The Japanese Brain

I often wonder if we British are more similar to Japanese people than we are different. After all, we are both relatively small island nations, both have a long history and extensive cultural ancestry and both tend to value high manners, sometimes making us appear formal or stand-offish in the presence of people we don’t know- (that is we often don’t seem willing to confidently assert our personal opinions to strangers as North Americans seem able to do!) Notwithstanding these similarities however, I have to concede that there have been times over the years when I have been confused and sometimes frustrated at what has seemed to me to be the alien and unreasonable ways of Japanese thinking. Granted, these cases have usually occurred in the arena of interpersonal relationships where I have found myself thinking, “Oh why can’t He just see reason?!” so maybe that happens between all men and women, after all we are supposed to be from different planets. But recently I read a fascinating piece of research that made me think that maybe we are more different than I realise. The article was about the Japanese brain and how it is different from our Western brains in that it processes information largely in the right hemisphere rather than, as ours does, in the left. Apparently, it developed this way due to the vowel-heavy nature of the Japanese language, as it was found that foreigners whose first language was Japanese also share this trait. So what does this mean exactly? Well, it means that Japanese process information in the hemisphere associated with feelings rather than facts, with emotions rather than reason and have a holistic rather than a linear way of thinking. This explains why aesthetics and form play an equally as important role in Japan as functionality; a feature that can be seen in the extraordinary beauty of design of simple day-to-day items such as the ceramics, kimono, the paper sliding doors, room dividers and the traditional architecture. Interestingly, the Japanese brain also processes some sounds in a different hemisphere than a non-Japanese brain. The sounds of insects, for example, are processed by Westerners in the right brain, or ‘music sphere’, together with sounds of music, machinery and noise. In contrast, however, insect sounds are processed in Japanese people’s language sphere, meaning that they hear these sounds as ‘insect voices’. Isn’t that fascinating?! This might explain why some insects are held in such high esteem by the Japanese, who traditionally have collected and enjoyed the many types of crickets, for example. In fact, in the summer I was delighted to see that the main Post Office in the middle of Fukuoka city had cricket cages on the counters so that customers could enjoy the chirping of ‘bell-ringing’ crickets! Fantastic! The Japanese brain also processes other sounds in the left side, in the language sphere- the cries of animals, the sound of the wind, waves, the rain, running water and the music of Japanese musical instruments whereas the non-Japanese brain processes these in the right side and hears them not as language but as just noises. I stopped trying to get #1 to understand my version of logic a long time ago- actually it seems to be a good policy in general I think- Who knows which side of his brain I am grappling with and besides, I have to remind myself that it’s me who has the alien thinking here.