COMPARATIVE CULTURE

ISSN 1343-8476 COMPARATIVE CULTURE The Journal of Miyazaki International College Volume 15 2010 Francis Brassard 2 What Makes a Bell Ring?: The Buddhist Golden Rule and Its Means of Implementation Cherie Brown and Julia Christmas 13 A Two-phase University Academic Writing Programme for Lower Level Japanese Learners of English as a Foreign Language Peter Cheyne 39 The Coleridgean Imagination: its Role in Thought and its Relation to Reason Stephen J. Davies 63 An Analysis of Some Japanese Students' English Interlanguage Futoshi Kobayashi 69 BMI, Breakfast Habits, and Fast Food Usage of American and Japanese College Students Debra J. Occhi 78 Consuming Kyara ‘Characters:’ Anthropomorphization and Marketing in Contemporary Japan Brian Zindel 88 “Now Can I Go?”: Internment and the Legacy of Silence in Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine Comparative Culture 15: 2-12, 2010 What Makes a Bell Ring?: The Buddhist Golden Rule and Its Means of Implementation Francis Brassard The following article is based on a presentation I gave at the Inter-university Center of Dubrovnik, Croatia as part of a course entitled “The Future of Religion” in 2007. The theme of this year course was “From the Jus Talionis to the Golden Rule.” Buddhism, like many religious traditions, has its equivalents of a Golden Rule; that is, a course of action that takes into consideration equally one’s own interests and those of others. For example, in Shântideva’s Bodhicaryâvatâra, a Buddhist text from the eight-century CE, one is told that, “All equally experience suffering and happiness, and I must protect them as I do myself.”1 Using this basic idea as a theme, the author further gives a long series of justification to enjoin us to act accordingly. For instance, he says that, “Just as the body, which has many parts owing to its division into arms and so forth, should be protected as a whole, so should this entire world,”2 or, “I should eliminate the suffering of others because it is suffering, just like my own suffering. I should take care of others because they are sentient beings, just as I am a sentient being.”3 The reason why one should act according to this Golden Rule is also very explicitly given in this text. It is a means to cultivate bodhicitta, a Sanskrit technical term that may be translated as “Thought of Awakening.” In the Bodhicaryâvatâra, as well as in many other Buddhist texts, bodhicitta is defined as the desire to achieve awakening (or enlightenment) for the sake of all sentient beings. It is the cornerstone of a person’s commitment to the Buddhist path. Such a person is called a bodhisattva, and his or her spiritual life as a bodhisattva actually starts with the explicit vow, often made in front of a community of other bodhisattva, to achieve awakening for the sake of all beings. At first, the vow to save all beings takes the form of an act of will. It is a commitment that may have to be renewed constantly along the path, like a resolution one takes and of which one keeps reminding oneself. However, the Buddhist scriptures also present the vow as a form of spiritual experience, as a kind of spiritual breakthrough. The most important characteristic of this spiritual breakthrough, from a psychological and phenomenological point of view, is that the sense of I, which is usually at the base of one’s motivation to act, disappears. A person who has reached such a state of mind—in Buddhist technical terms we would say that this person has experienced the arising of the Thought of Awakening—is still doing actions. His or her actions, however, naturally flow out from him- or herself. It is like someone who, being half-asleep, reaches out for a fallen pillow and brings it back automatically, without any thoughts. According to Buddhism, it is in this state of mind that one can truly act for the benefits of all sentient beings. Without oversimplifying one’s understanding of Buddhism, one can say that the sole aim of their religious and philosophical discourses is to induce this spiritual breakthrough. I would like next to discuss how, from a phenomenological 1 BCA, VIII: 90 (trans. Wallace). 2 BCA, VIII: 91 (trans. Wallace). 3 BCA, VIII: 94 (trans. Wallace). Francis Brassard teaches at Miyazaki International College. Correspondence may be sent to: MIC, 1405 Kano, Kiyotake-cho, Miyazaki-shi, Miyazaki-ken, Japan 889-1605, Tel: 0985-85-5931, Fax: 0985-84-3396, E-mail: fbrassar@sky.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp What Makes a Bell Ring? 3 point of view, this breakthrough is achieved. This analysis should help us appreciate the extent of the task involved and the conditions by which it is likely to be accomplished. The distinction between these two modes of implementing the Buddhist way of action is not foreign to Buddhism itself. Indeed, Paul Griffiths, a Buddhist scholar, identified two basic approaches, which at the beginning of Buddhism, seemed to have lived side by side. He called these two approaches: the analytic and the enstatic approach. As Griffiths says: [The analytic approach] is concerned with repeated meditations upon standard items of Buddhist doctrine--the four truths, the 12-fold chain of dependent origination and so forth-until these are completely internalized by practitioners and their cognitive and perceptual systems operate only in terms of them. Such analytical meditations are designed to remove standard cognitive and perceptual habit-patterns and to replace them with new ones. Furthermore, these techniques are designed to teach the practitioner something new about the way things are, to inculcate in his consciousness a whole series of knowledges that suchand-such is the case. In contrast, the enstatic meditations are designed to reduce the contents of consciousness, to focus awareness upon a single point and ultimately to bring all mental activity to a halt.4 Eventually, the analytic approach became the dominant means of achieving awakening in Buddhism. The Buddhists themselves give the main reason why the enstatic meditations were marginalized.5 Indeed, in the Bodhicaryâvatâra one leans that, “The mind that has mental objects has to dwell on one thing or another (including Buddhist ideas). Without emptiness, the mind is constrained and arises again, as in a non-cognitive meditative equipoise.”6 What this means, is that the enstatic meditations can only suppress the emotions, feelings, actions, etc., but not eradicate their causes. Although the state of suppression could be quite extraordinary, it is still not considered to be a liberating experience. It is like pushing down an inverted bucket, full of air, to the bottom of a pool; it takes an enormous effort to maintain it in position and as soon as this effort is relaxed, it comes right up to the surface. One can easily imagined that, knowing the nature of human emotions and feelings, the efforts to implement any Golden Rule in such a way would be comparable to that of maintaining our bucket at the bottom. In fact, I believe that such an effort is impossible and that, any one attempting to do it, may incur serious psychological and traumatic damages.7 The analytical approach is therefore the only approach. What, then, does it consist of? The last quotation gives us a clue; it says that the mind should be without mental objects and that without emptiness the mind arises again. This means that emptiness, a key Buddhist concept, has to be “thought about” as if it is not present in the mind. This seems somehow paradoxical. Indeed, how can we think about something and not imagine it at the same time? The solution of this paradox is, however, the key to understanding the analytical approach. Let’s begin by saying the Buddhist philosophers usually believe that there are two kinds of knowledge: the first one is purely intellectual and objective; the second 4 Griffiths (1986): p. 13. 5 In fact, they were maintained as preparatory stages for the analytical meditations, a kind of spiritual warming-up so to speak. BCA, IX: 47-8 (trans. Wallace). 6 7 In this regards, I would direct the reader to the works of Eugen Drewermann, in particular, Kleriker. Psychogramm eines Ideals. Vol. 15, 2010 4 Francis Brassard one is experiential or subjective. To understand the distinction between these two types of knowledge, it might be interesting to refer to Michael Polanyi, a philosopher of science, and his idea of twofold awareness. Basically, Polanyi argues that when one is performing a task, one is paying attention to two things at the same time, but not in the same way. When driving a nail, for example, we focus our attention on the nail. At the same time, we feel the hammer in our hand. The feelings in our hand guide us in handling the hammer effectively; we are aware of them but in a way different from our paying attention to the nail. Put differently, these feelings are not objects of our attention but instruments of it. As Polanyi says: “They are not watched in themselves; we watch something else while keeping intensely aware of them. I have a subsidiary awareness of the feeling in the palm of my hand which merged into my focal awareness of my driving in the nail.”8 This idea of twofold awareness led Polanyi to make a distinction between what he called "tacit" and "explicit" knowledge. Explicit knowledge refers to what is directly apprehended (the intellectual and objective knowledge): the things out there. Tacit knowledge (the experiential and subjective knowledge), on the other hand, is not dealing with what is directly seen, but rather with that which gives meaning to our experiences. For example, we always see a person as something, a mother, a friend, a stranger, an enemy, etc. Seeing someone as something is the jurisdiction of the tacit knowledge. Another way to put it is to say that tacit knowledge is the background that defines our experiences of the world, like the screen on which a film is projected. From a negative perspective, it functions like a prejudice: it gives us a distorted view of reality. From a positive point of view, it is some kind of a force that transforms one’s entire way of relating and responding to the world.9 Given these two types of knowledge or awareness, the purpose of the Buddhist analytical approach consists in firstly, accepting on faith or trust any of their fundamental truths such as “Everything is empty.” At this point, the truth is still part of one’s objective knowledge of reality. Then one tries, by means of intense “investigation” and a good deal of imagination, to transform it into the background of one's awareness. Then, some kind of breakthrough occurs and the ability to see the world in terms of the truth accepted becomes natural. At this moment, one enters into a contemplative state; one is really on the path. To understand what exactly happens in the mind of a person undergoing such transformation, I would like to present an explanation of the satori experience of Zen Buddhism as related by Victor Hori, a Rinzai Zen monk and Buddhist scholar. The experience of satori is usually generated by a reflection on a kôan. A kôan is like a riddle such as "Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Such a kôan has to be resolved by the student. Every now and then, he would go to the Zen master to give what he thinks to be the answer to the kôan, but the master will always tell him that his answer is wrong as long as it is formulated in an dualistic 8 Polanyi (1962): p. 55. 9 There is a Taoist story from the Lieh Tzu, that beautifully illustrates this idea. A man lost his ax. He suspected his neighbor's son and began to observe him. He believed that, judging from his appearance, he was an ax thief; his facial expression was that of an ax thief; his way of talking was exactly that of an ax thief. All his movements, all his being distinctively expressed the fact that he was an ax thief. Some time afterward, this man, digging in his garden, found his ax. When he saw his neighbor's son again, all his movements, all his being had nothing of an ax thief about them anymore. Comparative Culture What Makes a Bell Ring? 5 way; that is, with the awareness that there is a subject (the knower) distinct from the object of knowledge. Thus, At the extremity of his great doubt, there will come an interesting moment. This moment is hard to describe but on reflection afterward we might say that there comes a point when the monk realizes that he himself and the way he is reacting to his inability to penetrate the kôan are themselves the activity of the kôan working within him. The kôan no longer appears as an inert object in the spotlight of consciousness but has become part of the searching movement of the illuminating spotlight itself. His seeking to penetrate the kôan, he realizes, is itself the action of the kôan that has invaded his consciousness. It has become part of the very consciousness that seeks to penetrate itself. He himself is the kôan. Realization of this is the response to the kôan.10 According to Buddhism, the fruits of this breakthrough or this spiritual transformation are the following: 1] At the cognitive level, the shift from having an idea as part of our objective knowledge of the world to its becoming the background of all our experiences or making it our tacit knowledge of reality, brings about a destruction of our dualistic assumption concerning what is truly real. Indeed, everything is now defined in terms of a single idea, be it suffering or emptiness. Even the subject who “observes” the world (or the agent who acts upon it) is now included or has been redefined in terms of this single idea. It is like becoming aware that all golden objects are made of gold. From this perspective, there are no longer any fundamental distinctions between all golden objects. It is to be noted that this awareness does not annihilate the distinctions that exist at the level of what is objectively apprehended. For example, a golden ring is still a ring and not a golden chain. 2] At the psychological level, such shift is likely to bring about a state of mind devoid of any anxiety and a more stable experience of peace. It is also characterized by an experience of detachment. Seeing the world in its “proper” perspective also results in the experience of a sense of freedom from it. 3] And finally, at the ethical or behavioral level, despite the fact that one no longer needs to decide what the right course of action is, such realization is the guarantee of a behavior that is always beneficial to all without exception. At this point, a Buddhist has transcended karma (that which chains a person to determined courses of action, like having bad habits) because his or her actions are no longer intentional; what triggers them is the suffering of people combined with the perfect state of readiness to free them from it. This understanding of one’s behavior is incidentally what explains how, in Buddhism, wisdom and compassion, as a pure desire to help, are considered to be the two sides of the same coin.11 There is one simile that illustrates well what the Buddhists are doing when they practice the analytical approach. In ancient India people would perfume clothes by putting in a box one piece of tissue that had previously been soaked in perfume under the pile of unscented cloths. By the process of suffusion, the perfume 10 Hori (1994): p. 30. 11 These fruits, as well as the dynamic of transformation, are specific to the Buddhist tradition. In Christianity, for example, it can be said that the purpose of its “spiritual path” is not to transcend sins (our egoistical tendencies, to use a Buddhist way of thinking), but to reveal them so that one may reconcile oneself with them, to be more precise, the sinner. The act of reconciliation or forgiveness is, from this point of view, radically different from the Buddhist concept of compassion. Indeed, their understanding of compassion is, I believe, closer to the idea of altruism, that is, the readiness to help someone to be free from suffering and not, as in the Christian context, an act of suffering with. Vol. 15, 2010 6 Francis Brassard impregnates all the unscented clothes. Similarly, the purpose of the analytical approach is to impregnate all our experiences of reality with a sense of pervasiveness of one basic idea, like that of the emptiness of all things. At this point one can anticipate the extent of the conditions by which this process of suffusion is achieved. The practice of the analytical approach is likely to require more than just a limited environment to thrive. Indeed, an entire culture is necessary to help the individual maintain the process on course. Disruptions in the cultural and social landscape are likely to distract his or her attention, thus running the risk of aborting it altogether. Concretely speaking, it means that a religion like Buddhism, even if it is tolerant of any culture, has to create a Buddhist culture to grow and produce fruit. Such culture is always specific and is thus likely to be different from other cultures. Let’s give another example to illustrate this point. One method used in Tibetan Buddhism to arise the Thought of Awakening is the "seven-point cause-and-effect method." The method consists in extending the benevolent feelings one usually has for one's mother to all sentient beings starting with one's own friends, then to people one is normally indifferent to and, finally, to one's enemies. The justification behind this method is that, because everyone is reborn an indefinite number of times, each and all of us has been at least once each other’s mother. In other words, the method is efficient if one accepts specific cultural, religious, or philosophical presuppositions, in the present case, the doctrine of reincarnation. It goes without saying that these presuppositions are not universal, although they have to be perceived as such by those who are following the method. To some extent, one can say that any system of thought, whose purpose is to actualize a Golden Rule, is relative when viewed from the outside and absolute from the inside. To put it succinctly, the relative nature of a system of though with its supporting culture is relative as well. What do we do now?12 Before suggesting a model that takes into consideration this double nature of any system of religious and spiritual thought, I would like to look at one attempt to avert the clashes between religious and philosophical cultures. This attempt is quite popular today among people involved in interreligious dialogue and it is largely known as the pluralist view of religion. There are many versions of this pluralist view but, for the sake of the present discussion, I would like to retain the one that views the practice of religion as true only within the private sphere, in other words, relative to one’s own religious and spiritual commitment. At the social level, this means that no religion can claim to have the monopole of truth, that the finality of each religious system of thought is equally valid. This conviction implicitly means that there are many “salvations” to be experienced. This view of religions is the result of a specific problem: how can people of different faiths live peacefully together and respect each other? The problem is essentially social. It directly addresses the type of attitude one, as believer of a specific creed and committed to certain practices, should entertain in order to minimize frictions with people having their own faith, or even claiming to have none. This problem is an objective reality in today’s cosmopolitan world and attempts at finding viable solutions to it are not new. Already Locke proposed that philosophic doubt would appease religious fanaticism and Bertrand Russell could not state it more clearly by saying that dogmatism is the greatest of the mental 12 To say that a system of thought or value is relative requires a tacit assumption of an absolute. If, for example, one affirms, “Everything is relative,” the absolute is implicit in the “everything;” that is, an all-encompassing vision of reality. To relativize this tacit assumption as well, leaves us in a kind of void or in an infinite regression, like two mirrors reflecting each other. Comparative Culture What Makes a Bell Ring? 7 obstacles to human happiness. The pluralistic view of religion is just a variation of these systems of thought. In theory, this appears to be quite acceptable, but there is a major problem with this view. In effect, what is happening here is that the pluralist view of religion takes on its own finality and in the process destroys the finalities of the spiritual systems of belief it tries to harmonize. Because its finality is to maintain social harmony, any element from these spiritual systems that is likely to disrupt that harmony is leveled out. For example, claims to universal truths are to be banned, that is, relegated to their own private sphere. The end effect of this process of harmonizing the systems of belief is that they lose their distinctiveness. Attempts, even from the point of view of the scientific study of religions, to identify substantial distinction between religious beliefs and practices, are inhibited. What a pluralist view of religion is doing is exactly what a reductionist interpretation of the religious phenomenon is accomplishing.13 Let me give a concrete example of this point. A few years ago, I participated in a group discussion on the works of Eugene Drewermann, a German theologian and psychoanalyst. One of the participants said that Drewermann’s analysis of the Bible allowed her for the first time to make sense of this text, that she could now concretely relate it to her own experience of life. This testimony made quite an impression on the audience as it came from a lady of over seventy years old. For her, reading Drewermann had been a revelation like a sudden and abundant rain on the parched land of her spiritual life. Stepping back from the emotional charge of the situation, one may, however, legitimately ask what was the exact nature of her experience? Is it a Christian experience? Or, it is the type of experience Christians should be aiming at through their reading of the Bible? I believe that the answer is no. The psychoanalytical discourse is centered on a more or less explicit view of what the human experience ought to be. It is often expressed in terms of self-emancipation, ability to function well in society and to contribute to it, or just to achieve a certain degree of freedom from one’s impulses and habits resulting from past experiences. From a Christian point of view, and from other religions’ as well, these goals fall short of what is believed possible to experience as human being. The finality of the psychoanalytical system of thought is therefore different. Of course, one is free to choose one’s aspirations in life but this is not the issue here. What is at stake is what happens when one system of thought, like that of the psychoanalytical discourse, hijacks another system by infusing in it its own finality? The most serious consequence, as mentioned above, is that the hijacked system entirely loses its distinctiveness; its symbols are now being used to serve a finality different from what it had articulated in the first place. This means that the hijacked system is now deprived of its capacity to generate the experiences for which it was designed in the first place. Moreover, in the case of the psychoanalytical interpretation of the Bible for instance, the discourse of the Bible takes a subordinate position. The language of psychoanalysis, because it is now the focus of attention, will inevitably render the language of the Bible obsolete. In this regard it is worth mentioning that Drewermann also uses the psychoanalytical paradigm for the analysis of folk tales. The end effect is to view the Bible at par with these stories, that is, to overlook their possible differences. The question posed above regarding what should be done is now clearer. How can we reconcile systems of thought that make universal claims without “relativizing” their distinctiveness? Which model could be used to conceptualize a 13 It is not a coincidence that the pluralist view of religion, whatever its characteristics, is an outcome of the scientific study of religion that has evolved in the last hundred years. Vol. 15, 2010 8 Francis Brassard harmonious relationship between antagonistic systems of thought? In my discussion of the pluralist view of religion I introduced the idea of finality. This is the cornerstone of my model. Let me make this idea more explicit. The finality of a system is what defines its elements. For example, a veil worn by a Muslim woman is not just a piece of cloth but a sign of her submission to the will of Allah; that is, of being Muslim. A piece of bread eaten by Christians as the Eucharist is not just a piece of bread, but the living presence of Jesus-Christ. One can go on with many examples from any sphere of life to support this idea. Here one can say that the meaning of an element is relative to the finality of the system it belongs to. But we can also say, using Polanyi’s description of hammering down a nail, that the elements “absolutize” the finality of the system they are part of and, as such, preclude any relativization of their value. Think of a mirror. How do we know that what we see through it is a reflection? One way is by being aware of its frame. A frame can be of any shape—so we may think that its present shape is relative—but the moment we experience the insight, “Ah, this is a mirror!” the frame that allowed this experience is absolute. The idea that the frame may be made of various shapes is an after-thought that is unconnected to the experience of insight. In fact, deliberating on its relative nature not only inhibits the insight but also keeps us from looking at the mirror altogether. Again, on the basis of what has been previously discussed above in the context of the analytical approach, the absolute is not a static experience but a dynamic one. It is dynamic in the sense that it does not rest on a single object but rather on a view that can be supported by all objects. This explanation may appear complicated, but in fact it is very simple because everyone experiences it all the time. Indeed, the name of a person is a good example of this dynamic absolute. Being aware of a person’s name put us in contact with her reality. This contact is always influencing us in some way or another. Its influence makes it real. We may have ideas about this person, ideas that act as a filter, but nevertheless, some transformation occurs by the very fact that one is aware of her existence. The ideas we may have about a person are therefore relative, because they change no matter how hard we resist, but the fact of the existence of the person, around which all our ideas are constructed, is absolute. To some extent, the more we do relativize our ideas about a person, the more one is transformed by her existence, provided that we do not forget her. The willingness to disregard any judgment about a person while maintaining an awareness of her existence puts us, however, in a state of constant tension. In other words, the finality of a system does not only define its elements but also keeps us engaged in it. From an ethical point of view, it is this engagement that allows any Golden Rule to produce its fruit. One can now see why it is important to maintain the tension. The very purpose of the system of thought one adheres to is at stake. Consequently, because the state of tension provides the justification of the truthfulness of the elements of a system of thought, it is the tacit rule that allows the acceptance or rejection of elements from other systems. In other words, that standard by which one judges the validity of foreign ideas does not rest on an idea itself but rather on what this idea makes us experience. It is, again, a dynamic process. I am now ready to present a model where every system of belief (including cultural and scientific systems of thoughts) may coexist in harmony without compromising their integrity or identity. A system of thought that is in constant state of tension is what I call an open system. It is open because its finality is never fully accomplished; that is, its tension is never resolved. A closed system, by way of contrast, is considered closed because the solution of its problem has been solved; there is no more tension. A pluralistic Comparative Culture What Makes a Bell Ring? 9 view of religion is in effect a closed system because it is believed to solve the problem of religious differences in a cosmopolitan environment. A psychoanalytical explanation of the Bible is also a closed system because its application only confirms its basic assumptions. Any new observation is reintegrated in its explanatory matrix and remains as such unchallenged from this perspective. It is in effect self-sustaining. It is like the rules of grammar of a specific language. Their explanatory power is confirmed by every analysis of the language they are derived from. A closed system, however, is not a dead system of thought. New articulations of its tenets are always possible; there are always new cases to prove the assumptions on which it rests. To use an analogy, it is like an organism that procreates. But like any organism, its entire offspring are determined by a specific genetic code, that is, in the case of a closed system of thought, its basic tenets.14 This is not the case for an open system where encounters with the environment constantly produce a state of tension. In this regard, paradigms in the field of natural sciences are open systems because they are constantly challenged by observation and ultimately transformed. In fact, one can say that the moment a paradigm is formulated, the moment it appears to close itself by resolving the tension between the phenomena it has observed, it is already outmoded. Like a camp fire at night that allows us to see the firewood scattered around, the more one feeds it with the firewood, the bigger it becomes and the more firewood it allows us to feed it with. As such, the pursuit of understanding the nature of the universe, to “touch” reality as it is, as entertained by natural scientists, is comparable to the pursuit of ever fulfilling satisfaction by religious believers. Both endeavors, because their respective tension is not likely to be resolved soon, result in maintaining their system of thought constantly open to new ways of seeing and experiencing reality. In fact, making sure that their system remains open is what would guaranty their commitment to the finality they set out to fulfill, even if they feel that this moment is far away. For believers, this can be achieved, among other things, by the practice of religious dialogue. Using the ideas discussed so far, religious dialogue can thus be defined as a means, among others, to maintain the openness of a religious system, which is usually manifested by a desire to experience its potentials, to resonate it in its infinite ways depending on the dispositions of its believers, by integrating the products of closed systems of thought. Let’s use a simple example. Let’s say that one has to understand the meaning of a particular text written in an unknown language. Because the understanding of the meaning of this text may vary according to the cultural presuppositions of the reader, one can say that its system of interpretation is likely to remain an open system. To understand the text, however, one may need to study the unknown language it is written in. This language, with its fixed rules of grammar and vocabulary, is a closed system. It will have to be mastered to a point where our reader will be able to make some sense of the text. Thus, the finality of the closed system of grammar, which is to make sense of sentences written in the language it is issued from, is integrated to that of the attempt of figuring out the meaning of the given text. Contrary to what is happening with the psychoanalytical explanation of the Bible, the closed system, that is, the grammar, is not violated in its integrity. In fact, its integrity, its potential to make sense of the unknown language, is needed. Without it, the search for the meaning of the text would be impaired. Using the same analogy, what happens when a closed system is not integrated into an open system, when the study of the unknown language becomes an end in itself? 14 One can think here of technological applications derived from a scientific law or even a social policy based on a certain understanding of society. Vol. 15, 2010 10 Francis Brassard One can easily see that the pursuit of finding the meaning of the text is completely abandoned. As explained before, both systems, with respect to their finality, are mutually exclusive. This is the danger with the study of religions and with interreligious dialogue as well. It may result in the formulation of a common model of explanation regarding the inner workings of any religion. This model should not be allowed to take a life on its own by supporting a view that negates the distinctiveness of all religions. On the contrary, such a model should be integrated into the finality of each respective religion. This new understanding should help believers to better understand their own religions and thus allowing them to strengthen their commitment. Let’s say, for example, that one decides to find out whether there is such a thing as an altruistic act. One could do that in the light of the claims made by neurobiologists that all human actions can be reduced to neuronal activity. Such a view is likely to undermine one’s confidence in trying to act in an altruistic way. Thus, once it has been determined that an altruistic act is truly possible, one is likely to feel more confident in doing such act. The newly formulated knowledge has therefore been integrated into another system. Its finality— understanding human nature in a way as objective as possible— is now serving another finality: the perfection of one’s altruistic behavior. In the light of this understanding, one can see that open systems are inclusivist. It appears to me that the inclusivist model is more natural that the pluralist view which puts all systems at par. Science would not function at all if it were to entertain the idea that all explanatory systems of the world, all conceptions of reality share an equal level of merits. Some views have to be true; they cannot all be true at the same time. In spite of this discrimination, the relative value of any system of thought is not denied. Its value is, however, always determined by the finality of the system that includes or integrates it. Since the finality of the Christian system of thought is to maintain a state of tension, anything coming outside it, be it from other religions, cultures or even science, is likely to be used to maintain that state, or even to increase it. This is why dialogue with other religions, as well as with the scientific world, has to be valued and developed. This way of integrating the fruits of other system of thought may appear to be a selfish endeavor, but this is done reciprocally. It is for that reason that all believers, whatever their faith, have a duty to maintain its integrity and to proclaim it: doing otherwise would be to forsake their responsibility as members of the world community, like a scientist who hides knowledge that could be of benefit to others. Once they truly live their faith, which means above all to let their Golden Rules produce effects, problems related to living in a cosmopolitan world should resolve themselves. In this regard, I would like to cite a personal anecdote to illustrate the gravity of the pluralistic view of religions. When my son reached the age of about three and a half, we had to fill a questionnaire regarding his health condition. Basically, the usual questions are asked, for example, previous ailments, allergies, etc. There was, however, one curious question. It inquired whether the mother thinks her child beautiful. The question is odd, because one would not expect a mother to ask such a question about her child. This is in fact the point of the question: whether the mother, by finding the question acceptable, objectifies her child. Such objectification is the sign of a problem, that the connection mother-child has been broken. In a similar way, a pluralist view of religions objectifies the beliefs of all religions. Those who entertain that view are in reality disconnected from their own tradition. Reconnection is possible only when this view is abandoned; because all systems of thought with their finality are mutually exclusive, holding a pluralistic view of religion and efficient engagement in one’s faith are impossible. The other problem of those who advocate a pluralistic view of religion is that they Comparative Culture What Makes a Bell Ring? 11 do not understand, when, for example, a Buddhist affirms that “Everything is suffering” or a Christian maintains the universality of Jesus; it is not to test their claims in the light of other beliefs or even scientific knowledge, but to let himself or herself be transformed by it. Using the Christian context, if Jesus is universal, if he is a king in his own way, to see him as such means to experience his kingdom or to aspire to it. The experience of the ever presence of Jesus, here and now, is for the believer an objective experience that can be shared. This is how he lives his faith. Therefore, because his experience hinges on that belief, it cannot be relativized. In this regard, new ways of reinterpreting, understanding, appreciating Jesus Christ proposed by some Christian theologians are again just showing their disconnection with the experience of their own tradition. They are not better than a religious fundamentalist who hijacks the symbols of his religion to construct his identity. On this last point, let me share another anecdote that, to some extent, provoked my reflection on the present model. When I was a student, I was invited with my colleagues to a mosque to meet the local imam. While we were waiting for him, an important member of the regional Moslem community spoke to us. He talked mostly about what Moslems believe in. His address was a little bit unsettling though. To be honest, I was always on the defensive. Then came the imam who talked about what he believed as a Moslem. This may be a subtle distinction but, although his statements were, from a certain point of view, the same as that of the preceding speaker, I felt calmed and genuinely interested in listening to him. His words had an entirely different effect on me. He was clearly presenting to us his beliefs without any coating to make it more acceptable for people of other faiths and most importantly, without any hint of contempt for the “infidels.” Reflecting back on my visit to the mosque, I may explain my experience in the following way. The imam looked sympathetic to me because I felt that his faith, even if I do not share it, was more than empty words. I felt that he was speaking from his heart, that he was sincerely telling us what his faith meant for him. The way he was living his faith had even an inspiring effect on me; it encouraged me to be more serious or committed to my own convictions. This was not the case with the first speaker. What I felt while listening to him was something like “I am proud of what I believe” or “This is what you ought to believe and you are wrong to believe otherwise.” In other words, his convictions were not used to make his life more fulfilling, but rather to assert his identity. The claims of his faith were secondary. The affirmation of his identity was therefore the primary motive for talking about his faith. This is what resonated from him and as a result triggered in me my own sense of identity. If I had not been polite, I would—and I have to say that I really felt like it—have responded in an aggressive way by showing the banners and colors of my own convictions. Again, the point of this anecdote is to say that someone’s faith and affirmation of it do not necessarily lead to confrontation. The experience of an individual, whether one shares his convictions or not, can even be very inspiring. Reference Brassard, Francis. 