Undermining Coexistence: Japanese Discursive Formations Related to Empathy
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Conflicts between the inseparable forces of globalisation and counter-globalisation are accelerating today amongst myriad regional cultural sets. Ongoing globalisation is characterized by the development of Advanced Information and Communication Systems (AICS). These systems often disseminate, on a global scale, information that undermines many regional cultural constructions, altering locally constructed worldviews. In the constantly conflicting and altering situations of globalisation, an enhancing of mutually respectful coexistence is needed; in order to achieve this, the development of empathy, ‘the ability to imagine oneself in another’s place and understand the other’s feelings, desires, ideas, and actions’ is crucial. To better comprehend the operations of the concept of empathy in regional cultural sets and within individual identities, conducting a study on the cultural/linguistic/psychological constructions embedded in languages/discourses to reveal the discursive formations related to empathy will be helpful. An examination of current Japanese discursive formations reveals a lack of empathy; this absence of empathy, within the culturally constructed discursive formations that govern the discourses operating within the Japanese regional identity set, undermines possibilities for coexistence with non-Japanese regional sets. The theories used in conducting the study are based upon Lacan’s notions on language and culture. According to Lacan in ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,’ language ‘with its structure, exists prior to each subject’s entry into it’ and ‘the subject, while he may appear to be the slave of language, is still more the slave of a discourse’ and that the term culture ‘may well be reduced to language.’ Though this chapter examines empathy in current Japanese discursive formations, the premise and methods are applicable to the analysis of many concepts related to multiculturalism. The first section will layout the concepts needed to discuss coexistence in the chapter, in relation to empathy. It will then analyse empathy, or the lack of, in current Japanese discursive formations; it will also discuss the cultural/linguistic/psychological structures that castrate empathy. Finally, suggestions on how to alter the structures that undermine coexistence will be made.