Dogen keeps talking about shinjin, inevitably translated as “body and mind”. The fascicle of Shōbō Genzō named Shinjin Gakudō (身心学é?“) is translated by Tanahashi as Body-and-Mind Study of the Way . The word also forms a part of Dogen’s trademark phrase shinjin datsuraku, of course, which in an earlier post I analyzed as Dogen telling us we should “drop out of the body/mind game”.

Today let’s delve more deeply into shinjin. The first character is 身, pronounced shin in Japanese; it’s also used to write the native Japanese word mi. Mi is a great example of how Japanese assigns single words to broad swaths of meaning. In English, we break things up right away into little pieces, assigning a separate word to each; in Japanese, they group things into big catch-all lexical categories, then let the context do the disambiguation. If necessary, they’ll narrow down the meaning by tacking on words (or, in some cases, by choosing one out of several alternative Chinese characters to write the word).

The broad category that mi covers is primary physical content. There is a nuance of substantiality, as well as of centrality. There is also a connotation of an underlying process, probably intentful, which has given rise to the content. Thus, mi is used for “fruit”. In other words, behind every mi is a kind of spirit or essence—in the case of the fruit, the tree that bore it. Of course, mi is also commonly used to refer to the human body.

We thus see how the dichotomy between form and essence is embodied in the Japanese language, with mi corresponding to form.

What then is essence? That’s kokoro, the native Japanese word written using the shin (心) character. To find out about kokoro, let’s ask 100 Japanese to point to their kokoro, and watch as every single one points to their chest. We hear couples pledging love from their kokoro, or politicians apologizing for scandals from their kokoro. A nationalist might refer to the kokoro of Japan. No question about it: this kokoro maps very closely to the English “heart” or “soul”.

So why do Dogen translators always render this as mind? Applying the “point to it” test, we find English-speakers point to their head when asked to indicate where their mind is. Whatever mind is, it’s connected to the brain somehow, and involves cognition, mentation, and intention—not the feeling we associate with the heart. Which leaves us with the very simple conclusion that translating shinjin as “body/mind” is wrong.

So Western students of Dogen, struggling fruitlessly to “cast off body and mind” as they believe the master instructed, have been betrayed not only by an incorrect syntactical analysis of the phrase, as I have pointed out earlier, but also by an egregious lexical mixup in translating the individual words and characters that form the most important half of the phrase shinjin datsuraku, the mere hearing of which is said to have nudged Dogen into enlightenment. Rather than “body and mind”, it must be “body and soul”.

Sitting on their cushions, Western practitioners can somehow imagine what it means to cast off body and mind, or even to cast off the body/mind dichotomy. But what on earth does it mean to cast off body and soul, or the body/soul dichotomy? The utter strangeness of this concept is what probably prevented translators from getting it right. They translated kokoro as mind because they themselves simply weren’t capable of imagining how you could cast off your soul.

The key is to remember that kokoro means essence. Mi means the physical expression of that essence. Thus, the two characters forming the compound shinjin refer to the essence and its expression. But in the context of shinjin datsuraku, it’s clear that shinjin cannot mean “essence and expression”—how could one possible cast that off?—but rather the dichotomy between the two. That is what Dogen is counseling us to cast off. He’s teaching us, in one memorable four-character phrase, not to segment the world into ideas vs. objects, concepts vs. physical reality, the ideal vs. the concrete.

Of course, the characters in shinjin, in addition to having the general meaning of essence and expression, do possess strong associations with the human body and spirit, yielding an additional layer of guidance: we should apply this insight to our own views of ourselves.

My new translation for shinjin datsuraku is thus: dropping out of the body/soul game.

Calligraphy by K. Kuwahara.

Bread is central to our Western civilization, so much so that it’s a common metaphor for spiritual nutrition. The starving Israelites wandering in the desert survived on manna from heaven. Jesus multiplied the loaves to feed the multitudes.

So it’s rather surprising to learn that bread was not first baked in Japan until 1842. Egawa Tarozaemon, a 19th century Japanese Renaissance man, was the man responsible, and is thus known as “Panso”: the Father of Bread. He felt bread would be the ideal food for the “farmer militia” he came up with the idea of training in readiness for attacks from foreign ships, although the bakufu never adopted his plan.

