Learning Japanese (and English) through Modern Philosophy, Mathematics, Medicine, and “Japaneseness” – A (Quasi-)Isomorphism between Japanese & English, Modern Philosophy & Mathematics, and Morphology & Function –

Learning Japanese (and English) through Modern Philosophy, Mathematics, Medicine, and “Japaneseness” – A (Quasi-)Isomorphism between Japanese & English, Modern Philosophy & Mathematics, and Morphology & Function – What follows is an attempt to show that by understanding Japanese, you can simultaneously deepen your grasp of modern philosophy, foreign languages, and even the structure of various sciences. More concretely, I’ll sketch correspondences between: Japanese vs. English Structuralism vs. Realism in modern philosophy Set theory vs. category theory in mathematics Morphology vs. function in medicine By doing so, I hope to give a kind of bird’s-eye “diagram” of how different disciplines can be seen as (quasi-)isomorphic to each other. In principle, whenever we seriously study something, a good “General Introduction” or “Overview” should come first. But because our education in Japanese and English usually proceeds by inertia from elementary and secondary school, we rarely get that overview. The result is that in English learning, for example, various misunderstandings harden into “common sense”, and people end up studying in unnecessarily inefficient ways. So here I’ll use English as a contrastive target to explain a general theory of Japanese. In doing so, we’ll also touch on cultural theory, and on the rather deep, almost “incompatible” structural differences between Japanese and the Western cultural sphere. At the same time, we’ll see that once these differences are made explicit, mutual understanding and translation between them become surprisingly thinkable. If this feels like one of those year-end “everything must go” bargain sales where you get multiple bonuses folded into one, that’s about the right mood. 1. First, the Conclusion Japanese is a high-context language embedded in a high-context culture. More than that, Japanese is built on the assumption that: “Language cannot completely convey what we want to convey.” Culturally and linguistically, Japanese does not rest on the premise that something can be fully expressed in words. On the contrary, it assumes from the start that this is impossible. You could call this a non-logos-centric stance. To make this clearer, I’ll state it in deliberately extreme terms. There are, of course, many exceptions and counter-examples, but the extremes make the basic structure easier to see. In Japanese, no single sentence is expected to say everything. Even a whole text made of many sentences is still not enough. In addition, Japanese assumes: non-verbal expression, shared cultural background, tacit presuppositions as an integral part of “what is being conveyed”. And even then, the expectation is not: “If we do all that, the intended meaning will be perfectly expressed.” Rather, it assumes that even for the speaker/writer themselves, the content to be expressed does not have sharply defined boundaries, and that trying to “pin it down completely” is itself misguided. In Buddhist terms, this is close to the idea of 不立文字 (furyū monji): “Words and letters cannot fully transmit what is most essential.” Japanese language and culture are, in a sense, built on this premise. 2. English Is (More or Less) the Opposite As a contrast, let’s pick English as the representative Western language. The English-speaking world is rooted in the Bible and ancient Greek philosophy, with the famous line in the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This is literally a logos-centric declaration. English is a language that: either assumes that “a sentence can contain everything you want to say,” or at least tries very hard to pack as much as possible into a single sentence. More precisely: English is optimized so that a single well-formed sentence can, in principle, stand on its own. The underlying cultural stance is something like: “The world can (and should) be expressed in logos (language, logic).” Japanese and English are, structurally, almost mirror images in this respect. Again, this is an extreme simplification, and reality is messier—but as a first approximation, it’s useful to adopt this contrast. 