Tatemae and Honne

"Tokyo Story" (1953), dir. Yasujiro Ozu

Honne and tatemae. This is a concept I learned of outside of the martial arts, but I think relevant to it: it is broadly characteristic of Japanese culture at large. We have similar concepts in the west, but not so explicitly codified.

Honne is a person's true feelings, their authentic self, state of nature; tatemae is the socialized self, the persona and conditioned behaviors one presents to others in the world.

This might not sound like a novel concept to western readers, as we generally have a sense of "realness" or authenticity as a preferable ideal, in contrast with the conformist, the square, etc. What's interesting about the Japanese conception of these two aspects of human identity and behavior, however, is that it seems to anticipate the non-conformist's rebellion against the falsely constructed self. Yes, it acknowledges, you have your honne, your truth, what you actually feel; with that in mind, for the sake of others and the society in which we live, you must cultivate tatemae, you must construct a persona with which you may live and deal harmoniously with your peers.

Examples of this concept are at play in Yasujiro Ozu's film "Tokyo Story" (1953), which treats the topic despairingly: an elderly couple, facing illness and the specter of death, bears a thousand petty abuses and annoyances at the hands of their aloof children and grandchildren with smiling, stoic graciousness, a response that masks evident sentiments of abandonment, heartbreak and nostalgia. Another example, Natsume Sōseki's classic novel Kokoro (1914), can be read as a dialogue between tatemae and honne, in the forms of a young Japanese university student in the post-Meiji Restoration Japan of the early 1900s, who is habituated to the rapid inculcation of modern, western social norms, and his elderly mentor: an eccentric, reclusive human relic of a lost traditionalism, but also one who has rejected the new world, has renounced membership in it, without hope of triumphing over a puerile modern dispensation except in death. The young man is tatemae, a timid and compliant (if well-meaning) social climber; the old man is honne, rageful and dejected, and his only recourse is ultimately suicide. Of course, in feudal Japan, ritual suicide or seppuku was a means of regaining grace under the threat of dishonor. Equally, however, it was the ultimate act of acquiescence to the reigning social order. (We might take solace in presuming that the elder in this story is offering his death to the "old Japan".)

As a westerner, I'm interested in the Japanese rendering of the dichotomy between the private self and the public one, because in my life, there have been times when I've gotten myself quite confused around matters of self, authenticity and true nature - and I think a lot of us in the west may share that confusion. David Foster Wallace, a beloved Gen X novelist and essayist, infamously wrote tortuous, impenetrable volumes of navel-gazing exegesis about authenticity, identity and right action amidst fractious and relativistic forces of secular post-modernity. Like the old man in Kokoro, Wallace killed himself. This is not to suggest that failing to discover one's true nature, or to be at peace with being at the mercy of contradictory social pressures, results in suicide - it has come out that the nature of Wallace's inner suffering was rooted in treatment-resistant clinical mood issues, and his wrangling with weighty existential questions was likely an expression of that. That being said, I think that suicide is a fitting metaphor for the substitution of the social self for the natural one: tatemae being the the willful self-negation of the honne.

But then, what makes the concept of tatemae-honne so interesting is that, in contrast with the western attitude by which social conditioning simply happens - unconsciously, quietly, as if by accident - tatemae is a set of behaviors that one chooses, cognizant though they are of their honne. At first blush, such choosing might seem abhorrent, a kind of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. On the contrary, however, I wonder to what, if any, extent that consciously and deliberately willing the artificial representation of oneself changes the nature of the act.

Moving away from a model of mask and reality, a "false self" and a "true self," what if there simply existed a self, singular and whole, but understood dually as both an outward-facing, extroverted tatemae, and a private, intimately personal honne? Importantly, both of these aspects are considered authentic - or if you'd rather, neither is (that would depend more on the religious paradigm through which one views the issue, a topic beyond the scope of this writing). Authenticity, in this conception of self, becomes a moot point, a vestige of a flawed dichotomous conception. What follows is a realization:

There is nothing we can express that doesn't contain some part of us.

I am aware of myself, except in rare cases, extraordinary settings, as playing a role, inhabiting an affected persona, a constructed self. But not to feel myself to be implicitly condemned, according to some standard of modern-day pop virtue, as "inauthentic" for this - that would be a kind of freedom.