The best thing about Japanese — and what can also be its greatest weakness — is probably "ambiguity."
It isn't well suited to laying out logic and structure, but it's very good for sharing emotion and atmosphere as images. I myself feel I communicate by conveying images in my head, and receiving others' words as images too.
An example of ambiguous communication: as a student I asked a friend majoring in law why he chose it. He said: the world is built on law, so if you study law you can understand how the world works.
The causal link is a bit shaky, and the premises of each claim are shaky too. But in Japanese — especially spoken — hearing it once, it doesn't feel very problematic. If you tried to verify it you could poke endless logical holes, but I wasn't so tactless as to point that out, and it was casual talk, so I still don't think of it as a problem.
(For the record: he's one of my closest friends, a great guy with a wonderful character.)
I used it as an example of ambiguous communication — but isn't a lot of Japanese conversation like this? I also talk in nuance alone sometimes.
People sometimes say Japanese is ambiguous so Japanese people are weak at logical thinking or problem-solving — but personally I think you just use communication that fits the setting of a debate; there's no need to pin everything on Japanese's weakness.
Ambiguity in Japanese is often cast as a minus, but as I wrote, I do "Japanese-style communication" as a matter of course, and oddly enough I benefit from Japanese a lot.
Something I noticed talking with that friend recently. We met again after a while. I don't remember details, so read it as a kind of parable.
The talk turned to: if you went independent, what would you do?
I said something like: if I went independent, I'd be very interested in a growth business aiming at IPO. And above all, I'd want good partners who can share passion and celebrate together when looking back after hitting a goal.
He responded: well, sure, business isn't only about sales. What kind of people would you want?
Hearing that, I felt a vague "huh?" Then I thought again: ah, but his response isn't wrong either.
This is exactly nuance, so putting it in writing is hard — but in this case: the nuance that sales matter a lot in business and must be taken seriously didn't land cleanly; and "what kind of people" wasn't really the point — I knew it was abstract, but I mainly wanted to stress wanting good partners for now.
Whatever the correctness of my nuance, as a listener he simply took it literally and tried to continue. I'll say again: this isn't about his comprehension being low — he's rather correct.
Not only this conversation — I run into scenes like this sometimes.
As I wrote at the start: whether speaking or listening, I share things roughly as images and recreate them in my head to empathize. So mismatches in understanding can happen. It's a difference in communication style.
On this blog I often write with lots of caveats. (Lines like "this is only an analogy," or "setting X aside.")
Many readers probably notice. It may be long-winded and hard to read — if so, I'm sorry — but my intent is to convey my images as accurately as I can. And when being taken literally would be inconvenient, it ends up that way.
Communicating ambiguously isn't always bad. Like when reading: value isn't only focusing on the important bits in the book, but the reading experience and thinking while reading — even the scent of the place you're reading.
What's the difference between "summarizing key passages so you can refer anytime" and "rereading the whole book"?
Even if what you think important doesn't change on a reread, the images that float up in that experience — even if you can't put them in words — will differ.
And even if points extracted by a summary service match exactly what you found important when reading, the effect on something like your thinking is another thing entirely.
Then ambiguity gains value. Not the image of slack gaps or spare room — value in a state that's overall abstract and low-resolution.
Ambiguously put: leaving things ambiguous, conveying them ambiguously, listening ambiguously — is sometimes important.
© 2020 ZUUHE