34, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 10-14 To the Editor Search

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EVERY human culture has space, but each culture has culture-bound use of space. This paper addresses the universal concept of inside space and outside space and the culturally specific embodiment of the concept in the Japanese use of space. Inside and outside are originally physical categories, but they can be easily subjected to metaphoric interpretation, as can other spatial concepts in human culture.

The Western view of inside is varied. Some will say outside starts with one’s skin; some will say one’s home is inside and the space surrounding it is outside. A philosophical Westerner might say that inside is one’s brain, where mind is assumed to be located, which is the Cartesian view: mind as distinct from body. This Western inside/outside dichotomy can be extended to cover the modernistic notion of Ferdinand de Saussure’s signifying (sound) and signified (meaning) or, for that matter, Noam Chomsky’s distinction between surface structure (sound) and deep structure (meaning).

The Japanese view of inside (uchi) and outside (soto) is much narrower than the Western view, primarily because there is the intriguing equation uchi = one’s house or home. An average Japanese person would say that uchi is space for interacting freely with others in an informal, friendly, or intimate relationship. If the equation uchi = one’s house-home is found nowhere else in the world and if metaphors are basic to human thought, then the uchi/soto concept must be particularly distinctive of the Japanese language and culture.

In what follows I discuss the design of a traditional Japanese house to clarify the importance of the uchi equation. I deal with some of the key cultural concepts tied closely with uchi/soto, then show that the use of the spatial notion in Japanese grammar reflects how culture and language are part of an integrated system.

The prototypical single Japanese house, regardless of size, is surrounded by walls five to nine feet tall made of bricks or more traditionally of hedges. There is always a gate through which you reach space just in front of the house. Entering the gate, you feel the first sense of uchi because you are enclosed by the walls. This space is ambiguous, however; it is still between soto and uchi. The ambiguity continues in the entrance of the house, the genkan. You feel you are inside because the genkan is under the roof, but you are not quite inside, you have yet to take off your shoes. The genkan is lower than the inner entrance by a step. You may proceed only if you are invited. After you are accepted as a visitor and have removed your shoes, you step upward into the house. You might then conclude that you are in uchi, but you are not really. It takes time before you are allowed to enter the space of the family room. Notice that in the Japanese mind, uchi and soto are not dichotomously perceived: one gradually changes into the other. Uchi space is obviously not a building but a location for close, intimate ties, often with one’s blood relations. This space is one of empathy, a psychological proximity among people that often enables them to communicate nonverbally.

Charles Quinn, in an extensive analysis of Japanese compounds and phrases that involve uchi and soto, associates these two concepts with the following qualities:

Uchi: fully bounded, indoors, nearby, enclosed, concave, dark, domestic, family, intralineal, we, casual, comfortable, informal, familiar, private, indulgent, free, concealed, secret, privileged, detailed, known, shared, mutual benefit, local, limited, controlled, specifiable, enumerable, part of larger whole, sacred, special, primary

Soto: outside an enclosure, outdoors, open, protruding, convex, extralineal, nondomestic, they, secular, profane, removed, exposed, visible, customers, well-behaved, restrained, maintaining appearances, “on the town,” peripheral, foreign, less known, less detailed, undifferentiated, uncontrolled, secondary (63–64)

Quinn finds that “ever since the earliest written texts, uchi has been used in a greater variety of contexts than (so)to” (42). This lexical predominance suggests a culture that stresses the value of empathy.

Uchi is a space of empathy and familiarity. When someone or something is in your uchi space, you can more readily achieve intimacy with the person or object, because you are able directly to see, listen, touch, smell, and taste. This observation leads to the hypothesis that Japanese culture is more sense-oriented than Western culture.

A number of Japanese cultural concepts are tied closely with uchi. These are key concepts, allowing one to explain, analyze, and predict cultural phenomena.

Amae (“Physical-Psychological Dependency”)

Takeo Doi points to amae as a key cultural concept, defining it as “to depend and presume upon another’s benevolence” (132). My definition is essentially the same as his but stipulates that this dependency is not on a soto person but on an uchi person who moreover is older than the one who depends. The uchi can be manifested in either a real home or a homelike system. The prototypical situation of amae is that of an infant in its mother’s arms. Amae is of course a universal concept, but how is its Japanese form generated? Two anthropological papers, though neither addresses amae specifically, provide evidence for its genesis. Both show that in Japan the period in which most amae is allowed is longer than in the United States, where psychological independence is a key cultural concept.

