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issues of the newsletter ************************************************************************ Issue #2: 2003.11.10.
************************************************************************ The author, who has been formally trained by the four most important co-developers of NLP (Grinder, Bandler, Dilts, and DeLozier) will send newsletters containing a variety of information concerning the advanced communication psychology/ pragmatic psychology known as NLP. ************************************************************************ Hello everybody! I am Taiten Kitaoka, a Japanese NLP trainer/facilitator. In the previous issue of this newsletter, I wrote "I would like to elucidate and analyse in the following issues why NLP has become so popular in Europe and America as well as Chinese countries (probably still excluding Mainland China), while it has not yet become known much in Japan". I would like to discuss this topic in detail in the current issue. I think that there are two main reasons why NLP has been made widely known in the countries of the West and of Chinese origin: The first reason is a linguistic one (though this first reason may not be necessarily more serious than the second reason mentioned below). Namely, as was suggested in the previous issue of this newsletter, NLP has a very close relationship with mathematical formulas and linguistic syntaxes, say, of English (syntaxes mean the five main rules making any given sentence a well-formed sentence in the language in question, e.g., English, such as Subject + Verb, Subject + Verb + Object, etc.; the very interesting relationship between NLP and English will be discussed in a future issue of the newsletter as an independent topic). In other words, logic is very heavily emphasised in NLP. Therefore, it seems that NLP very neatly fits the brain mechanism of people who speak English (or other similar Western languages) as their mother tongue, where any well-formed sentences can necessarily be analysed logically from the syntactic point of view, though, of course, they may not necessarily be speaking their mother tongue, always consciously syntactically analysing what they say. On the other hand, I personally think that Japanese is a logically very vague language. It doesn't seem to be easy to logically analyse Japanese syntax-wise like English, even if it is not impossible. With regard to the vagueness of this language, I remember what Professor Sigeo Kawamoto, a linguistic scholar well known worldwide, explained in one of his university lectures some 20 years ago: Professor Kawamoto categorically claimed that, no matter how much computer technology would develop in the future, perfect translation machines would never be created, enumerating two sentences as examples showing why it is impossible. One was "Zou wa hana ga nagai" (meaning "Elephants' noses are long" or "Elephants have long noses"), and it was pointed out that in this Japanese sentence the subject cannot be determined (is it "zou (elephants)" or "hana (noses)"?). The second example was "Kanojo wa watashi ga sukida" (usually meaning "She loves me"), and it was suggested that, very curiously, this can be translated either as "She loves me" or as "I love her", meaning the totally opposite thing. Though the second example seems quite complicated, Professor Kawamoto argued that the unusual translation of this sentence is possible in limited special circumstances, basing his argument on another well-formed sentence "Kono kuruma wa, (ano hito dehanaku,) watashi ga sukida", meaning "It is I, and not that person, that like this car". (NB: Detailed academic discussion on these comparisons of the sentences in Japanese and in English is not possible here for obvious reasons.) Further, in Japanese, the subjects of both written and spoken sentences are very often, or probably almost always for that matter, omitted, while such omissions are simply unthinkable in Western languages. Certainly it is not impossible to omit the subjects of the sentences in classic Latin or modern languages like Spanish, but, even then, the verbs conjugate (change) according to the implied subjects, enabling the hearer of the sentences to correctly guess what the subjects are. In Japanese, where there are no conjugal changes of the verbs, even such an implicit logic is missing. Incidentally, such vagueness of linguistic logic seems to epitomise the difference between the Japanese culture emphasising the belonging-ness to the community and the Western culture where the tendency of individualism is very strong. I had been staying in the UK more than 15 years until last year, and it is certainly true that, in the daily life, it was very tiring for me to be called by my name by my friends after each sentence they spoke, for them to expect me to always call them by their names, or for me to be asked to linguistically express myself clearly in terms of "Who did what to whom", but, on the other hand, I have been always flabbergasted to find that the people walking on the streets interviewed in TV news, had, almost without exception, the ability to express themselves logically from the beginning to the end, with few interjections. Whenever I watch TV news in Japan, I find that few of the people on the streets are able to clearly express their own opinions and that there is a very strong trend especially among young people to use totally redundant expressions like "Chotto" ("a little") or "Kanji de" ("sort of"), whose sole function is to make sentences more vague. I am not a West-supremacist, but rather am an anthropological "comparatist". Yet, I am very much inclined to want to advise Japanese people to try to improve their ability to think and speak in a clearly logical way. Of course, if the Japanese can continue to live on these small islands by themselves for ever, I sincerely think that my advice should be totally ignored once and for all, but we are already living in the twenty-first century's informational globalisation age. Therefore, if one wants to overcome the national image the Japanese people have acquired on the international stage that they are a nation unable to express themselves, only following whatever America tells them, and decides to try to create a new image and to further contribute to the trend of