On Dividuals
I was walking down the street when a French person asked me for directions. The only French I know is how to introduce myself, so I managed with my lousy English. At times like these, a me completely different from the one that speaks Japanese appears.
For example, I shrug my shoulders even though I usually wouldn’t, and I come out with hackneyed comments like, “I went to Paris once. I remember the croissants being really good,” that I would never normally make.
The person said, “I like Junichiro Tanizaki,” so I was going to reply, “Daidokoro taiheiki is really interesting. Have you read it?” but I didn’t know the title of the book in English, so I just made a low-effort reply: “Yeah, he’s good.” It’s not as if I was acting. It wasn’t my natural self either. But I did feel like I saw a different expression of myself for the first time in a while.
When I was young, I lived in an English-speaking area for a month. Then, too, a different me from the one who is in Japan appeared. When I look back on it, it was merely a reaction caused by tracing the differences between superficial customs and manners. Though I sensed a bit of a culture gap, I didn’t meet a totally different version of myself.
What kind of values and creeds do people live by? Honestly, I never did find out. I wear Western clothing like they do, listen to Western music, and I know a bit about movies and authors too. I think that made me notice the things we have in common more than the essential differences between our cultures. I must have been trying to understand foreign culture by looking for things I knew.
How would it have gone if I had been in a region where they spoke Mlabri or the Dogon languages? You don’t see them much in the media, so I’m not familiar with them. I probably would have come up directly against differences in manners and gestures, so wouldn’t I have inevitably focused on what was different? I’m sure I would have sensed quite vividly through interacting with the people who lived in those lands that there were people there who thought and lived in a way completely different from the way I do.
Just having contact with the outside world doesn’t automatically mean you grasp diversity. I’m sure it’s possible to spend the whole time in a type of sightseeing mode, just adding new experiences to your catalogue. You can only cultivate a diversity mindset with an experience that changes you.
“Changing” here isn’t just easily understood changes in character like becoming more upbeat, being able to express your opinion suddenly whereas before you were withdrawn, or something like the experience I had with the French person. Space opens up inside you for people who live with different cultures and ideas. That means holding the otherness within you, and the more otherness you have, the better your sense of diversity.
The other day I read author Keiichiro Hirano’s Watashi to wa nanika: Kojin kara bunjin e (What am I? From “individual” to “dividual.”) What I’ve been talking about has some things in common with the “dividuals” this book proposes.
Dividuals are introduced in order to switch away from “individual” as a unit of humans. The concept of the individual doesn’t go very well with our contemporary lifestyle, does it? Doesn’t the idea of a “one true me” strain our relationships and make us needlessly fret about our identities? Out of those questions came the dividual.
The dividual frees us from the bondage of “the real me.” If we’re going to survive this era and its requirement of complex communication, this concept of the dividual could usher in a new way of thinking.
What caught my eye in this book is how it treats the body. Hirano says, “Unless you kill someone and chop them to pieces, there’s no way to divide [a person’s body].” Then how about personality? Traditionally, it has been thought indivisible.
But Hirano sees humans as capable of dividing. There are as many yous as there are people you interact with. In other words, people are divisible.
I think this is the key point. Can a person divide? Or are we each divided to begin with? It’s a slight difference in the words on the page, but the shift in meaning is endlessly vast.
Even if we are divisible through interactions with people, what Hirano is saying is that just as with the attitude I took towards the French man, the process is led not by any skill, but naturally, by our relationships.
That said, if our premise is that humans are capable of dividing, we’re probably constantly aware in some corner of our minds that the stress surrounding the idea of our “real selves” has been relieved. In that sense, what looks natural might just be a more natural-looking skill.
Not that that’s a bad thing. For people these days who think communication is paying attention to how other people and society see us, the concept that a one true self doesn’t exist, this dividualizing, might be very effective for relieving tension.
If we think of ourselves as only our personalities, then dividualizing could become dividualism and gain traction with people as a system of thought. But is it really your personality that changes when you interact with other people? I think it’s your body.
For example, when I speak English, my breathing changes noticeably. I get excited, I’ll point my fingers up at chest level and wave my hands to gesture. I never speak from my stomach, always from my chest to my throat. In that sense, it’s less another personality than another body.
“Unless you kill someone and chop them to pieces, there’s no way to divide [a person’s body].” So conversely, if you take someone apart, you can divide them? That’s anatomical knowledge we shouldn’t be able to acquire from a living person. At some point, we started thinking of ourselves as scattered body parts. We simplified a dead body into a thing and started applying the knowledge we gained through that view to our living bodies. I suppose we can say that we began to believe that the physical object layer of the body is us.
The body is made up of layers. Whether you can realize we’re already divided or not is important in grasping how unwieldy we are living in this reality. The condition of the multi-layered body is not so simple that it could be classified as a being like the contemporary person who is caught in conflict between society and the individual. It might just be that this worry of about the “real self” is the opposite of our appearance and natural self, and the conflict arises because we think we have no choice but to ping between the two poles.
Maybe before society became stratified in the modern era, people didn’t divide; they were simply divided as a matter of course.
When Kinoshita Tōkichirō became Hashiba Hideyoshi and then Toyotomi Hideyoshi, he was the same person, yet his title, name, surname, and alias changed. And there was also succession to names as a matter of course, as in “Ichikawa Danjūrō V.” Back when there were no concepts of the individual or personality, how were those phenomena viewed? Perhaps people at least understood as their main premise that we are divided—That’s just how it is.
An individual has to maintain a firm identity. The concept of dividuals was created to overcome that. But if the conscious attempt to dividualize is only ever the flip side of never being content except as your true self, then I doubt it’s possible to gain freedom that way.
Post originally in Japanese July 26, 2021
Translated by Emily Balistrieri