William Caudill and Helen Weinstein examine how infant care by a mother differs in Japan and the United States. They record the relationship between infant and mother in great detail, using a time-sampling procedure by which observations are made at regular intervals during a day. They find that Japanese mothers tend to lull their infants to sleep rather than talk with them; that they are with their infants three times more than American mothers, two times more if regular caretaking and sleep time are not counted; that they wait until their children are four years old before giving them solid food, whereas American mothers start weaning their infants at one month; that 60% of them breast-feed, whereas only 16% of American mothers do.

Japanese mothers keep in physical proximity to their infants as long as they can; as a result, a Japanese child is likely to develop a stronger psychological-physical dependency on its mother than an American child. This proximity, which fosters development of Japanese amae, is essentially nonverbal.

Caudill and David Plath observed the cosleeping patterns in 323 Japanese households in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Matsumoto (in Nagano Prefecture). They found that in the household of a young couple with an infant of three to four months, 86% would cosleep regardless of the number of rooms for sleeping; that even when a child is thirteen and the husband and the wife are forty-five and forty, respectively, the rate of cosleeping is 62%; that the rate is lowest (20%) when the child is between sixteen and twenty-six, a period during which the suicide rate happens to be the highest.

Japanese tend to sleep in a group. Here again, nonverbal physical proximity creates amae.

Haji (“Sense of Shame”)

Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a classical work on Japanese culture, classifies it as a culture not of guilt, as in the West, but of shame (haji). Any human being has a sense of shame, so haji isn’t peculiar to Japanese culture. According to Benedict, a culture of shame operates on standards of morality that are not absolute but relative to a given situation (223). In other words, Japanese ethics is situational. Haji arises when you violate your community’s ethical rules and are caught in the act; your personal community, the people you deal with day by day, called seken, is situated between uchi and soto. Imagine concentric circles. At the center is uchi as self, surrounded by uchi as family members, in turn surrounded by friends, including fellow employees or fellow students, in turn surrounded by your local community before you go out into soto. Once free from the eyes of seken, you may violate societal rules with impunity. As a Japanese proverb says, “When you are on a trip, you can throw away haji.” For a Japanese, seken is a situational God, whereas in the Judeo-Christian tradition God knows no spatial or temporal limitations.

Hon’ne (“True Feelings and Intentions”) versus Tatemae (“Stated Reasons”)

Hon’ne, one’s true feelings and intentions, can hardly be expressed in soto, especially in the formal situation of talking with one’s superior. In soto, Japanese tend to assume a public persona, expressing their true feelings only when they come home. Tatemae may sound like hypocrisy to a Westerner, but for a Japanese it is a proper social strategy to talk and behave according to established protocols and to avoid self-assertion in soto. It should be pointed out, however, that Japanese society is beginning to change from tatemae-oriented to hon’ne-oriented even in soto space.

Ninjoo (“Humane Feeling”) versus Giri (“Social Obligation”)

Ninjoo is similar to hon’ne in that both refer to a person’s true feelings, but ninjoo is in opposition not with tatemae but with giri, social obligation. It is uchi-oriented, whereas giri, intricately codified but unwritten, is a product of seken. Giri specifies an array of behaviors that one should observe to maintain good relations with soto people. Ninjoo and tatemae, however, are not mutually exclusive. If you feel genuinely grateful to your boss (a manifestation of ninjoo), you may give a gift during the socially instituted gift-giving seasons (i.e., midyear and end of the year), satisfying that emotion. Giri, though, must be observed even when ninjoo is absent. Conflicts thus emerge between the two, leaving Japanese mentally and spatially confused.

Miren (“Lingering Attachment to a Person or Thing of the Near Past”)

Miren indicates a lingering attachment to a person or thing of the near past. Typical miren behavior manifests itself universally in the situation where young lovers must part but feel unable to. Miren is centripetal, guaranteeing that the person about to go to soto will return to uchi. In Japan, social departures take long to complete, especially the ritual of seeing off a guest from one’s home. Just as there are at least three stages of entering uchi as a guest, there are at least three stages when leaving it. At each stage, thank-yous and goodbyes are said: in the room where the socializing took place; at the genkan, where the guest puts footwear back on; as the guest goes through the outer gate; and perhaps also at the car, or at the nearest train station or bus stop. Miren as a psychological vector is not limited to parting. The Japanese guest will thank the host or benefactor again after the event, the next time they meet. The guest thereby brings back a thing of soto (i.e., the past) to uchi (the present).

