ChilliMuffin

The Mindset of Japanese Arguments

tofugu:

Recently there has been a lot of talk about the Japanese education system on Tofugu. One thing to note is that communication, rhetoric, and argumentation are not taught as extensively in Japanese schools and universities as they are in the West. This tends to be one reason Japanese students want to study abroad. Western rhetoric sprung out of a long history of Greek and Roman philosophers like Plato, Socrates, and Cicero, who spent a lot of time arguing about arguments. Japan doesn’t really have a comparable rhetorical tradition. Their tradition evolved, like many East-Asian writing styles, from poetry and theater.

The Western standard argumentative style that most of us are sick of from high school—explicitly stated main idea in the first paragraph, and everything else in support of that idea—was traditionally used to give a direct voice of democracy and dissent. Early Greek and Roman orators were infatuated with the idea of individual voices challenging the status quo, something the traditionally-minded Japan was never very keen on. Western rhetoric tends to stress the importance of the individual speaker, but the Japanese, historically, have favored the group mentality. In fact Western argumentative styles can be sometimes seen as offensively direct or arrogant to practitioners of East-Asian writing traditions.

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