2000. The Concept of Bodhicitta in Shântideva’s Bodhicaryâvatâra. New York. Suny Press. Vol. 15, 2010 12 Francis Brassard --------. 2002. “Seeing the Good in Others: a Buddhist perspective” in Comparative Culture: The Journal of Miyazaki International College, 8, pp. 1-12. Comparative Culture Comparative Culture 15: 13-38, 2010 A Two-phase University Academic Writing Programme for Lower Level Japanese Learners of English as a Foreign Language Brown, C. and J. Christmas Teachers of lower-intermediate students, or students who are perceived as having low motivation for writing, often struggle to know “where to begin” a writing program. The “Two-Phase” programme and the results of its implementation exhibit that with step-by-step and clear instruction, lower level writers can indeed master the fundamentals of academic writing that they will need in order to proceed to higher level writing tasks. The authors address problems faced by teachers of students with limited experience in academic writing by offering concrete ideas which are based on current thought about language acquisition and writing instruction. The case study and multiple appendix approach offer materials that instructors can readily adapt to their own writing classrooms. Introduction The Two-phase Academic Writing Programme outlined below, resulted from a compilation of ideas developed and used during the normal course of learning and teaching in two “English Two” (E2) classes in the second semester of 2009 at MIC (Miyazaki International College), a private Liberal Arts college located in Kyushu, Japan. MIC offers a four-year university degree programme in ‘Comparative Culture.’ All content (subject discipline) courses at MIC, across the curriculum (apart from Japanese Language and Expression classes), are taught in English. Added to this, twice-weekly English Language classes (1.5 hours each) are mandatory for all students in their first three semesters at the college. By the time students reach their final year at MIC, they are expected to demonstrate an ability to apply the conventions of academic writing in all their formal written work. This includes short written assignments of varying genres, in the full range of curriculum areas pertinent to each student, as well as longer academic essays and eventually, in the fourth year, an extended senior thesis developed around a self-selected research topic, which is published and stored in the institution’s library for future reference. In reality, many third and fourth year students still have serious difficulties producing academic writing of an acceptable standard, and for many there is an apparent lack of awareness of important but basic conventions of academic writing.1 MIC students and their teachers alike often express frustration at the demands of higher level writing tasks and the quality of written work that is produced. Typical complaints by teachers about the quality of writing produced by MIC students (at all levels) have included the following.2 There is… 1 2 One impact of this has been the recent decision to revisit the senior thesis requirements and to implement a ‘Writing Across the Curriculum’ programme at senior levels. Comments here are drawn from informal conversations over a two-year period with colleagues at MIC who teach in a wide range of disciplines. Cherie Brown and Julia Christmas teach at Miyazaki International College. Correspondence may be sent to: MIC, 1405 Kano, Kiyotake-cho, Miyazaki-shi, Miyazaki-ken, Japan 889-1605, Tel: 0985-85-5931, Fax: 0985-84-3396, E-mail: cbrown@sky.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp or jchristmas@sky.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp 14 Brown, C. and J. Christmas • A high level of grammatical inaccuracy that frequently interferes with communicative quality (i.e. Much of what many students write is incoherent and often unintelligible.) • An over-reliance on low level, general high-frequency lexis, with little attempt to use academic vocabulary, and/or inappropriate use of academic vocabulary (i.e. in form and/or meaning). • A lack of depth, poor organization and/or connection of ideas and weak control over conventional patterns of academic discourse in writing ‘products’3 • Poor referencing (if this exists at all) • Frequent plagiarism • A lack of a mature ‘voice’ • Problems with aspects of style and appropriate register • Evidence of first language interference (e.g. sentence ‘listing,’ literal translation of Japanese expressions, and use of Japanese punctuation conventions) • Overuse of previously taught formulaic phrases (such as “That is to say,” and “… and so on.”) • ‘Regurgitation’ of class content with little evidence of independent research, problem-solving, synthesis of information and/or critical analysis Other comments included references to an apparent belief that many students seem content to hand in sloppy work, hoping that it will be good enough to get a pass grade. This (it is claimed) may be because some students don’t take any pride in what they produce, or it may be that the demands of other work see some students trying to ‘cut corners’ in order to meet course deadlines in all of their subjects. In the latter case, some teachers appear resigned to the fact that at times they have had no choice but to accept work they would normally consider substandard, since it was better than receiving no work at all. On the other hand, some teachers appear to think that strong academic writing of any kind is simply beyond MIC students, especially at lower levels. (Statements that underscore this include, “These students are of such a low level, they simply CAN’T produce academic writing of a standard that is acceptable. I guess I just have to take what they give me.” Or, “ These students can’t even manage to write an accurate sentence. We need to focus our energies on getting them to write accurate sentences,” (with the implication, perhaps, that asking lower level students to create longer texts is a waste of time). 4 Similarly, students’ complaints about writing often indicate frustration. Statements along these lines are common… • “I just don’t know what to do (or where to start).” • “It’s too difficult, I can’t do it.” • “My grammar is bad, but I don’t know how to make it better.” • “I don’t know enough vocabulary, so it’s hard to say what I want to say.” • “I hate writing, even in Japanese, so I don’t want to do it in English.” • “There’s too much information and I don’t know what is important and what is not. How do I choose?” 3 4 ‘Products’ in this case refers to any finished piece of written work required by a teacher that is to be used as a demonstration of a student’s writing abilities, critical thinking skills and/or understanding of class content, for assessment purposes. Authors’ interpretation. Comparative Culture A Two-phase University Academic Writing Programme 15 • “Why do I have to do this?” (Perhaps the relevance of the writing task is unclear, or the task seems ‘trivial.’) • “Why do I have to do it THIS way?” (Perhaps indicating a lack of awareness of the underlying learning goals, or a sense of frustration with task boundaries.) • “I have no ideas. Where can I get ideas from?” Or, “Why can’t I just use the ideas of other people (experts), since they know more than I do?” • “I have ideas but I don’t know how to express them in English.” • “I have ideas, but I don’t know how to organise them.” • “I did my best, but my teacher still isn’t happy and I don't know why.” The teacher/student issues raised above can be broadly categorized thus; teacher expectations, student motivation (including issues relating to task relevance), problems with control over grammatical and lexical forms, problems with text organization and academic writing conventions, and overall task management problems (from planning to completion). The two E2 teachers who developed the Two-phase Academic Writing Programme below, were, in their respective classes, trying independently to address these kinds of issues, aware that teaching faculty in all disciplines are very conscious of the need to devise new ways to improve the writing skills of MIC students at all instructional levels. As a preface to the description of the Two-phase Academic Writing Programme, it is worth considering these issues briefly, since the values underpinning these formed, in no small part, a rationale for the way the programme developed. Teacher Expectations Aware of the possible impact of a ‘Pygmalion Effect,’5 the two E2 teachers were determined to set up writing tasks in such a way as to indicate that they believed their students were indeed capable of achieving the challenging task of writing a strong academic essay. In fact, in the case of Class Two, the independent writing project was a conscious experiment to test the belief that MIC students at low levels were incapable of writing a well-organised, appropriately referenced, multi-paragraph academic essay. From the outset, the Class Two teacher believed, given adequate time, appropriate instruction, sympathetic and practical support, clear expectations and suitable models, that her first-year students were in fact able to complete such an essay. This belief was clearly communicated to her students in the introduction to the writing project and many times throughout. Student Motivation Student motivation was heightened in Class One through the selection of topics relevant to the age and interests of the students, and via the collaborative nature of the tasks. In Class Two, students were motivated by being given the freedom to select any topic they liked, provided it was related to work in another MIC class that was of interest and importance to them. They were specifically asked to write only about something they wanted to write about. Many expressed initial disbelief at the freedom being given them and sought reassurance that this was 5 Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. 1968. Pygmalion in the Classroom. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Vol. 15, 2010 16 Brown, C. and J. Christmas indeed what the teacher was asking them to do. They seemed excited to have the opportunity to write freely about something that mattered to them personally. At all stages, the teachers also took pains to relate the writing skills and strategies used in the E2 class to writing tasks in other MIC classes. Students understood the relevance of the tasks because they were explicitly shown how they might transfer their new insights to other (non E2) MIC written work. Two other factors were important. Firstly, the students knew they would have a peer audience for their work and secondly, their teachers were also concerned to draw students’ attention to the requirements of the kind of writing they would eventually be expected to complete in their final year at MIC – the Senior Thesis. In both instances, when they understood the ‘real’ nature of the writing task, this became a motivation for students to apply themselves. The fact that students were repeatedly told that their teacher believed they could complete the task and complete it well, was a source of motivation. Class Two students in particular were frequently praised for their efforts, no matter how small, and the teacher made a point of commenting thoughtfully and often about each student’s work in an effort to show the student’s ideas and writing attempts, no matter how maturely (or not) these were expressed, were taken seriously. Problems with Control over Grammatical and Lexical Forms While Ellis admits to the usefulness of explicit grammar instruction in certain contexts,6 his recent research indicates that the greatest value of such instruction is not in the actual progress it is able to evoke in learners’ language (in particular, in improved accuracy), but in the fact that such instruction draws the learner’s attention to form (through the act of ‘noticing’) and by doing so, sets the learner up for acquisition at a later stage. In other words, while a learner may produce ‘accurate’ language when consciously attempting to use a form that has been explicitly taught, (for example answering a grammar question correctly in a test), it is usually not until a much later stage, (when the learner is developmentally ready), that he/she is able to activate this ‘knowledge’ automatically, without conscious effort. In the meantime, she/he will continue to make the same grammatical errors, even though aware of correct form when errors are pointed out. 7 Indeed, it is now known that grammatical accuracy is linked to an individual’s progress through fixed second-language developmental stages. Accuracy (and fluency) cannot, therefore, be ‘manufactured’ through a pedagogical approach that focuses purely on the teaching of grammatical ‘rules’. The cumulative findings of several well-known longitudinal SLA studies, such as those by Pienemann, indicate that it is impossible for students to leap these developmental stages through focused, decontextualised grammatical instruction for which they are not developmentally ready. 8 In fact, decontextualised grammar instruction, and/or 6 Ellis, R. (2002). The Place of Grammar Instruction in the Second/Foreign Language Curriculum. In Fotos, S. and Hinkel, E. (Eds.), New Perspectives on Grammar Teaching in Second Language Classrooms (pp. 17-34). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. 7 Ellis, R. (2002). Does form-focused instruction affect the acquisition of implicit knowledge? Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 24(2), 223-236. Doughty, C., & Williams, J. (Eds.). (1998). Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 8 Pienemann, M. Is Language Teachable? Psycholinguistic Experiments and Hypotheses. Applied Linguistics 1989 10(1):52-79. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Comparative Culture A Two-phase University Academic Writing Programme 17 focusing on grammatical accuracy while in the act of writing is counterproductive to development.9 With these factors in mind, it is, therefore, more productive to deal with issues of grammatical accuracy on a case-by-case basis, with individual students, in the context of the message they want to convey, after they have already made an attempt to communicate that message in written form. While this approach may be more time-consuming for the teacher, since it requires a greater level of individualised instruction, it is preferable to a ‘one-sizefits all’ approach to grammatical instruction which, though easier for a teacher to plan and administer, leaves students who have already acquired the structures being taught, bored on the sidelines, while those who are not developmentally ready for it remain confused and frustrated. In neither case is real learning taking place. The Two-phase Academic Writing Programme outlined below offers teachers and students an approach to the teaching and learning of grammar that better fits what is known of the language acquisition process and better meets individual learning needs. It does, however, require a commitment on the part of the teacher to less formulaic pedagogy and an abandonment of over-reliance on ‘recipe’ grammar resources. The extra effort involved may be offset, however, by the satisfaction that comes from knowing one is delivering more relevant instruction, with a corresponding noticeable improvement in both student motivation and grammatical accuracy at the precise points where this is needed, and where the student is developmentally capable of making genuine change. Likewise, in relation to the development of vocabulary knowledge, obviously each learner has an individual repertoire. The individualised approach of the Class Two writing project in particular, enabled the teacher to introduce high frequency (academic and general) vocabulary that was directly relevant to each learner and avoided wasting time on items already known. The Class One programme, by taking a topical and collaborative approach, provided a bank of words elicited from the learners themselves, which individuals could draw on at will. This allowed even weaker learners to demonstrate their prior knowledge, since everyone knew different words, while providing opportunities for the acquisition of (genuinely) new words by all, regardless of language proficiency level. Giving weaker students this opportunity to provide peer support also helps to develop their confidence, thus building their willingness to contribute ideas in English. In both classes, while using a lot of new vocabulary in their writing, learners knew which new words they should actually make an effort to learn, (i.e. words which are also found on the general and academic high frequency word lists, which students had copies of, these words being recognized as of higher priority than other words). Though useful in the context of a specific piece of writing, other words that are known to be of low frequency do not need to be the focus of instruction, since 9 Kasper, L.F. (1997) Assessing the Metacognitive Growth of ESL Student Writers. TESL-EJ, 3 (1), A-1. Retrieved January 22nd, 2010 from: http://www.cc.kyoto-su.ac.jp/information/tesl-ej/ej09/a1.html Kasper found that focusing on grammatical aspects of writing had a negative impact on writing quality, while making communicative aspects of writing the priority led to better quality writing overall. Likewise, Kubota’s work indicates that L2 writing suffers when teachers focus on sentence level accuracy. See Kubota, R. (1998). An investigation of L1-L2 transfer in writing among Japanese university students: Implications for contrastive rhetoric. Journal of Second Language Writing, 7(1), 69– 100. Vol. 15, 2010 18 Brown, C. and J. Christmas they are unlikely to be encountered often. 10 Subject-discipline specific words (specialized vocabulary) varied from essay topic to topic and students were free to choose which of these they wished to attempt to retain. Text Organization and Academic Writing Conventions Problems with text organization and academic writing conventions were addressed by means of careful and appropriate modeling. Students were given examples of essays, paragraphs and sentences to read and analyse, and time and opportunity to practise creating their own. The use of detailed corrective feedback created a further opportunity to provide models of appropriate language use. 11 Modeling writing, especially with low-level learners, is increasingly seen as an effective method in the development of stronger writing skills. 12 For low-level learners at MIC, providing understandable models of alternative language forms and patterns, which they could then attempt to manipulate, was seen as a more efficient step to writing progress than simply highlighting the fact that an error had been made and expecting the student to work out the correction for themselves. 13 Task Management Problems Often, when given an essay topic and a task outline and asked to ‘get on with it,’ students are at a loss as to how and where to start. This is especially the case for low-level learners who may have little or no prior experience in writing academic texts. Indeed, a native English speaker at the early stages of tertiary study may also find this kind of task extremely difficult. While a ‘sink or swim’ approach to writing, in which students are expected to complete a whole (and difficult) task with little preparation, and little understanding of the steps involved, and are then (possibly) berated for their lack of skill, or their inevitable inability to produce exactly what the teacher required, may reap benefits for some more resilient learners, the reality is that most students will experience a great deal of unnecessary stress if taught in this way. If (as Krashen suggests) negative affective factors have a detrimental effect on learning14, then this approach should be avoided at all costs. 10 Nation, I.S.P. (2001) Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paul Nation’s research into vocabulary acquisition indicates that high frequency words are so important, anything a teacher can do to ensure these are learnt is worthwhile, though it is better if these words are encountered in the context of a meaningful communicative task. For this reason, the methodology of vocabulary instruction was of less concern in the E2 writing programme, than the fact that at all times students were encouraged to learn high frequency lexical items and that they had a means (high frequency general and academic vocabulary lists) whereby to identify which words are high frequency words and which are not. 11 The value of corrective feedback (in its various forms) is still debated. See: Bitchener, J., S. Young and D. Cameron. (2005) The effect of different types of corrective feedback on ESL student writing. Journal of Second Language Writing. Volume 14, Issue 3, September 2005, Pages 191-205 12 Master, P. (1997) Using models in EST. , 35(4). English Teaching Forum. Retrieved January 22nd, 2010 from: http://eca.state.gov/forum/vols/vol35/no4/p30.htm 13 Of course, as mentioned earlier, retention of the forms modeled is related to developmental readiness, so the models served only to encourage ‘noticing’ in the cases where a student was not developmentally ready to acquire the structure he/she was having problems with. 14 Krashen, S. (1987) Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. New York: Prentice-Hall International. Comparative Culture A Two-phase University Academic Writing Programme 19 By breaking the essay writing task into clear sub-stages, and taking a slow, methodical approach, even students who hate to write begin to experience success, and may undergo a change of attitude to writing not only in English, but also in their own language.15 Having an open-ended timeframe for completion may be a luxury that most teachers cannot afford, but setting specific, smaller goals and shorter, manageable deadlines, and expecting students to complete parts of a whole, rather than an entire piece of work at once, with one ‘now or never’ deadline, is more conducive to learning, and more likely to result in task completion by all learners. Such a staged approach is actually manageable in most cases, provided the semester’s work schedule is planned well. Emergence of the Two-Phase Academic Writing Programme Apart from occasional ‘remedial’ writing tutoring of individual learners at upper levels, and some limited input into senior thesis papers at the (late) editing stage, the focus of the teaching of the authors (at MIC) had been on delivering first and second year English language and content classes. Therefore, the programme described here reflects attempts to deal with writing issues at this early stage of the learners’ tertiary experience. To begin, the background to the Two-phase Academic Writing Programme is explained, and then an outline of the programme is given. The appendices found at the end of this document contain student comments and some lesson materials, all of which, it is hoped, will encourage teachers of lower-level English language students to a greater confidence in their students’ abilities to create well-crafted academic written texts, and motivate teachers to use and/or adapt the academic writing programme to their respective classes. While the programme suggested here is specifically designed to be incorporated into the MIC E2 context, as a ‘stand-alone’ programme it could also be useful, with some adaptation, in other teaching situations. Background: Writing Tuition in First Year English Language Classes at MIC ‘English Two’ is the course label appended to the second-semester English skills enhancement class required of all first-year Japanese university students at MIC. As the name would suggest, this course is preceded by an ‘English One’ (E1) English Language class. In the E1 class, which is offered in the first semester each year, first-year students are introduced to “initial basic proficiency in fluency and accuracy in …written English,” and to “writing skills from the paragraph level.” They are encouraged to develop a “basic level of accuracy in… written sentence construction” along with a basic knowledge of “vocabulary for academic purposes.”16 The E2 classes are expected to build on the foundation established in the E1 classes. The MIC Handbook elaborates this aim thus… “English 2 continues 15 In fact, improvement in writing skills in English (as an L2), may well have positive effects on the quality of L1 writing, as recent work by Kobayashia, and Rinnert indicates multidirectionality of writing skills’ application (ie. writing skills acquired in L2 can be transferred back to writing in L1, not just in forward transfer from L1 to L2). 16 2009 Bulletin and Handbook of Student Information: Miyazaki International College. P. 88. Vol. 15, 2010 20 Brown, C. and J. Christmas proficiency development in … written English…strengthens written proficiency through practice in organized multi-paragraph essays…(and) … further develops structural accuracy and fluency using more complex forms.”17 Writing instruction in first year English Language classes is, therefore, expected to provide both input and practice opportunities that will create a sound foundation on which students can build, and which will enable them to cope successfully with the demands of academic writing in their wider college experience. Background: The Emergence of the Two-Phase Academic Writing Programme In the second semester of 2009, while planning and teaching independently, and lacking a detailed formal course outline, two relatively new (to MIC) E2 teachers sought to implement their own interpretation of the course description as elaborated in the MIC Handbook, in their second semester, English Two classes. Students in one class, (Class One), were asked to write a multi-paragraph ‘opinion’ essay on a ‘controversial’ topic. Students in the other class (Class Two) were also expected to prepare a multi-paragraph essay, but their writing was expected to demonstrate summarizing and description skills.18 In each class, one period per week, over approximately five weeks, was designated for this. In the case of Class Two, the computer suites were booked for most of these lessons. The quality of writing eventually produced in both classes was extremely encouraging and, when compared with pieces of writing completed by those same students for other (non-English Language) classes in semester two, 2009 at MIC, (taught by these same E2 teachers), the writing completed in the E2 classes, while not without its problems, was in most cases noticeably superior in terms of grammatical accuracy, quality of content, appropriate use of vocabulary, organization, word count and application of writing conventions (in particular attribution of ideas and use of appropriate referencing conventions). Overall the standard of writing and presentation was much higher than either teacher had anticipated and the students themselves evidenced a great deal of pride in their unexpectedly strong quality of work. Even the lowest proficiency learners managed to produce work of a very pleasing standard. Most students later commented that they believed they had made significant strides in their English academic writing skills. 19 In order to capture some practical benefit from insights obtained through this very positive experience, which may lead to an improvement the quality of writing teaching and learning in the E2 classes generally, it was decided, after the semester was over, to combine the most useful elements of each teacher’s approach into one teaching and learning ‘package,’ and to make this information available in the form of the Two-phase Academic Writing Programme outlined below. The work completed in Class One was seen to be preparatory to the more independent work in the Class Two programme. During the preparatory phase, as well as receiving active teacher input, students strongly supported and scaffolded 17 18 19 Ibid. In the latter case, the accuracy of content, though normally important, was NOT the prime consideration, since the focus of the task was to develop the quality of the language, an awareness of essay structure and basic academic conventions, though of course the teacher concerned drew students’ attention to any glaring errors and illogical or contradictory statements. See Appendix One Comparative Culture A Two-phase University Academic Writing Programme 21 each other, while learning the basic mechanics of writing an academic essay. This preparatory phase has been entitled Phase One. The work undertaken in Class Two incorporated many of the same features, but students worked more independently. The requirement to do unassisted research, the opportunity to plan and write about a personally selected topic, along with more stringent presentation and referencing requirements, was seen as a natural progression to the work completed in Class One.20 This more ‘independent’ phase is entitled Phase Two. In compiling the two programmes into one, it is hoped, that the resulting Two-phase programme will… • Be a useful resource to other interested teachers of low-level writers (thereby avoiding the necessity of completely ‘reinventing the wheel,’ in planning terms, each semester) • Enable low-level English language learners, who are struggling to cope with the demands of academic writing generally, to experience greater writing success at the beginning stages of their academic writing experience • Provide a means (through a more systematic and ‘staged’ approach to academic writing instruction at the early levels) to promote improvement in the quality of written academic texts produced by students in the senior years of academic study. • Be a vehicle through which teachers, student advisors (and perhaps other student support personnel) may track development in academic writing skills on the part of individual learners in order to enable earlier intervention where students are seen to be having serious writing difficulties. 21 The Two-phase Academic Writing Programme Phase One: Introduction to Basic Academic (5 paragraph) Essay Writing - an Opinion Essay Stages 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 20 21 Teaching students planning strategies Reading sample essays to raise awareness Divide and conquer—students collaboratively create essays Rewriting—peer editing and rubrics Limited research essay In fact in the original Class One programme, a sixth stage requiring an independent essay (on a topic set by the teacher) was originally included, but since this duplicated many aspects of the Class Two individual essay, the two independent essays were merged in the final Two-phase programme outlined here. One suggestion would be the introduction of an ongoing writing portfolio for each student that would collect samples of written work from classes taken in each year. The advantage of such a body of work, (which could be stored by each student’s advisor), would be to highlight, early in a student’s career, those who are having significant problems achieving writing success at an acceptable pace. This would enable more speedy intervention in the form of ongoing remedial work (e.g. extra 1:1 tuition in the ARC – Academic Resource Centre (an independent learning centre) to begin much sooner and thus circumvent the present need for last minute ‘rescue attempts’ in a student’s fourth year. Vol. 15, 2010 22 Brown, C. and J. Christmas Stage One: Teaching Students Planning Strategies Students often want to ‘dive into the deep end’ (begin their essays immediately) although they do not really know how to ‘swim’ (write). It is vital to help them understand that good writing begins with thinking and planning. One way to facilitate this process is to begin with a graphic organiser. Any type of mind map might do. However, the organiser given below has been particularly effective, as it visually represents the body of the essay, in helping students grasp the concept of “one paragraph/one main idea.” The topmost circle is the essay question slot. In this slot students usually write a word or symbol that indicates their stance on the ‘opinion essay’ topic. In each of the three lower circles, the students write a key idea that explains why they believe in the stance they have taken. In the second part of the planning stage “support and reasons” boxes are added to the organiser. (See the example below, created in response to the question: Are cell phones appropriate for younger students?) No—Cell phones are not appropriate BP1 Dangerous a) internet predators b) anonymous net bullying c) adult sites BP2 Expensive a) hidden costs b) easy to make dialing mistakes c) unnecessary waste of money BP3 Have harmful effects a) focus on phone not class b) disrupt class c) school performance may decline The lower three circles and boxes represent the three body paragraphs (BP) of a traditional five paragraph essay. The arrows help the students to visualize the concept that the supporting ideas and reasons in the box below the key idea must be logically related and offer concrete support for that particular key idea. During the first stage of teaching how to plan, students engage in a ‘quick plan’ activity with a number of essay topics. In other words they have at least two topics to plan per class and a time limit for the creating of the graphic organiser Comparative Culture A Two-phase University Academic Writing Programme 23 activity. Additionally, topics are recycled during speaking activities in order to help students share ideas, gain exposure to a variety of viewpoints, recycle vocabulary and to allow opportunities for automatising of language. During the initial ‘idea gathering’ (creating the graphic organiser), students do not need to write full sentences. Using only key points allows them to focus on generating ideas, rather than worrying about grammar or spelling, which can be dealt with later. The use of only key ideas will also allow students to work on fluency (rather than reading) during associated speaking exercises that make use of pre-created organisers. Stage Two: Reading Sample Essays to Raise Awareness As mentioned earlier, current research in ESL writing points to the efficacy of allowing students to learn to write by using models. In E2, the students found it helpful to read essays similar to the types of essay that they would be expected to write. In order to raise student awareness regarding traditional essay features, a series of exercises accompanied the readings. The following is a list of activities that were used… • Read a sample essay and ‘reverse-engineer’ (or work backwards) to fill in a graphic organiser based on the key ideas and support for these, as found in the sample essay • Read and circle, correct or add paragraph elements such as transitional phrases, synonyms, conjunctions and punctuation • Read and put the paragraphs in order Stage Three: Divide and Conquer—Students Collaboratively Create Essay Paragraphs, Introductions and Conclusions By this stage of the essay writing process, students now have a clearer idea of what an essay is and are thus more prepared to write at least a well-supported paragraph. At this point, students are given an essay topic. It is helpful if the topic is relevant to their age, interests and experience. They should then begin to plan with the use of a graphic organiser. Students share their ideas and create one organiser for the whole class on the whiteboard. Following this, in pairs, students collaboratively write one body paragraph. For example, in a class of 18 students, the writing of the first body paragraph (BP1) is assigned to three pairs of students. Similarly, responsibility for the second (BP2) and third body (BP3) paragraphs is given to three pairs of students respectively. Thus, if using the example from the ‘cell phone’ topic above, three pairs of students would be expected to write about the dangers posed by cell phones to younger students, three pairs of students would write a paragraph about the expensive nature of cell phones for younger students and the final three pairs of students would write a paragraph explaining the harmful effects of cell phones on young learners. (Each pair is asked to initially work independently of the other pairs who have the same paragraph assignment. This strategy allows for comparison of language and writing style at a later stage.) Stage Three and Stage Four are repeated for teaching introduction and conclusion writing. Stage Four: Rewriting—Peer Editing and Rubrics After the pair paragraph writing activity, the students will be ready to begin peer editing. In order for students to be able to give feedback, it is important to make Vol. 15, 2010 24 Brown, C. and J. Christmas sure that students have a clear picture of the elements of a good paragraph. To help remind students and to further their understanding, a review activity with a good sample paragraph and a rubric that will help the students rank/rate and offer feedback on their classmate’s writing is useful. It is also valuable to teach students how to give feedback by giving examples of positive comments and constructive criticism. (Although some teachers have misgivings about peer editing, in the years that the Class One teacher used it, students continually exclaimed how useful it was to receive comments on their work by multiple readers.) If teachers teach their students how to give good feedback and emphasise that writing is a process and a way to learn to be a better writer, there is much less reticence about sharing work. 22 Stage Five: Limited Research Essay Once the students have grasped a basic understanding of essay writing conventions and demonstrated their ability to write a five-paragraph essay based on their own ideas, it is time to begin to ask students to do some research. Another topic is chosen at this point, (e.g. ‘Should the legal drinking age be lowered?’). The students then engage in a number of activities to help them learn some basic skills necessary for writing an essay that is based on ideas provided by a third-party. Sample Activities: • Readings on the topic (provided by the teacher) • Two sample essays (referenced) that illustrated both sides of a similar issue—Students read and ‘reverse-engineer’ a graphic organiser. Students also go to the online references, read and record the paragraph number and the author’s or organisation’s name • Mini-debate on the topic. Contrasting personal ideas and ideas gleaned from readings • Annotated bibliography on the topic • Plagiarising awareness activity & paraphrasing activity • Graphic organiser • First draft five paragraph essay—with footnotes • Peer editing Having successfully completed this first preparatory phase, students are now ready for Phase Two of the Academic Writing Programme. Phase Two: Independent Research Essay Concerned specifically about the teacher/student issues mentioned earlier, the teacher of Class Two decided to create a writing project that would attempt to deal with these and lead her lower-level students to a position of greater writing strength and self-confidence. The project was designed as an informal ‘experiment’, in order to see what low-level students could produce if the expectations were clear, the process was well-staged, each student had regular feedback, relevant models were available and the task was challenging but (in light of the low proficiency level) still considered to be achievable. 