Tuning in Silently

I have seen consultation sessions here in Japan where the client/student sit in enclosed silence while the therapist/teacher silently and patiently waits, neither saying a word until the end of the session. Perhaps it is through such silent meditation with another that we can truly penetrate to that internal space beyond spoken language, that beautiful [...]

Deepening Web Communication (Fragments)

Communications theorist Lee Thayer once wrote, “We ‘dilute’ the world by having an idea of it; and the intent of our words is, more often than not, to eliminate the world as resistance (Thayer 190).” As languaging creatures, our comprehension of the world is at once in direct contact with it (with certain spatial areas, [...]

Spoken and Unspoken Japanese

I move between two languages on a daily basis, English and Japanese. When I say that I “move between” these two languages, I mean that I dive into conversations, jokes, sarcasms, criticisms, small-talk and office politics in both languages throughout the day. I am surrounded by others who do the same. I am also surrounded [...]

A Précis on E.M. Cioran’s Supremacy of the Adjective

E.M. Cioran, in his Supremacy of the Adjective suggests that we are forever bound by our language use. This biting observation generally addresses the human condition, more specifically, those who speak history into existence and color the past with their adjectival descriptions of it. The world changes in accordance with the words that we use [...]

An Explication of Bernard Rudofsky’s On Language from “The Kimono Mind: An Informal Guide to Japan and the Japanese”

Upon entering into a Japanese conversation with a native-Japanese speaker, one may find oneself at a crossroads of misunderstanding, incomprehensibility, extreme conversational nuance and tremendously polite speech. That this communicative mountain shall serve to block one’s attempts at deciphering the conversation or inspire one to imitate one’s Japanese conversant, depend on one’s capacities for minding [...]