3. Japanese Has No “Subject”? No Object? No Complement? Here again I’ll speak in extremes to make the structure visible. Strictly speaking, Japanese grammar was originally better described in terms like: 体言 / 用言 (nominals / predicates) 主部 / 述部 / 修飾部 (topic part / predicate part / modifiers) However, under the influence of Western grammatical tradition, we often talk about Japanese in terms of: subject, verb, object, complement, etc. This can be pedagogically useful, but it also obscures what’s distinctive about Japanese. If we dare to say it bluntly: Japanese does not require a subject. Not “there is never anything that functions like a subject,” but: a sentence can be perfectly legitimate without an explicit subject, and even when something acts like a subject, it can be invisible on the surface. This is the core of Mikami Akira’s “no-subject” theory, which famously surprised the linguist Kindaichi. Japanese doesn’t deny that “subject-like” elements can appear; they just aren’t obligatory. You can add them when it seems helpful; you can omit them when it isn’t. In that sense, you can even say: “Even what looks like a subject in Japanese is, in a way, just another kind of modifier.” The particle は (“wa”) is often treated as a “subject marker” in school grammar, but more accurately it is a topic particle: it marks what the utterance is about, not necessarily the logical subject. Similarly, が (“ga”) introduces a new noun phrase into the discourse—often as something like a subject, but its primary function is not “this is the subject”, but “here is a newly introduced entity”. So we get: Japanese: “Whether you explicitly put in something like a subject or not depends on the situation, on the ba (場; context/scene).” English: In a normal declarative sentence, you must have a subject and a verb. The verb’s form changes depending on the subject. The verb’s valency (does it take a direct object, indirect object, complement, etc.?) is largely fixed lexically. In other words: English is a subject-centered language. Japanese is a predicate-centered language. In fact, in Japanese, you can sometimes get away with only a predicate—nothing else is strictly required. Everything besides the predicate is, in an extreme view, optional and modifier-like. From that perspective, it’s often cleaner to lump “subject part” and “modifier part” together and simply think: “Japanese is a predicate-centered language.” 4. Nouns vs. Predicates, Morphology vs. Function, Set Theory vs. Category Theory From another angle, we can say: English (and related Western languages) are noun-centered. Japanese is predicate-centered. This maps beautifully onto foundational distinctions in logic and mathematics. In basic logic, we start with propositional logic, then move to (first-order) predicate logic. First-order predicate logic: uses variables over objects (which correspond to “nouns”), and predicates over those variables. This lines up naturally with: Realism / substantialism Set theory: objects as elements, sets as containers, membership 𝑥 ∈ 𝐴 x∈A. In medicine, we often split topics into: Morphology (形態): anatomy, histology, pathology Function (機能): physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology Morphology is also strongly set-theoretic and realist: “The liver is here.” “This organ belongs to this system.” “This cell belongs to the set of cancer cells.” Function, by contrast, is more structural and relational: How substances flow in metabolic pathways How organs interact dynamically How homeostasis is maintained Here, what matters is not the “thing-in-itself”, but patterns of interaction—very much in the spirit of category theory and structuralism. So we can sketch a correspondence like this: English / Western languages → noun-centered → realism → set theory → morphology Japanese → predicate-centered → structuralism → category theory → function English, in this view, is a language that builds a world out of logos + entities (“there are such-and-such things, and we describe them logically”). Japanese is a language that: treats logos as inherently insufficient, or as a necessary but limited tool, and is more comfortable with a world that is not fully capturable in language. This is why Japanese tends to resonate more naturally with modern philosophy (in particular, structuralism and its developments), while English aligns more with modernity in the narrower sense (Enlightenment, rationalism, classical science). No wonder that even with serious institutional reforms, the gap between Japan and the Western cultural sphere doesn’t simply disappear. As Yamamoto Natsuhiko once wrote, “Japan is its language”; and earlier I suggested that another deep fracture line lies in “heart/mind”. Both of these are massive structural differences. Bridging that gap would require, in effect, replacing one side’s language and deep spiritual/religious layer wholesale—something like colonization or enslavement on a civilizational scale. Fortunately (or unfortunately), neither Japan nor the West ever fully enslaved the other. 