The 'Ura of the Ura' of Japanese Mind

For many the Japanese psyche has been an enigma. Descriptions of the inscrutable Japanese have been used ever since the West came in contact. Outwardly there is little sign of emotion on the Japanese face, but inwardly and secretly they are a highly emotional people.

One of the first Westerners to live in Japan, a Jesuit called Joao Rodrigues, seems to have understood the Japanese mask uncannily well. Rodrigues arrived in 1576. The Japanese have three hearts, Rodrigues surmised:

"a false one in their mouths for all the world to see, another within their breasts only for their friends, and third in the depths of their hearts, reserved for themselves alone and never manifested to anyone."

To wear a mask among others: Is there a better measure of how thoroughly the individual is effaced, of how well the Japanese personality learned to peak out through the reed screen of a purposely blank expression that hides the true face from public view? These habits of mind and physiology have been so completely internalized that Japanese even today have difficulty discussing their own ways of thinking or feeling. But a nation of effaced personalities is different from one which individual personalities somehow, miraculously do not exist. It was not individuality that was missing so much as public individuality, the open manifestation of the self, the self unmasked within the group. 

Early in 1867 everything went strangely quiet. Popular unrest more or less ceased. But in the autumn Japan broke out in ecstatic revelry – a combination of rioting, religious hysteria, sake-powered partying, and spontaneous, orgiastic street dancing. House were hung with brightly colored rice cakes, straw, and flowers. Despite all the pent-up anger of late Edo, there was no violence. A British diplomat traveling in Osaka remarked on the absence of fear or animosity. Everywhere the revellers repeated the same incantatory chant: Ee ja nai ka! This elusive term has numerous inexact translations. Its nearest literal meaning is “Isn’t it good?” or “Why not? It’s all right!” A scholar recently described it as falling somewhere among “Right on! Go for it,” “What the hell,” and “No more bullshit!”

Ee ja nai ka! The subtext of every shout was an open declaration of liberation, a jack-in-the-box release of pent up desire. This alone would give ee ja nai ka a place in Japan’s hidden history, but there is more. What does it mean when people of no great sophistication take to cross-dressing, or to trampling across tatami in muddy shoes, or, in abject poverty, to throwing money away? One cannot be satisfied with the notion that a commoner celebrating sex and gluttony in late Edo Japan saw no farther than the next sake barrel and a free-spirited companion. Ee ja nai ka was a shout toward the heavens, a rejection of reigning order. It was as if people had seen through the roof of the great house of Tokugawa to glimpse an immensity of alternatives in the open sky beyond. Above all, it was an act of public individuality. 

Japanese is rich in its descriptions of this essential distinction. There are words denoting what is outside and inside, public and private, the spoken and authentic versions of the truth. One pair of these terms will be useful. Omote and ura mean the explicit and the implicit, the outer and the inner, the front and the back, or, more broadly, the revealed and the hidden. In old Japanese they meant "face" and "mind." Urameshii means to feel bitter, urayamuto feel envious, and urami is a grudge. None of these is an acceptable thing to reveal in Japan, where the group’s primary purpose is to preserve harmony and the appearance of sameness. So feelings of envy and bitterness are by definition ura, hidden. 

Common to the various terms for inside and outside are the values of belonging versus exclusion, revelation versus concealment. What is public has always been the higher social value in Japan. And what is public is associated with order and the group, while what is private is individual and therefore secretive, selfish, and corrupting. One may belong to a group, and that group to a larger group, but the price of belonging is the subjugation of the individual to the group, the private to the public, the authentic to the represented.

It is true that the Japanese reserve a special place for what is concealed. They are dedicated diarists for the simple reason that so much of life must be hidden. One of Japan's aesthetic traditions, famously displayed in a temple garden in Kyoto, is called mie gakure, the seen and unseen. In the garden, fifteen stones protrude from a sea of combed gravel. But from no vantage point are all of the stones visible; wherever you stand, one is always hidden. 

Mie gakure, applied to people, also means "to appear and disappear," or "to hide oneself." And there is nothing the Japanese are more accustomed to hiding than themselves, their inner beings. True heart, called kokoro, and ninjo, human feelings, are rarely manifest but all the more precious for it. Emotions are unsullied and innocent, which is why, when the Japanese expose them, they appear childishly sentimental -- as, for example, when they are drunk, or singing in a karaoke bar. Emotions are part of the "ura of the ura," the inside of the inside, and it is because they are withheld that each Japanese lives with a certain sense of crisis in his relations with the outer world.

"What is concealed is the flower," wrote Ze-ami, the fourteenth-century Noh master. "What is not concealed cannot be the flower." The thought survives in many contexts and is not irrelevant in this one. It is cited by the psychiatrist Takeo Doi in his explorations of the Japanese personality. Doi was a deeply traditional man. He believed that to live amid elaborate concealments was a normal, healthy thing. And he saw no tension between the security of belonging, which is undeniable among the Japanese, and the individual desire to break free of the group -- which, though traditionally unacknowledged, is also undeniable.

"The ideal condition of the mind, the condition from which mental health derives," Doi wrote in 1985, "is one in which we can feel comfortable having secrets."