How an individual interacts within the family can be seen as a function of self. But the idea of self is in flux, much like ie.
Enter anthropologist Jane Bachnik. Bachnik is a leading thinker on the self, and has explored ideas of connectedness, patterns of behaviour, and the shifting self, or kejime. She has written extensively on the relationship of public to private, and of the self within society. Bachnik suggests there is a sliding scale for ideas of selfhood, a force that is defined by shifting. How movement along what she describes as a social axis is actually initiated is the central organising factor for self and society, she argues (Bachnik 1992:155). In terms of organising factors, this harkens back, to some extent, to Benedict, who noted in “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” that: “Every Japanese learns the habit of hierarchy first in the bosom of his family and what he learns there he applies in wider fields of economic life and of government” (Benedict 1946:55-6). …show more content…
Tobin, our educational anthropologist, claims that “the key to child socialisation in Japan is to learn kejime” (2000:1157). Bachnik follows a similar line of thinking, writing that these skills develop and eventually emerge to become “a crucial kind of native knowledge” (Bachnik 1992:156). Tobin and Bachnik both agree that kejime is a fundamental element of Japanese behaviour. It is a way, Tobin articulates, in which expectations, actions and expression are adjusted in line with contextual demands