globalisation and information propagation, then, I hope that my advice may be hopefully listened to, even slightly, by such committed Japanese people. Recently, in the sport world, Japanese football and baseball players have been accepted and are active in the foreign countries where these sports originated. This means that the "a frog in a well" situation has been already changing for the better, and I would like to emphasise that this trend should be further advanced politically, economically and culturally, and I strongly believe that, very paradoxically, if the Japanese whose logic is vague study and master NLP, they will be able to acquire logical thinking, and to train themselves to speak both their native and foreign languages in a very logical manner. I can add that one of the most important reasons why NLP has been widely accepted in Hong Kong and Taiwan seems to be the grammatical and syntactical similarities between English and Chinese. In any case, it is apparently generally said that the Japanese are the nation in Asian countries who are the worst at speaking English. I think that there are many people who may be motivated to seriously study English, by hearing that studying NLP would enable one to considerably and quickly enhance their linguistic abilities. Furthermore, NLP related books are generally readable, when they are read in English on one hand, but they may not necessarily be amenable to the Japanese mind, when they are translated into the logically "vague" Japanese language, on the other hand. This fact may be partially contributing to the reasons why NLP has not yet been recognised widely in Japan. As the conclusion, if a Japanese person wants to acquire the logical thinking in a quick way, or develop his/her own logical linguistic abilities in a considerable way, with a view to being more than on a par with Western people on the international stage, then I would like to heartily recommend NLP to such a person, as the left-brain oriented (= deductive) methodology which can organically and holistically control his or her (inductive) right brain. I think that the second main reason why NLP hasn't been known in Japan on a large scale is the fact that Japan has never developed any tradition of therapy of any kind. In the Western world, the tradition of confession at the churches has lasted for centuries in the Christian environment, and it seems to me that, in this tradition, the very act of revealing one's own sin anonymously in front of a priest as a total stranger in the dark confession room was considered to be a kind of virtue. In the twentieth century, the very smart Sigmond Freud appeared in this Western tradition, and simply replaced the role of the priests with that of psychoanalysts. This is the very reason why Psychoanalysis has spread that much in Western countries. Until at least 20 to 30 years ago, for instance, in New York, someone saying that he or she had been treated by a psychoanalyst for dozens of years, and had paid him or her fees as much as hundreds of thousands of Dollars, meant a social status as high as someone owning expensive and gorgeous cars. Psychoanalysis had conquered American high society by this much. Incidentally, it can be anecdotally added that the professional analysts these high society people were proudly talking about were nothing but completely incompetent in solving their clients' problems, if viewed from the NLP's point of view. On the contrary, in Japan, where the culture of shame has long existed, going to therapy has meant a taboo like going to a pawn shop. It appears that this situation has recently been a little improved, but it is an undeniable fact that the degree to which psychotherapy or therapy is accepted and recognised here is still extremely low in comparison with what is the case in the West. I therefore think that it may be natural that NLP, which was born initially as a new alternative school of therapy in California, USA, in 1975, is looked at by the Japanese as something unacceptable to them. However, NLP has completely transformed itself around 1980 into a school of more generic general psychology, and, as pointed out in the previous issue of this newsletter, is a content free methodology, where clients don't need to talk about their problems in detail at all. It is for these reasons that I strongly believe that NLP is both the first and the last therapeutic school acceptable to the Japanese mind. Yet, the revolutionary nature of NLP could be recognised as such only by those who have gone through a series of modern psychotherapeutic schools starting from around the fifties, and therefore how much NLP should be appreciated may not be recognised by those who began to study NLP by skipping the traditional therapeutic schools (though such a recognition may not be required in the first place). I would like to discuss how NLP has integrated and transcended all the existing Western psychotherapeutic schools in the next issue. The two main reasons why NLP has not penetrated into the business world, etc., in Japan have been mentioned above. Here, I may be able to enumerate the third reason: NLP may have been introduced into Japan so far quite widely as individual techniques and models, while the principles, philosophy and "raisons d'etre" of NLP working behind these techniques and models may not yet have been conveyed to the Japanese audience in an organic way. I feel that this fact was due to the problems related to how the NLP teachers have taught NLP to their Japanese students. Of course, I am keenly aware that making such a shameless and audacious comment on my part sounds extremely impolite to the existing professionals involved in NLP in the Japanese market. Yet, I would like to leave the decision as to whether my comment is completely off the mark to each of the readers of the next issue of this newsletter, where I will try to cover the principles, philosophy and "raisons d'etre" of NLP in my own way. How did you find the current issue of the newsletter? If you have questions and feedback, please contact me at magazine@creativity.co.uk. Go to Taiten Kitaoka's Official Web site. Go to the site in English: Taiten Kitaoka's Newsletter: "This is the Genuine NLP!". Go to the site in Japanese: Taiten Kitaoka's Newsletter:"  ".(c) Copyright 2003, Taiten Kitaoka. All rights reserved. |