5. Can We Theorize the Link between “Heart” and “Language”? We’ve looked at language. Now let’s connect this to “heart/mind” (心) and modern philosophy. Japan is a culture where: what you feel in the moment, the emotions that arise, the sensibility with which you relate to humans, living things, inanimate objects, and even abstract concepts, is given priority and actively encouraged. It is considered good—and in some contexts, virtuous—to “put your heart into” things, regardless of whether they are human, non-human, or even non-living. Western thought on “heart/mind” and Japanese culture diverge more at the level of: consistency vs. inconsistency, non-contradiction vs. acceptance of contradictions, than at the level of structuralism vs. realism. Modern philosophy can handle both contradictions and non-contradictions, but formal, contradiction-free structuralism (as in modern mathematical foundations) is especially well modeled by things like: structuralist linguistics, modern abstract algebra, category theory, etc. Yet in the real world, many domains—language, ideology, politics, psychology—are full of contradictions. Structuralism doesn’t inherently require non-contradiction. So we get another pairing: Non-contradictory structure → modern mathematical foundations → excellent model for “clean” structuralism Contradictory or messy structure → language, ideology, many human sciences → structuralism still applies, but with more friction Curiously, modern philosophers and modern mathematicians rarely talk to each other, even though their fields are structurally aligned. Likewise, Mahāyāna Buddhist emptiness (śūnyatā), Madhyamaka, and the Threefold Truth are structurally extremely close to modern structuralism and deconstruction—yet direct, serious dialogue is still rare. If we made these correspondences explicit, we could, in principle, build a bridge connecting: Western thought, Eastern thought, natural science and technology, and mathematics. What follows is one such bridging attempt: English → realism → set theory → morphology vs. Japanese → structuralism → category theory → function 6. English ↔ Set Theory, Japanese ↔ Category Theory 6.1 English and Set Theory: Elements and Membership The English worldview can be glossed as: “There are solid individual things (elements), and understanding them means classifying them into sets.” The subject of an English sentence is like an element 𝑥 x. The predicate says what sets it belongs to, or what it is. Example: “I am a student.” → 𝐼 ∈ Students I∈Students The basic “A is B” structure fits neatly with: membership 𝑎 ∈ 𝐵 a∈B, or inclusion 𝐴 ⊆ 𝐵 A⊆B. This is a static, “being-oriented” view: the world is a collection of discrete particles, and classification is knowledge. 6.2 Japanese and Category Theory: Arrows and Composition The Japanese worldview, by contrast, pays less attention to the internal content of “things” and more to: how they relate, how they transform, how they are composed. In category-theoretic terms: Objects are nodes, but the real action is in the morphisms (arrows) and their composition. Japanese behaves like this: The predicate is akin to a morphism 𝑓 f. The particles (は, が, を, に, etc.) indicate the roles of noun phrases as sources and targets of these arrows. Verb + auxiliary + auxiliary… is exactly like composing functions. Example: 食べさせたくなかった “(I) didn’t want to make (someone) eat.” We can factor it as: 食べる 𝑓 f (to eat) させる 𝑔 g (causative: make/let) たい ℎ h (want to) ない 𝑖 i (not) かった 𝑗 j (past) So structurally: 𝑗 ∘ 𝑖 ∘ ℎ ∘ 𝑔 ∘ 𝑓 j∘i∘h∘g∘f English spreads this out analytically: did not want to make (him) eat Japanese fuses it into a single composite process. 6.3 Yoneda-like Intuition and the Japanese Self In category theory, the Yoneda Lemma says, roughly: “An object is completely determined by all the arrows going into it and all the arrows coming out of it.” Translated into culture: English: “First there is an ‘I’ as a self-standing entity; then we describe what I do.” Japanese: “What I am emerges from the relations I am embedded in: who I talk with, who I help, what I feel, how I relate to the ba (場).” Earlier, I suggested that: “The self exists only in networks of relations; the ba comes first, then the self.” That is essentially a Yoneda-style intuition: we do not look inside the object; we understand it through its relations. So we can say: Japanese is, in a deep sense, a language of relations, a kind of informal “category theory” embodied in everyday grammar. 