In Japan there are two modes of resembling. When someone’s face reminds one of someone else’s face, or when one piece of art appears to have been copied from another, then the word used will probably be “niteiru,” from “niru,” “to resemble, to look like, to be similar to.”
But there is another way of talking about resemblance. This requires using the word “fun’iki,” which has no good translation in English. It’s often rendered “atmosphere,” as in the atmosphere or ambiance of a dining establishment, but this is not quite it. Fun’iki is a way of expressing that the general feel of a person, place, thing, event, or idea calls to mind some other entity, or has the property of resembling something else in a way that goes beyond surface appearances.
There are very few people in the world who truly resemble, as in share similar physical characteristics with, animals. But in Japan people are often compared to animals using fun’iki. If someone has the fun’iki of a koala, for example, then that person’s “feel” will be, somehow, koala-y, probably giving off vague impressions of being gentle, or loveable, or adorably cute. It isn’t as though a person is gray, covered in fur, has big ears, or climbs eucalyptus trees. It’s that a certain person makes the heart feel the same way it does when it sees a koala. This is fun’iki.
It took me a very long time to understand what was being said when people made comparisons on the fun’iki level. I often didn’t get the reference at all. How can that person be said to resemble an alpaca, or a Labrador retriever, or a sea turtle? But slowly I began to see the resemblance. Not see, actually. Feel. When one looks at a certain person, one gets the feeling one gets when one sees a turkey or a fox. It isn’t mean-spirited to say this. It’s just noticing how things seem. Spend enough time in Japan and you’ll probably start thinking in fun’iki terms, too.
There’s more to it than this. Fun’iki has fun’iki of its own. It’s expandable throughout Japan as a lived experience. Those who are tone-deaf in social situations, for instance, who don’t know how to adjust to the interpersonal dynamics in a room and speak and act as the moment demands, are said to be “KY,” which is dated high school slang from a couple of decades ago. “KY” is an abbreviation of “kuki ga yomenai,” meaning that someone “can’t read the air,” that is, can’t catch all the unspoken but obvious things about a certain gathering of people or a certain change in the mood of a room. KY is not about explicit information. It’s about how things seem to us in our human lives.
As I learned these ins and outs of fun’iki, I began to wonder whether fun’iki was not a sonzairon, an ontology, a metaphysics of being. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that seeming was the ontological baseline in Japan. Things are almost never nailed down exactly. There is play in the lines holding us to places, people, and things. The world is as it appears to us, as it is presented. This may be unrealized phenomenology. But it seems like something much simpler. Fun’iki as sonzairon. Things seem, and in this seeming there is an infinity of gradation, all of it human-inclusive. See it once, and then you realize that it’s everywhere.
Take another common phrase in Japanese: “bimyo.” This is, like fun’iki, probably untranslatable. Let’s say that one is approaching a traffic light in a car when the light turns yellow. One is at just such a distance from the light that it would be as acceptable to stop as it would be to keep going. Does one stop or go? It isn’t immediately obvious what one should do. “Bimyo.” Or let’s say that someone is said to have the same fun’iki as a hammerhead shark. Hmm. Yes, well, I see what you mean, but I’m not so sure. Your way of seeming is different from mine. “Bimyo.” You may feel “hammerhead shark” when you see him, but I feel more “velociraptor” when he’s in the room. His aura comes across to me that way. There’s a bimyo between how you see him and how I do. Bimyo means that fun’iki sometimes seems variously to different people. Sonzairon is not always distributed in an even way. When that happens, when things are bimyo, then one will have to act without the benefit of fun’iki, or else wait until things clear up one way or another. Bimyo is perhaps the very foundation of being in Japan, with fun’iki arising from it. But even this is not well defined. At any rate, things seem to emerge from bimyo, attain some level of shared clarity among a group of people, and then sink back into bimyo again.
In the West, people love origin stories and Armageddons. They love creation myths and ends of worlds. In Japan, by contrast, origin stories are anticlimactical. Izanami and Izanagi, progenitor gods in Japanese mythology, do not do any calling forth of raw existence from black voids. There is no grand theater of “Fiat!” here. Izanagi and Izanami themselves come from other gods and goddesses, born in Takamagahara, the heaven above our world. But who made Takamagahara? I don’t know. How will our world end? Nobody mentions that, either. In Japan, everything begins in media res. When Marxism first came to Japan, people swooned over it, as in the West. What I find most different from Japan is the clearly defined origin and teleology in Marxism. Primitive accumulation to utopian socialism, one, two, three. It’s a very different kind of sonzairon. It has a history and a direction. Fun’iki doesn’t. It just falls into the intellect, without having to explain where it came from or where it’s going.