22 See Appendices Two and Three for examples of feedback rubric sheets Comparative Culture A Two-phase University Academic Writing Programme 25 Stages 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Explaining the task / Building motivation Deciding on a topic Gathering and selecting ideas Creating an ongoing reference record Planning the body of the essay Writing to the plan / Modifying the plan Feedback, modeling, rewriting Building an introduction and conclusion ‘Publishing’ (document presentation, peer-reading) Reflecting on the process Stage One: Explaining the Task / Building Motivation Students receive detailed written and verbal instructions explaining the writing project and the expectations for assessment.23 About half a period spent working through this information together allows enough time for students to ask any questions they may have. After the project has been explained, students share their understanding of the project with each other. This ensures every student understands what is expected and again allows for questions to be asked and answered. (The essay task in the second semester of 2009 was to be at least 250 words in length and to contain at least three body paragraphs (not counting the introduction and conclusion), though students were told there would be no upper word limit, and if they were really interested in their topic they could write as much as they liked.) The essay should describe or explain something that students already know about. They should be told the purpose of the writing, in this case the purpose was to use their essay to teach other students in the class about a topic, issue or person they were interested in. It should be made clear that there will be a real audience for the writing. This will encourage students to take the task seriously and to do their best work, since the quality of their writing will be ‘judged’ (albeit informally) by their peers. The rationale for the writing project in relation to its role in improving academic writing generally should also be discussed, with discussion of writing that is done in other classes, as well as long-term writing requirements in senior years. Students should first be asked to work in pairs to articulate their thoughts and previous experiences (negative and positive) about writing in English generally, and academic writing in particular. Students then give feedback to a whole class discussion, which is summarised on the whiteboard. The teacher should then spend time dealing with the issues and concerns that students raise, encouraging them to view academic writing in a more positive light and offering them examples, reasons and practical strategies for this. It is important at this point for the teacher to articulate the belief that these students are capable of completing a strong academic essay. Then, he/she should outline the stages that will be taken towards achieving that goal, and the reasons for completing the task in the manner described. If students know what they are aiming for and why they are working in a particular way, they will be more likely to follow instructions and to understand how their writing skills are being developed. 23 See Appendix Four Vol. 15, 2010 26 Brown, C. and J. Christmas The timeframe should be clear, along with the expectation that all work is to be completed in class time. Students should be asked NOT to do any written work for homework, apart from making notes while researching background information. The reason for this is to avoid putting students under ‘deadline’ stress during the writing process, and to avoid adding to an existing heavy homework load. More importantly, it avoids the likelihood that individual students may rush through the project simply to get it out of the way, thereby denying themselves the chance to see and retain a record of their writing development over the course of time, thus growing in understanding of the nature of the writing process itself. 24 Stage Two: Deciding on a Topic In the second half of the first class, after the writing project expectations have been outlined, students should be given time to peruse their notes from other classes, discuss topic ideas with each other, and to ask the teacher any further questions. It is important that this stage is not hurried, in order to give students ample time to think of a good topic idea. Their topic selection, however, should be decided before the next writing class. In the case of the Class Two students, the topic was drawn from one of the disciplines they were studying in other MIC classes (eg. Psychology, History, Anthropology, Political Science). Students should use materials and ideas from other (content) classes, books or the Internet as the basis for a completely new piece of written work, but ought not to copy directly from any sources, notes or other writing they have previously done. (I.e. Class time should not be used to simply prepare an essay already set as an assessment or homework task by another teacher, or to rework an assignment previously completed for another teacher.) Some class time can then be spent explaining, modeling and practising how to write a topic heading correctly (e.g. the use of punctuation conventions). Once selected, the topic (and the subject area to which it related) is written on the student’s individual copy of the ‘Essay Outline Sheet’ 25 . This planning sheet, containing the subject area and topic is then handed to the teacher for checking and feedback. 24 Doing the writing in class time helped, therefore, to overtly emphasise the process nature of the academic writing project. The teacher collected and stapled each student’s work together in the same order in which the writing progressed, forming a process writing ‘booklet.’ She made written comments and correction suggestions for each student each week, providing more language models where needed. Students would then, in the next class, rewrite the previous week’s writing, making changes in keeping with the advice from their teacher, and add the edited work to an ongoing computer document after which they would then begin working on another paragraph. During class time, students were also able to provide informal peer support (as they themselves sought this), though this was not planned as an integral part of the writing process. A pleasing observation in the Class Two programme was the noticeable jump in student motivation and teacher/student interaction as the writing proceeded. Because students were receiving a high level of individual feedback (in written form) on their writing documents, they began to seek more individual help during class time than this teacher had experienced in previous E2 writing classes. Even students who had previously been reluctant to interact with the teacher on an individual basis began to regularly seek help during the writing class in order to clarify teacher’s written comments, seek advice or to ask more questions. 25 See Appendix Five Comparative Culture A Two-phase University Academic Writing Programme 27 Stage Three: Gathering and Selecting Ideas Students who have selected a topic and written it correctly on their ‘Essay Outline sheet,’ are then able to use the computer suite or library immediately, in order to begin independent research. An entire period should be given to conducting research (using books, magazines and newspapers, the Internet and/or class notes from other classes) in order to begin to gather ideas and information about which to write. Students should also be encouraged to continue to do more research in their own time in preparation for the next class, (though they should not start writing yet). It is important for the teacher to monitor students’ research progress, as some students will have difficulties with this stage. It is not necessary for all research to be conducted in English,26 though this would be preferable, as it would provide an opportunity for students to practise reading skills. Stage Four: Creating an Ongoing Reference Record At the start of the research stage, students should begin to keep an ongoing record of sources from which they glean information, on the ‘Research Record Sheet,’ (on the back of the Essay Outline Sheet. 27) The teacher needs to check that individuals do this. A minimum of at least three references is a good guide for those who are new to academic writing, though students can be encouraged to provide more. To make the record-keeping easier, students can be given the option of creating a word document so that they can copy, cut and paste URL addresses of sites they visit. Doing this helps to avoid having to laboriously copy these details by hand (with the possibility of making errors). This record should grow during the course of the project, and the teacher needs to check it regularly. If it is left until the end, students may forget their sources. It is also useful for students to realise, by doing this, that successful academic writers establish a habit of keeping source records as they write, and that this practice is required in all academic writing, not just that done for this particular class. During this stage, if this has not already happened, there should be an open and frank class discussion reviewing the serious nature of plagiarism and its likely consequences. Stage Five: Planning the Body of the Essay In the next class, the teacher models how to select ideas from a wide body of information using a model text and a highlighter to identify key ideas. (Alternatively, students can be given this as an in-class task (as in Phase One). (Doing this could be a useful form of review; identifying and analysing topic sentences, for example.) Following the model, students examine their own research notes and any other material they have gathered, and highlight at least three key ideas they want to cover in their essays. These should be written on the ‘Essay Outline Sheet.’ Extra space on the ‘Essay Outline Sheet’ is provided, in case more ambitious students 26 27 The use of L1 in the English Language classroom remains under discussion, though many studies generally indicate that it does not hinder L2 development at all and that L1 is, in fact, an important learning resource that teachers ought not to overlook, or deny their students. For one example, see Auerbach, E. R. (1993) Re-examining English Only in the ESL Classroom. TESOL Quarterly Vol 27. No. 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 9-32. See Appendix Six Vol. 15, 2010 28 Brown, C. and J. Christmas decide to write more28. (Alternatively, students could use the graphic organiser, as in Phase One, at this point.) Again, the teacher checks the ‘Essay Outline Sheet,’ (or graphic organiser) and discusses the feasibility of ideas with individuals where this is necessary. Students then make changes where appropriate. The teacher and each student alike should have a clear idea of the potential direction of the essay. Class instruction then reviews the key elements of a topic sentence (subject and controlling idea) and how to write supporting sentences (in the form of examples and reasons), with the teacher again providing models.29 Students subsequently begin to work independently on the first body paragraph of their essays. Stage Six: Writing to the Plan / Modifying the Plan Students should begin with body paragraphs, rather than an introduction since this provides an opportunity for them to change their mind about the essay’s content as they write without having to re-work an introduction that was previously constructed. If, for example, information to support ideas on the outline sheet is not readily available, students are free to change the direction of their essay provided they modify their outline (and in some instances, the wording of their topics). Beginning this way gives students both a concrete starting point (since they have a plan) but also relieves them of the stress of having to deal with a topic that may otherwise become a kind of ‘straightjacket.’ It also reinforces individual ‘ownership’ of their essay. Having this kind of control over content allows students to consider other aspects of writing more deeply, such as the linguistic challenges and the organisational problems they face. Stage Seven: Feedback, Modeling, Rewriting After completing each draft paragraph on the ‘Paragraph Planning Sheet,’30 students submit this to the teacher to check. Every piece of writing for every student should be reviewed, with detailed correction suggestions and models given. (Because learners are of a lower proficiency level, and if class sizes are not large, teachers should be able to give their students’ writing close attention. The low level of the students and the need to provide accurate models necessitates this, but this is compensated for by the fact that the quantity of writing to be marked is not overly onerous.) At the start of the next lesson, the marked material is returned to students, who re-work the previous week’s (checked) writing on the computer, adding it to a word document containing all of their essay’s writing to date. This document should be printed out each week and handed to the teacher, along with any new draft paragraphs begun in class that week. All material should be stapled together in order (essay outline sheet, reference record, draft paragraph 28 29 30 One of the most unexpected and pleasing outcomes of the writing programme in this class was the fact that ALL students exceeded the 250 minimum word-count requirement. The weakest student presented a document of 406 words, while the longest (though not the strongest) essay was 814 words long! If this phase is preceded by Phase One, less time would be required at this point, since students would already be familiar with the concepts of topic and supporting sentences and would have had practice writing basic paragraphs.) See Appendix Seven Comparative Culture A Two-phase University Academic Writing Programme 29 one, edited paragraph one (computer generated), draft paragraph two, edited paragraph two, and so on). Keeping the work in order enables the student to see the progress made each week and is motivating. It also gives them a hard copy to refer to as they are typing, which is easier than flipping from one electronic document to another while writing, and minimizes the possibility that work will get ‘lost’. As students see their volume of work begin to grow, and the changes that are made to it, they begin to develop a clearer understanding of the writing process. It also helps them to see the links between their original writing outline, the actual writing they subsequently do and the final product. Stage Eight: Building an Introduction and Conclusion Once the body paragraphs are completed, it is then easy to specify, in the introduction paragraph, what the essay will cover, since the content of the essay has already been decided and writing completed. In any case, the models for the introduction and the conclusion are more or less formulaic. Low-level students can be encouraged to follow a standardised format for their introduction and conclusion, since the intent is to provide a useful model that they can apply (with adaptation where necessary) to essays for other classes. 31 More capable students can also be given the model, but could be asked to attempt an introduction or conclusion using language of their own. Stage Nine: ‘Publishing’ (Document Presentation and Peer-reading) A cover page and the final reference page should be included at the beginning and end. Students should check and adjust the formatting where necessary. The entire essay should be printed out and all papers should be stapled together to form one document. Two copies should be given to the teacher, one to be marked and one for the peer-reading session. Students should also submit all draft material, as it is helpful for teachers to be able to comment on the growth evident in the writing over the course of the project by referring to the draft. Again, this emphasizes process, not just product. After marking the writing, a final class should be allocated for students to read each other’s work. Students should have ample time to discuss each essay with its author if they wish. Stage Ten: Reflecting on the Process After sharing their writing with each other in a peer-reading class, students should be given the chance to reflect on their learning through a short written task in which they are asked to comment on their progress and the value of the writing programme as they see it. 32 This will provide valuable feedback that can inform future teaching, but also gives students a chance to consider the writing experience as a whole. If they are able to identify aspects of the programme that were helpful, they can then be encouraged to apply their new skills and knowledge to other writing tasks. A final suggestion is for the teacher to summarise useful ideas from the feedback in a document to be given to students to read in their own time, as these may provide guidelines for future writing tasks. In any case, it may be 31 32 See Appendix Eight See Appendix One Vol. 15, 2010 30 Brown, C. and J. Christmas interesting for students to read each other’s (anonymous) comments as these may help them realize their troubling writing issues are not entirely unique. Conclusion By combining the preparatory phase (the Class One programme) with the more independent phase (Class Two’s programme), a holistic writing programme has evolved that can be used to lead students from a position of complete novice to that of a more confident academic writer. Though the final products (academic essays) may still reflect lower language proficiency levels, most students at least, by working through the entire programme, should now appreciate the essential elements of a well-rounded piece of academic work and are better equipped to begin to transfer these new insights to written work in other classes. It is hoped, therefore, that the use of the Two-phase Academic Writing Programme will help resolve some of the more straightforward and common issues that commonly concern teachers and students alike, particularly in the first year of academic study. Over time, it remains to be seen whether this programme will lead to actual progress in the quality of academic writing at upper levels. The implementation of the Two-phase Academic Writing Programme at lower levels, therefore, not only aims to develop lower level students’ academic writing skills, but also provides an opportunity for investigation into any long-term effects on the quality of their academic writing. If significant improvements are found, as is hoped, teachers of senior students would be more free to ‘fine-tune’ the academic writing their upper level students produce, and focus on achieving better quality and depth of academic content, rather than having to repeatedly deal with ‘fixing the basics’ and lastminute or overdue written work completion issues in the latter stages of a students period of study. With a thorough grounding in basic academic writing skills in the early years of their tertiary experience, students will at least have had the necessary preparation to enable them to begin producing academic writing of a standard more appropriate to senior levels, in their third and fourth years of study. References Auerbach, E. R. (1993) Re-examining English Only in the ESL Classroom. TESOL Quarterly Vol 27. No. 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 9-32 Bitchener, J., S. Young and D. Cameron. (2005) The effect of different types of corrective feedback on ESL student writing. Journal of Second Language Writing. Volume 14, Issue 3, September 2005, Pages 191-205 Doughty, C., & Williams, J. (Eds.). (1998). Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellis, R. (2002). The Place of Grammar Instruction in the Second/Foreign Language Curriculum. In Fotos, S. and Hinkel, E. (Eds.), New Perspectives on Grammar Teaching in Second Language Classrooms (pp. 17-34). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Ellis, R. (2002). Does form-focused instruction affect the acquisition of implicit knowledge? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24(2), 223-236. Comparative Culture A Two-phase University Academic Writing Programme 31 Kasper, L.F. (1997) Assessing the Metacognitive Growth of ESL Student Writers. TESL-EJ, 3 (1), A-1. Retrieved January 22nd, 2010 from: http://www.cc.kyotosu.ac.jp/information/tesl-ej/ej09/a1.html Kobayashi, H. and C. Rinnert, (2008). Writing in Foreign Language Contexts; Research Insights. Journal of Second Language Writing. Volume 17, Issue 1, March 2008, Pages 7-29. Krashen, S. (1987) Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. New York: Prentice-Hall International. Kubota, R. (1998). An investigation of L1-L2 transfer in writing among Japanese university students: Implications for contrastive rhetoric. Journal of Second Language Writing, 7(1), 69–100. Nation, I.S.P. (2001) Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Master, P. (1997) Using models in EST. , 35(4). English Teaching Forum. Retrieved January 22nd, 2010 from: http://eca.state.gov/forum/vols/vol35/no4/p30.htm Pienemann, M. Is Language Teachable? Psycholinguistic Experiments and Hypotheses. Applied Linguistics 1989 10(1):52-79. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. 1968. Pygmalion in the Classroom. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 2009 Bulletin and Handbook of Student Information. Miyazaki International College. P. 88. Appendices Appendix One: Student Feedback on the Class Two Writing Programme At the end of the (Phase Two) writing programme in Class Two, students were asked to complete a fluency writing task in response to the following questions… “Recently, we wrote a long essay in the CCR1 (computer suite). What did you think of this learning task? Why? What did you learn about writing by doing this activity?” Their comments were overwhelmingly positive and are provided below. • “Before I wrote the essay, I thought I can’t finish or I can’t write long sentences. But you helped me when I asked some questions about my topic…and you taught me how to write, so that it was not too hard for me. Writing the essay helped me to improve my English Skill. Essay is very hard work and sometimes I feel stress, but I got the chance to think of English and my topic in good way. Writing essay taught me that I should not give up and should not feel stress. I had many time to look up on Internet or write the essay, so that I wrote very smoothly.” • “I learnt to connect sentences by doing this activity. Before I learnt about writing essay, I couldn’t connect sentence…Addition to it, I learned how to use past, present and future. Before I learned this activity, I confused present and future.” Vol. 15, 2010 32 Brown, C. and J. Christmas • • • • • • • • • • • • • “When I wrote and think about my essay, I thought that it is very fun for me to write my essay. It is because I could write anything that is interesting for me to research. I learned many things from this writing activity. For example, I could learn how to write topic sentences, introduction, my conclusion and reference…I learned that I can write the long essay if I have interesting things, so this activity is very useful for me…” “I think that it is important to write an essay, because when I wrote the essay, I could learn about many things. For example, I could get a lot of vocabularies…” “I didn’t think that I can write 600 words essay. I have never written more than 400 words in essay. In learning task, I was able to improve my English skills and I came to like writing…We have to write essay in other classes, so it was so useful. When I am final year, I must write thesis in order to graduate from school…” “In this activity, I learnt how to write sentences in correct order.” “I never gave up because (I did it) for myself.” “To write an essay is important for us in this college, because we have to write essays in many classes, so this activity is very useful. I learned how to write essays, to use many vocabulary and to write so people can read easily. I learned it is important to research.” “Thanks to this writing task, I could learn how to write an essay and think about (my topic) deeply.” “I’m thankful that you checked my wrong grammar.” “I didn’t like to write essay, but this activity made me to like writing. I learned how to write and (that I) must decide what I want to write.” “I thought this essay was very difficult to me because I can’t research, write and type fast, so finally, I (was) late…but I learned how to write the essay.” “I learned about effort by doing this activity. I think that the activity is very good practice. Actually, I felt that my sentences were greater than last semester. Specifically, I could remember about how to make a topic sentence.” “I think that the learning task which we wrote essay is very good for me, because I could think about my task deeply again through researching details. I learned the way to write essay and how to represent my idea about writing by doing this activity.” Comparative Culture A Two-phase University Academic Writing Programme 33 Appendix Two: Sample Paragraph Level Feedback / Rubric Sheet Reader’s name: The main idea is clearly stated in the first sentence of the paragraph. The reasons and/or support were concrete and logically related to the main idea of the paragraph. Examples of reasons/concrete support: Grammar mistakes did not interfere with your understanding Grammar problems: /5 /5 /5 Please write one positive comment: Please write one suggestion: Appendix Three: Sample Essay Level Feedback / Rubric Sheet Essay Evaluation Sheet Intro Thesis /10 Length (“I Name: /10 believe…”) References /10 Form /10 Grammar /10 BP1 Idea /5 BP1 support /5 BP2 Idea /5 BP2 support /5 BP3 Idea /5 BP3 Support /5 Conclusion /5 Transitions /10 /5 Total Advice: Positive Comment: Vol. 15, 2010 /100 34 Brown, C. and J. Christmas Appendix Four: Task Information Sheet (Class Two) Writing a Strong Essay Over the next few weeks, we will study how to write a strong academic essay. You will do MOST of this work IN CLASS. Do NOT try to finish it quickly at home, as there is much you need to learn about writing a good essay. This is why we will do it in class time. Here is what you will do. 1. Choose an essay topic. Your idea for a topic should come from one of the other classes in which you study at MIC. You MUST NOT use an essay that has already been given by another MIC teacher. Your topic MUST be a NEW topic, but it should relate to your studies here. 2. Do some research to get information about your topic. You will have ONLY ONE class in which to do this! REMEMBER to write down a list of the websites you visit while you do your research! (This list will become part of your essay. Make sure it is accurate! You will lose marks if you do NOT provide this list of references!) 3. Brainstorm ideas for three or more paragraphs 4. Write (at least three) body paragraphs. Each paragraph should have a topic sentence and some supporting sentences that give examples and reasons for your ideas. 5. Write an introduction paragraph to your essay. The introduction should explain what your essay is going to be about. The information should be very general. 6. Write a conclusion paragraph to your essay. Your conclusion should summarise the main points you have already made in the body paragraphs. Do NOT introduce new ideas in your conclusion. 7. Add the list of references to the end of your essay. 8. Check that your work is DOUBLE SPACED and that the paragraphs are clearly separated from each other. Your final copy should be TYPED on a computer, NOT hand-written! (You may need to do the typing in your own time.) Your essay should be on A4 sized paper. 9. Make a cover page (A4 size) to put at the front of your essay. The cover page should have your name, the name and course number of the E2 class, the topic of your essay, the number of words you have written and the number of pages you have used (not counting the cover page). 10. Staple everything together in the TOP LEFT HAND corner, and give it to your teacher on the due date. (She will tell you when this is.) Comparative Culture A Two-phase University Academic Writing Programme 35 Appendix Five: Essay Outline Sheet Essay Outline Sheet NAME: ________________________________________________ Subject Area: ___________________________________________ Essay Topic_________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ Ideas I will write about in my essay (one idea for each paragraph) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Vol. 15, 2010 36 Brown, C. and J. Christmas Appendix Six: Research Record Research Record (Include all website addresses, books, magazines, articles, class notes that you have used) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Teacher’s comment Comparative Culture A Two-phase University Academic Writing Programme 37 Appendix Seven: Paragraph Planning Sheet Name: _______________________ Body Paragraph number _____ Topic sentence ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ Supporting points ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ Conclusion sentence ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ Vol. 15, 2010 38 Brown, C. and J. Christmas Appendix Eight: Writing an Introduction, Conclusion, Reference Page and Cover Sheet X Writing an Introduction When you write an essay, you need to introduce your ideas to the reader. Here is ONE way you can do this… This essay introduces the topic “ __________(write your topic here) ____________”. _____(write the number of ideas / body paragraphs) _____ aspects of this topic will be discussed. These include, firstly, _____(say what the first paragraph is about)_____. Secondly, _____(say what the second body paragraph is about) _____, thirdly, _____(say what the third body paragraph is about, and so on) _____. Finally, the essay will conclude with a short summary (or the writer’s opinion) about the topic. Writing a Conclusion A conclusion can be written in a similar way. Here is ONE way to write a conclusion… In conclusion, after discussing the ____(number) aspects above, we can see that the topic outlined here is a/an (adjective + adjective eg. ‘interesting and complex’) one. In my opinion, it is a useful subject to consider because ________(give your opinion here) _________. __________________________________________________________________________________ Remember to add a • reference page (at the end of your work) • cover page (at the front) 1. Your reference page should list ALL the references you used. If you used books, journals, articles or magazines, list them in alphabetical order. Make sure you put the name of the author, the publishing date and the name of the publisher. 2. Your cover page should include… Name: ___________ Name of the class: _____________ Topic: ___________ Word count: __________ (Do NOT count the words in the reference page or the words on the cover page) Number of pages: ___________ (Do NOT count the reference page or the cover page) Staple everything together in the top left-hand corner. (See X above) Comparative Culture Comparative Culture 15: 39-62, 2010 The Coleridgean Imagination: its Role in Thought and its Relation to Reason Peter Cheyne This paper traces the development of the Coleridgean imagination to its position at the heart of a broadly neoplatonic system merging associationist roots with kantian inspiration. Rather than the place of the imagination being supplanted in Coleridge’s later thinking (e.g., in Aids to Reflection (1825), and Church and State (1826)) by the role of platonic Ideas, I aim to show that the latter grew in prominence with the necessary groundwork having been laid by establishing the role of imagination in thought and its relation to Reason considered logically, and along platonic and neoplatonic lines, and not psychologically. Coleridge’s theory of imagination was not just a brilliant theory of poetry; it was integral to a systematic philosophy that evinced as one example that from the very fact of poetry, the associationist philosophy of empiricism could not be a complete theory, but could only retain value as part of a larger system. Far from being a brilliant theory that was later eclipsed in Coleridge’s writings by the theory of Ideas, I argue that the Coleridgean imagination can only be properly understood in terms of its necessity in bringing Reason explicitly to self-aware thought, and thus bringing Ideas to enlightened mind. For this to be possible, it must first be acknowledged how and why the concepts of the understanding can only be enlightened by negative reason, and that imagination is necessary in order for thinking to be aware of Reason in its positive aspect. This paper is an exploration of the development of Coleridge’s theory of the imagination as his philosophical ideas evolved from enthusiasm for the British empiricism of the day, transforming his take on transcendental idealism towards a broadly neoplatonic system. Coleridge’s thoughts turned towards the imagination as he tried to understand what made a poet and what distinguished good poetry from bad. Since his school days at Christ’s Hospital, he held a conviction, instilled in him by his Headmaster, James Boyer1, “that poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes.” 2 Much of Coleridge’s life was spent in this difficult pursuit of poetry’s logic. Early in this pursuit, Coleridge was a follower of empiricist philosophy, believing association to be the important link between body and spirit. Associationism seemed to explain how the perceiving mind multiplies connections within experience, quite naturally producing similes and metaphors. While associationism was just one aspect of Locke’s empiricism, David Hartley based his entire system on a theory of association by contiguity and repetition. Although Hartley’s influence on Coleridge would not retain its central position, it was strong enough at the time for the poet to name his first son Hartley Coleridge. Coleridge was especially interested in Hartley’s theory because it progressed towards a kind of sublimation theory whereby the sense material became spiritualized. “Some degree of spirituality”, wrote Hartley, “is the necessary consequence of passing through life. The sensible pleasures and pains must be transferred by association more and more every day, upon things that afford neither sensible pleasure nor sensible pain in themselves, and so beget the intellectual pleasures and pains.” In ‘Religious Musings’, Coleridge hails Hartley as “of mortal Peter Cheyne teaches at Miyazaki International College. Correspondence may be sent to: MIC, 1405 Kano, Kiyotake-cho, Miyazaki-shi, Miyazaki-ken, Japan 889-1605, Tel: 0985-85-5931, Fax: 0985-84-3396, E-mail: pcheyne@sky.