Hisao Nakai (1934-) is a very well-known Japanese psychiatrist and to me, more than anything else, the author of SCHIZOPHRENIA AND THE HUMAN back in the early 80s. A Japanese friend of mine gave me a copy of his recent book of essays: Toki no shizuku. Les gouttes de temps! It's a real miscellany in which you occasionally come across very interesting ideas.
Just as examples:
1. When the Mongolian empire attacked Japan for the second time in the late 13th century, the invading army was defeated by the typhoon and washed ashore. The mongolian commanders were killed, but the Chinese foot-soldiers were admitted the status of exile-colons and began to live in various regions of the Japanese archipelago. The number approached 100,000. This must have amounted to several percent of the whole Japanese population at that time.
2. The strain of psychiatry focused on therapy (dynamic psychiatry) has been developped by those who were born on the fringe of mountains and plains. Freud was born at the edge of the Moravian forest; Adler is from the western Hungary, Jung is from the northen Switzerland, yet both from the bordering areas of mountains and plains.
3. In Japanese society, up until the WW II, a father often enunciated at home the kind of moral propagated by the government. He was not to speak up his own opinion. Even if he had his own, to tell that to children could cause them a future alianation from the society. This discretion made the pre-war Japanese father reticent; he was forced to speak on behalf of the society.
4. In the Edo era, the commoners could read "sosho" (script-type handwriting) but had hard time reading "kaisho" (block-type handwriting). [This is something tout-à-fait contrary for us.]
5. A person with the S (schizophrenia) affinity had an advantage of being a good semiotician. The ability to read signs was higly appreciated in hunter-gatherer societies. With the advent of agriculture, the appreciation for this ability diminished, and the person with the S affinity may become prone to [mental] illness. Still, the leaders of the society cannot do without such an ability to predict the weather or the natural fluctuations and catastrophes. Rain-dancers and magicians are often the other faces of the king. This ability, needless to say, is indispensable for a medecin.
Nakai is in many respects stimulating and even entertaining, but there is something that puts me off, too. Am I being over-hostile to psychiatry? Well, partly, yes. But maybe there is something deeper than that... His piece on the essayist the late Atsuko Suga is brilliant. It teaches me how I have absolutely NOTHING TO DO with the culture of the hanshin area, the area that stretches between Osaka and Kobe. I don't even have a local admittance to that culture...