Fun’iki as sonzairon is thus a very loose-fitting ontology. There is plenty of room for various interpretations, and people are usually careful not to get in the way of someone else’s take on things. Take, for instance, the use of “-rashii,” “-ppoi,” “so,” and “yo.” If I am forgetful, and I am to be at someone’s house for dinner at seven pm, but it’s twenty after and I’m not there yet, and the host calls me and asks where I am, and I say, Oh, no, I forgot, but I’m leaving now and will be there soon, and the host hangs up and explains the situation to the other guests, someone will probably say, “Morgan rashii.” This means, yes, this behavior is true to form. The thing Morgan has done is the thing one would expect given the way his character has revealed itself to us so far. In a similar way, to say, without knowing for sure, that Morgan will likely be late, or that one has heard from someone else that Morgan will be late, or that things are shaping up such that Morgan might show up later than scheduled, one can use “-ppoi,” or “so,” or “yo,” to indicate that one has not determined with absolute certainty that A will come to pass, but that things are pointing in the general direction of A. Nothing exists finally and absolutely. A and not-A are fraternal twins. Even the word for “contradiction,” mujun, means a halberd and a shield, things are thought to be opposite, but that are, on second thought, a set of things at the same time. A and not-A are a third thing, B, and so forth. Not dialectically. Just all at the same time. Things arise, entangle, and fade away. What happened? It’s hard to say with finality. But something did happen, and we can just let it join our circle of existence and give off its own fun’iki, with each person letting it fall into his or her kokoro (is this heart, or mind, or neither, or both?) in whatever way it wants. A? OK. Not-A? OK, too. B? Yes, you are not wrong to think it. “Ten people, ten colors,” the saying goes here. As Paul Feyerabend wrote, “anything goes.”
This is all very much unlike Cartesian or Kantian sonzairon. Of course there are scholars in Japan who study Descartes and Kant. There are college students who have to read their books. It’s not as though alien modes of thinking are unknowable. What’s human is human, no matter how foreign. But those kinds of origin stories just strike me, now, as silly, exercises in fantasy. Kant and Descartes got all worked up over what no one could ever know. Why go to all that trouble? What difference does it make? Things fall into the intellect as wholes. St. Thomas Aquinas knew that. It’s the truth. When I am walking in the woods and I see the tail and hind quarters of a wolfish creature darting behind a stand of trees, I don’t have to go through a mental flowchart of what I know about hind legs and tails to know that what I’ve seen is a wolf. The fun’iki is unmistakable, even if I haven’t seen the entire creature with my own eyes. I know a wolf when I see one. That’s what fun’iki is. I don’t know where wolves came from, who made them, what the fate of wolfdom will one day be. I don’t know whether the wolf is a trick of some evil genius, or the projection of my mind. I started in media res, just like the wolf did. I came into a world already here. But that is no handicap. It’s the human condition. By the powers of -rashii, so, yo, and -ppoi, I can get a pretty good idea of what is going on around me and what I ought to do next. If the wolf stops and turns to look back at me, then it’s bimyo. Do I flee or freeze or climb a tree, or what? But it’s not fun’iki’s fault that I don’t know how to proceed. And to sit down and wrack one’s brains over whether one really exists or not is just sad. Poor Descartes. If he had been able to travel to Japan then things might have turned out differently.
In the same forest as the wolf, during the afternoon, Descartes might have seen light falling through trees. This is komorebi. It’s not the light. It’s not the trees. It’s the fun’iki of protons filtering through leaves in a quiet, magical, forest-y way. Descartes might have seen komorebi, and smiled.
But here I have to interrupt the reverie to advise some caution in dealing with fun’iki as sonzairon. Fun’iki is not for beginners. Well, it is for beginners, but it’s not easy to undo Western ways in a day. There is much latitude to think one has the hang of fun’iki, only to find that one is mistaken. It is not easy to see fun’iki as sonzairon, not at first. If one is not from Japan, then one’s “image” (to use another fun’iki-type word in a Japanese context) is apt to get in the way of what is really going on inside of Japan.
A good example of this is keeping house. A few years back there was a craze in the West for Marie Kondo, whose advice on living a clutter-free existence and “sparking joy” in the process is probably thought, by many, to be a very Japanese thing. It isn’t, though. There was a funny essay in Shukan Shincho, a weekly newsmagazine in Japan, a couple of years ago by artist Yoko’o Tadanori about this. The idea of throwing things away is not Japanese at all, he pointed out. Japanese people tend to respect the sonzairon of material objects. Willy-nilly tossing everything onto the trash heap, Yoko’o wrote, feels much more like an extension of consumer capitalism than of Japanese culture. He’s so right. Japanese homes are often cluttered. There’s stuff piled up on tables and in corners of rooms. Marie Kondo is maybe the least Japanese person alive. Sonzairon, fun’iki, don’t require bare floors and walls. Sonzairon is all-inclusive in Japan. Fun’iki is about seeming, not stripping away. Marie Kondo is a Cartesian, if you think about it. No wonder she was a big hit in California.
To know what fun’iki is as sonzairon, it’s probably necessary to spend years and years in Japan with Japanese people, listening to them, reading their books, seeing how they live. Not as an anthropologist. That is the most non-fun’iki thing ever, the Margaret Mead objectification of people and their ways. Fun’iki is eminently participatory. You have to be in media res, irrevocably, to see how it works.
How does it work, exactly? I have no idea. And I bet that, no matter how hard you try, neither will you. So it’s probably best to let go of origin stories and teleologies, and of the faux, Heideggerian letting-go of origin stories and teleologies, and just to notice how things seem, and to take things at that.