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp 40 Peter Cheyne kind / Wisest”, because he essayed to establish value on a materialistic and scientific footing and was the “first who marked the ideal tribes / Up the fine fibres through the sentient brain”.3 Coleridge would grow to criticize the associationist philosophers in the strongest terms, but would never jettison the theory from his system. Associationism remained within the Coleridgean system, holding a place around the lower rungs of his ladder between nature and reason. The lower levels progressed from nature, through sensation and then fancy to the lower understanding, then to the higher levels, from higher understanding, through imagination to reason, the station after which is reached the ultimate truth: logos, or God. Conceiving this scheme as a ladder shows the order that Coleridge had in mind. Coleridge described his system as a polarity, as in a bar magnet, with reason and sense being the upper and lower counterparts. Imagination and fancy occupied the next upper and lower positions. A higher and a lower understanding were then lodged in the middle of the polarity, between fancy and imagination. Analogies always break down, and we must be cautious not to assess Coleridge as a faculty psychologist. He was careful to emphasize that his was no faculty psychology, and that talking of sense, fancy, understanding, imagination, and reason was not to assume discrete faculties, but was rather a way of describing different kinds of basic mental processing, different kinds of creative mental activity. For Coleridge, each process involves the whole, in that an act of understanding, for example, involves and requires the contributions of associated fancy. Coleridge never considered such processes and activities in a way that was not holistic, or organicist, to prefer a term of his own coinage. We must bear with any appearances of faculty psychology in his system, and construe them as scaffolding, helping to form a modeled ensemble of the reality that Coleridge essayed to convey. Association drove Hartley’s entire psychology, whereas in Coleridge’s system association operates only at the level of the fancy. Here, fancy processes for the lower understanding the materials provided by senses. The fancy provides the lower understanding with counters garnered from sense experience to be worked into concepts. Thus the understanding can then abstract from experience, gaining a concept of “outness”, as Coleridge termed the sense of externality. Proceeding from this outness we conceive ourselves as detached individuals. This faculty of understanding (Coleridge’s lower understanding) is concerned with concepts abstracted from experience and leads to an alienation that would be final if the associationist philosophy were the ultimate word in human psychology. The sense of individuality presented by the understanding is a personal unity consisting, negatively, in division from the main. It is the subjective residue after the objective entities in experience have been abstracted. This provides a sense of being an observer and an agent, a self who is able to observe and in turn act upon passive nature only in virtue of being cut off from it. The romantic gist is familiar. Within the realm of instinct and pre-reflective experience, the mind is at one with nature; with conceptual understanding comes the divorce. Further in his theory, Coleridge saw a higher reunion with nature through the mediation of the imagination bringing the ideas of reason down to the higher understanding. This reunion, displacing the sense of detachment with a higher order of attachment, must have felt like the source of a great hope for Coleridge. This was both a personal hope and a hope to remedy many of the ills of the age, the age of enlightenment, which he was the first to describe as “the age of anxiety”. For the mechanist and associationist philosophers, standing at the position that Coleridge calls the lower understanding would have represented the ascent to the Comparative Culture The Coleridgean Imagination 41 apex of human ability, standing proudly detached on a Himalayan peak, above and detached from a world it may now survey aloof with the clarity of distance. For Coleridge, on the other hand, the feeling would have been one of embarrassment and disappointment. “Is this it?”, he might have asked himself. Coleridge warned that to position the understanding as the crowning glory of humanity to be revered as an end in itself would make of us, “a race of animals, in whom the presence of reason is manifested solely by the absence of instinct.” We may turn to a margin note that Coleridge wrote in his copy of Tennemann’s Gesichte der Philosophie in order to clarify the outline of his system.4 Here he wrote that, “The simplest yet practically sufficient order of the Mental Powers is, beginning from the lowest highest Sense Fancy Understanding -----------Understanding Imagination Reason lowest Reason Imagination Understanding -----------Understanding Fancy Sense highest The polarities in the diagram can be clearly seen. From the lowest to the highest orders we move from sense to reason. Sense and reason are counterparts, as are fancy and imagination, with the lower and higher understandings being counterparts around the centre. Owen Barfield has noted, in What Coleridge Thought, that these complementarities are like octaves, and that there is more in common (in tune) between reason and sense than between reason and understanding, even though understanding is closer to it in the system as represented. 5 Coleridge complained that for the empiricists of his day, the lower understanding represented the apex of human thought and development. At this point Coleridge draws a bar, just before the higher understanding. Elsewhere, Coleridge remarked that the genius of Aristotle’s understanding was a cloud that prevented his being able to see what Plato indicated in his theory of Ideas. This cloud is like the bar between Coleridge’s lower and higher understanding. Beyond this bar is all that lies beyond the empirical theories, all that is not dreamt of in that philosophy. In his theory of imagination and reason, Coleridge perceived rays of hope in a human reunion with nature and the source of the principles of the universe, which source and principles, cognate with the logos of tradition, he opposed to the abstracted rules culled by the understanding from the senses. For Coleridge this would have seemed a prospect worthy of life. The reunion with reason is indeed a higher reunion in this system because, for Coleridge, reason was present in nature but only present to the higher understanding. It is apparent here that the reason Coleridge had in mind was that of a logos implicit in nature, and not just a faculty of human discourse. With the presence of reason reaching a level of awareness in the higher understanding, a new horizon beyond fixed and definite concepts could be glimpsed, however dimly this might first appear. This was the vision that Coleridge aspired to convey to his age, a vision that he believed his contemporaries, especially his compatriots, sorely needed. Coleridge diagnosed the intellectual malady of his day with his observation that, “The histories and political economy of the present Vol. 15, 2010 42 Peter Cheyne and preceding century partake in the general contagion of its mechanistic philosophy, and are the product of an unenlivened understanding.”6 Coleridge noted that, “the Present is the Epoch of the Understanding and the Senses” because the understanding, though it has access to ideas of reason through its power to abstract, is turned back, in its search for knowledge, to the impressions of sense once the reason in its positive aspect is denied. From this position, we note that Coleridge did not disparage the fancy and the understanding; he simply cautioned that they should not be overestimated. Just as genius requires talent as its counterpart, so imagination depends upon fancy, with the higher faculties using the energy and materials of the lower. Fancy was for Coleridge the offspring of association, providing to the understanding “fixities and definites” from experience, which could use them as counters transformed into concepts. The important thing in Coleridge’s caution was that we should not fail to see that the step from fancy to understanding has its higher counterpart in the step from imagination to reason. In Coleridge’s system, fancy has an important role in the generation of consciousness, converting perceptions into memories and streaming these together according to their spatio-temporal associations. Although fancy converts perceptions into memories, the primary imagination is responsible for the formation of perceptions themselves out of sensations and stimuli. Because the primary imagination organizes and shapes perceptions, by synthesizing in Kantian fashion the materials of sense experience with concepts from the understanding, our experience is intelligible. The fancy is able to use these percepts for the creation of its “fixities and definites”. Debased, however, into passive fancy, it can lead to “the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude” 7 , by which we enter “the lethargy of custom, having eyes, yet see not, ears yet hear not.” 8 In passive fancy, the conceivable is reduced to the bounds of the merely picturable. We have just noted that the fancy requires the organizing and shaping activity, which activity Coleridge called esemplastic, of the primary imagination in order to receive its materials. 9 This primary imagination is what Coleridge also called “the necessary imagination”, necessary because it was a condition of perception. The primary imagination is spontaneous, fusing sensations and concepts into meaningful experience. As such it corresponds to Kant’s empirical degree of the imagination, and its transcendental schematism of concepts and intuitions, producing intelligible experience. The secondary imagination is not spontaneous, but voluntary. This creative power can remain dormant in individuals, or it can be stirred to activity, becoming the poetic or the philosophic imagination. This voluntary imagination is a superior degree of the same imagination responsible for the spontaneous shaping of perception. It exists in all people but is not equally developed in all, and it represents the fullest exertion of the self, controlled by “the free-will, our only absolute self.”10 Because the secondary imagination is voluntary, its acts of creation and recreation carry a personal, moral and social responsibility. The secondary imagination uses materials gathered and shaped by the primary imagination, able to idealize and unify these into harmony with the whole mind and not just with the understanding. Thus the secondary imagination may create and recreate according to the energies of reason. Although not everybody achieves the poetic imagination, everybody is more or less able to appreciate the fruits of poetic imagination. As Coleridge said, to hear a poem as a poem one must become, for at least that short time, a poet.11 Once the artist has created the artwork, be it poem, painting, musical composition, and so on, the finished result can then be approached, via the senses, Comparative Culture The Coleridgean Imagination 43 by the imagination and understanding of the public. The same goes for work in philosophy. The secondary imagination can work as poetic or philosophic imagination. This philosophic imagination is a transcendental power whose “sources must be far higher and far inward”12 from the ordinary mode of consciousness. It is “the sacred power of self-intuition,”13, able to work from that command descended from the heavens, as Coleridge was fond of quoting, the Delphic locution: “Know thyself!” In philosophic consciousness, the imagination intuitively contemplates its intuitive knowledge of the world, relating this consciousness to nature. Because the self is constitutive, the mind realizes that in self-contemplation it has also already been contemplating nature as natura naturans (nature naturing, the processes of nature) and not just the apparent phenomena of nature as natura naturata (nature natured, the outward forms of nature). Thus Coleridge takes further than Kant the insight, made in The Critique of Practical Reason, that we have access to at least one noumenon, or thing-in-itself, namely the self. This self we simultaneously are and perceive, although the perceived self is distinguished by being a reflection, an empirical phenomenon, rather than the thingin-itself in the immediate first person. Although Kant was very cautious about the ramifications of this insight (referring to the transcendental ego as beyond the laws of phenomena, with the empirical ego being a phenomenon subject to psychological laws), thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Fichte, and Schelling sought in the noumenal self who we are an entrance into the wider universe of transcendental reality and a return to metaphysics as such, rather than a kantian metaphysics of metaphysics. Coleridge thought that the self-intuition of the philosophic imagination had direct access to natura naturans in virtue of having this mode of reality itself. This does not, however, place him in quite the same post-kantian camp of metaphysics as Schopenhauer, because Coleridge understood nature to be “the term in which we comprehend all things that are representable in the forms of time and space, and subjected to the relations of cause and effect: and the cause of the existence of which, therefore, is to be sought for perpetually in something antecedent.”14 Nevertheless, the philosophic imagination is, Coleridge thought, in a position to bring the ideas of intuitive reason, which are not phenomenal and not subject to cause and effect, down to the higher understanding. In this respect, the philosophic imagination is the counterpart of the primary imagination, which brings the materials of sensation up to the lower understanding. Fancy mobilizes the stream of association of fixities and definites taken from perception, offering them up to the understanding as ready-mades or objets trouvés. The understanding may then formulate a picture model of the world, wherein only the imageable is accepted as the conceivable. This was the thinking process, Coleridge noted, standardly theorized by the materialists. In one of many examples of this process of thinking, Coleridge spoke in his philosophical lectures of Locke’s insistence that we need distinct images when defining words and concepts. We may further note that Locke’s insistence is in line with Aristotle, contra Plato, who held, in On the Soul (Part VII), that the soul never thinks without an image. Coleridge warned against mistaking distinct images for clear conceptions. For Coleridge, a very useful aspect of fancy was that it presented its fixed and definite images, and presenting also what we may call auditory compounds, tactile compounds, taste compounds, and olfactory compounds, in the flowing stream of association. It is over this stream that the thinker, in the act of composition or in the ordinary act of trying to recollect a name, a word, or a face, and so on, rests, like a pond-skater, to use Coleridge’s emblem of the process, sometimes resisting the Vol. 15, 2010 44 Peter Cheyne stream’s current,i.e. associationist fancy, sometimes allowing itself to be carried along by it, winning its way, until it makes the exertion, the moment of will and choice, to reach the sought for object. At this point we are drawn to inquire into what the ideas of reason, to be conveyed to the higher understanding, are. The lower understanding conceives according to the perception of phenomena (natura naturata), “the sum total of the facts and phenomena of the senses”. Natura naturans, on the other hand, denotes the essential power behind natura, or physis in the Greek. This essence is that phenomena are always in the process of becoming, and we can always seek the antecedent phenomenon or phenomena of any given phenomenon. The distinction between natura naturata and naturans is supported by the insight that the laws of phenomena are not themselves phenomena. When hearing that something being talked about is not a phenomenon, not an object to be perceived, most people will assume it to be an abstraction. But the referents of natura naturans are no more abstractions, and are no less real, than, for example, gravity.15 This distinction, using Latinized terms from Aristotle, subsequently adopted and adapted by Spinoza, is related to Coleridge’s insight that the act of thinking is not itself a thought. The act of thinking is often unconscious, while the products of the act, thoughts, are what achieve consciousness. On those occasions when we do think self-consciously, it is sometimes possible to snatch the thinking away from the product of the act. The result of thinking, the thought, is part of the “spontaneous consciousness natural to all reflecting beings.”16 The thinking itself, Coleridge observed, is not so spontaneously conscious on a natural level. The act of thinking (e.g., constructing, in imagination, a line without breadth) is more perfect, more adequate to the idea in a platonic sense, than the more easily reproduced and schematized representation of that act (e.g., the image of a line). An example given by Coleridge is when connecting two stars as extremities of a line. He felt the sensation, as it were, of a perfect length without breadth. This is an act of the imagination the representation of which might be a line drawn or scratched on a surface to represent the ideal. In the same way, he suggests, natural laws are neither things (phenomena) nor abstractions. We might arrive at knowledge, or at least working hypotheses, of natural laws through abstraction from experiment, but that is not what the laws actually are. Because the prevailing empirical philosophy in his day, at least in Britain, worked under the belief that every possible object of knowledge was either a phenomenon or an abstraction from such, and because it was no longer inspired by the inquiry into physis (the coming into being of beings) as such, Coleridge observed that “we have not yet attained to a science of nature.”17 The understanding, working only with those functions proper to it, can deal only with phenomena and the causal relations between them. Delving deeply into phenomena, the understanding is led to other phenomena, until it becomes stuck. The understanding might then find itself faced with what Coleridge called protophenomena, or the Ur-phänomene of Goethe. Or it might reach the technical limits of experimental possibility. It is at such points that the understanding’s spade must turn, failing to dig further. Unable to make progress, the understanding conveys the proto-phenomena, or the thus-far ultimate results of state-of-the-art experimentation, for the contemplation of the imagination. For the understanding to inquire behind proto-phenomena in search of yet more underlying phenomena would be for it to turn itself over to fancy and to invent picture-theories of material states of affairs: turtles all the way down, one might say. A representative sample of Coleridge’s proto-phenomena would contain, among other examples, the phenomena of magnetism, of electricity, of crystal formation, of organic growth and Comparative Culture The Coleridgean Imagination 45 many observable processes of life and mind. From these proto-phenomena, Coleridge asserted, in keeping with his reading of Giordano Bruno and Jacob Böhme (“Behmen” in Coleridge’s writings), we may deduce the most general law to be “polarity, or the essential dualism of Nature, arising out of its productive unity, and still tending to reaffirm it, either as equilibrium, indifference or identity”.18 Coleridge places “the mystery and dignity of human nature” in the foundation that reason provides for individual personality. This reason is only reason insofar as it “is of universal validity and obligatory on all mankind.” This is the same insight reached by Heraclitus: “Although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each had a private intelligence of his own.” Thinking is an act that individuates the thinker. The thinker judges the verity of propositions and ascertains states of affairs by engaging in the act of thinking. This act is a detachment insofar as it employs concepts that have been abstracted from reality in the polarization of experience into the thinking subject and its thoughts about world. This act is also a reattachment insofar as it commits itself to a true approach to the real state of affairs. The individual grasps and feels her individuality in the act of thinking, the product of which (viz. the thought) can be conveyed to other thinking beings who in their turn are able to test its verity, to compare its message to their own experience, and to hold the thought up to the light, as it were, of reason. It is “the queen bee in the hive of error,” Coleridge cautioned, to believe that the same idea in two minds is two ideas and not one. As ever, Coleridge stated his platonism in unambiguous terms. The ideas of reason are of higher origin than the notions of the understanding; it is by their irradiation that the understanding itself becomes a human understanding. If the understanding ignores the downshine, as it were, of reason, then it will remain a mere, rather than a fully human, understanding. This was precisely the danger facing his empirically reductionist contemporaries. The mere understanding would have no role other than to order sense data according to cause and effect, and to assign concepts to them. The name truth would denote nothing beyond personal sincerity, as each individual would conceive their concepts idiosyncratically unique, varying to greater or lesser degrees from what we might be able to call corresponding concepts in the understandings of other individuals. Such is the expression of personality, or rather of idiosyncrasy, that appears when understanding is held to be the end and apex of the human mind. It would have no other faculty to assist when it reaches its limits, the limits of being able to find only phenomena behind phenomena until it reaches proto-phenomena. No other, that is, than the fancy, which then fabricates from its fixities and definites images of hypothesized phenomena that might appear if only we could somehow get closer to them. The alternative, that of informing the understanding with imagination and reason, illuminates personality “when this light shines downward into the understanding it is always more or less refracted, and differently in every individual.” Reason distinguishes the understanding with individuality rather than detachment, and it was part of Coleridge’s romantic ambition to so heal this detachment. In keeping with his central philosophy of polarity, Coleridge divides reason into two modalities: negative and positive reason. Negative reason operates, however unselfconsciously, in the understanding, enabling the latter faculty to abstract in terms of universals. Negative reason is still reason, it is just not conscious and it operates only to the degree with which the understanding can cope. It is this ability that forces the understanding’s detachment from nature. Now the understanding, as subjectivity, utilizes its ability to compare and contrast its objects Vol. 15, 2010 46 Peter Cheyne into the categories of sameness and difference. This negative reason consists in the “power of seeing, whether any two conceptions, which happen to be in mind, are, or are not, in contradiction with each other.”19 Negative reason retains only the mechanical, separable elements of experience. It deals with natura naturata and is not equipped to approach natura naturans. Such an understanding, if left to stand alone, analyzes to the point of leaving a notion of nature bereft of life. The principle of contradiction, which operates as the negative reason in the understanding, can work only within the sphere of fixities and definites. With entities considered in detachment, the understanding cannot work with nature in its natural state of flux. Natura naturans cannot be caught in the net of this stop-start Eleatic reasoning. Negative reasoning, which is the understanding working only with negative reason, becomes a master of distinction and division. It is able to compartmentalize every element of nature by understanding what each thing is not in relation to other things, yet remains quite unable to state positively what anything essentially is. But even through this stage a glimmer of reason in its positive mode may shine, for the principle of contradiction has the quality of universality, which may impress the understanding such that the “unindividual and transcendent character of the Reason as a presence to the mind” awakens.20 When the principle of contradiction itself is considered, the understanding must turn its attentions away from the outward sense and reflect inwards and upwards, if we may employ a hasty visual metaphor for this mental process. The reflection would turn “inwards” because attention would be forced away from what common sense takes to be outward objects and “upwards” because for Coleridge, reason is above, as it were, nature. Reason is above nature in that while Coleridge considered sense, fancy and the understanding to be a part of nature, he held reason to be somehow above nature, although he did not consider it entirely apart from nature. This is because he held reason to be present in every level of being by, as the metaphor goes, shining down upon it. An example of the Coleridgean downshine of Reason is in the notion of instinct as potential intelligence. When the understanding turns from outward objects to consider the principle of contradiction itself, it turns from natura naturata towards natura naturans. Such is the move from fancy’s aggregating the “products of destruction, the cadavera rerum” 21 to imagination’s finding itself, as natura naturans, in the unity of the polarities it perceives as the higher unity of contradictories. Contemplation of the principle of contradiction has this somewhat revolutionary effect in Coleridge’s system because therein the understanding may be led to inquire into that which indicates contradictories as such. If reason in its passive mode can indicate contradictories, it must itself transcend contradictories in order to draw them together as presentations to the understanding, which may then hold them apart. The first glimpse of Coleridgean reason is in polarity: one power manifest as two forces. Polarity, “a living and generative interpenetration,”22 may not be grasped by the naked understanding, which conceives of everything in detachment, related indeed by cause and effect, but only mechanically related. It is the imagination that must lay hold of polarity. Where the understanding as negative reason grasps logical opposites (contradictories), the imagination holds polar opposites, which are mutually generative, inclusive and not exclusive, and therefore capable of distinction, but not of division. Coleridge found imagination between the understanding and reason (above understanding and below reason), rather than Comparative Culture The Coleridgean Imagination 47 below and between the understanding and intuition as Kant first placed it, or as a compartment within the conceptual understanding, as Kant later revised his scheme. Between understanding and reason, Coleridge’s imagination is a bridge between the two, which is seen clearly in the scale, reproduced above, that Coleridge sketched in the margin of his copy of Tennenann’s Geschichte der Philosophie. This sketch schematizes the Coleridgean system of faculties in terms of the lowest and highest in the human scale. That Coleridge drew these scales twice, laying them side by side with the lowest to highest on the left and the highest to lowest on the right highlights how the faculties are complementaries on a pole. The polarity is emphasized by his inclusion of a bar, on both scales, between the higher and lower understanding. When the understanding is, as Coleridge described it, “impregnated” with the imagination, then the understanding “becomes intuitive, and a living power.”23 The scale sketched in Tennemann describes the faculties in their order from the lowest level, from sense to reason, and from the highest level. The scales are drawn twice, in opposite orders, suggesting their mutual and corresponding generativity. In Coleridge’s writings, reason is described as above both nature and the human scale, such that the human search for wisdom may approach reason, with that reason to be considered a “gift”, rather than a faculty. On first appearances Coleridge presents us with what seems clearly to be a faculty psychology, yet he consistently denies that these powers are discrete faculties. When considered in terms of what we might loosely call the epistemological pole, the powers are seen in their proper light and then seen as incapable of division and separate operation, although for the purposes of inquiry they have been found to be distinguishable. A telling observation of Coleridge’s is that, “it is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order to distinguish; but it is a still worse, that distinguishes in order to divide.” 24 Furthermore, Coleridge notes, “in every act of mind the man unites the properties of sense, understanding and reason. Nevertheless it is of great practical importance, that these distinctions should be made and understood.”25 Coleridge held that the primary and secondary imaginations were one power expressing different modes of operation. The secondary imagination, poetic or philosophic, unites the clarity of the understanding with the depth of reason, while the primary imagination, this time unconscious in its operation, unites “the plenitude of the sense with the comprehensibility of the understanding.”26 It is the imagination that generates symbols through which may be conveyed the ideas of reason, and it is this idea Coleridge expresses in the following definition of the imagination: “That reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and selfcircling energies of reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors.”27 By virtue of the imagination’s sensual ‘incorporations’ of reason, its symbols are ‘consubstantial’ with the conducted truths of reason. Such, for Coleridge, is imagination’s role in the human connection with reason in its positive mode. While reason (in its negative mode) in the understanding gives rise to contradiction, reason in the imagination gives rise to the unity of experienced nature. The constantly changing and aspect-shifting appearances of phenomena 28 are related, by the imagination, to the permanent “energies of reason” (A Lay Sermon). This relation allows consciousness a temporality, an access to time, by virtue of being aware of mutable presences with their essences. From Chapter V of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge begins his history and critique of association “traced from Aristotle to Hartley.” Aristotle emerges from Vol. 15, 2010 48 Peter Cheyne this critique relatively unscathed. Coleridge judges that “the wise Stagyrite” delivered a “just theory without pretending to an hypothesis”, which is to say that Aristotle delivered his survey of the observed facts of association without placing these within the framework of a guiding fiction or fancied state-of-affairs. The same cannot be said of the modern associationist theories that Coleridge targeted. Descartes, for example, assumed nervous spirits to drive association by etching and re-etching “engravings on the brain”. Other associationists supposed this movement to be more mechanical than nerve-spiritual. Later proponents of associationism hypothesized ether oscillating along solid fibres and hollow tubes. Later still, in Coleridge’s day, theories involved electric light or the elective affinity of chemical compositions as driving association. Coleridge’s objection to these hypotheses was threefold: they were more unfounded flights of fancy than proper science; they were created in the thrall of “the despotism of the eye”, as if these physical relations could be seen, requiring only a powerful enough microscope to be made; they were metaphysically materialistic, whereas Aristotle’s original theory had the virtue of being ontologically neutral. Coleridge did not wish to do away with the theory of association; indeed he retained it within his system as the “universal law of passive fancy” 29, supplying objects to other faculties. The image-forming or rather re-forming power, the imagination in its passive sense, which I would rather call Fancy=Phantasy, a phainein, this, the Fetisch & Talisman of all modern Philosophers (the Germans excepted) may not inaptly be compared to the Gorgon Head, which looked death into every thing and this not by accident, but from the nature of the faculty itself, the province of which is to give consciousness to the Subject by presenting to it its conceptions objectively but the Soul differences itself from any other Soul for the purposes of symbolical knowledge by form or body only, but all form as body, i.e. as shape, & not as forma efformans30, is dead. Life may be inferred, even as intelligence is from black marks on white paper, but the black marks themselves are truly “ the dead letter” . Here then is the error, not in the faculty itself, without which there would be no fixation, consequently, no distinct perception or conception, but in the gross idolatry of those who abuse it, & make that the goal & end which should only be a means of arriving at it. It is any excuse to him who treats a living being as inanimate Body, that we cannot arrive at the knowledge of the living Being but thro’ the Body which is its Symbol & outward & visible Sign?31 In this passage, empiricism is alluded to as a dead system, looking death into all it gazes on, and Locke’s simile of a blank tablet for the human mind is referred to as truly dead. The chief error is to take the products of fancy as the highest end and purpose of the human mind, when it is rather a means, albeit a necessary one, in the process of forming concepts from experience. The Lockean theory and, a fortiori, the wholly associationist Hartleian system, envision picture-theories of mind that achieve their end in the formation of concepts and the flow of associated images and concepts. Coleridge shrewdly observed that these theories fully apply not to the human mind taken as a whole, but only, and even then not completely, to a state of giddiness or delirium: “There is in truth but one state to which this theory applies at all, namely, that of complete light-headedness; and even to this it applies but partially, because the will and reason are perhaps never wholly suspended.”32 Coleridge held that the result of perception is neither a true subject nor true object but rather the most original union of both. This union is a chief effect of the primary imagination. Imagination blends thoughts and intuitions allowing for the very possibility of perception and, after that, allowing us to see beyond transitory phenomena into what Coleridge often referred to as the life of things: natura Comparative Culture The Coleridgean Imagination 49 naturans. Coleridge did not expect his ideas to be well received, or even understood by the empiricists of his day: “ Every system, which is under the necessity of using terms not familiarized by the metaphysics in fashion, will be described as written in an unintelligible style, and the author must expect the charge of having substituted learned jargon for clear conception; while, according to the creed of our modern philosophers, nothing is deemed a clear conception, but what is representable by a distinct image. Thus the conceivable is reduced within the bounds of the picturable.” 33 Coleridge’s position regarding the imagination in Bigraphia Literaria had been germinating for at least twenty years. In his lecture on the slave trade, Coleridge presented his earliest definition of the imagination. The imitation of creativeness by combination would, twenty years later, become the fancy and imagination would retain its key position in Coleridge’s thinking. In this early statement we see that Coleridge places his hope for humanity not in the self-satisfied delight of creativeness through combination, but in the splendid possibilities and real excellence that imagination inspires. Without imagination, the optimistic motive for social improvement would be doomed to wither and fail. The dying motive to be revivified was the feeling of hope inspired by the early days of the French Revolution. Coleridge’s theory of the imagination aspired to be more than merely a tool to understand the difference between good poetry and bad. To develope the powers of the Creator is our proper employment – and to imitate Creativeness by combination our most exalted and self-satisfying Delight. But we are progressive and must not rest content with present Blessings. Our Almighty Parent hath therefore given to us Imagination that stimulates to the attainment of real excellence by the contemplation of splendid Possibilities that still revivifies the dying motive within us, and fixing our eye on the glittering Summits that rise one above the other in the Alpine endlessness still urges us up the ascent of Being, amusing the ruggedness of the road with the beauty and grandeur of the ever-widening Prospect. Such and so noble are the ends for which this restless faculty was given us – but horrible has been its misapplication. ‘Lecture on the Slave Trade’, 16th June 1795. Twenty years later Coleridge wrote his most famous paragraphs on fancy and imagination: The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will which we express with the word choice. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. Biographia Literaria, Vol. 1, Chapter XIII. Coleridge dictated these arresting sentences in the summer of 1815, as he did the majority of Biographia Literaria. Fancy is entirely distinguished from imagination, Vol. 15, 2010 50 Peter Cheyne enjoying its play with fixities and definites. The last sentence of Chapter XIV rates fancy as “drapery”: “Finally, GOOD SENSE is the BODY of poetic genius, FANCY its DRAPERY, MOTION its LIFE, and IMAGINATION the SOUL that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.” Coleridge deemed fanciful work as not only more casual and superficial than imagination but as of an altogether different order. One reason for this transcendental distinction was that fancy represented the only creativity possible under the various systems of British empiricism while his concept of the imagination developed quite differently, with his encounter with German transcendental philosophy. Various British authors before Coleridge had proffered distinctions between fancy and imagination; indeed coining variations on this very distinction was a fashionable parlour game among aesthetes of the 18th Century. Coleridge’s originality in this matter lies on the weight and meaning he gives to the terms. Coleridge’s distinction between fancy and imagination can clearly be read as part of a system that retained a place for British empiricism, a necessary one, but one within the lower orders of the system. Coleridge found the associationism of the empiricists as completely unable to account for artistic genius and creativity. It seems that Coleridge never wholly abandoned any position he held, preferring to award spoils from the succeeding system. In retaining elements of empiricism in his philosophy of “spiritual realism,” Coleridge upheld Leibniz’s injunction to “collect the fragments of truth scattered throughout systems apparently the most incongruous.”34 Primary imagination is an unconscious act necessary for all human perception. Imagination becomes secondary, in either its poetic or philosophical form, when it becomes conscious, or at least moves closer to consciousness. In ‘On Poesy or Art’, Coleridge wrote that “there is in genius itself an unconscious activity; nay, that is the genius in the man of genius.” In the Notes and Lectures on Shakespeare he described a “genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.” Coleridge’s notion of genius was bold, for he did not talk only of one artist’s genius for representation, another thinker’s genius for synthesis, and so on with particular exceptional abilities. Rather, he directed his words to genius in general as that which reflects nature exemplified by events and phenomena; the artist polishes such forms in consciousness to make nature thought: In the objects of nature are presented, as in a mirror, all the possible elements, steps, and processes of intellect antecedent to consciousness, and therefore to the full development of the intelligential act; and man’s mind is the very focus of all the rays of intellect which are scattered throughout the images of nature. Now, so to place these images, totalized and fitted to the limits of the human mind, as to elicit from, and to superinduce upon, the forms themselves the moral reflections to which they approximate, to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature–this is the mystery of genius in the fine arts. Dare I add that the genius must act on the feeling, that body is but a striving to become mind–that it is mind in its essence? In every work of art there is a reconcilement of the external with the internal; the conscious is so impressed on the unconscious as to appear in it. Yes, not to acquire cold notions–lifeless technical rules–but living and life-producing ideas, which shall contain their own evidence, the certainty that they are essentially one with the germinal causes in nature–his consciousness being the focus and mirror of both–for this does the artist for a time abandon the external realm in order to return to it with a complete sympathy with its internal and actual. For of all we see, hear, feel, and touch the substance is and must be in ourselves. ‘On Poesy or Art’, 1818 lecture. Comparative Culture The Coleridgean Imagination 51 Coleridge coined the term “desynonymization” in his Biographia Literaria to help explain his distinction between fancy and imagination. Indeed his use of these terms required careful explanation because Coleridge inverted the traditional meanings of “fancy” and “imagination”. “Fancy”, whose root is the Greek “phantasia”, originally meant a free play of the mind not tied to specific or definite images. “Imagination”, insofar as it sometimes expressed a different meaning from fancy, traditionally referred to the capacity to generate images in the mind. In Coleridge’s inversion, imagination became the higher, more creative, faculty and fancy became that by which we create fixed and definite images. Coleridge explains, “It is not, I own, easy to conceive a more opposite translation of the Greek Phantasia than the Latin Imaginatio; but it is equally true that in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize those words originally of the same meaning.” On desynonymization, Coleridge believed, as he remarked in the fifth of his philosophical lectures, that, “The whole process of human intellect is gradually to desynonymize terms.” Coleridge provided many examples, taken mainly from English poetry, of fancy and imagination to illustrate his distinction. Here is one example of fancy: And like a lobster boyl’d the Morn From black to red began to turn. No imaginative power could sanely fuse together the various images and meanings in this burlesque example of fancy at play, and fancy is defined as entirely different in kind from imagination. Butler’s lines are as deliberately burlesque as Otway’s, “Lutes, lobsters, seas of milk, and ships of amber”- another product of fancy, coincidently mentioning lobsters, given by Coleridge. Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis’ is the source of the following example of fancy adduced by Coleridge: Full gently now she takes him by the hand, A lily prison’d in a gaol of snow, Or ivory in an alabaster band; So white a friend engirts so white a foe. Here fancy aggregates various images as similes to represent the goddess’s hand taking that of her mortal lover. In each image – the lily, the gaol, snow, ivory and alabaster – a likeness is shown, but the images, as “fixities and definites”, do not cohere; there is “no connexion natural or moral, but [they] are yoked together by the poet by means of some accidental coincidence.”35 Choice, “an empirical phenomenon of the will”, rather than the will as principle of the mind’s being, has selected by association these images. The properties of the various images are merely “aggregated” and not “co-adunated” (fittingly assembled), so they cannot interfuse to mutual enrichment. Coleridge speculates here that Shakespeare employed fancy in order to distance his poetry from a cloying subject matter: “Shakespeare writes in this poem, as if he were of another planet, charming you to gaze on the movements of Venus and Adonis, as you would on the dances of two vernal butterflies.” Because the products of fancy produce “fixities and definites” that neither intermingle with each other, nor interfuse with the mind (of the poet or reader), they can be used to effect various moods all typified by a certain distance from the subject being considered or presented. In his earliest traced desynonymization of fancy and imagination, Coleridge noted that “Definites, be they Sounds or Images, must be thought of either as being or as capable of being, out of us”, that is to say, external to us in a way that cannot be said of imagination’s products. He continues, “Nay, is this not faulty?–– for an Imagination quoad Imagination cannot be thought of as capable of being out Vol. 15, 2010 52 Peter Cheyne of us. Answer. No. For while we imagine, we never do think thus. We always think of it as an it, & intimately mix the Thing & the Symbol.” Staying with “Venus and Adonis”, Coleridge quotes an example of poetic imagination: Look! how bright a star shooteth from the sky So glides he in the night from Venus’ eye. “How many images and feelings”, comments Coleridge, “are here brought together without effort and without discord, in the beauty of Adonis, the rapidity of his flight, the yearning, yet hopelessness, of the enamored gazer, while a shadowy ideal character is thrown over the whole!” Here imagination co-adunates separable meanings into one whole. Importantly, the reader’s activity is also brought into play in this process. “You feel him to be a poet,” notes Coleridge, “inasmuch as for a time he has made you one––an active creative being.” (Lectures on Shakespeare, I: 251) “You may conceive the difference in kind between the Fancy and the Imagination in this way, that if the check of the senses and the reason were withdrawn, the first would become delirium and the last mania.” 36 It is an interesting observation that an excess of fancy tends towards delirium, whereas an excess of imagination may lead to mania. Fancy is moved by association, with one impression recalling others in more or less rapid succession, like the free association of the psychoanalysts. This delirium is a state of excitement and mental confusion, sometimes accompanied by hallucinations. Working mainly with images, fancy brings together elements that are only accidentally related into a sometimes delightful, sometimes nightmarish, nonsense. Imagination, on the other hand, works to fuse, unite and create meaningful wholes. When the influence of the senses and the reason are reduced, the mind may move towards mania, formulating ever-greater units and systems of meaning around one central idea. The central idea at the hub cannot bear to carry such a burgeoning weight of significance. The secondary imagination may be enjoined to the task of, “awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”37 Fancy is, “always the ape, and too often the adulterator and counterfeit of our memory.”38 Passive fancy can become habituated and contribute to that “film of familiarity” that the poetic or philosophical imagination is tasked to replace with “the loveliness of the treasures of the world.”39 The lethargy of custom holds sway when the mind remains among passive fancy’s ready-made fixities and definites rather than rise to its active and creative potential. When the active fancy is set to choose its images, there is the reduction of “the conceivable within the bounds of the picturable.” In Chapter VI of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge shows the active fancy being involved in the creation of Hartley’s theory of “vibratiuncles” and as factitiously picturing something that cannot be seen, satisfying “the despotism of the eye” by promising that if we had better eyesight, then these unobservables could in fact be observed. For Coleridge, the principle of life is individuation. This unifying principle in life both creates the unified life-world of an organism and also holds it somewhat apart as an individual in the world. Primary imagination perceives a unified landscape, “a oneness, even as nature, the greatest of poets, acts upon us, when we open our eyes upon an extended prospect.” 40 Secondary imagination creates meaningful relations; fancy, however, simply brings together fixities & definites that Comparative Culture The Coleridgean Imagination 53 do not meaningfully belong together. Empiricism divides the world into smaller components, but it can’t very well put it back together again. In Theory of Life, Coleridge writes of “the power which discloses itself from within as the principle of unity in many.” Here he also describes “totality dawning into individuation” with the development of life. The unity in multeity becomes “more intense in proportion as it constitutes each particular thing a whole of itself; and yet more, again, in proportion to the number and interdependence of the parts which it unites as a whole.” 41 As primary imagination allows for perception itself, secondary imagination expresses and intensifies (this verb is a Coleridgeism) perception’s unity in multeity of organically related parts in a whole. It is the imagination’s symbolic activity that works with this unity in multeity. Fixities and definites are opaque, and analogies are opaque, which is to say that they do not, on their own, allow us to see through them into what they are intended to represent. The imagination, however, allows the symbol to emerge as translucence. Not only do they allow the intended object to be seen in and through them, they allow the logical object to be conceived in the first place, just as light is not clearly seen until it is “held” diffused in a diamond or crystal. Here is an example from Coleridge. The beautiful image of the pond-skater and its motion reflected on the sunny bottom of the stream appears in Coleridge’s ongoing discussion of association in Chapter Seven of Biographia Literaria as follows: Now let a man watch his mind while he is composing, or […] while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process completely analogous. Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little the animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. (In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the imagination. But in common language, and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior degree of the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary controul over it.) When in the act of composition, or trying to recollect a name, the mind allows the stream of associations to flow until it feels confident to make the leap and land on the sought word it was seeking. Coleridge’s introspection of the involuntary stream and the active thinker waiting to make a move at the appropriate time is a masterpiece of subtle psychological observation. Coleridge evokes a natural phenomenon to grasp the process of thinking and understanding in metaphorical language. The movement of the pond-skater, gliding now by the current, now against it, visually stands for two opposite powers at work while thinking, for example while writing poetry. The active phase is an exertion of the will, the passive phase surrendering to the power of the current. Active and passive only in relation to each other, Coleridge adds, because the moment when the pond-skater ceases to resist the current and yields to it for a short duration is still a moment of, as it were, choice, which moment of choice is more literal in the human psychological example that the pond-skater charmingly emblemizes. The dialectic of the motions propels the process. Concerning the creative process, in the active, self-conscious phase the mind is in control, and makes, for instance, compositional decisions. Whereas in the passive phase it is controlled through a reliance on the inspiration from the Vol. 15, 2010 54 Peter Cheyne materials it works upon. Coleridge’s passage emphasizes the necessity of their balance. Katherine Wheeler, who tirelessly edited many of Coleridge’s previously unpublished manuscripts, claims that the metaphorical passages in Biographia most often thematize the act of understanding, and should be read self-reflexively. I think the water-insect passage in particular refers the reader to their own self-experience, to observe their own processes of thinking.42 Engell and Bate, Coleridge’s editors for the Bollingen editions of the Collected Coleridge volumes, interpret the water-insect metaphor as anticipating the definition of imagination in Biographia Literaria’s Chapter Thirteen. For them, the phrase “in all its degrees and determinations” differentiates the degrees there named as primary and secondary imagination. That state which is passive in relation to the other can thus be interpreted as the primary imagination of perception, which is an instinctive reflex of the mind. The water-insect yields to the power of the mightier current as the mind yields to a myriad of stimuli and composes a living picture of the surrounding world. Engell and Bate, conversely, interpret the active state as being the secondary, poetic imagination, which co-exists “with the conscious will.” The act of will instigates and controls the poetic imagination: “This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, controul reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.” It seems to me that Engell and Bate might be mistaken here, because in that passage Coleridge writes that between the active and the passive powers lies the intermediate faculty of imagination. Imagination as a faculty (comprising primary and secondary imagination) cannot be the intermediate between primary and secondary imagination, as Engell and Bate’s interpretation would read. The intermediate aspect of imagination is explicitly described in Biographia. Coleridge’s grasp of imagination as a mediating term is perhaps best understood in light of his discussion of the strength of thinking in: leaving a middle state of mind more strictly appropriate to the imagination than any other, when it is, as it were, hovering between images. As soon as it is fixed on one image, it becomes understanding; but while it is unfixed and wavering between them, attaching itself permanently to none, it is imagination– a strong working of the mind.43 A will exists, insists Coleridge, "whose function it is to control, determine, and modify the phantasmal chaos of association."44 It is clear that Coleridge is not merely talking about Hartley’s theory here, but about the chaos of free consciousness itself. Even as Coleridge enacts a form of stream-of-consciousness, and enacts a considerable feat of memory, he warns against that enactment. For what is stream-of-consciousness, really, besides a stream of association? It is interspersed with acts of will, for one thing. For Coleridge the "Act of Will" accordingly becomes not only the basis of the "PRINCIPLE, in which BEING AND THOUGHT COINCIDE," but also "the original and perpetual Epiphany" (Notebooks 3: note 4265). It also supports a prospective view of humanity in which "the will, and with the will all acts of thought and attention, are ... distinct powers, whose function it is to controul, determine, and modify the phantasmal chaos of association" (Biographia 1:116). In Coleridge’s system, association provides a chaotic stream of material to be shaped and directed according to the uses decided by the will, sometimes inspired by reason and imagination, usually determined by understanding, and often directed back to the play of fancy and whim. More needs to be said to clarify the mysterious place and all-important role of reason in Coleridge’s system. In the foregoing, we noted the role of reason in its Comparative Culture The Coleridgean Imagination 55 negative mode as the principle of contradiction. This is placed squarely in the lower understanding. When this principle itself is reflected upon, the thinking mind is apt to be impressed by the principle’s universality of applicability, and a glimmer of positive reason is perceived. Positive reason in the human mind is more clearly observed in the use of symbolism, whereby imagination works to schematize the invisible Form or Idea into a “living educt”, a symbol to be imaginatively approached and contemplated, “consubstantial” with the idea itself. This idea is, of course, platonic, and we could do worse than consider Coleridge’s Platonism as we approach what he meant by the ideas of reason. Coleridge considered himself a congenital Platonist, believing that all people fall naturally into one of two general kinds regarding the use of reason. 'Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that any one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are the two classes of men, beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third. The one considers reason a quality, or attribute; the other considers it a power. I believe that Aristotle never could get to understand what Plato meant by an idea. ... Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding: the faculty judging by the senses. He was a conceptualist, and never could raise himself into that higher state, which was natural to Plato, and has been so to others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated, and, as it were, looked down upon, from the throne of actual ideas, or living, inborn, essential truths.' Table Talk, 2nd Edition, p. 95. Aristotle was a conceptualist, according to Coleridge, who never thought beyond the concepts of the understanding. He considered reason to be a quality, or attribute of the mind, of a discourse, or a proposition, and so on. Plato, on the other hand, considered reason to be a power. Coleridge does not elaborate his meaning here, but perhaps we can imagine this power as similar to the Heraclitean logos, to Lao Tze’s Tao, and, as Coleridge related several times, to Baconian laws of nature. Plato’s allegory, itself imagistic, of the prisoners in the cave, in Book VII of The Republic, addresses the problem of appearance, the image and their relation to reality. These prisoners compete for honours by creating systems to explain the reality and meaning of the shadows projected before them by a fire behind, unseen due to their severe neck shackles. One prisoner escapes from the cave into the dazzling world outside, but he can at first only look at shadows, then colours, then three-dimensional objects, eventually to face the sun itself. When he tries to free the remaining prisoners from their bondage to a world of inconstant shadows, he finds that they would rather kill him than allow him to rend them from the only world and reality they know. By his own account, Coleridge was a Platonist. Although Plato illustrated philosophy with some of the subject’s most beautiful and memorable images, the official role of imagination in his system is rather a lowly one. Indeed Plato’s esteem for poetry was notably low. In The Ion he denounced rhapsode as magnetism rather than mastery – a divinely inspired magnetic dynamis rather than more rational techne. Of course, this divine inspiration does provide assurance of poetry’s exalted origin, but on the other hand, it is to be seen as a gift from the gods, and not as the product of mastery and expertise. It was the imaginative bias of the poets that led Plato to expel them from his ideal Republic. This contrasts starkly with the importance of imagination in Coleridge’s system. For Coleridge imagination is the faculty relating the human mind most closely to God (although one could argue that this might be true in Plato too). Vol. 15, 2010 56 Peter Cheyne Certainly Coleridge accepted Plato’s metaphysics. Here we see, neatly set in the image of the divided line from The Republic (509d-511e), reality divided into the realm of the Forms, or Ideas, and the sensible world. The realm of the Forms, the intelligible world of universals, consists of the higher Forms reflected by the lower region of concepts and mathematical Forms. The sensible world then reflects the realm of the Forms, with particular sensible objects that are in turn reflected in the mere images or shadows of things. The metaphysical division between the realm of the Forms and the sensible world is reflected in the epistemological division between knowledge, which relates to Forms, and opinion or conjecture, relating to the sensible world. In knowledge, pure reason relates to the higher Forms, while concepts and mathematical Forms make up the province of the understanding, subsuming the particular under the general. In opinion, sensible things are accessible through sense perception and belief, with the lowly imagination being left with the mere images of things. Hereby imagination is placed three distinct removes from the truest reality of the higher Forms. Indeed it is four distinct removes from ultimate reality, which originates in the Form of the Good, from which originate the harmony and beauty we may contemplate in all of the other Forms. Elsewhere Plato describes imagination as an “inner artist painting pictures in the soul” (Philebus, 39c). This “inner artist” provides a mnemonic service, as “memory is like a block of wax into which our perceptions and thoughts stamp impressions” (Theatetus, 191c, d).45 For Plato, thinking with created images involved a lower consciousness of reality than even sense perception and belief. Our memory’s retentive capacity is essentially imagistic in its storing of impressions, and this capacity is less attuned to reality than direct contemplation of the Forms. Between the imagistic impression and the contemplation of the Forms, is the written word. With the written word, impressions are made on paper, a tablet, a screen and so on, and these impressions record relations between concepts, although these relations and concepts cannot always be faithfully retrieved with the same meaning with which they were originally inscribed. This is part of the problem that Plato describes in The Phaedrus, when Socrates calls writing a pharmakon. The pharmakon, the drug, is both remedy and poison. While Plato reserved a very humble place for imagination and the image in his system, there was indeed a place for them there. Plato found their inclusion necessary, not least to allow the actual transmission and illustration of his teaching into other minds. But with Plato’s ideal being the contemplation of the Forms beyond image and concept, he would certainly not have agreed with Aristotle’s view that, “the soul never thinks without a mental image (phantasma).”46 On this point Coleridge seems close to Aristotle’s position, but not exactly. Coleridge noted that, “A whole Essay might be written on the danger of thinking without images.” 47 Coleridge’s note here, although in a similar spirit to Aristotle’s, contradicts Aristotle. If Coleridge believed that the soul never thought without images, then he would not have been able to speak of the dangers of doing so. What Coleridge feared here, reminiscent of Kant, was the danger of thinking with concepts only, unaided by images. This would not be to contradict Plato, because for the thoroughgoing Platonist, there is no possibility of thinking in terms of Forms or Ideas. The Ideas can be contemplated but not conceived, or turned into concepts and used as fixed and definite counters. Here is the fuller quote from Coleridge’s letter to Josiah Wedgewood: “She interested me a good deal;” Coleridge wrote of Wedgewood’s late governess, “she appears to me to have been injured by going out of the common way without any of that Imagination, which if it be a Jack o’Lanthorn Comparative Culture The Coleridgean Imagination 57 to lead us out of that way is however at the same time a Torch to light us whither we are going. A whole Essay, […etc.].” The injury came from thinking in concepts only, traversing unknown terrain dialectically without the guiding lights, though they have their own Jack O’Lanthorn-like dangers, afforded by imagination. Coleridge held that we ought to think also with imaginative symbols, which he thought of as educts of ideas, and not aim to think by concepts alone. In a platonic vein, Coleridge discoursed on “Ideas of Reason.” He distinguished them, parallel to Plato’s distinguishing them from mathemata and the theorems of dianoia, from“conceptions of the Understanding.” With this very distinction, came the problem of defining the Ideas of Reason. If Ideas of Reason transcended concepts, then their definition would appear to be impossible. A conception of an Idea would only be the shadow of an Idea and would, of course, remain a concept. Coleridge was very much alive to this problem, “Ideas and Conceptions are utterly disparate, and Ideas and Images are the negatives of each other.”48 This problem much exercised the neo-platonists, one of whose discourses was entitled ‘A Discourse on Truth, Which Cannot be Discussed.’ Coleridge could find no convenient gradus ad philosophiam from concepts to Ideas. In Ideas he saw the union of universal with particular, much as Hegel saw the Notion as unifying particularity, universality and individuality as the concrete universal (without their predicated universals, subjects would not be individuals at all, so universals are not just those predicates which group different individuals together). Particulars share a pervading identity or universal, which is the soul of the particulars. Coleridge describes the identity or universal of a particular as its “Law”, a Law “constitutive” of phenomena and “In the order of thought necessarily antecedent” to them revealing fragments of the Ideal world distinguished, “not from the real, but from the phenomenal.”49 Coleridge presents us with objects perceived in experience and asks us to consider their predicates as universals. In the light of Ideas, particulars are seen and understood as individualizations of universals. The Law is that in phenomena which is antecedent to and constitutive of the objects in our experience. Coleridge understood Plato’s Ideas as “Living Laws” imbued with particularity.50 The aim of these Living Laws in human life is “to present that which is necessary as a whole consistently with the moral freedom of each particular act.” 51 Coleridge sees evidence of a “directing idea” which shapes our ends, as “a chain of necessity, the particular links of which are free acts.”52 “You may see an Idea working in a man by watching his tastes and enjoyments, though he may hitherto have no consciousness of any other reasoning than that of conception and facts.”53 Indeed, “All men live in the power of Ideas which work in them, though few live in their light.”54 We detect here that for Coleridge, human Reason and its relation to Ideas was not entirely conscious. While Coleridge held Aristotle to be the undisputed master of the Understanding, Plato surveyed the Understanding from a higher vantage and, “as it were, looked down upon, from the throne of actual ideas, or living, inborn, essential truths.”55 In his seminal criticism, Coleridge holds up Shakespeare as literature’s master of the Ideal. “In every one of his characters we find ourselves communing with the same human nature. Everywhere we find the same human nature. Everywhere we find individuality, nowhere mere portraiture. The excellence of his productions is the union of the universal with the particular. But the universal is the Idea. Shakespeare therefore studied mankind in the Idea of the human race, and he followed out that Idea in all its varieties by a method that never failed to guide his steps aright.” (Preliminary Treatise on Method, p. 41). How may we hope to access, Vol. 15, 2010 58 Peter Cheyne like Shakespeare, the Ideas and live in their light? According to Coleridge’s metaphysics, we all live in the power of Ideas, but it is another thing to befriend wisdom and live in, and choose to be guided by, their light. Could we not be mistaken in identifying the light of an Idea? After all, Coleridge held Aristotle, the genius of the Understanding known for centuries simply as ‘The Philosopher’, to be a conceptualist unable to raise himself to that higher state natural to Plato. How could we tell if we had ever been, or have failed to be, illuminated by an Idea? Surely it could not come directly from sensory experience. Nor would it come from what we could generalize from such experience, as that would rather be a conceptual booty, rightfully the acquisition of the understanding. Although many thinkers since and including Plato have appealed to different manners of Ideas being innate, Coleridge did not accept that as a feasible option. Echoing the Cambridge Platonists, whom he admired from a distance, he repudiated the doctrine of innate ideas. Far from Coleridge’s position was Descartes’ conception of clear and distinct innate ideas. Although Descartes’ model gave ideas independence from perception and will, it was an absurdity that Coleridge could not entertain because of Descartes’ “fanciful hypothesis” of “configurations of the brain which were as so many moulds to the influxes of the external world”.56 Indeed Kant’s apparent support of Cartesian innate ideas was a distinct point where Coleridge parted company from Kant, as Coleridge’s spiritual realism opposed Kant’s idealism. Coleridge did, however, agree that the configuration of the mind was endowed with “instincts and offices of Reason”. With Kant, he saw these as necessary for experience, bringing “a unity into all our conceptions and several knowledges. On this all system depends; and without this we could reflect connectedly neither in nature nor on our own minds.”57 Coleridge’s originality here was in insisting that the unifying idea must be found as arising out of experience and not as superimposed on it. Abstractions of thought, as much as perceptions and images, may well obstruct the unifying principle and must be surmounted if we would ascend to the Idea. Coleridge called for that experience in which outer and inner is united – wherein the whole experiencing mind is surveyed. From this survey Ideas such as life, freedom and our deeper purposes arise in our mind neither as objects given nor as impositions from our nature but “as deep calling to deep in the self-evolution of truth.”58 This unity would come from a ground common to mind and world: Coleridge’s ens realissimum. This most real being would be the ground for all other realities and Ideas seen in their unity and truth. As such it was, after a Platonic fashion, the Idea Idearum, the Idea of Ideas. “The grand problem, the solution of which forms the final object and distinctive character of philosophy, is this: for all that exists conditionally (that is, the existence of which is inconceivable except under the conditions of its dependency on some other as its antecedent) to find a ground that is unconditioned and absolute, and thereby to reduce the aggregate of human knowledge to a system.”59 Coleridge argued the indisputability of this ground from two facts. Firstly, scientific inquiry seeks the relations, or laws, as the ground of phenomena. Secondly, we conceive of a “ground common to the world and man”, which forms “the link or mordant by which philosophy becomes scientific and the sciences philosophical.”60 This ground would account for the general unity of experience, the general concord of reason and experience. This was the ground that Hume declared did not exist – that our expectation of the sun rising tomorrow, or of a purse full of gold left on the pavement at Charing-Cross flying away like a feather are merely inferences brought about by the habits of witnessing constant Comparative Culture The Coleridgean Imagination 59 conjunctions of similarly associated events, the mind merely being "determined by custom to infer the one appearance from the other”.61 This same ground Kant essayed to defend with the transcendental unity of apperception: if the real causes of events could not be shown for things themselves, then at least phenomena might be shown to be necessarily unified in experience. But Coleridge did not set about to show the unity of experience alone. As Hume had shown, this ground is not reachable by induction. “If we use only the discursive reason we must be driven from ground to ground, each of which would cease to be a ground the moment we pressed in it. We either must be whirled down the gulf of an infinite series, thus making our reason baffle the end and purpose of all reason, namely unity and system, or we must break off the series arbitrarily and affirm an absolute something which is causa sui.”62 The option of affirming a causa sui provides a break from the logic of the understanding, but this arbitrary break, was not seriously considered by Coleridge. We do, however know of one causative thing, and we know it from the inside, namely the will. Coleridge gave priority to the will in human and universal consciousness. Coleridge approached the Idea via an act of will. “It is at once the distinctive and constitutive basis of my philosophy that I place the ground and genesis of my system, not, as others, in a fact impressed, much less in a generalization from facts collectively, least of all in an abstraction embodied in an hypothesis, in which the pretended solution is most often but a repetition of the problem in disguise. In contradiction to this, I place my principle in an act – in the language of the grammarians I begin with the verb – but the act involves its reality” (Opus Maximum). This affirmation of action is not the same as the Faust of Goethe who declared, “Im Anfang war die Tat!” (In the beginning was the deed!), for this act of Coleridge’s is his human access to the Idea, it says nothing of God or of the Word – also the Idea is held as anteceding the deed. Coleridge’s major divergences from Kant can be seen to stem from his Platonism. For Coleridge's “ideas of Reason” were not an innate conduit to extraphenomenal reality. Rather he appreciated them as mental products and correspondents, and as the culminating stage of conscious development, mental counterparts of the laws of nature themselves. These counterparts stand as “correlatives that suppose each other.” Here Coleridge harmonizes with Schelling, who wrote in his Natürphilosophie that “Mind is invisible Nature; Nature visible Mind.” The Ideas are, in other words, “living and life producing ideas, which . . . are essentially one with the germinal causes in nature,” and so are “constitutive” of the generative principles which they represent in the realm of awareness. Reason in Coleridge’s system, it must be stressed, is not a faculty, even as imagination and understanding can be thought of as faculties. Coleridge remained loyal to the neoplatonists he studied and said that Plotinus provided “the statement in his most beautiful language of the only possible form of philosophic Realism,” as well as furnished “the demonstration of it by one of the most masterly pieces of exhaustive logic found in ancient or modern writings.” “Let the attempt of Plotinus have ended in failure, yet who could see the courage and skill, with which he seizes the reins and vaults into the chariot of the sun, without sharing his enthusiasm and taking honour to the human mind even to have fallen from such magnificent daring?”63 Coleridge was defending Plotinus’s principle, which Tennemann “so cavalierly kicked out of the ring,” that, namely, whatever is necessary to reality is necessarily real itself. Plotinus demonstrated, rallied Coleridge, that “a knowledge of Ideas is a constant process of involution and Vol. 15, 2010 60 Peter Cheyne evolution, different from the concepts of the understanding in this respect only, that no reason can be brought for the affirmation, because it is reason. The soul (for example) contemplates its principle (which is) the universal in itself, as a particular, i.e. knows that this truth is involved and vice versa evolves itself from its principle.” Here we find the beauty of the poet-philosopher’s quarry, the identity of act and object in the neoplatonic act of contemplation, an act involving the reality of the Idea. 1 Bowyer, but in Coleridge’s mis-remembered spelling. Biographia Literaria, Ch. I 3 ‘Religious Musings’, Coleridge’s Works, vol. VII, ed. Shedd, p. 81, New York, Harper & Bros., 1864. 