Miren is a physical-psychological act of looking back. In the Judeo-Christian tradition it can carry a negative implication, as demonstrated by the story of Lot’s wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back at the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is no wonder that in the brave new world of the United States, pioneering, the antithesis of miren and embodied by the successful moon landing in 1969, is one of the most important cultural key words. In Japan, miren manifests itself in many ways. Nobody has statistics on this, but there is probably more personal diary keeping per capita in Japan than in any other country. Japanese schoolchildren are still made to keep a diary during their summer holidays. The first Japanese modern novels derive from Ki no Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary (c. 936). One of the nonliterary reasons that a literature of diaries ensued, I would argue, is that a diary facilitates remembrance of the past and so satisfies miren. The short poetry of haiku and that of the more traditional tanka provide similar satisfaction by being useful records of a poet’s experience of a moment.

Japanese grammar uses the spatial notion of uchi/soto to integrate culture and language into one system. Since most readers of the ADFL Bulletin do not understand the Japanese language, in the examples below I use as many English words as possible while preserving the original Japanese word order. The grammatical categories I deal with here are these four: donative verbs, receiving verbs, expressions of intention, and expressions of politeness.

Donative Verbs

Japanese gift exchange, almost institutionalized, is controlled to a large extent by the Japanese sense of giri. Who gives what to whom is a complex matter. This complexity is reflected in the use of donative verbs and receiving verbs. Unlike the Indo-European languages, where there is only one basic donative verb (in English, give), Japanese has two basic donative verbs, yaru and kureru. These verbs can be used in the following example:

(1a)

John wa	Mary ni	chocolate o	yatta
subject	indirect object	directo object	verb

(John gave Mary a chocolate.)

(1b)

(John gave Mary a chocolate.)

The translations don’t convey the difference between the two sentences. Consider the next example:

(2a)

(John gave a chocolate to a stranger.)

(2b)

(John gave a chocolate to my little brother.)

[* = ungrammatical]

The receivers now are different. In 2a it is a stranger from the viewpoint of both the speaker and the subject of the sentence, John. The stranger is by definition a soto person. In 2b the receiver is the speaker’s little brother and therefore from the speaker’s perspective an uchi person. If the receiver is the speaker’s soto person, the donative verb must be yaru; if the speaker’s uchi person, kureru. Whether a person is perceived as uchi or soto depends to a large degree on the current social relationship between speaker and receiver. If a woman divorces her husband because he had an affair with another woman, he is no longer uchi.

(3)

(That woman gave money to my divorced husband.)

Example 3 suggests to us that the notion of uchi person versus soto person is rather fluid, because the grammatical category is based on the social relationship between speaker and receiver at the time of the utterance. The same person may be uchi or soto depending on the situation. “My divorced husband” is a soto person, but in example 4 he is referred to as “my husband” and is an uchi person:

(4)

Ryooshin wa	otto ni	whiskey o	kureta/*yatta
subject	indirect object	direct object	verb
my parents	my husband	whiskey	gave

(My parents gave my husband whiskey.)

Let us now put the notions of uchi person and soto person in grammatical terms. In sharp contrast to the Japanese grammatical notion of person, person in Indo-European languages is anything but fluid. The first person (the speaker) is always the first person, the second person (the listener) always the second, and the third person (neither speaker nor listener) is always the third, regardless of the linguistic or social contexts in which they are used. And in the Indo-European languages there are elaborate agreement rules dependent on person.

The uchi/soto distinction is crucial in three other categories of Japanese grammar.

Receiving Verbs

The two sentences of example 1 can be rephrased in both Japanese and English by the use of a receiving verb. The Japanese receiving verb is morau.

(5)

(Mary got a chocolate from John.)

Notice that the giver is marked by the postposition ni or kara. If the social context is not specified, you can use either, but if it is given, you can use only one.

(6a)

(I received a fellowship from the Japan Foundation.)

(6b)

(He received a Nobel Prize from the Nobel Committee.)

The postposition ni nonmetaphorically means spatial involvement; the postposition kara nonmetaphorically means spatial detachment. These spatial meanings acquire metaphoric meanings: an empathetic sense for ni, a nonempathetic one for kara (Makino and Tsutsui). In other words, the giver in both sentences in example 6 is perceived as a soto person with whom the speaker can hardly empathize.

Consider the following sentences:

(7a)

(I received a book from my professor.)