7. Morphology vs. Function in Medicine: Sets vs. Categories 7.1 Morphology: Set-Theoretic and Realist Anatomy / Histology / Pathology form the world of morphology. They classify organs, tissues, cells into sets: digestive system, respiratory system, etc. normal cells vs. cancer cells, etc. Here: The object’s being-there is central. Even in a cadaver, the organ is physically present. Names and classifications are crucial. This matches: set theory, realism, nominalist taxonomy. 7.2 Function: Category-Theoretic and Structuralist In physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology: The focus shifts from the organ as a thing to: flows, transformations, feedback loops, interactions. Metabolic pathways like glycolysis or the TCA cycle are: giant diagrams of arrows (reactions), composed into longer arrows (overall transformations). Homeostasis is a structural property: individual molecules and cells are replaced, but the overall pattern of interactions is maintained. This is exactly how structuralism thinks: “The identity of a system lies in the structure of relations, not in the persistence of individual bits.” 7.3 Diagnosis and Treatment as Translations Between the Two Using the earlier scheme: Diagnosis: Observe functional anomalies (category-like, relational patterns), Map them onto a morphological disease category (a box in set-theoretic space). Treatment: Surgery: intervene on morphology (cut out or alter the “set element”). Drugs: intervene on function (tweak arrows, modulate pathways). Seen this way, medicine constantly translates between: shape ↔ flow, set ↔ category, thing ↔ relation. Your “morphology = set theory / realism” and “function = category theory / structuralism” pairing is, I think, an extremely powerful learning compass. For a medical student drowning in rote memorization, it suggests: “Now I’m in morphology mode; think in terms of sets and names.” “Now I’m in function mode; think in terms of flows and arrows.” Switching OS like this can drastically improve learning efficiency. 8. Two Views of Language: Logos-centrism vs. “Expanded Sapir–Whorf” We can now summarize two broad attitudes toward language. 8.1 Logos-centrism / Logos-superiority This is the stance inherited from: the Bible, ancient Greek philosophy, and the modern Western tradition. In short: “Language (logos) is superior; language can, in principle, capture the whole of reality.” English and many Indo-European languages are built—and taught—under this assumption, more or less explicitly. Christianity and Islam, even though Semitic in origin, have largely been absorbed into Indo-European linguistic frameworks and shaped by them. 8.2 An “Expanded Sapir–Whorf” View: Language as Limited, Incomplete, Secondary The Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis is usually taken to mean: “Language shapes thought.” If we radicalize and extend this, we get something like: “Language is only a small, limited cross-section of a much larger reality; it cannot fully describe that reality and is, in some respects, a crude substitute.” This “anti-logos-centric” or “logos-inferior” stance is: close to certain currents in modern philosophy, close to Mahāyāna Buddhist views (空, 中観, 三諦論), and embedded in various “minor” or “non-Western” traditions—including Japanese culture. Japanese is, in this sense, a non-logos-centric language par excellence: It presupposes that language cannot fully grasp or transmit what matters most. It leans heavily on ba (場), atmosphere, non-verbal cues, and shared background. Its grammar centers on predicates and relations rather than on self-standing subjects and entities. 9. Closing If we keep this framework in mind, it becomes a powerful tool for: Japanese people learning foreign languages, foreigners learning Japanese language and culture, and anyone trying to navigate across disciplines. To summarize the skeletal correspondences: English / Western languages noun-centered realist, logos-centric set-theoretic morphology-oriented modernity / Enlightenment compatible Japanese predicate-centered structuralist, non-logos-centric category-theoretic function-oriented naturally resonant with modern philosophy and Mahāyāna Buddhist thought Knowing this doesn’t magically solve everything, but it gives us: a clearer sense of what we’re doing when we “learn a language”, a way to see modern philosophy and mathematics not as exotic abstractions, but as reflections of deeper patterns already present in language and culture, a first sketch of how East/West, science/humanities, and logic/heart might be connected structurally.