Introduction: Japanese Cultural Psychology and Empathic Understanding: Implications for Academic and Cultural Psychology

Summary

Recent research in cultural psychology has given renewed attention to the problem of understanding Japanese behavior, experience, and development (Kitayama & Markus, 1994; Stigler, Shweder, Goodnow, Hatano, LeVine, Markus, & Miller, 1998; Shweder, & Herdt, 1990). In terms of the cultural psychology of the Japanese, the studies by Markus and Kitayama (1991) and Wierzbicka (1996) are at the forefront. Markus and Kitayama suggest, for example, that the Japanese, along with their East Asian cohorts, have a culturally distinct “construal of self,” which “insists on the fundamental relatedness of individual to each other” (1991, p. 224). Wierzbicka (1996), by contrast, suggests that the “cultural scripts” guiding Japanese social behaviors, such as “apologies,” are semantically distinct from their English counterparts. Therefore, to “apologize” has culturally distinct meanings in Japanese and in English.

In this Introduction, I shall argue that Markus and Kitayama's and Wierzbicka's approaches are steps in the right direction toward minimizing ethnocentrism in academic psychology. Both approaches, however, are too methodologically limited to capture the complexity of subjective experience in individual lives. Using hypothetical problems to elicit a restricted range of meanings of Japanese cultural norms for individuals, these three scholars do not consider the contradictory and multidimensional motives behind the interaction of culture and person.