The Japanese have little originality, so that Japan has very few geniuses who could create religions, philosophies or scientific principles that bring about revolutions in human consciousness in history. So say many foreigners, and sometimes this is believed by many Japanese themselves.

But creativity is not always a matter of individuality. True, there are few geniuses in Japan who could contribute something great to world history through their individual originality, but there is rich originality and creativity in Japanese culture itself. E.g., in Japan there is a very characteristic literary culture which is truly original and powerful.

For example, today’s Japanese use four sorts of letters, namely, Chinese characters, katakana, hiragana and the Roman alphabet. All educated Japanese can imagine these four sorts of characters at the same time and instantly when they think of something, for the Japanese language is always a combination of four types of characters. In the Japanese consciousness the inter-relation between these is incomparably better organized than in any computer. The Japanese can decipher and use the configuration of these four sorts of characters with precision and in context. No one has invented such a super machine, and it is the product not of an individual genius, but of collective creativity.

To grasp the functions of these four sorts of characters note that Chinese characters are not simple phonetic signs; but each letter is one word constructed through a symbolic figure. Thus, sometimes it is very difficult to write foreign proper nouns only through Chinese characters. In such a case the Japanese use katakana which are phonetic signs used for foreign pronunciation.

In the Japanese language Chinese characters have several ways of being read. The first is a limitation of Chinese phonetics for the Chinese technical terms which the Japanese had to import as foreign words. The second is the application of Japanese words for Chinese words. In such a case the Chinese characters are written, but their pronunciation is entirely Japanese. The third is a semantic interpretation of Chinese words. In this case one Chinese word may be said in several Japanese words and vice versa. The katakana was originally phonetic signs in order to read Chinese text in the Japanese way. Hiragana was also phonetic signs in the Japanese language, but invented in order to write Japanese together with Chinese characters. Chinese characters were used at the beginning also as phonetic signs of Japanese (manyogana) from which hiragana was made. So, there is creative invention in analyzing a Chinese character to its elemental form and applying it to another dimension. This analytic operation and hetero-dimensional applications are the two Japanese creative peculiarities found in the modern technological domain.

Compared with Western languages in which the verb has dominant with decisive function as to person, number and tense, the Japanese language is a language of the noun which has dominant and decisive functions. Western language is one of point and line with which the meaning of the word becomes clear; in contrast Japanese is one of phase and field in which the atmospheres of the nouns are combined with each other through post positional words.

In the present world there are 2796 language, divided into 12 principal language families and another 50 less important families of languages. Of these 62 language families, Japanese is one. Each language family is a product of original creativity, and hence one of the clearest signs of collective creativity. The writing custom consisting of four sorts of characters is a product of such collective creativity on the part of the Japanese people.

In countries where the upper class uses a difficult manner of writing, the lower classes cannot learn to write and civilization cannot be shared. In Japanese the Chinese characters were employed by the dominant class from the ancient Edo era, but for the lower class there was hiragana parallel to the Chinese characters. Thus humanistic education with reading and writing was diffused to a very high percentage of the population. This enabled Japan quickly to receive and learn foreign civilizations after the Meiji restauration. This too is the result of its creativity with regard to writing.

Parallel to the literary culture are a number of technological achievements. One of the most characteristic inventions is the form of rice cultivation in the water fields. This is a refinement of the original method received from South China or some Southern islands. By improving this method, the quantity of the harvest was very great, which made possible a self-sufficient system of food production till the Edo era. This too is an impersonal collective creation and another is the electro-technological system. The prosperity of Japan in this technology also originated from a collective creativity for which no personal name is necessary, but parallel to the creativity of language and writing in Japan.

Thus the theme, "humanization of technology", can be studied in the context of a literary culture in which the technical must be integrated along with such other values as the ethical and communicative.

Translated by Prof. Noriko Hashimoto