Egawa not only introduced bread into Japan, but was also responsible for bringing in landfill technology for creating harbor islands. He did the initial work that led to the development of Odaiba, a huge man-made island in the middle of Tokyo Bay, now packed with leisure and business facilities. He also built some of the earliest cannons in Japan, which required construction of a pig-iron furnace, still a landmark in the area. He dabbled in painting too: the drawing to the left is his self-portrait.

Egawa was a hereditary local governor in Nirayama (map), a part of modern-day Shizuoka Prefecture. His ancestral house, which still stands, is well worth a visit. Nearby, you can purchase modern-day versions of the bread he made 150 years ago; it’s dry, almost cracker-like.

Additional information in Japanese (Wikipedia) and English.

Foreign languages offer interesting, useful words, like gambari, with nuances and shades we sometimes cannot find in our own language, and it is not surprising that we end up borrowing them. Gambari has not entered English yet, but it should and probably will.

William Safire, our friendly NYT columnist whose ignorance of multilingual computing we pointed out in a recent post, recently took up this topic in his weekly column in the New York Times Magazine.

Introducing a Japanese example, he starts off with an astonishing assertion:

Many foreign languages are difficult for the Japanese to learn because their language is written vertically.

Now, I have heard many theories as to why Japanese should be so poor at learning foreign languages, but this one is brand new! For one thing, it’s based on a false assumption, that Japanese is written vertically. In fact, vertical Japanese is found only in novels, a few literary magazines, school textbooks, and station nameplates hanging vertically on pillars in train stations.

It’s true that Japanese was originally written vertically, as was Chinese of course, and I’ve been unable to find any information on why this might have been the case. What is known is that horizontal writing first appeared around the beginning of the Meiji period, and became widespread (in left-to-right form) after the war. The most common theory is that this is another example of the well-known Japanese inferiority complex vis-a-vis the West. Psychologists have found no evidence that either horizontal or vertical writing is superior from the cognitive standpoint.

Off topic, but there may be cognitive differences between left-to-right and right-to-left writing. One researcher points out that since most humans are right-handed, left-to-right is a more natural direction, but in that case, why were the first written languages apparently right-to-left? One possibility is that writing was originally localized in the right hemisphere of the brain, and the shift to left-to-right writing (around the time of Greeks) coincided with a shift in hemispheric dominance for the literacy task (which is a huge topic in itself).

This would be consistent with the timing of the emergence of Chinese characters and the fact that the vertical columns in which they were written also went from right to left. Of course, writing with a brush instead of a quill eliminated some of the logistical problems with right-to-left writing, like dragging your sleeve through the ink you just put down on the paper.

Returning to our friend William Safire, he seems to be getting more and confused as time goes on. The example he trots out for a Japanese word describing a concept not in English is:

They have come up with the phrase yoko (‘’horizontal’‘) meshi (‘’boiled rice’‘), meaning ‘’a meal eaten sideways.’’ Yoko meshi evokes the stress that comes from trying to make oneself understood in a foreign language.

Unfortunately, neither myself nor any native Japanese informant I consulted has ever heard of this word. It gets only 51 Google hits. From the references on the web, the tiny number of Japanese who have used this term do not themselves seem to agree on its meaning, and none of them think it means Safire’s “stress coming from trying to speak a foreign language”. The dominant nuance is of trying to talk with foreigners while eating, while another meaning is apparently simply “Western food”.

Where did you come up with this word anyway, Bill?

Gambari is one of those uniquely Japanese-flavored words you’ll never be able to translate into English for the simple reason that the concept—an effort which is sustained, slightly stubborn, and perhaps just marginally excessive—doesn’t really exist in our culture. Gambari evokes images of a race—not a dash, but a marathon. Gambari assumes that the probability of winning is somewhat low—an underdog flavor—but that there is realistic hope of doing so if all goes well, although that is not the overriding goal, gambari being its own reward. Gambari has a payoff which is often far down the road, a road on which lurk any number of obstacles, large and small.

Their appreciation of gambari is why Japanese love marathons of all sorts, including the “Hakone Ekiden” ultramarathon run by teams of college boys every New Year’s, and Olympic marathon champions like Yuko Arimori who won silver in Barcelona in 1992, her tiny figure the very picture of gambari as she huffed and puffed across the finish line. On the economic front, the rebuilding of the Japanese economy in the ‘50s and ‘60s was one of the premier gambaris of all time.

