ABSTRACT
Scholars and lay observers alike largely agree that selfhood in Japan is unlike selfhood in the West— at least the modern West— in fundamental ways. This chapter argues that it is important to recognize both the similarities and the divergences between (and within) the two types of selfhood, and that in several important respects the Japanese self is closer than we think to our own. These misperceptions arise in part from several problems with the ways we customarily think about Japanese selfhood and personal identity most disturbing, of course, is the frequently met assumption of universal validity of Western paradigmatic descriptions of selfhood. One important thing to recognize about the history of selfhood in Japan is that it is very much of a piece with the history of Japanese culture in general— and the characteristic pattern by which Japanese cultural history progresses differs from the characteristic Western pattern in two respects.