4 Coleridge was the first person to use the term “marginalia” (he used it in a letter to describe his notes in margins), although Edgar Allen Poe was first to have the word published. This note has been dated by Jackson (1969) as written between July, 1818, and March, 1819. Coleridge referred to Tennemann’s History of Philosophy while preparing his series of philosophical lectures, which ended on 29 March 1819. Coleridge also coined the words 'intensify', 'mammonolatry', 'desynonymization', 'psycho-analytic', 'darwinize', 'interpenetration', and 'esemplastic', to name but a few of the concepts he contributed to the English language. 5 What Coleridge Thought, pp. 101-102, The Barfield Press, San Rafael, CA, 2006. 6 The Statesman’s Manual (1816). At the end of his life, Coleridge resided in Highgate with Gillman, his friend and doctor. In Gillman’s copy of The Statesman’s Manual, Coleridge amended the word “product” to “artefacts”. This is noted in W.J. Bate, Coleridge, London, Wiedenfeld & Nicholson, 1968. 7 Biographia Literaria, Ch. XIV. 8 Ibid. 9 Coined by Coleridge in Biog. Lit. to denote a power to unite disparate elements into a whole. This word is perhaps an attempt to translate Schelling’s ineinsbildung. 10 Ibid. 11 Lectures on Shakespeare, I: 251. 12 Ibid., Ch. CXII. 13 Ibid., Ch. CXII 14 Aids to Reflection. 15 What Coleridge Thought, Barfield, Owen, p. 24. 16 Biographia Literaria, I: 164. 17 The Statesman’s Manual, Shedd, I: 450 (penultimate page). 18 Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life, Coleridge, S. T., p. 578, ed. Seth B. Watson, 1848. 19 The Friend, ‘The Landing Place’, Essay V, ed. Shedd, vol II, p.148. 20 Logic, Pt I: ChII, p.69, ed. Jackson, J.R., 1981. 21 Aids to Reflection, Appendix B, Shedd, vol. 1, p. 464. 22 The Statesman’s Manual, Shedd, vol. 1. 23 Appendix B, The Statesman’s Manual, Shedd, vol. 1. 24 Aids to Reflection, Aphorism XXVI. 2 Comparative Culture The Coleridgean Imagination 61 25 The Friend, The Landing Place, Essay III, p. 164, ed. Shedd. Aids to Reflection, p.375. 27 The Statesman’s Manual, p.35, London, 1816. 28 This problem proved a thorny one in A. J. Ayer’s radically empirical phenomenalism, a theory which essayed to show that the appearance of the phenomenon (pardon the apparent pleonasm) was logically equivalent to its being. Language, Truth and Logic, 1936. 29 Biographia Literaria, 1:104. 30 Coleridge’s term for the form-forming form as opposed to the formed form- active form rather than passive shape. This term is clarified in a footnote in The Friend, “The word Nature has been used in two senses, viz. Actively and passively; energetic ( = forma formans), and material ( = forma formata).” 31 Biographia Literaria, Ch. V. 32 Biographia Literaria, 1: Ch. 6. 33 Biographia Literaria, 1: Thesis X. 34 Quoted in Biog. Lit., Ch. XII, Everyman, pp. 140-141. 35 Table Talk, 23 June, 1834. 36 Ibid. 37 Biographia Literaria, Ch. XIV. 38 Ibid., Ch. XXIV. 39 Ibid., Ch. XIV. 40 Lectures 1818, quoted Biographia Literaria, vol. II. 41 Hints Towards the Formation of a more Comprehensive Theory of Life, ed. Watson, Seth B., London: John Churchill, 1848, p. 44. 42 Sources, Processes and Methods in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Katherine M. Wheeler, Cambridge University Press, 1980. 43 The Seventh Lecture (1811-12), Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism, 1930, Harvard University Press. 44 Biog. Lit., Ch VII. 45 The limitations of this image-making faculty were memorably described by Descartes, who in his Meditations argued in favour of pure reason when he tried to imagine the essence of wax balls, the properties of which he claimed could be clearly and distinctly grasped neither by imagination nor by sense, but only by what he called the mind alone. 26 46 47 48 Aristotle, On the Soul, 431a, 15-20. Letter to Josiah Wedgewood, All Saints’ Day, 1800. Semina Rerum, Audita, Cogitata, Cogitanda, quoted in Alice D. Snyder, Coleridge on Logic and Learning, New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1929, pp.135-7. 49 Cited in J. H. Muirhead, 1930 p. 98 from Semina Rerum, Audita, Cogitata, Cogitanda, p. 33. 50 The Friend, 1: 492. 51 Cited in Muirhead, p. 99. 52 Ibid. Vol. 15, 2010 62 Peter Cheyne 53 Ibid. Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Muirhead, John H., ‘Cambridge Platonists’, Mind, vol. Xxxvi, p.172 n. 57 Aids to Reflection, Aphorism XCVIIIc, 5. 58 Coleridge as Philosopher, Muirhead, London: George Allen & Unwin, [1930] 1954, p. 102. 59 The Friend, ed. Shedd, circa p. 420. 60 Ibid., Shedd, vol. ii, p.420. 61 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume, Ch. VIII. 62 Biographia Literaria, p. xii. 63 Marginalia, in Tennemann’s Geschichte der Philosophie. 54 Comparative Culture Comparative Culture 15: 63-68, 2010 An Analysis of Some Japanese Students' English Interlanguage Stephen J. Davies Ll only features are often thought to cause difficulties for students learning a second language. By analyzinq the written interlanguage of some Japanese students of English, this paper attempts to demonstrate that L2 only items may be a greater source of difficulty than Ll only items. The paper concludes with an argument for teaching materials developed specifically for students based on an analysis of their performance errors and an understanding of their mother tongue. Japanese is an isolate language. It is not a member of a large language family in the way that English is a member of the IndoEuropean group of languages, although it may possibly be related to Korean, Manchurian, Mongolian and Turkish. Japanese differs from English in several ways; there is no future tense, verbs and nouns are not inflected for number, adjectives have tenses, the pronoun system is more complex, the counting system is radically different and the conventional word order is SOV. The Japanese have also evolved a special form of polite language; all verbs may be ranked according to their relative politeness and there are many special deferential expressions. Finally there are many special forms that only men may use and many that only women may use. Given these differences between English and Japanese we might expect to find signs of Ll interference in Japanese speakers' interlanguage. Yule writes: “Instead of treating the language of an L2 learner as the product of someone who is, in some way, competent in one language and incompetent in another, we should consider it as a type of language in its own right: which may, as it varies and develops, provide us with crucial insights into the very nature of that more general phenomenon called human language.” (Yule 1985 p.155). Despite this definition it is difficult not to think in terms of 'competent' and 'incompetent': I will make use of the term 'error' when referring to learners' interlanguage but only for the sake of convenience and not wishing to imply any negative associations. Swan & Smith (1985) suggests that Japanese learners' interlanguage may show Ll interference in the following areas: a. Word order. b. Verbs: tenses, passives, complementation. c. Pronouns. d. Nouns. e. Number and use of articles. f. Adjectives and adverbs. g. Determiners. h. Conjunctions and complex sentences. i. Vocabulary. His analysis moves from a consideration of how Japanese differs from English to an explanation of interlanguage errors. In other words ways in which Ll influences L2. But is it possible that features found only in L2 are also significant? Perhaps we can think in terms of three categories: 1. Items present in Ll but not in L2. 2. Items present in Ll and L2. 3. Items present in L2 only. Stephen J. Davies, deceased, Miyazaki International College. 64 Stephen J. Davies For category (a) items I have chosen inflection of adjectives for tense. Japanese regularly inflects adjectives making a verb unnecessary. For example 'it was hot' may be expressed in Japanese by changing the adjective 'atsui' to its past tense form 'atsukatta.' To use the past tense of the Japanese copula desu and attach it to the adjective 'atsui' to produce' * atsui deshita' is a non-standard form. (However it may be found in English speakers' Japanese interlanguage). We may expect then t.o find attempts to inflect English adjectives in Japanese speakers' interlanguage and this would clearly be a case of Ll interference. To be more specific I would expect to find the form '* hotted' or' '* yesterday it hot,' with the copula omitted, to use the above example. For category (b) items present in both Ll and L2 I have chosen prepositions. Prepositional forms are found in both languages although their usage differs; nevertheless the concept of 'preposition' is understood by Japanese speakers. For example the English sentence: 'I work in this school.' may be expressed in Japanese as: 'Watashi wa kana gakko de hatarakimasu.' with the prepositions marked in both cases. For category (c) I i terns present in L2 only I I have chosen the English definite and indefinite articles. Articles are not used at all in Japanese. As material for analysis I used fifteen letters written to me by former students. These were of similar length and represented the students' original writing. Also the students are all the same age, gender and members of the same school. As a contrast I examined four students' assessed written work. This work was longer than the letters and would have been more carefully checked by the students for errors. Analysis of the letters provide the data: Table (l) (See appendix l) For category (a) items, inflection of adjectives, no errors of the kind specified were found. For category (b) items, prepositions, from 137 examples 12 errors were found. This represents an error percentage rate of 8.7%. The figures show clearly that category (c) items, definite and indefinite articles, were the commonest source of error. From 99 examples 27 errors were found. This represents an error percentage of 27.7%. As a control another category of items (d) were chosen: plurals. Japanese nouns and verbs are not inflected for number and yet the concept of number is found in the counting system. We might expect the error rate to be similar to category (b) items, prepositions. The rate of error for plurals was found to be 10.1%. How do these findings compare with an analysis of the students' assessed written work? Table 2 (See appendix 2) For category (a) items no errors were found. For category (b) items an error rate of 6.8% was found, almost identical with Table 1. For category (c) items errors were most frequent with a percentage figure of 16.4%. Finally the control category (d) was closest to category (b) with a percentage error rate of 7.4%. So the data in Table 2 supports the conclusions drawn from the data in Table 1. The error rate was highest among category (c) items found only in L2. Conclusion and Implications for Teaching The amount of material used for analysis was very small. To be more conclusive it would be necessary to include students from other age groups and backgrounds and to vary the discourse types chosen for study. An interesting contrast could be made between written and spoken language. The implications for teaching would be that much more work needs to be done in the area of L2 only features such as articles and, in spoken discourse, on the 'l' and 'r' sounds which are Comparative Culture An Analysis of Some Japanese Students' English Interlanguage not found in Japanese; those items found only in L1, (eg. inflection of adjectives), may interfere less with L2 learning than is generally assumed. PART 2 In the first part of the assignment three specific grammatical categories were discussed with reference to students' letters and assessed written work. Errors which fell into these categories were noted but all other errors were ignored. In the second part of the assignment two students' letters have been examined and all the errors noted and commented on. Letter 1: Dear Stephen Davies, 1 Hello. How have you been in England? In Japan, it is 2 cool and vary comfortable season. The second semester has 3 started about a month ago. I have been very busy with the 4 exam, homework, and the school. I've become a sick just two 5 months ago, and the doctor said it would take 3 years or more 6 to get well perfectly. He also said not to sport, and I 7 decided to be a manager of tennis club, thouqh I have been a 8 player of it since last spring. I would like to go to 9 Winbledon, and to watch the Winbledon tennis match. (109 words) . Line 1: The sentence 'How have you been in England?' is grammatically and semantically accurate but is not 'natural.' This type of error is Common among Japanese learners. Another example is the unnecessary adverb 'perfectly' in line 6 and the unnecessary 'of it' in line 8. These failings to write ' natural' English are usually said to be the result of lack of exposure to authentic material, but this may not be the only reason because learners from other countries such as France, where there is a much greater exposure to ' authentic' material, still sometimes produce similar 'unnatural' English. Line 2: This line has a syntax error. The subject 'season' has been placed at the end of the sentence. Swan writes this about Japanese syntax: 'Japanese is a 'subject-object-verb' language. Qualifier precedes qualified, topic precedes comment and subordinate precedes main. What correspond to English prepositions follow the noun, and so do particles meaning too, either, only and even. Subordinating conjunctions follow their clause; sentence particles showing interrogation, affirmation and tentativeness and so on follow the sentence.' (Swan 1985 p.214). From this summary it can be seen that Japanese syntax differs substantially from English: however based on my experience teaching in Japan, syntax errors are far less frequent than grammatical errors with articles, tenses and plurals. Line 3: The present perfect tense has been used rather than the simple past. Ljne 4: Two errors have been made with the article 'the he.' An error has been made with the indefinite article 'a.' Line 6: The noun 'sport' has been used rather than the more complex verb phrase 'to play any sport. Line 7: The verb I to be' has been used instead of I become. I There are also two more mistakes with articles. Line 9: 'Winbledon' is the first spelling mistake and 'the' has been inserted unnecessarily. Vol. 15, 2010 65 66 Stephen J. Davies These errors may be summarized as follows: (a) Unnatural English. (b) Syntax (c) Wrong choice of tense. (d) Errors with articles. (e) Noun chosen in place of verb. (f) Wrong choice of verb. (g) Spelling. Here is another letter written by a different student: Dear Steve 1 How are you? Did you get my Christmas card? I also wanted 2 to get your card !!! (that's OK). Sachiyo showed me your 3 letter. I read them. Is it real that you have a mustache? 4 I want to see your face having mustache 5 terribly! 6 Well I'll be a student of university!! I have passed an 7 entrance examination. Thank you. Thank you. I can't believe 8 that I will not be a high school student. You must think that 9 too. Time really flies 7 March we'll have graduation 10 ceremony. I'll send to you pictures taken in my house. When 11 Sachiyo lodged my house, we took this pictures. Strange 12 face!! (108 words) . Line l: There is some 'unnatural English.' The use of the adverb 'also' may show Ll interference as it is a literal translation of the Japanese 'Watashi mo' or 'I also.' Line 3: The adjective 'real' has been chosen instead of 'true.' Line 4: 'Face having' is unnecessary. Line 6: In the sentence,' I'll be a student of university,' the wrong future construction has been used. There is also a syntax error with 'student of university.' The article 'an' has been used in place of 'the.' Line 9: The preposition 'on' is missing. Line 10: The sentence, ' I send to you pictures taken in my house,' shows three errors. The present tense has been used where the present continuous is needed, the preposition 'to' is not needed and the article 'the' has been left out. Line 11: The wrong verb has been chosen. ' Stayed' is better than ' lodged.' Line 12: There is a mistake with plurals. The pronoun 'this' (singular) has been used instead of 'these' (plural). This also occurs in line 3 where the plural 'them' has been used in place of 'it.' These errors may be summarized as follows: (a) Unnatural English. (b) Spelling. (c) Wrong choice of adjectives. (d) Errors with articles. (e) Syntax. (f) Wrong tense choice. (g) Preposition (h) Wrong choice of verb. (i) Plurals. Both letter writers have made a range of errors of various kinds with article errors being the most common. It is also clear that they both have a grasp of many fundamental structures in English although their inter language shows that they are not yet completely accurate. Conclusion In this assignment two approaches have' been followed. In Part 1 adjectives, articles, prepositions and plurals were checked in fifteen letters and four pieces of assessed coursework. In Part 2 two letters were examined to determine the range and variety Comparative Culture An Analysis of Some Japanese Students' English Interlanguage 67 of errors. It can be seen that the most frequent type of error is made with English articles; this would support the claim that L2 only items create the most difficulty for these students. Of course more material needs to be examined and other L2 only items checked. The ultimate aim would be to develop teaching materials based on a researched study of Japanese students' needs, developed from a direct analysis of performance errors. Finally it should be noted that the theory of interlanguage implied in this assignment is that interlanguage itself represents a transitional stage between Ll and L2: this perhaps implies a more unified and stable view of L2 than a sociolinguistic model suggests where language is viewed as a non-hierarchical system of dialects. Reference Eastwood J. & Mackin R. 1982 A Basic English Grammar (OUP). Graddol G. et al. 1987 Describing Language (Open Univ. Press) . Konno Y. et al. 1987 Japanese Language Text Book One, (Clair) . Konno Y. et al. 1987 Japanese Language Text Book Two, (Clair) Mizutani o. 1981 Japanese: The Spoken Language in Japanese Life Ltd.) . Swan M. & Smith B. 1985 Learner English (CUP). Yule G. 1985 The Study of Language (CUP). Appendix 1 item 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 TOT % #article s 10 6 11 14 16 6 0 9 3 2 5 4 7 1 5 99 27.7 #error 1 1 6 5 5 1 0 1 0 0 2 0 2 1 2 27 #prep 10 5 5 26 8 10 4 22 5 7 1 5 9 6 14 137 #error 2 2 1 3 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 12 #adj 3 2 3 7 3 2 2 8 1 0 2 2 0 3 3 41 0 #error 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 #plurals 3 7 1 18 1 2 0 11 4 0 1 2 2 5 2 59 10.6 #error 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 6 Appendix 2 item 1 2 3 4 total % #articles 26 11 12 36 85 16.4 #error 7 1 0 6 14 Vol. 15, 2010 8.7 68 Stephen J. Davies #prep 43 11 18 40 112 8.6 #error 1 1 3 4 9 0 #adj 6 10 4 13 13 #error 0 0 0 0 0 #plurals 17 11 1 23 54 #error 1 0 1 2 4 Comparative Culture 7.4 Comparative Culture 15: 69-77, 2010 BMI, Breakfast Habits, and Fast Food Usage of American and Japanese College Students Futoshi Kobayashi Futoshi Kobayashi teaches at Miyazaki International College. Correspondence may be sent to: MIC, 1405 Kano, Kiyotake-cho, Miyazaki-shi, Miyazaki-ken, Japan 889-1605, Tel: 0985-85-5931, Fax: 0985-84-3396, E-mail: fkobayas@sky.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp 70 Futoshi Kobayashi conducted a simulation study for fast food diet by using 38 male mice. The mice with high fat and high fructose diet gained weight significantly and also had a significantly higher level of blood glucose than the mice fed with normal food and water over three months. In studies of American adult populations, there were positive correlations between fast food usage frequency and the BMI (Bowman & Vinyard, 2004; Jeffery & French, 1998; Pereira et al., 2005). Several studies found that skipping breakfast is one of the risk factors for obesity (Berkey, Rockett, Gillman, Field, & Colditz, 2003; Ma et al., 2003; van der Heijden, Hu, Rimm, & van Dam, 2007). Huang, Song, Schemmel, and Hoerr (1994) found that approximately one in five American college students do not eat breakfast regularly. Other studies also found a steady increase of skipping breakfast in children under the age of 18 (Siega-Riz, Popkin, & Carson, 1998) and adults over the age of 18 (Haines, Guilkey, & Popkin, 1996) in the U.S. from 1965 to 1991. Moreover, Niemeier, Raynor, LloydRichardson, Rogers, and Wing (2006) reported that both fast food consumption and skipping breakfast are predictive factors for weight gain in nationally representative adolescent samples. In contrast, neither being overweight nor obesity is a serious problem in Japanese college students and, especially, very few of them are obese (Kobayashi, 2007; Matsuura, Fujimura, Nozawa, Iida & Hirayama, 1992; Sakamaki, Amamoto, Mochida, Shinfuku & Toyama, 2005; Tanaka, Itoh & Hattori, 2002). Fast food is one of the representations of American lifestyle (Schlosser, 2001) and Japanese gradually have taken on a more American lifestyle after World War II. Indeed, fast food usage among college students has been increasing in Japan. Asano et al. (2003) found that male college students eat fast food more often than female students (p < .01) and 58.0% of male students and 36.6% of female students eat fast food once or more on a weekly basis. Several studies found that the frequent fast food users were more likely to skip one of their meals than the infrequent fast food users in a college population (Asano et al., 2003; Egami, Hasegawa, & Itazu, 1995; Egami, Hasegawa, & Ohya, 1993). The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (2007) reported that 28.3% of Japanese aged from 20 to 29 in 2005 skipped their breakfast. Especially, more men (33.1%) skipped their breakfast than women (23.5%) did. In addition, Goto, Oishi, Takenaka, and Furukawa (2003) reported that approximately 60% of 837 college students in rural areas ate their breakfast regularly and about one out of four of them had a tendency of skipping breakfast. In summary, the obesity problem may be a serious health risk for American college students and could be influenced by both breakfast habits and fast food usage. Fast food usage of Japanese college students is increasing and may be linked with skipping breakfast. However, there are few published studies that investigate how BMI (Body Mass Index), breakfast habit, and fast food usage are related to one another in these two different countries. Thus, this study researches this issue in both American and Japanese college populations simultaneously. It is hypothesized that both breakfast habits and fast food usage would be related to the BMI of American college students but not to that of Japanese college students. Method Participants The Japanese participants were 153 undergraduate college students aged from 18 to 26 (56.2% men and 43.8% women) from a private university in a rural area of Japan. The American participants were 132 undergraduate college students Comparative Culture Bmi, Breakfast, Fast Food 71 aged from 18 to 53 (22.7% men and 77.3% women) from a state university in a rural area of the U.S. Procedure The study was approved by the institutional review boards of both the state university in the U.S. and the private university in Japan. Then, the author collected the data from the two different universities in rural areas of the U.S. and Japan. After granting their informed consent, the participants answered about their own gender, age, height, weight, breakfast habit, and the frequency of eating fast food per week in their own native languages. Results All the statistical analyses were conducted by Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) for Windows,TM version 16.0 J (SPSS Inc. Tokyo, Japan) with the level of significance at p < .05. Table 1 indicated the comparison data between American and Japanese samples in regard to target variables. Table 1. Comparison data between American and Japanese samples in regard to target variables Japanese p American Variable Mean SD N Mean SD N Age (year) 20.4 1.2 153 21.4 5.2 132 .05 Height (m) 1.66 .08 153 1.71 .10 132 .001 Weight (kg) 56.8 9.9 153 71.8 15.9 132 .001 BMI (kg/m2) 20.5 2.4 153 24.5 4.2 132 .001 Fast Food (times) .99 .80 153 1.95 1.1 132 .001 Breakfast (%) 73.9 NA 153 47.0 NA 132 .001 Note. Weight means body weight. BMI stands for body mass index. Fast Food (times) indicates the frequency of eating fast food per week. Breakfast (%) means the percentage of students who eat breakfast each day. NA indicates not applicable. The American students were older (t(283) = 2.06, p < .05), taller (t(283) = 4.30, p < .001), heavier (t (283) = 9.41, p < .001), larger in BMI (t (283) = 9.79, p < .001), ate fast food more frequently per week (t (283) = 8.50, p < .001), and less likely to eat breakfast each day (χ2(1) = 21.6, p < .001) than their Japanese counterparts. In order to investigate how BMI, breakfast habits, and weekly fast food usage were related to one another, 2 (Gender: Female or Male) X 2 (Breakfast Habit: Yes or No) X 2 (Fast Food Usage: Infrequent User or Frequent User) between-subjects Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was conducted to each country’s participants. Due to the differences in weekly fast food usage regarding the U.S. and Japan, the author made two definitions of frequent users for their fast food usage. Regarding the Japanese sample, the author chose .99 usages per week as a maximum cutting point of infrequent user in order to make two comparative groups and also due to the fact that both mode and median scores were 1.0. In this way, 33.3% were classified as infrequent users and 66.7% were classified as frequent users. Vol. 15, 2010 72 Futoshi Kobayashi Regarding the American sample, the author chose 1.99 usages per week as a maximum cutting point of infrequent user in order to make two comparative groups and also due to the fact that both mode and median scores were 2.0. In this way, 42.4% were classified as infrequent users and 57.6% were classified as frequent users. When it came to the ANOVA results of the Japanese sample, there was a significant main effect of gender (F(1, 145) = 17.1, p < .001). None of the other effects were significant (Fs < 2, ns). Figure 1 displayed the mean BMI of male and female Japanese students regarding breakfast habit and fast food usage. Figure 1. Mean BMI of male and female Japanese students regarding breakfast habit and fast food usage When it came to the ANOVA results of the American sample, a three-way interaction effect between Gender X Breakfast Habit X Fast Food Usage became significant (F(1, 124) = 6.72, p < .05) and also there was a significant main effect of gender (F(1, 124) = 9.14, p < .01). None of the other effects were significant (Fs < 3, ns). As a next step, 2 (Breakfast Habit: Yes or No) X 2 (Fast Food Usage: Infrequent User or Frequent User) between-subjects ANOVA was conducted on each gender. The results from the female sample indicated that none of the main and interaction effects were significant (Fs < 2, ns). However, the results from the male sample indicated that a two-way interaction effect between breakfast habit and fast food usage became significant (F(1, 26) = 4.58, p < .05). None of the other effects were significant (Fs < 1, ns). Then, the simple effects were tested for the male students. The simple effect of fast food usage upon male students who had a breakfast habit was marginally significant (F(1, 26) = 3.08, p < .10). In addition, the simple effect of breakfast habits upon male students who eat Comparative Culture Bmi, Breakfast, Fast Food 73 fast food 2.00 times or more per week was also marginally significant (F(1, 26) = 3.23, p < .10). As shown in Figure 2, American male college students who had a breakfast habit increased their BMI in regard to their fast food usage but the BMI of American female college students are related with neither breakfast habits nor fast food usage and stayed within the normal range (18.5 kg/m2 < BMI < 25 kg/m2) based on the U.S. clinical guideline (National Institute of Health, US Dept of Health and Human Services, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and the North American Association for the Study of Obesity, 2000). Figure 2. Mean BMI of male and female American students regarding breakfast habit and fast food usage Discussion Compared to the previous study (Huang, Song, Schemmel, & Hoerr, 1994), a lower frequency of American students (47.0%) ate their breakfast. Although Japanese were more likely to eat their breakfast (73.9%), this frequency was not in the satisfactory level because it also meant more than one in four of them did not eat their breakfast. Breakfast skipping is one of the risk factors for obesity (Berkey, Rockett, Gillman, Field, & Colditz, 2003; Ma et al., 2003; van der Heijden, Hu, Rimm, & van Dam, 2007), therefore, both American and Japanese students were increasing their risks for becoming overweight or obese. Regarding the Japanese sample, their BMIs were not related to either breakfast habits or the level of weekly fast food usage. Although the author hypothesized that both the breakfast habit and fast food usage would be related to Vol. 15, 2010 74 Futoshi Kobayashi the BMI of American students, such a result appeared only in the American male students. Regarding the American female students, neither breakfast habits nor fast food usage was related to their BMI significantly. However, the BMI of American male students was related with both breakfast habit and the level of weekly fast food usage in a complex way. When American male students who had a breakfast habit ate fast food frequently, their BMI became significantly higher than their infrequent fast food users. It may result from the fact that they ate fast food as their breakfast. When the American male breakfast skippers were compared, the BMI of the infrequent fast food users was higher than that of the frequent fast food users. The infrequent fast food users may eat too much in later meals or snacks to decrease their hunger (Niemeier, Raynor, Lloyd-Richardson, Rogers, & Wing, 2006). On the other hand, the frequent fast food users might not eat anything after skipping meals. For example, researchers had already found that the frequent fast food users were more likely to skip one of their meals than the infrequent fast food users in a Japanese college population (Asano et al., 2003; Egami, Hasegawa, & Itazu, 1995; Egami, Hasegawa, & Ohya, 1993). Past research indicated that frequent fast food usage and skipping breakfast were two contributing factors for increasing obesity among American adolescents (Niemeier, Raynor, Lloyd-Richardson, Rogers, & Wing, 2006). This study did not find a similar result in the American female sample, but both factors were found to be related to the American male sample in a complex way. American male students should pay more attention to their breakfast habit and fast food usage than their female counterparts. The limitations of this study should be noticed. First, the number in the American male sample was only 30 and it is less than one-third of their female counterparts. A future study should use a greater number of American male participants. Second, this study is non-experimental in design, thus, ANOVAs can indicate only relationships among target variables, but not any causal relationship among them. Although this study had its own limitations, this study warns American male college students to pay more attention to their breakfast habits and fast food usage. Reference Allison, D. B., Fontaine, K. R., Manson, J. E., Stevens, J., & Vanltallie, T. B. (1999). Annual deaths attributable to obesity in the United States. Journal of American Medical Association, 282, 1530-1538. American College Health Association. (2007). American college health association national college health assessment spring 2006 reference group data report (abridged). Journal of American College Health, 55, 195-206. Asano, M., Fukakura, N., Odachi, J., Kawaraya, C., Nanba, A., Yasuda, N., & Yamamoto, E. (2003). Jidou kara daigakusei niitaru jyakunensouno faasutofuudo no riyoujittaichousa [Assessment of fast food usage among young generation from children to college students]. Japanese Journal of Nutrition and Dietetics, 61, 47-54. Berkey, C. S., Rockett, H. R., Gillman, M. W., Field, A. E., & Colditz, G. A. (2003). Longitudinal study of skipping breakfast and weight change in adolescents. International Journal of Obesity and Related Metabolic Disorders, 27, 12581266. Comparative Culture Bmi, Breakfast, Fast Food 75 Bowman, S. A., & Vinyard, B. T. (2004). Fast food consumption of U.S. adults: Impact on energy and nutrient intakes and overweight status. Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 23, 163-168. Buckworth, J., & Nigg, C. (2004). Physical activity, exercise, and sedentary behavior in college students. Journal of American College Health, 53, 28-34. Critser, G. (2003). Fat land: How Americans became the fattest people in the world. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Egami, I., Hasegawa, N., & Itazu, M. (1995). On lifestyle of overweight women students (part 2): The relationship between dietary lifestyle and eating behavior. Journal of Nagoya Bunri College, 20, 87-91. Egami, I., Hasegawa, N., & Ohya, M. (1993). On lifestyle of overweight women students (part 1): The relationship between dietary lifestyle and overweight. Journal of Nagoya Bunri College, 18, 85-91. Goto, Y., Oishi, N., Takenaka, R., & Furukawa, K. (2003). A survey on university students’ breakfast: Focusing on their dietary behavior. Bulletin of the Faculty of Education, Yamaguchi University, 53, A31-A50. Haines, P. S., Guilkey, D. K., & Popkin, B. M. (1996). 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Nutrition and Food Science, 37, 329337. Ma, Y., Bertone, E. R., Stanek, E. J., III, Reed, G. W., Hebert, J. R., Cohen, N. L., Merriam, P. A., & Ockene, I. S. (2003). Association between eating patterns and obesity in a free-living US adult population. American Journal of Epidemiology, 158, 85-92. Matsuura, K., Fujimura, M., Nozawa, Y., Iida, Y., & Hirayama, M. (1992). The body shape preferences of Japanese female students. International Journal of Obesity and Related Metabolic Disorders, 16, 87-93. Vol. 15, 2010 76 Futoshi Kobayashi Messier, C., Whately, K., Liang, J., Du, L., & Puissant, D. (2007). The effects of a highfat, high-fructose, and combination diet on learning, weight, and glucose regulation in C57BL/6 mice. Behavioural Brain Research, 178, 139-145. Ministry of Health, Labour & Welfare. (2007). Heisei 17 nen kokumin kenkou eiyouchousa no gaiyou [Summary report of the result from the investigation on the citizen’s health and nutrition in 2005]. Available at: http://www.mhlw.go.jp/houdou/2007/05/dl/h0516-3c.pdf National Institute of Health, US Dept of Health and Human Services, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and the North American Association for the Study of Obesity. (2000). The Practical guide: Identification, evaluation, and treatment of overweight and obesity in adults. (NIH Pub 00-4084). Available at http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/guidelines/obesity/practgde.htm. Niemeier, H. M., Raynor, H. A., Lloyd-Richardson, E. E., Rogers, M. L., & Wing, R. R. (2006). Fast food consumption and breakfast skipping: Predictors of weight gain from adolescence to adulthood in a nationally representative sample. Journal of Adolescent Health, 39, 842-849. Nielsen, S. J., Siega-Riz, A. M., & Popkin, B. M. (2002). Trends in food locations and sources among adolescents and young adults. Preventive Medicine, 35, 107113. Ogden, C. L., Carroll, M. D., McDowell, M. A., & Flegal, K. M. (2007). Obesity among adults in the United States-No statistically significant change since 2003-2004. NCHS data brief No. 1. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. Pereira, M. A., Kartashov, A. I., Ebbeling, C. B., Van Horn, L., Slattery, M. L., Jacobs, D. R. Jr., & Ludwig, D. S. (2005). Fast-food habits, weight gain, and insulin resistance (the CARDIA study): 15-year prospective analysis. Lancet, 365, 3642. Sakamaki, R., Amamoto, R., Mochida, Y., Shinfuku, N., & Toyama, K. (2005). A comparative study of food habits and body shape perception of university students in Japan and Korea. Nutrition Journal, 4, 31-36. Schlosser, E. (2001). Fast food nation. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Shell, E. R. (2002). The hungry gene: The science of fat and the future of thin. New York: Atlantic Monthly. Siega-Riz, A. M., Popkin, B. M., & Carson, T. (1998). Trends in breakfast consumption for children in the United States from 1965 to 1991. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 67, 748S-756S. Sneed, J., & Holdt, C. S. (1991). Many factors influence college students’ eating patterns. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 91, 1380. Sparling, P. B. (2007). Obesity on campus. Preventing chronic disease: Public health research, practice, and policy, 4(3), 1-4. Available at http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2007/jul/06_0142.htm Comparative Culture Bmi, Breakfast, Fast Food 77 Tanaka, S., Itoh, Y., & Hattori, K. (2002). Relationship of body composition to bodyfatness estimation in Japanese university students. Obesity Research, 10, 590596. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2001). The surgeon general's call to action to prevent and decrease overweight and obesity. Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Office of the Surgeon General. Available from: http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/topics/obesity/ van der Heijden, A. A. W. A., Hu, F. B., Rimm, E. B., & van Dam, R. M. (2007). A prospective study of breakfast consumption and weight gain among U.S. men. Obesity, 15, 2463-2469. Vol. 15, 2010 Comparative Culture 15: 78-87, 2010 Consuming Kyara ‘Characters:’ Anthropomorphization and Marketing in Contemporary Japan Debra J. Occhi Japan is famous for its manga tradition, said to form a large part of the Cool Japan image promulgated globally as a lauded aspect of soft power. Yet an important contemporary part of this tradition that reflects domestic aesthetics and values is the practice through which products, services, events and policies can be represented by a kyara (originally kyarakutaa, ‘character’). Kyara can be actual people, but are often cartoon characters or imaginary creatures constructed through the process of gijinka ‘anthropomorphization’ of some aspect of the entity they represent. This paper examines a sample of such emergent kyara as marketing agents in contemporary Japan. Introduction Why eat a plain sugar cookie when you could have a smiling one -- or, why should a sugar cookie smile? Ubiquitous in marketing food and other products, cute characters provide cues to the Japanese viewer in hopes of generating sales, and via association, good will towards the product and the brand. Things, ideas, events, and persons become products sold by soft power. Japanese consumers are bombarded with cute representations that not only serve as marketing tools, but also guide the user towards specific behaviors. This paper provides specific examples of kyara – ‘spokespeople,’ cartoon characters, and often anthropomorphized objects -- to examine the mechanisms of this phenomenon. Character cookies: kyara in corporate context A rectangular box of Morinaga’s DEAR Sable cookies (self-named ‘The New Standard Biscuit’) show how product and process are characterized for specific outcomes. These smiling sugar cookies are marketed with language and images that teach us how to open the box, how to incorporate cookie eating into a balanced diet, and how to recycle the empty box. These gentle imperatives are delivered through a plethora of grinning, cute figures including the brand logo, several illustrations, and the cookies themselves. The pale, circular cookies, marketed since 2006, are embossed with six kinds of smiling faces which vary in eye and nose shape, adding visual interest. Photographic images of some of these faces decorate the front of the box, along with the Morinaga “M” logo into which is incorporated a cherub’s face and wings. Next to the product’s name DEAR, three more smiley faces appear in loose yuru kyara style, as if a child drew them with a crayon. Under these faces is the catch phrase, itsudemo nikkori. yasashii egao.: ‘always grinning. kind smiling faces.’ This design also appears on the opposite side of the box, rotated ninety degrees so that the product can be displayed with either lengthwise or vertical orientation on a shelf. On the side next to the opening flap is a diagram showing how to flatten the box for easy disposal. Inside the box is a manga version of these instructions, with happy faces incorporated into the drawings of the box and of the trash can. There is also a Debra J. Occhi teaches at Miyazaki International College. Correspondence may be sent to: MIC, 1405 Kano, Kiyotake-cho, Miyazaki-shi, Miyazaki-ken, Japan 889-1605, Tel: 0985-85-5931, Fax: 0985-84-3396, E-mail: docchi@sky.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp Consuming Kyara ‘Characters 79 reminder inside that the box lid can stand open to allow easy access to the cookies -complete with a word which represents the sound effect made when the lid is opened fully (kachi) and another manga of the happy cookie box. On the remaining large side of the box is yet another simply sketched manga of two children and a dog enjoying snacks. The accompanying paragraph details the notion that ‘a snack should be considered one’s fourth meal,’ bordered on the right by a catch phrase tanoshiku tabeyoo. kichin to tabeyoo.: ‘let’s enjoy eating. let’s eat properly.’ To the left of the paragraph is a replica of the Japanese ‘food balance guide’ (shokuji baransu gaido) developed by the Ministry of Health & Welfare and the Ministry of Agriculture (comparable to the US Dept. of Agriculture’s Food Pyramid), represented as a spinning top with various foods drawn upon it. One small side of the box contains the ingredient label and the sell-by date, and icons of a computer and a mobile phone(at the bottom next to the website address). The other end has the product name, a computer rendered cartoon image of the naked, blonde Morinaga cherub, and the catchphrase oishiku tanoshiku sukoyuka ni ‘deliciously, enjoyably, healthily.’ Each side of this box, and the inside as well, contains multiple messages couched in cuteness. These messages encourage the consumer not only to buy and enjoy the product, but to use it in specific and predetermined ways. The DEAR section of the Morinaga website directs the consumer how to decorate the cookies further, personalizing the smiling faces or making them look like animal faces with icing, and invites participation by consumers to share photos and comments of how they decorated the cookies (http://www.morinaga.co.jp/ dear/top.html). DEAR cookies are an especially rich example of how kyara are used on everyday products. Characters in regional and national food promotions Kyara are also used to represent food consumption ideals to Japanese by government agencies. The food balance guide shown on the box itself contains a human figure running around the top of the guide to represent the need for exercise. Though in its national representation (as shown on the DEAR Sable box) it is a colorful though generic manga of a human figurei, the Kyushu regional version has developed a specific kyara who runs around the top, named Kyuu-chan. She also appears at the bottom of the page with a companion, the male, Shuu-kun. Their names together make up the place name of Kyushu; in the image, she holds a rice paddle while he holds a ladle. They are introduced as ‘hardworking supporters of Kyushu’s regional traditional cooking,’ in this localized version of the food balance guide. She says that ‘the nutrition chart represents an approx. 2200 calorie intake; however, individual needs will vary depending on sex, age, and activity level. He says ‘let's enact a healthy dietary lifestyle by exercising and eating a balanced diet.’ As typical Japanese kyara characters with a moralizing message, they are telling the reader that one should do something, in this case, to eat and exercise in balance for health. They represent the official voice of MAFF, the Japanese Ministry of Forestries, Farming, and Fisheries, Kyushu branch. Their dress and hairstyles resemble the manga depictions of Japan's ancient gods, whose origin legends link to various locations in Kyushu. Kyuu-chan and Shuu-kun combine local imagery and cuisine with a message to enforce national guidelines about ideal eating habits, using similar strategies as those seen in commercial advertising (www.maff.go.jp/ kyushu). MAFF worries not only about proper nutrition, but also about Japan’s low level of national food self-sufficiency, which is currently about 40%. In hopes of increasing that percentage, the Food Action Nippon Promotion Bureau was formed, operating at the national level. Its kyara logo mark shows a smiling child who Vol. 15, 2010 80 Debra J. Occhi embraces the red hinomaru sun of the Japanese flag. The child gazes down towards the circle, as if he is about to take a bite from it. This image appears along with the catchphrase oishii Nippon o, ‘a delicious Japan,’ providing a simple representation of domestic consumption. That simple message is apparently not enough. The bureau’s website also introduces us to the eight-year-old boy Kokusan, a kyara representing the Food Action Nippon (FAN) Promotion Bureau (http://syokuryo.jp/index.html), along with his little dog “Gochi.” The name Kokusan is a homonym for kokusan, ‘domestic production,’and a cook or chef is known as a kokku; thus, Kokusan wears white garb and a chef’s hat. These characters and the logo mark appear throughout the FAN site, along with tips, recipes and events to promote cooking with domestic products (promulgated by human celebrity chefs) and tie-ups with magazines and other commercial food-related businesses. FAN encourages the reader to sign up for news about their events and the email magazines MoguMaga (mogu is an onomatopoeia for eating, maga is short for ‘magazine’) and Kokusan Tayori ‘Koku-san Greetings’ by joining the FAN kurabu ‘FAN club.’ In one section of the website one can play a game to determine one’s approximate level of domestic product consumption by entering menu choices, and if sufficient points are gained, till and farm imaginary land adjacent to Kokusan’s plot. Like any typical eight-year-old boy, Kokusan has a family. This family is described in short but surprisingly detailed narratives. Such a strategy in kyara construction is common and, as the kyara producer Kensuke Kondo points out, important in creating kyara with longevity (2006:57). These narratives, intended to promote engagement with the FAN theme, portray an idealized family. Kokusan’s father Kokuzo is forty-eight, a serious-minded and easily embarrassed Japanese restauranteur. He combines his uncompromising Edokko (native Tokyoite) professionalism with an unabashed romanticism for his wife Kokue, with whom he fell in love at first sight. She is forty-three and is herself the owner and chef of a French restaurant. Many a boy lost his heart over this strong gal, but her devotion to cooking was unwavering until she met Kokuzo and married him against her parents’ wishes. Though we don’t hear her speak, we learn that since she studied in France, she occasionally mixes French into her conversation, a trait that Kokuzo finds appealing. Kokusan has two brothers. The eldest, Kokuichi, is described as a stylish, intelligent, and thoughtful twenty-two-year-old . He is tall, with a long lock of purple hair covering one eye. He is good at sports as well as academics and is popular with women, probably because of the ‘ladies first’ philosophy he gleaned from the influence of his France-educated mother. Though he is somewhat of a narcissist, he takes good care of those around him and thus earns their esteem. He graduated from a prestigious university and is currently in training at his mother’s restaurant. Next appears Kokuji, the other brother, who is short and stocky. A sensitive lad of eighteen, he respects his father, and has just begun to apprentice at his restaurant. Cooking is his passion, and his sentimentality extends even towards stray cats and roadside flowers. He is very good with his hands, crafting decorative elements for his father’s dishes (his skill at this surpasses his father’s), and enjoying respect for his embroidery and knitting. We can now appreciate another aspect of Kokusan’s naming. It may seem strange that a young boy would receive a name ending in -san, since young boys would usually have -kun affixed as an address term. In this case, however, -san is not an address term. Kokusan is the third son after Kokuichi and Kokuji, (ichi means ‘one,’ ji is a form of ‘two’ used in naming, and ‘three’ is san) so in address he would be Kokusan-kun. The youngest in his restauranteur family, this lad is honest and Comparative Culture Consuming Kyara ‘Characters 81 beloved by the people around him. He is a gourmand with a mature palate for his years, and his mouth waters whenever he encounters something delicious. He uses surprisingly polite language -- due to the influence of his parents who are in the service industry -- though he still makes cute mistakes. He is a second grader and has owned his dog Gocchi since he was three. Still, a kyara logo and a kyara family bearing this level of characterizing detail are apparently not enough to carry the symbolic load of promoting Japanese food to Japanese. MAFF also uses a winking tomato and a smiling head of lettuce along with a carrot, a cucumber, and an eggplant in its logo for the Natsu Beji Purojiekuto ‘Summer Veggie Project.’ This project ties in to the overall logic of eating seasonal foods discussed throughout the FAN site; apparently, the Bureau believes that Japanese must be reminded of this aspect of their traditional food culture for which they have been celebrated worldwide. MAFF has clearly attempted to craft its message in support of domestic consumption in order to appeal to children, via the Kokusan narrative, and to their mothers, both through the kyara and the inclusion of recipes, events, and commercial tie-ins. This targeting reflects one of the major findings of the Bandai Character Research Laboratory - that the current target audience for characters should be mothers and their young children (Aihara 2007:23). Consumers can, thanks to recent legislation, determine food origins when shopping, and work towards consuming more domestic foodstuffs. What is missing from the FAN site, however, is a discussion of one major part of the domestic self-sufficiency puzzle: the use of imported foods in restaurants and in readymade and frozen foods. The behaviors leading to this situation are carried out by corporate decisionmakers, of whom the majority tend to be men in Japan’s glass-ceilinged corporate world. Thus the effects of FAN can only extend towards possibly influencing personal decisionmaking in stores whose purchasing decisions are beyond the reach of FAN’s fans. Another part of FAN’s message is the importance of eating local foods, for which a variety of local marketing strategies also exist. Consumer reactions to kyara advertising In a regional food promotion campaign for rural Shimane Prefecture, a glossy black shijimi ‘corbicula’ clam rests on a cushion with a cup of green tea and some traditional sweets nearby. Above is a thought bubble: Shimijimi omou Shimane ni umarete yokatta naa~ “I think keenly ‘wow, it’s good I was born in Shimane.’” There’s obvious alliteration between Shimane the place, shijimi the clam, and shimijimi, the sound-symbolic term describing the depth of thought. Having a clam as a spokesperson is a logical choice given that Shimane produces about 40% of the shijimi consumed nationally. It doesn’t matter that this is an actual photo of clam lacking a face, rather than a drawing. Japan’s pervasive aesthetic and religious tendency to anthropomorphize non-human objects encourages the viewer of this image to interpret the clam as representative of a human. The particular context provides clues as to its age and gender as well. Japanese readily identify the clam as an old man based on the manner of expression, the dark colors of the clam and cushion, the traditional sweets, and the hometown motif. These kinds of contextual aesthetic clues are commonly used to forefront products in advertisements: here, the clam, the tea, and the sweets of Shimane. Advertisement is, after all, reliant on the manipulation of cultural and linguistic resources in the interests of spreading information and creating desire. In Japan, anthropomorphization is a powerful communicative tool that is frequently used in advertising. Though non-Japanese viewers often see anthropomorphized Vol. 15, 2010 82 Debra J. Occhi representations primarily as cute, if not gratuitous, native speakers report two additional effects. The first reinstantiates the historical, cultural linguistic lack of imaginal separation between humans and nature, or even between humans and their creations. When a group of students in an MIC course on Japanese Popular Culture were shown ads and asked to describe what kind of human was being represented by the non-human entity in the advertisement, they were quick to identify linguistic and other traits by which identity could be discerned. The clam is having a moment of deep reflection indicated by the soundsymbolic term shimijimi. This term is reduplicated (shimi + shimi = shimijimi) showing a continual action. This is one of the large class of sound-symbolic terms in Japanese that are subcategorized as giongo ‘onomatopoeia,’ gitaigo ‘mimetics,’ and giseigo ‘manner adverbs.’ These terms evoke cultural scenarios including emotional and visceral experience, and may take a variety of phonological shapes which indicate their grammatical classification as adverbs or verbal nouns. They are common in manga comics as well as in other casual texts such as personal letters. Japanese ascribe the meanings of these terms with a sense of naturalness brought on by their sound symbolism (as in English, the sl sound shared in slip, slop, slide). The clam’s philosophical rumination is elaborated by the ending particle naa~ which is akin to ‘yeah,’ with casual, dialectal, and somewhat masculine overtones. Thus the clam mentioned above is an older male. This identity is easily ascribed because of features of his quoted speech, the rustic teatime scenario, and the dark colors used in the advertisement. Language and image contribute cultural cues that are readily accessible to the viewer. The second major effect described by viewers of these ads relates to information flow. Contrary to the assumption that anthropomorphization includes extraneous information, viewers state that its inclusion makes the advertisements easy to understand. The linguistic and cultural schemata invoked via anthropomorphization reportedly allowed greater access to the information content of the message. Given that in the Japanese cultural linguistic system, anthropomorphization is a type of schematization which though rooted in historical poetic practice is an enduring practice in the present day, its use in advertising combines textual and visual resources to situate creatures and objects within the world of humans. For this reason anthropomorphization creates a sense of comfort and affinity. Another example of a faceless though emotive kyara appeared in the late 1990s, in a Pizza California advertisement. This ad was quite simple visually, depicting a round ball of pizza dough on a blue background. The text was as follows: Kyoo wa piza ni naru. Waku waku “Today (I) become pizza. Wowee!” The term waku waku is another sound-symbolic gitaigo form expressing generalized excitement; it was used to invoke a shared feeling in the reader. As with the clam, the makers of this ad refrained from the common practice of drawing a cartooned face on the dough, which often appears in anthropomorphized ads. By omitting the face, the quoted statement (which also lacks an overt grammatical subject) is made ambiguous and could be ascribed to the reader as well with a slightly different reading, as if deciding what to have for dinner: “Today (it) will be pizza. Wowee!” Another ‘excited’ product is the Meritto shampoo refill package. My students and I dubbed this kyara Shampoo Banzai Boy. It is considered to be a boy, since being unmarked for gender renders it male; its cuteness makes it young. We called him Banzai because the shape of the container is described in the ad as having its arms raised as when Japanese people yell “Banzai!” in celebration. The product’s catchphrase was Katachi wa hen da ga, nani ka to ureshii ‘the shape is odd, but somehow (it is) happy.’ The two ‘arms’ are corners of a rectangular pouch with a cap Comparative Culture Consuming Kyara ‘Characters 83 in between them on one of the short sides of the rectangle; the other end of the pouch has a gusset so that the product can stand alone. In the advertisement a simple smiling face was drawn just under the cap. The product illustrations and text showed how the refill pouch should be used and rolled up for convenient disposal. The stages of use are described as follows: (1) Banzai suru ryootei o ageta hen na katachi ‘Do banzai - an odd shape with both hands’ raised; (2) Bôshi o toru… ‘Take off the hat;’ -- the cap was removed; (3) Udekumi o suru… (wa~i) ‘Cross the arms (hurrah)’ -as the corners were joined to make a bottle shape; (4) Dô ga fukuramu… ‘The trunk expands’ -- at this stage the product was upended, pouring the shampoo into the owner’s original plastic bottle; (5) Chiisaku naru… ‘It becomes small’-- as it was rolled up and flying into the trash can, still grinning. As with the pizza dough, excitement is the key to understanding the value-added feature of this product. However, by the inclusion of body-part imagery, the shampoo package was further anthropomorphized, to the extent of performing humanlike actions that guide the consumer towards proper use of the product. The mushroom families: narratives and advertising The MAFF promotion of eating domestic foods by means of characters is, though the characters are conceptual rather than directly representational of the product, not unlike the marketing strategies of corporations themselves. An example which combines food as a product with the family motif is the group of mushroom characters popularized by the Hokuto Corporation. Anthropomorphized mushrooms appear on packaging, in television commercials, and in videos describing how to cook the mushrooms. Their song kinoko no uta “The mushroom song” is part of the videos and plays in the produce sections of grocery stores, becoming so widely recognized that it is marketed as a CD in its own right including a karaoke version (Sony 2003). In the CD package is a booklet with the song lyrics, finger puppets, and a page describing each character’s’name, gender, and attributes. These descriptions contain rather a large amount of detail, as in the MAFF site, given the reality that the Hokuto characters are not part of any larger story than that of the advertisement. They are named after the mushrooms they represent: eringi ‘king trumpet’ who takes the fatherly role, maitake the mother, and three children -- two girls, bunashimeji, and bunapi (a hybrid bunashimeji), and a boy named for the corporation itself, Hokuto-kun. Here are two of the characterizations. Eringi: Substantial and manly. Having a fighting spirit, he’s never lost a fight. Yet, his hobby is gardening, and he cries quite easily. A hidden romanticist. Maitake: Extremely fashionable. She makes her presence as the fashion leader of the mushroom world. Despite her flashiness, she’s good at cooking, and is more home-oriented than one would think. She has a lot of pride, which is occasionally wounded. These characterizations show not only that the mushrooms are gendered with predictable traits from a Japanese cultural perspective (e.g., the male’s fighting spirit and the female’s skill at cooking), but that they have hobbies, and rich emotional lives as well. They echo the characterizations of the father and mother cooks in the MAFF website. Of the two girls, one is a tomboy, one a femme. The boy is a model child. These Hokuto mushroom characters appear on product labels and signage, and throughout the company website as decorations and promulgators of mushroom cuisine (http://www.hokto-kinoko.co.jp/ index.html). Even the English section of the website contains a few images; however, the Japanese version is replete. One can easily imagine that should their popularity continue, the range of Hokuto Vol. 15, 2010 84 Debra J. Occhi character related goods may expand beyond the mushrooms themselves into toys and soft goods. That was the case with the DoCoMo Dake, a mushroom representing the DoCoMo cell phone corporation, and his invented family. Doko mo means ‘everywhere’ in Japanese, and DoCoMo dake can mean ‘only DoCoMo’ as well as ‘DoCoMo mushroom.’ Cell phone mascots and stuffed toys representing members of the DoCoMo Dake family are awarded to customers, and can be found on internet auction sites. A vast amount of electronic content - games, narratives, downloadable items, and an archive of advertisements - devoted to this character group are found at http://docomodake.net/ top.html. Among them is a CM ‘commercial message’ instructing users how to make a fat sushi roll (futomaki sushi) that when sliced will show the image of the original DoCoMo Dake. The closing screen of the CM reminds the viewer that just as saying itadakimasu ‘[I]will receive’ before eating is polite Japanese, that one should mind one’s manners while using a cell phone. This ties the character- and food-focused narrative of the commercial back to its maker, the cell phone company while reminding the consumer of a moral imperative. History of kyara-based advertising Looking back over Japan’s product advertisement archives, it becomes clear how recent the current panoply of kyara is. Most Meiji-period (1868-1912) advertisements relied on images of the product, its logo, or a famous personage to appeal to the public. One notable counter-example is the Oorudo “Old Gold” cigarette advertisement showing two cats, wearing colorful collars and smoking. Only their facial features show anthropomorphization. In the early Showa period, we see very few creatures in advertising. A Nikka Whisky advertisement depicted a bear wearing a red muffler and holding a bottle in its paw. Here as well the bear resembles the real animal much more so than do the current crop of kyara who more closely resemble cartoon characters. As with manga generally, the boom in kyara advertisements is a post-WWII phenomena. In 1968, the groundbreaking magazine Teiin Rukku ‘Teen Look’ included a heart-shaped face logo which, like the DEAR Sable cookie, showed a variety of expressions – possibly a predecessor for the kaomoji text emoticons which are so popular of late. Based on the results of market survey, Teen Look was designed for high school girls, for whom no targeted magazine existed. It included articles on fashion, popular boy bands, and manga, and even employed young women’s slang in its text – considered daring at the time. Shujiro Murakawa of the marketing division of Shufu to Seikatsusha ‘Housewives and Lifestyle Company’ publisher explains that of the many issues they faced in creating the magazine, the creation of a symbol mark or petto maaku ‘pet mark’ was believed necessary. The heart-shaped logo was designed to appeal directly to girls and stimulate their emotional response. It was a success. Designed with various expressions intended to reflect those of real girls such as laughter, crying, and winking, it became popular to the extent that readers requested the creation of rings and pendants bearing its visage. These were not produced for Teen Look, but the popularity of its early kyara-like logo mark with women readers was apparently not lost on Shufu to Seikatsusha. Its magazine Suteki na Okusan ‘Wonderful Wife’ includes giveaways and other tie-ups to kyara licensed from San-X corporation, and it since 2005 even has its own kyara, a family of toy poodles. Another magazine in the Shufu to Seikatsusha line allows readers to play a sort of ‘Where’s Waldo’ search game with kyara-laden pictures. Successful players of the games in Kyara Sagashi Rando ‘Character Search Land’ can then enter contests to win prizes. Such a magazine feeds consumer recognition of and familiarity with Comparative Culture Consuming Kyara ‘Characters 85 kyara in a game format; not surprisingly, a Nintendo DS version of the game is also available. Kyara in the high-involvement marketplace It may not seem surprising that kyara could help sell such relatively cheap amusements as magazines and games. In the world of advertising, a common distinction is drawn between low-involvement and high-involvement purchasing decisions. Involvement means time spent for decision making, money spent, and longevity of the relationship between consumer and product. Snacks are located at the far end of the low-involvement spectrum, since they are cheap and readily consumed. High-involvement products take a greater financial investment and are more durable purchases, such as automobiles or medical insurance. Though typically kyara and other soft-sell strategies have been associated with lowinvolvement products, while high information load is characteristic of highinvolvement product advertising, the encroachment of kyara marketing in Japan has extended into the high-involvement market. The Nissan March is a car labeled in advertising as furendorii in that it helps its driver, e.g., by turning off its own headlights upon exit from a tunnel. Not surprisingly, it is anthropomorphized in the television commercial that points out these “friendly” features. Most insurance companies in Japan each have their anthropomorphized kyara mascots. Nissay Corporation is even an official partner of Universal Studios Japan, and boasts Snoopy as its mascot (for in Japan, Snoopy is the figurehead character, not Charlie Brown). One recent innovative ad has attempted to indigenize the representation of a foreign insurance company, AFLAC (American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus), by altering its live duck mascot into a kyara. In television commercials the duck appears with the young actress Aoi Miyazaki and a live cat in a garden. The duck and the cat appear to sing and dance together for the actress via manipulation of video imagery. Their ditty ends in the phrase maneki neko dakku, combining the traditional Japanese imagery of the shopkeeper’s beckoning cat statue (maneki neko) with the duck. A catchy reminder of the foreignness of the duck remains in the use of the innovative loanword dakku rather than the Japanese term for duck, ahiru. The kyara version of this combination then appears, with the duck inside a cat costume. The foreign company (represented by the duck) is imagistically subsumed by the familiar and domestic maneki neko. The jingle is then used in radio advertising and the kyara in print ads without inclusion of the actress who had been the focus in earlier advertising. She becomes extraneous to the company’s representation, replaced by a kyara. Humans vs. kyara spokespeople Why are kyara considered better than humans for advertising? Beyond the fact that kyara draw no salaries beyond the designer’s fee, advertisers need not worry about the damaging effects of scandal should a celebrity’s life go off the rails. When scandal erupts in Japan, any advertising in which the famous culprit is shown goes immediately off the air. One recent example is that of the Softbank cell phone company, who has a long-running representation by the band called SMAP. When one of its squeaky-clean members, Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, was arrested in Spring 2009 for singing loudly and drunkenly in the nude late at night in a public park in Roppongi, the ads were pulled until his official apology was made and a coolingdown period elapsed. Moreover, his image was dropped permanently from the ads for the DPA, Association of Promotion of Digital [TV] broadcasting, who then Vol. 15, 2010 86 Debra J. Occhi picked up Kitajima Saburo and four younger celebrities to support their cause. Of course, they also ramped up the use of a deerlike kyara named Chidejishika. Shika means deer, and chideji is an abbreviated form chijoo dejitaru hoosoo ‘above ground digital broadcasting.’ As part of this promotion, a cell phone strap with the deer figure would be sent to respondents to questionnaire about watching TV on one’s cell phone (http://www.dpa.or.jp). In animated TV commercials the deer removes its antennalike antlers and plants them atop buildings, with a gesture reminiscent of the commercials in which Kusanagi raised his arm and pointed to buildings with proper antennas. The expression chidejishika can mean ‘only with chideji,’ which is the chief message the corporation must express, since Japanese TV broadcasting goes digital as of July 24, 2011, necessitating new antennas. The deer itself represents solely that message, not another corporation, and not the identity of a person who lost his grip on sobriety one spring evening. Characters will not embarrass their corporate creators, and moreover, contain none of the extraneous and possibly scandalous memories viewers may associate with live celebrities. The worst thing that can happen to the relationship of kyara and corporation is still a scandal, however. The NOVA Usagi, a pink rabbit spokescharacter advertising the NOVA English conversation school franchise, was launched in September 2002 and had achieved star status of its own as a kyara in the five years following, through a series of television commercials depicting it as earnest, if odd -it sported a yellow beak. Cell phone mascot straps, stationery, toys and even a Nintendo DS game starred the character. Unfortunately, the NOVA corporation became notorious for poor business practices and went bankrupt in 2007. The school has reopened in April of 2009 under different ownership, retaining the NOVA Usagi as its mascot, but has yet to reach acceptance by a skeptical public. Not surprisingly, the rabbit figures are no longer found in shops. Conclusion: the logic of kyara More enduringly popular kyara such as Hello Kitty, who are not initially designed for specific products, appear throughout the marketplace in various configurations including their two-dimensional representations as manga, games or storybooks. Their 3-D versions as toys form a large part of Japanese character marketing; they can also lend their fame to endorse other products, as is the case with An-Pan Man. Characters that are created specifically as marketing agents from products or to represent products, services, or social imperatives differ only slightly from independent kyara in the ways described here. Much has been written about the former, from Atom Boy to Pokemon. However, their fame can easily overshadow any product they may endorse, just as with human celebrities. And celebrities are further flawed by their innate humanity. The creation of marketing kyara as specific representatives of a product or service rendered mentally ‘sticky’ through narratives, wordplay and other specialized aspects of their design, lends these less-famous, yet ubiquitous kyara their power to influence consumers in the Japanese marketplace of products and ideas. That is why the sugar cookie smiles. Reference Aihara, Hiroyuki. 2007. Kyaraka suru Nippon. Tokyo: Kodansha. Kondo, Kensuke. 2006. Hyaku nen ai sareru kyarakutaa no tsukurikata. Tokyo: Goma Books. Comparative Culture Consuming Kyara ‘Characters 87 Murakami, Shuujiro. 1968. Seikoo shita ado-kyarakutaa no sentei. Maaketeingu to houkoku 141:11:40-46. http://docomodake.net/ top.html http://www.dpa.or.jp http://www.hokto-kinoko.co.jp/ index.html) www.maff.go.jp/kyushu http://www.morinaga.co.jp/dear/top.html http://syokuryo.jp/index.html i The US Dept. of Agriculture has recently incorporated a human figure into its pyramid image to represent incorporating exercise with ideals of nutrition, but image is a dark outline of a generic person. In Japan such dark images are usually evil figures, typically criminals. Vol. 15, 2010 Comparative Culture 15: 88-98, 2010 “Now Can I Go?”: Internment and the Legacy of Silence in Julie Otsuka’s When t he Emperor Was Divine Brian Zindel This article is part of my larger project which examines Japanese American internment, specifically how the camps were experienced and how this historical period has been represented in American literature and culture since the 1940’s. I also explore the narratives of this history in memorials and facilities at the former internment camp sites in order to compare representational methods between the spaces of fiction and physical space. I discuss how contemporary literature provides a solid opportunity for critical inquiry into these sites as a collective social memory and an articulation of its contemporary cultural presence. In this article I focus on Deborah Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine as an important critique of the processes of censorship and social denial. Soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. military command initiated a program of swift action against all people of Japanese descent residing in the Pacific Coast states including those with American citizenship. With a total dismissal of legal and national status in favor of a blanket “enemy” designation based on ethnicity, the U.S. government coordinated the forced relocation and incarceration of West Coast Japanese Americans. The imprisonment of Japanese Americans without trial in early 1942 marks the inception of Japanese American internment, which continued until March 1946. Between those years over 110,000 West Coast Japanese, two-thirds of whom had attained citizenship through naturalization or had gained it as birthright, were stripped of their civil rights and forced into army-monitored camps. During the internment period and in the aftermath of World War II, no formal charges of sabotage were brought against the thousands who were interned. The 1982 report by the U.S. Presidential Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians declares that the process and events were “not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from it […] were not driven by analysis of military conditions” (18). Further, the report concluded that the historical causes were the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership” (18). Japanese American internment is characterized, at a bare minimum, by the government’s abject denial of fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution. While this deployment of State control most forcefully expressed goals for wartime nationalist preservation, it demonstrably undermined (even literally alienated) the principles of democratic inclusion and national identity. That is, while solidifying the concept of the nation it sought to protect, the State was overtly, perhaps unconsciously, sacrificing its doctrinal base. This disregard for the legal rights, not to mention the humanity, of those unjustly incarcerated certainly problematizes positions which disavow the abuse of power as evidence of systemic racism. The outright focus on ethnicity and race became actualized through the severe knee-jerk reactions to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. This insuperable delineation of difference and separation materialized as the incrimination of all Japanese in a generalized enemy status, which signaled a shift from the national to the ethnic in defining what comprised individual identity. As one Nisei (second generation) recollects, “I felt very conscious of the fact that I had a Japanese face. I Brian Zindel teaches at Miyazaki International College. Correspondence may be sent to: MIC, 1405 Kano, Kiyotake-cho, Miyazaki-shi, Miyazaki-ken, Japan 889-1605, Tel: 0985-85-5931, Fax: 0985-84-3396, E-mail: bzindel@sky.