Travis, Catherine (1998). Omoiyari as a core Japanese value: Japanese-style empathy? In Angeliki Athanasiadou, & Elzbieta Tabakowska (Eds.), Speaking of emotions: Conceptualisation and expression (pp. 83-103). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110806007.55
This paper presents a semantic analysis of the Japanese concept of omoiyari, a key word representing core Japanese values. Omoiyari is essential to successful communication and the maintaining of harmonious relations in Japan. A full understanding of this word is extremely insightful into Japanese culture, revealing a great deal about the Japanese “indirect” communicative style; the importance of being “in tune” with others’ unexpressed desires and feelings; the “interdependence” on which group relations are based in Japan; and, in the light of all these factors, the Japanese perception of individuality, or “selfhood”. Furthermore, an understanding of omoiyari provides analysts with a tool with which to examine and describe Japanese culture, allowing them to adopt a kind of Japanese perspective, and thus to gain greater comprehension of some of the values and attitudes on which the society operates.
Omoiyari essentially represents a kind of “intuitive” understanding of the unexpressed feelings, desires and thoughts of others, and doing something for them on the basis of this understanding. Previous analyses of this word have been carried out without establishing an explicit definition of omoiyari, and it has been defined in terms of apparently “close” English equivalents. Such an approach is inherently flawed, as there is no one word for omoiyari in English. It is possible to fully define omoiyari in a way that makes its meaning accessible to non-Japanese speakers, and that is by using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage as developed by Wierzbicka and colleagues. This paper will present such a definition, established through an analysis of usage examples. This will then be compared with the meaning of one of its “close” English equivalents, and probably the word most commonly used to translate omoiyari, which is empathy. It shall be shown that, although these two words are similar in some respects, their meanings have much less in common than may be perceived through a superficial analysis, and that these differences reflect real differences in the respective cultures to which these words belong.
