The Land of Unlikeness

One of the most haunting aspects of Silence is the sense you get that Christianity meets its match in this land of “swamp.” That here we have a group of islands whose rockiness has proved inpenetrable to the truth of the cross, and the blazing sword of God’s love. Strangely enough, I just read that Lacan said the same thing about this land, but that he said it concerning psychoanalysis, that Japanese people couldn’t be psychoanalysts because of the way their writing system could be read in two completely divergent ways. That is, the on-yomi and the kun-yomi, two different ways of reading Japanese Kanji (characters imported from China–this of course isn’t even mentioning the two different syllabaries also used in everyday writing, whose doubleness perhaps images the dual readings of the kanji). In other words, you could have the very same kanji that would be pronounced completely differently depending on the mode of reading you were using. Before I knew this, but after I studied a very small amount of Japanese, a language which for English speakers is a cinch to pronounce but a bitch to read, I also droned on to my World Religion classes that the Japanese were fascinating because they could be in two places at once, they could be completely traditional and completely modern/techno/industrial/secular at the same time. In the West, I said, we felt torn between those two options, whereas the Japanese pulled it off so naturally, the way they might design a insurance building according to the ki streaming down the mountainside or start the baseball season off with a Shinto blessing. There is a certain nonchalance about everything in Japan, a confidence that anything can be Japanified, any word absorbed into the language, that they have the secret to digesting everything. Of course, this is the complaint in Silence, that Christianity has just become another variant of Japanese thought, that it was some kind of seed not mentioned in the parable of the sower, the seed that is planted but becomes genetically modified and grows into something else!

For Lacan, Catholicism (and Rome) was closely linked with psychoanalysis, and if we look at the success of Lacanian thought it is mostly in the Latin and Catholic countries, Italy, Spain, France, and all over South America. I think there have been Japanese psychoanalysts, but the question I want to ask is, what is it about Japan that causes a difficulty, whether for the religion or the analysis closely allied with it? I will just venture one answer here, which I hope others will add to: by virtue of the doubleness of the writing and speaking system, the Japanese subjectivity does not become oriented around a center (a quilting point in Lacanese, or perhaps even the phallic signifier) but always takes on two centers. Now while this might be more “honest” in a way, just like this is the truth of our solar system’s elliptic orbits whose planets actually spin around dual centers, both of them off center (Lacan liked this and said that Kepler was more valuable than Copernicus because the latter never got over the fantasy of a controlling center), but it also never establishes a certain mode of truth-seeking that demands reconciliation and repentance at a singular altar, that demands universalization of language and being at the origin and end of all things. If the Western psyche has a clearly established One, it also (per Lacan) can define the lack and crack of that One, which is where we get the sense of split subjectivity or crucified self. If one is double from the beginning (for language and being are co-terminous) the problem is not that one can’t be One, but that one can’t fathom the split.