ABSTRACT
Japanese grammar, where the well-defined Western system of subtle tenses is paralleled by two basic modes of describing completed and incompleted actions. Perhaps the preponderance of incomplete formulation (imperfective modes) in a Japanese-speaking person’s mental life could incline him away from completed, easily circumscribed, and encoded experience into a sea of undulating, undirected contingencies. This might explain, then, the development of what a Westerner views as “patience” and the Japanese see as a sort of unemotional resignation.