Now a Japanese government poll (see graph) reveals that more than half of all Japanese believe that gambari is what society should reward people for—more than accomplishment, and much, much more than seniority. 53.2% of all respondents thought people’s status and compensation should be based on their level of effort (and this was up from the 51.1% the previous year), while only 34.2% thought accomplishment should be the determinant (down from 34.7%). Meanwhile, anyone who believes Japan still functions under the seniority system needs to wake up: only 1.8% of respondents said age is what should govern status and pay, and a mere 7.2% thought it still did in actuality. Effort beat out accomplishment as the preferred driver for societal rewards in every demographic except for men in their 20s.

Western management whizzes ready to take over Japan, beware. It’s not going to work to just toss cash bonuses at your workers to get them hit your favorite new metrics. Underneath the Japanese appreciation of gambari is a realization, one that lurks hidden even within the souls of Westerners, that we are not in complete control of our destinies. Calling this a form of Buddhist-inspired fatalism doesn’t change the fact that actually it’s true.

Put a different way, when as managers we pay for accomplishment, we can’t be sure what really led to the performance we’re paying for. Was it truly superior execution, or was it favorable conditions, a target which was set wrong, a brilliant strategy set by higher-ups, accomplishments of others on the team, or just chance? And we ignore at our peril the corrosive societal effect from seeing some people rewarded unfairly, to an absurd extent in some cases. There is even an internal negative effect on (most of) the people getting the rewards as they discern the arbitrary nature of the booty they are collecting.

There is doubtless a connection between the Japan’s Buddhist heritage and its preoccupation with gambari. The quintessential Buddhist activity of meditation fits the model of gambari perfectly. And gambari’s emphasis on doing your best and then letting what may happen do so, certainly reflects the Buddhist model of interrelatedness and interdependence as well.

These days fMRI is used to figure out what parts of your brain light up when doing everything from meditating to taking a crap, so why not take a peek at the neurophysiology of reading Chinese characters? That’s what a group of Taiwanese researchers did in this study (warning, long, boring PDF). Strapped into the big fMRI machine, the hapless subjects peered through a mirror at pairs of huge Chinese characters projected at their feet, attempting to determine if they were homophones, a task requiring the so-called orthography-to-phonology mapping, or identical shapes, a purely geometric task. This paper comes complete with those de rigeur pictures of brains with their activated red and orange areas (the one here showing people at work on the homophone task).

The only problem is, I can’t figure out what their conclusions were:

While the left occipitotemporal region, left dorsal processing stream, and right middle frontal gyrus constitute a network for orthogrpahic processing, the regions of the left premotor gyrus, left middle/inferior frontal gyrus, medial frontal cortex, and the left temporopariental region work in concert for phonological processing of Chinese…The engagement of sets of regions for different levels of Chinese orthographic and phonological processing is consistent with the notion of distributed parallel processing. Our knowledge of characters arises from concurrent interaction between orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing.

Well, OK.

As an aside, I’m fascinated by this excerpt from the paper:

Engagement of the left post-central gyrus, medial superior frontal gyrus (SMA, spatially extended to cingulate cortex), thalamus, and cerebellum was mostly due to subjects’ voluntary movement of right index and middle fingers in response to the tasks.

Now tell me, what were those folks doing wiggling their fingers in that big old fMRI machine?

Overall, this is an intruiging topic, but I am dismayed by the scientific level of this paper. Whatever happened to the good old scientific method stuff—having a hypothesis, making predictions, and designing experiments to validate them?

Yakult defines their corporate mission uniquely: they want to solve all your intestinal needs. They really, really care about your intestines.

Back in 1935 their founder Dr. Minoru Shirota invented the lactobacillus in the distinctive fermented milk drink inside those ubiquitous little white plastic bottles you see everywhere in Japan. The whitish liquid scoots past your stomach’s defenses to head straight for the intestines where it can bestow its life-enhancing powers, which include stimulating the intestines, promoting bowel movements, and preventing the growth of unhealthy bacteria down there and the nasty intestinal putrefaction which can result.

The company raises Shirota’s ideas to the level of a pseudo-religion (“Shirota-ism”), and identifies as one of its defining values the notion that a healthy intestinal tract leads to a long life.

Where else can a focus on the gut take you as a business? Drugs, for one thing. Japan has one of the highest rates of stomach and intestinal cancer in the world, believed to stem from all the salted pickles and fish the people eat. Although Yakult’s eponymous drink itself has been shown to be effective in preventing cancer, Yakult also has an active pharmaceutical business. It already has the stomach cancer fighter “Campto” on the market, and just got approval for Oxaliplatin, part of a drug cocktail to treat colorectal cancer.