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp “Now Can I Go?” 89 wondered how we would be treated by our non-Japanese friends and neighbors. I felt very much alone, silently hoping for some words of comfort but fearing that my features would cause me to be the target of hatred and suspicion for what the Japanese Navy had done” (Hosokawa 233). This fear that one’s physical characteristics and genealogy would serve as evidence of complicit guilt for Japan’s act of war was not unfounded. The vindictive desire for retribution galvanized actions against the innocent who merely shared common Japanese ancestry. The residual effects of divisive social systems and state-sanctioned exclusion in the camps persists for the Japanese American community decades after its conclusion. However, there is relative silence about the events within U.S. society at large. There is a silence about internment itself coupled with the collective social inability to confront this history. Singling out an entire people for evacuation to prisons in deserts and marshes far removed from densely populated areas certainly is the action of a government attempting to make a “problem” invisible. For the War Department to silence and control the West Coast Japanese population meant making it literally vanish into punishing environments. Thus, the unwanted population was wedded to a forsaken landscape and became a spatial analogue of rejection: the outsiders, the undesirable, the silenced and exiled. As an unwanted historical legacy, the camps in large part have been forgotten, marginalized or rendered insignificant as a footnote to an extremely complex period of twentieth century history. Despite the collective silence about internment, a number of literary texts have been published in the past few decades as American society seems to be coming to terms with this often undisclosed history. Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine is grounded in the historical realities of internment and explores the subjective experience of a Berkeley family entangled in the racially focalized anger which incited the federal process of exclusion, confinement, and resettlement. Rather than creating an emotionally charged drama exposing the deep psychological consequences on this family, Otsuka’s style presents a muted, sophisticated portrait in short, simple, declarative sentences without grand, descriptive flourishes. The language is largely stripped of expressive quality and deliberately devoid of emotional proclamations. A sense of narrative distance withholds direct access to the character’s thoughts and feelings. Although difficult to register immediately, the underlying force of this stylistic design and narrative structure becomes clear as the domestic scenes of internment begin to gain clarity. The narrative style provides its own subtle criticism of the social consequences and callousness with which the Japanese community was treated in the internment era. Otsuka’s detached style of pared down, objective separation is echoed in the delineation of family members indicated not by name but, rather, their gender or domestic position. Literalizing the loss of identity for internees, the main characters of the novel are referenced with the most reductive descriptive signifiers as merely the woman, the man, the girl, and the boy or, alternatively, as the mother, the father, the daughter, and the son. However, other Americans (that is, non-Japanese) are supplied with specific identities and their own names: Joe Lundy, Elizabeth, Greg Meyer, et cetera. Soon after the Pearl Harbor bombing, the father of the family had been taken in for FBI questioning, but without just cause. The father, then, is one of the 2,192 FBI arrests of primarily Issei (first generation) leaders in the Japanese American communities both in the continental U.S. and Hawaii (Hosokawa 237).1 The news of 1 Roger Daniels explains that due to the fact that “the government acted largely on the theory of guilt by association, it arrested most of the leaders of the Japanese community: Vol. 15, 2010 90 Brian Zindel the father’s arrest is dropped in the narrative amid a catalogue of events that compose the desolate scenery of a broken family, the abandoned dreams of a former livelihood: Weeds were everywhere. The woman had not mowed the grass for months. Her husband usually did that. She had not seen her husband since his arrest last December. First he had been sent to Fort Missoula, Montana, on a train and then he had been transferred to Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Every few days he was allowed to write her a letter. Usually he told her about the weather. The weather at Fort Sam Houston was fine. On the back of every envelope was stamped “ Censored, War Department,” or “ Detained Alien Enemy Mail.” (10) Throughout the novel the father supplies only sparse information in his correspondence. Subject to censorship by the War Department, these letters from the father are delivered with entire lines and passages deleted: “Every few days the letters arrived, tattered and torn, from Lordsburg, New Mexico. Sometimes entire sentences had been cut out with a razor blade by the censors and the letters did not make any sense. Sometimes they arrived in one piece, but with half of the words blacked out. Always, they were signed, ‘From Papa, With Love’” (59). The trope of the absent father underscores the metaphorical loss of leadership both for the son in the family and the community in general. The father’s arrest leaves the mother as the sole parent who must bear the responsibility for the family and their house. Otsuka’s novel opens with a public declaration that permanently effects this family: “The sign had appeared overnight. On billboards and trees and the backs of the bus-stop benches. It hung in the window of Woolworth’s. It hung by the entrance to the YMCA. It was stapled to the door of the municipal court and nailed, at eye level, to every telephone pole along University Avenue” (3). The sign is Civilian Evacuation Order No. 19 posted throughout the streets of Berkeley, California, in April 1942. Like the hundreds of other such orders posted in the Pacific Coast states of Washington, Oregon, California, and Arizona, this notice directed all residents with Japanese ancestry to report for removal and relocation. The opening scene portrays this family ensnared in a coordinated effort for social control which reduced Japanese to a single collective identity regardless of citizenship and personal history. They, like all others in the Pacific Coast states, were designated with an “enemy” Japanese identity eclipsing their status as Americans. The evacuation order drives a wedge between the terms “Japanese” and “American” and forces the family out of society. The woman must resolutely comply with the evacuation order and she deliberately boxes up everything in the house, hides valuables in a hole in the backyard, and stores cherished furniture in a locked room. The narrative does not reveal any emotional or intellectual response to these impositions. As abruptly as the notice for forced evacuation appeared, so too must she respond: “the woman, who did not always follow the rules, followed the rules. She gave the cat to the Greers next door. She caught the chicken that had been running wild in the yard since the fall and snapped its neck beneath the handle of a broomstick” (9). Showing emotional detachment, the woman continues to complete her tasks with the swift movements of necessity: Somewhere in the distance a telephone rang. White Dog barked. ‘Hush,’ she said. White Dog grew quiet. ‘Now roll over,’ she said. White Dog rolled over and looked up at her with his good eye. ‘Play dead,’ she said. White Dog turned his head to the side and closed his eyes. officials of organizations, and those persons who had observable contacts with the Japanese embassy and consulates” (26). Comparative Culture “Now Can I Go?” 91 His paws went limp. The woman picked up the large shovel that was leaning against the trunk of the tree. She lifted it high in the air with both hands and brought the blade down swiftly on his head. White Dog’s body shuddered twice and his hind legs kicked out into the air, as though he were trying to run. Then he grew still. A trickle of blood seeped out from the corner of his mouth. She untied him from the tree and let out a deep breath. The shovel had been the right choice. Better, she thought, than a hammer. (11) The woman’s distressing indifference about her dog’s death indicated by her concluding thought is the first moment of any character’s internal reflection in the narrative. The stark objectivity of this brutal scene confronts the reader and begs a visceral response, yet the narration halts any such emotional release. Otsuka sustains this effect throughout the novel. When we, as readers, want to react in shock, anger or sorrow to the racially charged events of this historical period, typically we are not afforded a moment to embrace subjective reflection from these characters. Yet, the dread of inevitable internment proceeds as an inescapable certainty and the reader also becomes conditioned to withdraw in resignation to the hopelessness of incarceration. The shocking violence in the passage describing the death of White Dog serves as a sharp correlative to the destruction visited upon this family in its arrest and internment. They are constructed as beings deprived of personal identity, as a political category, as data within a massive government program. The family is herded with the Berkeley Japanese American community and transported to the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California. Like many of the Temporary Assembly Centers in the Pacific Coast states, Tanforan was hastily arranged as temporary housing for thousands of families until the completion of preparations for “permanent” confinement in the ten internment camps. 2 Having previous experience specific only to army barrack life of young adult men, the State was woefully unprepared to deal with the full-scale care of such a large and diverse population. The primitive nature of Tanforan is clear when the girl reminisces about how all summer long they had lived in the old horse stalls in the stables behind the racetrack. In the morning they had washed their faces in the long tin troughs and at night they had slept on mattresses stuffed with straw. Twice a day when the siren blew they had returned to the stalls for the head count and three times a day they had lined up to eat in the mess hall on the ground floor of the grandstands. On their first night there her brother had plucked the stiff horse hairs out of the freshly white-washed walls and run his fingers along the toothmarks on top of the double Dutch door where the wood was soft and worn. On warm days he had smelled the smell of the horses rising up through the damp linoleum floors. (30-1) The implication of housing West Coast Japanese in horse stables is less than subtle. The treatment of Japanese internees during this period of war hysteria was no greater nor dignified than for the animals who formerly held residence in these quarters. Five months later the family is sent by train to the Topaz internment camp outside of Delta, Utah.3 Arrival at the Topaz camp immediately generates a feeling of austere permanence and inescapability. The girl “looked out the window and saw 2 3 In fact, most of the camps still remained incomplete after internees began arriving starting in the summer of 1942. The train ride between the Tanforan Assembly Center and the Topaz internment camp held its own challenges: passengers became ill, the train was struck by a brick thrown from outside, the duration of the trip seemed interminable and their destination was ultimately unpleasant. Vol. 15, 2010 92 Brian Zindel hundreds of tar-paper barracks sitting beneath the hot sun. She saw telephone poles and barbed-wire fences. She saw soldiers. And everything she saw through a cloud of fine white dust that had once been the bed of an ancient salt lake” (48). The everpresent dust has an irrepressible effect as the boy “began to cough and the girl untied her scarf and shoved it into his hand and told him to hold it over his nose and mouth. He pressed the scarf to his face and took the girl’s hand and together they stepped out of the bus and into the blinding white glare of the desert” (48). This environmental shock serves as their jarring introduction to this “city of tar-paper barracks behind a barbed-wire fence on a dusty alkaline plain high up in the desert” (49) which becomes their enclosed, militarily guarded world. This bland, unwelcoming scene of impersonal army barracks arranged methodically across the desert floor dominates the experiences of this family during confinement. The spartan housing structures in the camps were erected with a primary interest in their rapid completion at the lowest expense. Bill Hosokawa details the basic military functionality of these barracks with their “exterior walls [of] wood sheathing applied on 2 by 4 studs and covered with black tarpaper. […] Each room was furnished with a stove, one droplight and steel Army cots and mattresses – nothing more. The space allotment was one room per family; it was up to the family’s ingenuity to build furniture and shelves from scrap lumber, arrange for the privacy of its members and make these bleak little boxes livable” (343). While adequate at the most basic level, these barracks provided little comfort, especially set in the high desert environment of Western Utah. Roger Daniels provides further description of the typical living quarters at Topaz: the uninsulated barracks were twenty feet wide. Thus, all “ apartments” were twenty feet in one dimension: and as little as eight feet or as much as twenty-four feet in the other. The largest “ apartment” was an unpartitioned area of twenty by twenty-four feet; that 480 square-foot space would be “ home” for a family of six. Partitions between “ apartments” did not reach the roof, so that privacy within or between family living spaces was impossible. As the camp populations declined, conditions improved somewhat. By April 1943 the average Topaz inmate had 114 square feet of living space; that is, an area six by nineteen feet. (67) Such is the cramped living space the family must inhabit in Otsuka’s story. At night the boy mentally locates himself within “the endless rows of black barracks all lined up in the sand. In the distance, a wide empty field where nothing but sagebrush grew, then the fence and the high wooden towers. There was a guard in each tower, and he carried a machine gun and binoculars and at night he manned the searchlight. He had brown hair and green eyes, or maybe they were blue, and he had just come back from a tour of the Pacific” (51-2). This relationship between the barracks and the armed guards never weakens. Confined to their featureless quarters, the family is perpetually aware that armed military guards enforce their restriction. Trapped within the camp, the outside world and former identities begin to vanish. Each section of the novel charts in stages how this family was forced to destroy its cherished heirlooms and other items which would differentiate them ethnically. The woman mulls over the memories of the days prior to the evacuation when she necessarily incinerated anything connected to Japan: a bonfire in the backyard consumed all letters from Kagoshima, family photographs, kimonos, phonograph records of Japanese opera, their abacus, et cetera. She ripped the flag of the rising sun, smashed the tea set and Imari dishes, and the “framed portrait of the boy’s uncle, who had once been a general in the emperor’s army. No more rice balls in lunch pails – peanut butter and jelly sandwiches instead. If asked, they are instructed to say that they are Chinese” (75). This deleterious process of winnowing down cultural markers culminates in retaining not much other than the nameless, Comparative Culture “Now Can I Go?” 93 common identity of Japanese prisoners. The family becomes defined solely on a racial basis, signifying nothing more than their inclusion in the War Department’s tally of “enemy” Japanese. The inescapably uninspiring aspects of this barrack city begin to erode visual distinctions. The indistinct external world of the camp personifies the reductive condition of the Japanese American community as a general ethnic type. In time, the Topaz population begins to resemble the bland, monotony of the identical, blank army barracks: the same cots, same potbellied stove, same single bare lightbulb hanging from the roof. Exemplifying the erasure of specific identity, the boy regards all internees as a mass without quality, as “an endless sea of bobbing black heads” (50). Lost within this undifferentiated crowd, the boy believes that he recognizes his absent father everywhere, mistaking nearly every older man for him. His painful search elucidates the depth of his desperation. Institutionalization sets in as the days bleed into one another without significance. Daily activities are divested of meaning and many internees merely subsist through the prolonged period of confinement by waiting for it to end. The mother in particular grows increasingly listless and despondent. Time itself begins to lose definition and she occasionally experiences confusion about her situation, intimating how sometimes in dreamlike disorientation she will “look up at the clock and it’s half past five and I’m sure that he’s on his way home from the office. And then I’ll start to panic. ‘It’s late,’ I’ll think to myself. ‘I should have started the rice by now’” (84-85 – italics in original). Time seems to be on hold and the ghosts of a past life reinforce the deprivation of internment. The girl literalizes this sensation of frozen time by no longer winding her watch after their arrival at Topaz. Whenever she is asked for the time, she states that it is 6 o’clock. The boy also becomes adrift in the indistinguishable years of imprisonment: “he lay awake on top of the sheets longing for ice, a section of orange, a stone, something, anything, to suck on, to quench his thirst. It was June now. Or maybe it was July. It was August. The calendar had fallen from the wall. The tin clock had stopped ticking. Its gears were clotted with dust and would not turn” (103). Clearly, time has become divided by the moment when this family entered confinement. The slow decay of time mirrors the slow erosion of their cultural identity as they are transformed into another family subsumed within the category of Japanese prisoners. Like many, this family has no option but to wait for the war to end and hopefully reunite with their father. The temporal divide between imprisonment and the memories of a prior life has its parallel in the spatial separation that distinguishes the camp from the outside world. The armed guards patrolling the barbed-wire borders and stationed atop watchtowers form a persistent external threat. This clear delineation of space cannot be questioned. The boy muses with childhood innocence about “the rules” of the fence: “You could not go over it, you could not go under it, you could not go around it, you could not go through it. / And if your kite got stuck on it? / That was an easy one. You let the kite go” (61). While these observations are bittersweet in their subtle, boyish evocation, they highlight the undeniable realism of coercion and the unwavering potential for violence. Otsuka describes the boy’s fantasies of a happier, flawless domestic life outside of the camp: in his mind he could see it: the tree-lined streets at sundown, the dark green lawns, the sidewalks, boys throwing balls in backyards, girls playing hopscotch, mothers with pink quilted mitts sliding hot casseroles out of ovens, fathers with shiny black briefcases bursting through front doors, shouting, “ Honey, I’m home! Honey, I’m home!” / When he thought of the world outside it was always six o’clock. A Wednesday or a Thursday. Dinnertime across America. (66) Vol. 15, 2010 94 Brian Zindel Once again, that 6 o’clock marker registers the gulf between memories of the outside world and existence in the camp. In the end, there was not much to desire from the outside world anyhow. The experience of internees who were allowed outside of Topaz contrasts decidedly with his childish dream of escapism. Persecution of Japanese continues beyond the guarded barbed-wire fences. The War Relocation Authority permits agricultural workers to travel to distant farms and some “swore they would never go out there again. They said they’d been shot at. Spat on. Refused entrance to the local diner. The movie theater. The dry goods store. They said the signs in the windows were the same wherever they went: NO JAPS ALLOWED. Life was easier, they said, on this side of the fence” (66-67). Hearing these stories diminishes the boy’s hope for freedom outside of the patrolled perimeter. In what is likely September 1945, the family finally gains release from Topaz after three and a half years of internment. However, there are further complications and continued racist encounters after they resettle in their former home. While fortunate to have a home to which they may return, the family soon discovers that it has been ransacked and had been inhabited by squatters while they were away. It was vandalized with “words scrawled in red ink that made [them] turn away” (111). The room in which the mother had locked their most valued possessions is now almost empty. Nevertheless, the children ebulliently embrace their return home and run from room to room “shouting ‘Fire! Help! Wolf!’ simply because [they] could” (109). As the children begin to resettle into their old neighborhood, they notice that neighbors now own furniture and appliances suspiciously similar to items that were stolen while they were away. However, initiating a dispute over true ownership would only draw increased negative attention. Readjustment to American society is extremely difficult after years of racist hysteria, especially in the Pacific Coast states; for example, the vast majority of Californians at the end of WWII still supported the decision for internment as a necessary action (Fugita and Fernandez 107). Most resettlers feared that publicly critiquing their treatment would garner rejection from an unsympathetic society and would only serve to extend the unwanted memory of internment. Likewise, drawing attention to internment would accentuate one’s Japanese ethnicity and invite further hostility; as such, many internees wanted to forget these tormenting years and maintain silence. For example, the father returns to the family residence in December 1945 and remains absolutely silent regarding the details of his imprisonment: He never said a word to us about the years he’d been away. Not one word. He never talked about politics, or his arrest, or how he had lost all his teeth. He never mentioned his loyalty hearing before the Alien Enemy Control Unit. He never told us what it was, exactly, he’d been accused of. Sabotage? Selling secrets to the enemy? Conspiring to overthrow the government? Was he guilty as charged? Was he innocent? (Was he even there at all?) We didn’t know. We didn’t want to know. We never asked. All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget. (133) By extension, the reader remains ignorant of his situation during incarceration. Those punishing years slowly became an unarticulated understanding in the family. Narrated from the children’s point-of-view, this section of the novel establishes a feeling of distance from the father. The children’s relationship with their father is ostensibly close, but the unconquerable silence about their recent past creates a lack of intimacy. Though he is outwardly enthusiastic to talk with his children, they note their father’s pronounced sense of vacancy: “no matter what we said […] his response was the same. ‘Is that so?’” (135). After his isolation, the father is a paranoid, frazzled, ruined man. He spends his days “sitting on the edge of his bed Comparative Culture “Now Can I Go?” 95 with his hands in his lap, staring out through the window as though he were waiting for something to happen. Sometimes he’d get dressed and put on his coat but he could not make himself walk out the front door” (137). The silence emerging from the desire to forget these painful memories provides fortitude for many resettlers in the Pacific Coast states attempting to recapture their identities and reconstruct their previous lives. However, this daunting prospect is not universally achieved nor often possible. As former prisoners reestablishing “normal” life in Berkeley, they encounter American war veterans who relate P.O.W. stories of torture by the Japanese military. The somewhat similar experiences of incarceration only serve to deepen race-based separation and lingering hatred. Rather than potentially generating an incipient form of national solidarity, this situation amplifies a common West Coast judgment of all Japanese as alien, a people who “could never be trusted again” (120). The racially focalized overtones of guilt ensnare this family, strengthening a presumed affiliation with the enemy Japanese. Rationalizations abound for internment by those who stubbornly refuse to recognize the distinction between Japanese who are Americans and those in a separate nation thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean: “Those people bombed Pearl Harbor! They deserved what they got” (121). Many veterans conclude that the end of the war, even including its nuclear terror, is cause for celebration: “Best day of my life? The day Harry dropped that beautiful bomb” (119 – italics in the original). After being granted freedom from the camps, the dominant justifications for the burdens of exclusion and unjust confinement must be endured without redress in what still remains a hostile social climate. Careers necessary for economic survival as well as establishing domestic stability are especially scarce for West Coast ethnic Japanese. The father lacks employment upon his return because the company where he had worked prior to the war was liquidated. The text lists the numerous explanations for why he is incapable of securing a job: “he was an old man, his health was not good, he had just come back from a camp for dangerous enemy aliens” (135). As undoubtedly the most significant factor, the latter reason indicates further carving of the racial divide during the resettlement period. After her own prolonged quest for employment full of rejections overtly due to her race, the mother finally secures work as a housekeeper, which is not comparable to her skill level. While the family may be lucky enough to have retained ownership of their home (unlike many) and are able to “begin again,” their financial success in Berkeley must be accomplished through tight-lipped endurance. Discriminatory practices were not necessarily the most powerful causes for silence. The self-monitoring will to assimilate and not “appear” Japanese (or even appear publically at all) displays an internalization of societal pressures. These panoptic measures were self-administered during the curfew period shortly before incarceration and intensify after resettlement. The mother outlines the goals for remaining invisible and socially harmless: “Keep your mouth shut and don’t say a thing. / Stay inside. / Don’t leave the house. / Travel only in the daytime. / Do not converse on the telephone in Japanese. / Do not congregate in one place. / When in town if you meet another Japanese do not greet him in the Japanese manner by bowing. / Remember, you’re in America. / Greet him in the American way by shaking his hand” (83-4). This set of normalizing behaviors becomes a postinternment inheritance to be complaisant, burying emotions and thoughts which might distinguish oneself as disharmonious or unique: When our teachers asked us if everything was all right we nodded our heads and said, yes, of course, everything was fine. / If we did something wrong we made sure to say excuse me Vol. 15, 2010 96 Brian Zindel (excuse me for looking at you, excuse me for sitting here, excuse me for coming back). If we did something terribly wrong we immediately said we were sorry (I’m sorry I touched your arm, I didn’t mean to, it was an accident, I didn’t see it resting there so quietly, so beautifully, so perfectly, so irresistibly, on the edge of the desk, I lost my balance and brushed against it by mistake, I was standing too close, I wasn’t watching where I was going, somebody pushed me from behind, I never wanted to touch you, I have always wanted to touch you, I will never touch you again, I promise, I swear…). (122-123) These painful efforts at extreme self-abnegation display their commitment to be as innocuous as possible. In a similar fashion, the stultifying command over permissible language was one of the lessons learned early in the internment experience. The threat of granting any negative valence to internment and its practices lead to prescribed rules about language describing the camps: “Here we say Dining Hall and not Mess Hall; Safety Council, not Internal Police; Residents, not Evacuees; and last but not least, Mental Climate, not Morale” (61). Such rhetorical substitution disallows direct, genuine portrayal of prison conditions and the treatment of its “residents.” When the Emperor Was Divine illustrates the multiple levels of silence permeating all aspects of internment. In addition to the coordinated federal program to render West Coast Japanese invisible, there are the individual struggles to silence one’s cultural identity through the internalization of social codes discouraging ethnic distinctions and the process of censorship, both self-administered and within bureaucratic channels. The final section of the novel, however, presents a vitriolic explosion in response to the injustices levied against this family. Although not specified, it is quite clear that this short section voices the father’s fury, who issues a vertiginous list addressing every unwarranted accusation against West Coast Japanese: “I admit it. I lied. You were right. You were always right. It was me. I did it. I poisoned your reservoirs. I sprinkled your food with insecticide. I sent my peas and potatoes to market full of arsenic. I planted sticks of dynamite alongside your railroads. I set your oil wells on fire. I scattered mines across the entrance to your harbors. I spied on your airfields. I spied on your naval yards” (140). 4 The “confession” becomes an absurd catalogue of nearly every socially undesirable element and paranoid threat attributed to the “enemy”; for example, “I crept into your house while you were away and sullied your wife. […] I pulled out the nails from your white picket fence and sold them to the enemy to melt down and make into bullets. I gave that same enemy your defense maps for free. […] I revealed to him your worst secrets. Short attention span. Doesn’t always remember to take out the garbage. Sometimes talks with his mouth full” (141 – italics in original). The text continues to detail the malevolent stereotypes and invectives issued against the Japanese in America: You know who I am. Or you think you do. I’m your florist. I’m your grocer. I’m your porter. I’m your waiter. I’m the owner of the dry-goods store on the corner of Elm. I’m the shoeshine boy. I’m the judo teacher. I’m the Buddhist priest. I’m the Shinto priest. […] I’m the one you call Jap. I’m the one you call Nip. I’m the one you call Slits. I’m the one you call Slopes. I’m the one you call Yellowbelly. I’m the one you call Gook. I’m the one you don’t see at all – we all look alike. I’m the one you see everywhere – we’re taking over the neighborhood. […] I’m your worst fear – you saw what we did in Manchuria, you remember Nanking, you can’t get Pearl Harbor out of your mind. […] So go ahead and lock me up. Take my children. Take my wife. Freeze my assets. Seize my crops. Search my office. Ransack my house. Cancel my 4 The limits of space prevent printing the full text of this “confession” section with all of its crisp condemnation of the wartime mistreatment of Japanese in the U.S. Comparative Culture “Now Can I Go?” 97 insurance. Auction off my business. Hand over my lease. Assign me a number. Inform me of my crime. (142-143) That is to say, the father, along with all others in the Pacific Coast states, stands trial for being Japanese and for “crimes” assessed from sweeping racist prejudices. The section concludes with extreme frustration and acquiescence in voicing a forced apology to his phantom interrogators: “And if they ask you someday what it was I most wanted to say, please tell them, if you would […] I’m sorry. / There. That’s it. I’ve said it. Now can I go?” (144). In other words, how much self-abasement is sufficient to end these tireless punishments? Otsuka cleverly sustains the narrative tension of silent endurance throughout the novel in preparation for the critical impact of this final concluding passage. The sharpest indictment of the racism underlying incarceration manifests in this list of ostensible crimes, which delineate an offensive catalogue of stereotypes and irrational fears. But the father must swallow his legitimate reproach and the “confession” remains unvoiced. Of course, none of his admissions of guilt are true; what is interesting is how their intensity and extensiveness emerges in contradistinction to the tortured silence portrayed since the beginning of the novel. The concluding forced confession emerges as a requisite response to the unwanted and uncompromising pressure to legitimize the unjust incrimination of innocent Japanese. When the Emperor Was Divine itself (albeit as a fictional representation) is the result of an imposition, both in the repressive nature of the historical subject matter and in its production as a cultural, testimonial document decades later. In fact, the entire history of internment is a lamentable cultural inheritance for generations of Japanese Americans. As a work of historical fiction, When the Emperor Was Divine must negotiate its separate roles as a text exhibiting American history, personal reminiscence (or memoir), and a collective cultural memory. The novel maintains a troubling tension between its exploration of the subjective experience of internment which humanizes the event and the simultaneous inclination to remain silent and to forget the internment era. At the same time, the novel articulates a social history largely erased from U.S. collective memory about the wholesale scapegoating of a racial and ethnic presence during wartime. In one fashion, then, literary representation of this history promotes discourse on that which otherwise cannot be articulated. But much more than supplying factual representation and encapsulating historical significance, a fictional account of internment like Otsuka’s testifies to the personal realities and cultural impact of internment. Hence, When the Emperor Was Divine fulfills an important social task of breaking the silence. It articulates, humanizes, and “embodies” this historical reality and enables contemporary audiences to confront internment and its human consequences. Reference Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Personal Justice Denied. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government, 1982. Daniels, Roger. Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. Fugita, Stephen S. and Marilyn Fernandez. Altered Lives, Enduring Community: Japanese Americans Remember Their World War II Incarceration. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2004. Vol. 15, 2010 98 Brian Zindel Hosokawa, Bill. Nisei: The Quiet Americans. Revised Edition. Boulder: UP of Colorado, 2002. Otsuka, Julie. When the Emperor Was Divine. New York: Anchor, 2002. TenBroek, Jacobus, Edward N. Barnhart and Floyd W. Matson. Prejudice, War and the Constitution: Causes and Consequences of the Evacuation of the Japanese Americans in World War II. Berkeley: U of California P, 1954. Comparative Culture COMPARATIVE CULTURE The Journal of Miyazaki International College Editorial Board College President Masayuki Kumamoto General Editors Míchéal Thompson Brian Zindel Technical Editor Micheal E. Cooper Editorial Correspondence Comparative Culture Miyazaki International College 1405 Kano, Kiyotake-cho, Miyazaki-shi 889-1605 Japan Email: mthompso@sky.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp World Wide Web URL: http://www.mic.ac.jp/17_public/08.html ISSN 1343-8476 Comparative Culture is published annually by Miyazaki International College.