Nihonjinron and nihongo.. same thing after all?

[omae mona]

A Wall Street Journal article discusses some new research (which may just be an update of old research), claiming language profoundly influences culture. Probably not a stunning claim, but it does go in the face of other theories that seem to be more in vogue recently. Of course Japan appears as an example several times.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868.html
Lost in Translation
New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish
..
In addition to space and time, languages also shape how we understand causality. For example, English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. English speakers tend to say things like "John broke the vase" even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would be more likely to say "the vase broke itself." Such differences between languages have profound consequences for how their speakers understand events, construct notions of causality and agency, what they remember as eyewitnesses and how much they blame and punish others.

In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford, speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone got a surprise memory test: For each event, can you remember who did it? She discovered a striking cross-linguistic difference in eyewitness memory. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of accidental events as well as did English speakers. Mind you, they remembered the agents of intentional events (for which their language would mention the agent) just fine. But for accidental events, when one wouldn't normally mention the agent in Spanish or Japanese, they didn't encode or remember the agent as well.
..

[Taro Toporific]

I loooove the "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis" ---Not once in 20 years working at Hitachi could a Japanese engineer quickly answer who/what did the "executing" in the standard computer manual sentence, "The [x-something] was executed."

[Marked Trail]

The author and Stanford researcher who wrote the Wall Street Journal story, Lera Boroditsky, is a famous "burner"---Here's her Burning Man costume and gear....



http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/banana/

[Yokohammer]

Fascinating stuff, but ...

Based on my own experience with Japanese and English and the attendant cultures (a little over 40 years) I've always understood that language has a huge formative effect on culture, and vice-versa. Sort of a chicken-and-egg type thing. It's especially easy to see with Japanese and English because of the large, obvious linguistic and cultural differences involved.

Seems like old news to me, as Omae Mona suggests.

[6810]

I wonder if the author is bi-/multi- lingual, or if she speaks any of the languages she is researching.

Because...

(a) If not, it just smacks of exoticisation of linguistic others.
(b) Her analysis of English seems rather (obviously) biased toward English as a norm (subject to further investigation) and she seems more interested in how other languages differ from English than they do each other.
(c) She is flat wrong about the vase breaking itself in Japanese. Intransitive verbs like "kowareta" imply an agent/actor/doer of the action. This "person" or force (an earthquake?) is understood/specified/implied from the context in which the language is used. Jay Rubin's Making Sense of Japanese does a really good job of explaining this point.

[Mock Cockpit]

Isn't this basic Anthropology 101? I always understood that language is culture, 14 years in Japan has only reinforced that view. What were some of the other theories that were "in vogue"?

[wuchan]

Isn't this basic Anthropology 101? I always understood that language is culture, 14 years in Japan has only reinforced that view. What were some of the other theories that were "in vogue"?

Japanese people believe blood type and breeding are responsible for their superior view of the world.

[Yokohammer]

Japanese people believe blood type and breeding are responsible for their superior view of the world.

I've heard that theory!

They say it's an inscrutable "je ne sais quoi" that can only be imparted through direct blood lineage plus being conceived and born in the pure land of Amaterasu-omikami. Something that barbarians, with their unclean minds and too-short intestines, can never even begin to comprehend.

Although after experiencing the reality first-hand for around four decades I'm inclined to think it's more entertainment than theory. I know it gives me a good laugh from time to time.