A bit further afield, under the rubric of “what’s good for your intestine might be good for your skin as well”, Yakult is bringing its expertise in biochemistry to the cosmetics business. The inspiration for this business, it is said, arose from the remarkably lustrous skin tone of the women whose job it was to wash Yakult bottles for re-use (way back when, before they went to the current plastic bottles).

Yakult is also researching mozuku, a particularly repulsive slimy type of seaweed. Turns out, the chemical that makes it slimy also prevents stomach ulcers.

The company still has its armies of “Yakult lady” salespeople, bringing intestinal health directly to your doorstep (although they’re now equipped with PDAs).

And like any other self-respecting Japanese company, Yakult has its own baseball team, the Yakult Swallows, although I wasn’t able to figure out the intestinal connection here.

In this day and age of ever greater specialization and segmentation, defining your business in terms of body parts may become a major trend. What will be next?

Every Westerner exposed to Kanjis immediately senses their topological nature. But this inherent aspect of Kanjis is still not reflected in any fontographical computing model. Bob has now put on-line his unique, if dated, survey of research into models of Kanji topology (PDF, 612K).

I’m extremely pleased to announce the on-line availability of my important proposal for a major reform of Japanese orthography: A New Kana (PDF, 646K).

Based on a sophisticated statistical analysis of the pronunciation profile of Sino-Japanese compounds, this innovative proposal promises to dramatically simplify the Japanese writing system while preserving its spirit and uniqueness.

I’ve often thought over the years of coming up with a new ideographic written language. Now I find a man named Charles K. Bliss has already done this, creating something called Blissymbols (or “Semantography”).

One useful-looking book is Heffman’s Biosymbolics: Speaking without Speech, which talks about using Blissymbols to help handicapped children to communicate.

For more information, visit Douglas Crockford’s site (Blisssymbolics link is on the left). (You may also want to check out his amazing materials on Javascript, of which he is doubtless the most advanced practitioner in the world.)

TODO: Check out languages mentioned by Umberto Eco in his book The Search for the Perfect Language.

There have been any number of proposals for visual alphabets, some quite recent. We might cite Bliss’s Semantography, Eckhaardt’s Safo, Janson’s Picto and Ota’s Locos Yet, as Noth has observed, these are all cases of pasigraphy (which we will discuss in a later chapter) rather than true languages. Besides, they are based on natural languages. Many, moreover, are mere lexical codes without any grammatical component (p. 175).

Crockford comments that semantography (Blissymbolics) does not belong to the class of visual alphabets that Eco is dismissing.

Imagine living in Japan for 15 years and never having heard of “Ajipon”, the ubiquitous ponzu sauce—although I’m sure we had some in our kitchen, and I must have walked by it on the grocery store shelves hundreds of times.

According to the Ajipon web site put up by its manufacturer, Mitsukan, Ajipon was developed in 1964, back when ponzu was not a common household item. The Mitsukan president was having some mizutaki in a restaurant and vowed to bring the fabulous taste of the dipping sauce into the Japanese home. Ajipon was the result of three years of experimentation with different types of citrus and degrees of saltiness.

Ponzu itself is created by boiling mirin with katsuo-bushi and konbu and vinegar, then adding citrus juice. If you then add soy sauce, it becomes “ponzu shouyu”, although this could also be called just ponzu. Ponzu or Ajipon would most commonly be used as a dipping sauce for nabe dishes; mixed with grated daikon for yakizakana; or as a dressing for tataki.

And in modern cuisine? In the recipe “Oyster-leek Gratine with ponzu” Ming Tsai deglazes the pan where he sauteed the leeks with ponzu. A San Diego restaurant serves up ahi with a ponzu glaze. Another restaurant dresses pan-fried Escolar with ponzu. Shiro in Pasadena serves catfish with ponzu and cilantro. A cruise ship’s menu tries a ginger ponzu sauce on its grilled ahi. Sushi Masu in Westwood serves up monkfish liver with mountain caviar in ponzu sauce. Add olive oil and you have a ponzu vinaigrette. Geisha uses ponzu as a marinade (with coconut!) for its fluke dish.

Ponzu is the perfect marriage of the flavors of the paddy and the sea and the orchard, of the salty and the sweet and the tart.