(7b)

(I received a diamond necklace from my boyfriend.)
[?? = very marginal]

The receiver (here, the speaker) uses kara when he or she feels psychological distance from the giver (7a) and ni when the speaker feels psychological closeness to the giver (7b). When the giver’s status is higher than the speaker’s, as in 7a, the receiving verb must change to the honorific form itadaku. Note that choice of a polite verb requires the nonempathetic postposition kara.

Expressions of Intention

One’s intention is expressed by a verblike adjective tsumori da:

(8a)

(I intend to join the MLA.)

(8b)

(My older brother intends to join the MLA.)

(8c)

(Do you intend to join the MLA?)

So far there is no difference between English and Japanese, but here again uchi/soto plays an important role in determining the grammar of the sentence. When the speaker talks about an uchi person’s intention, any sentence of intention is grammatical, but the speaker cannot directly talk about a soto person’s intention:

(9a)

(Prime Minister Koizumi intends to make an economic reform.)

(9b)

(It appears that Prime Minister Koizumi intends to make an economic reform.)

One’s intention is situated in the innermost space of the psyche, so the speaker’s uchi person cannot enter that psyche unless the speaker is the one with the intention. And it is difficult to empathize with a person who is of higher rank than the speaker. The higher the rank, the greater the difficulty.

Expressions of Politeness

With receiving verbs and expressions of intention, the psychological distance between speaker and receiver or person with an intention is a crucial factor in the choice of a grammatical form. With expressions of politeness, psychological distance becomes even more important. Japanese is a language highly sensitive to speech levels. Its speakers must take into account the differences in social position or rank between themselves and others. Even within a family, the ultimate space of uchi, there is a clear-cut line drawn not only between children and parents but also between younger children and older children. The younger can address older only with assigned kinship terms; the older can address the younger only with their first names. Older children tend to use their kinship terms when they address themselves. In other words, even within uchi there are soto persons and the necessity of using honorific expressions. According to Takie Sugiyama Lebra, there is a four-way situational combination of uchi/soto and omote/ura (“public space / private space”) (ch. 7). The soto/omote combination is known for its ritual behaviors among people of different ages and ranks. It is also interesting that with Japanese expressions of politeness you cannot be polite to someone about whom you have no firsthand knowledge, no matter how high that person is in status. In other words, you can be polite to a soto person, but not to a remote soto person.

For more instances of the importance of uchi/soto in Japanese grammar, I refer the interested reader to my essay “Uchi and Soto as Cultural and Linguistic Metaphors.”

Any human culture is a culture of space, because culture needs space in which to manifest itself. But the space of a culture, that is, the way space is defined and nurtured in it, is intriguingly diverse.

Works Cited

Benedict, Ruth. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston: Houghton, 1946.

Caudill, William, and David W. Plath. “Who Sleeps by Whom? Parent–Child Involvement in Urban Japanese Families.” Psychiatry 29 (1966): 344–66. Lebra and Lebra 247–79.

Caudill, William, and Helen Weinstein. “Maternal Care and Infant Behavior in Japan and America.” Psychiatry 32 (1946): 12–43. Lebra and Lebra 201–46.

Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: MIT P, 1965.

Doi, Takeo. “‘Amae’: A Key Concept for Understanding Japanese Personality Structure.” Japanese Culture: Its Development and Characteristics. Ed. R. Smith and R. Beadsley. Chicago: Aldine, 1962. 132–39.

Lebra, Takie Sugiyama. Japanese Patterns of Behavior. Honolulu: UP of Hawai‘i, 1976.

Lebra, Takie Sugiyama, and William P. Lebra, eds. Japanese Culture and Behavior: Selected Readings. Honolulu: UP of Hawai‘i, 1974.

Makino, Seiichi. “Uchi and Soto as Cultural and Linguistic Metaphors.” Exploring Japaneseness on Japanese Enactments of Culture and Consciousness. Ed. Ray T. Donahue. Westport: Ablex, 2002. 29–64.

Makino, Seiichi, and Michio Tsutsui. A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. Tokyo: Japan Times, 1986.

Quinn, Charles, Jr. “The Terms UCHI and SOTO as Windows on World.” Situated Meaning––Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society, and Language. Ed. Jane M. Bachnik and Quinn. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. 38–72.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique général. Paris: Payot, 1916.

Tsurayuki, Ki no. Tosa Nikki (The Tosa Diary). Trans. G. W. Sargent. 16 Jan. 2003 http://www.baobab.or.jp/~stranger/kochi/tosaniki.htm.

© 2003 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.

ADFL Bulletin 34, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 10-14

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