Japan: The Word for Being Allowed to Lean

Takeo Doi was a psychiatrist who trained partly in the United States and returned to Japan with a question about something his American colleagues had no word for.

His patients described, and he recognised in ordinary Japanese life, a specific comfort: the confidence that you may presume on somebody's goodwill without asking for permission. The word is amae. It is the expectation of being indulged, the assurance that an imposition will be received as closeness rather than as a demand. His book, published in 1971 and translated as The Anatomy of Dependence, built an entire account of Japanese social life on it.

Japanese also separates two words that English merges. Koi is longing and infatuation, directed at somebody you do not yet have. Ai is the settled deeper love that survives having them, and covers long marriage and family. English uses one word across that entire change of state and then finds the word imprecise, which is the complaint of the first book of this course arriving in a second language.

Now the anecdote, because it is repeated constantly and it is not sound.

The story goes that Natsume Soseki, teaching English, told his students that a Japanese person would never say I love you, and that the correct translation was the moon is beautiful, isn't it. It is a lovely story. Examination of the sources suggests it is a hybrid, welding a real observation attributed to Soseki about the awkwardness of the phrase onto a separate anecdote about the moon. It is repeated with a confidence the evidence does not carry, and it belongs in this course as a caution rather than as a fact.

That caution generalises, and it is why this book is organised the way it is.

Claims about untranslatable words travel extremely well because they flatter both parties: they make one culture seem deep and make the listener seem worldly for knowing about it. They also degrade in transit exactly as scientific findings do, and for the same reason, which is that the interesting version has qualifications in it.

So take Doi's thesis and apply the standard criticism, which is the one made of every national psychology theory. It takes something that exists everywhere and presents it as local. English speakers presume on their friends continuously. Every language has ways of saying that you may lean on somebody. If amae is universal, then a book explaining Japan by reference to it is explaining nothing.

The defensible version is narrower and considerably more interesting.

It is not that amae occurs only in Japan. It is that having a respectable, ordinary, unembarrassed noun for it changes what can be said out loud, and what can be asked for. In English the nearest available words are neediness, clinginess and imposition, all of which are faults. A culture in which the same behaviour has a neutral or warm name will handle it differently, not because the feeling differs but because the vocabulary assigns it a different moral position before anybody has spoken.

That is a claim about language shaping discourse rather than experience, it is modest, and it is probably true. It is also exactly what the first book of this course argued about Greek, arriving from the other direction.