Japanese youth today). Tokyo: Saimaru Shuppankai. Smith, RobertJ. 1983 Japanese Society: Tradition Self and the Social Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1991 Memory and Time in the Formation of the Not Entirely Sociocentric Self. Keynote Address Conference on the Self and the Social Order in China India andJapan, East-WestCenter Honolulu Hawaii, August 5. Spiro, Melford 1993 Is the Western Conception of the Self 'Peculiar' within the Context of the World Cultures? Ethos 21:107-153. Takayama, Hideko 1990 Japan's New Woman. Newsweek (Far East Edition).January 15: 10-15. Tanba, TetsurO 1988 Reikai seikatsu nojisso (The reality of life in the spiritual world). Tokyo: Tsuchiya ShOten. Watson, Lawrence C., and Maria-BarbaraWatson-Franke 1985 Interpreting Life Histories: An Anthropological Inquiry. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Yamazaki, Masakazu. 1987 Yawarakaikojinshugi no tanjo: shohi shakai no bigaku (The birth of soft individualism: the aesthetics of consumer society). Tokyo: ChOOKoron.

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THE STUFF OF DREAMS, FADING

747

Yanagawa Keiichi. 1977 Gendai ni okeru seishi no mondai (The contemporary problem of life and death). In Nihon ni okeru sei to shi no shisO (Japanese conceptions of life and death). T. Yoshiro and M. Ryoen, eds. Tokyo: Yuhikaku. Yoshihiro, Kyoko. 1991 Onna ga kodomo o umitagaranai wake (The reasons why woman don't want children). Tokyo: Bansei Shobo. Yoshino, Kosaku. 1992 Cultural Nationalism in ContemporaryJapan: A Sociological Enquiry. London: Routledge.

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.30 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:01:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions