5. The collective first
Last week Ryuichi Sakamoto released his new album “12”, in which all tracks are named after a date. You might have not given to it much thought but all dates are written in the format year-month-day, for instance 20220302, which is the standard way of writing dates in Japanese. I care to highlight this for a reason. (I briefly mentioned this on my radio show last Tuesday too - NB: I host the breakfast show “Yours Truly” on Italian online radio Radio Raheem every Monday and Tuesday at 9AM CET. You can listen to the mentioned episode here but disclaimer, I host in Italian -).
In both Japanese and Korean, two languages I have studied although not up to fluency (yet..!), dates are always written in the format year-month-day. In much of Europe, we use the format day-month-year 9 times out of 10, and then there’s the USA, most notably, where people use the most off the wall format of them all (sorry-not-sorry), the month-day-year one. Just nuts1.
It is pretty evident why the Japanese and Korean way is the most logical one. Indeed it is the international standard. Think about a digital archive: Listing everything using the year-month-day format allows files to be automatically sorted in chronological and alphabetical order. Why would you want anything different?! You don’t know how much it irks me to save files in the day-month-year format because that’s the European way [Here is a map of date format by country if you’re interested]. In my work life I often have to deal with huge shared archives of files and yet I have to name each file by “Name + Day-Month-Year” instead of “Year-Month-Day + Name” making the archives just messier to navigate and the files harder to find quickly. I cannot name not even one advantage of using the DMY format. Can you?
Why am I saying all this though? It is not really to show you my idiosyncracies and quirks. It is because the way Japanese and Koreans write dates offers an insight into their way of thinking (fans of Noam Chomsky, hold on), and ultimately also explains what I mean when I say “I feel like my personality fits with the culture here” when people ask me how I like living in South Korea.
Listing the year first and the day last means going from the set to the subset, from biggest to smallest, from the universal to the particular. We write time following this pattern: 12h11m59s and not 59s11m12h (although there are languages like German and English for example, in which time can also be read by saying the minutes first followed by the hour). Listing the year first and the day last means looking at the context first and then focusing on the detail; looking at the group first and then focusing on the members who constitute such group. In Japanese and Korean this doesn’t just happen when it comes to dates; this pattern is reflected in the sentence structure too. Generally, subordinates precede the principal clause - and this is one of the main struggles Western-European language speakers encounter when learning such languages.
Let’s make an example: In both Japanese and Korean you would say “Since I was tired, I didn’t go to the party” and not “I didn’t go to the party because I was tired”. If you are determined to say it following the latter order, then you have to put a full stop between the two sentences. You’d say: “I didn’t go the party. That is because / The reason for it being I was tired”. It is just not possible to build a complex long sentence in that order. Again, this highlights how the context is of higher hierarchy than the detail. What the subject did or didn’t do is secondary to the conditions that made the subject behave in a certain way. The focus is shifted from the individual to the universal; the individual isn’t at the center of the universe. This is also reflected in people’s names: Surname always comes first.
So what do I mean when I affirm “This says a lot about their way of thinking and explains why I feel like my personality fits with the culture here”?
Before I proceed - I know very well what you could rebut. “This is too much of a stretch”; “Language doesn’t shape the way we think. Chomsky explained it.”; “This is an almost racist explanation”. Different cultures do exist though and it is certain that different languages stress some concepts over others. I do not believe however it is language shaping culture only, but that they both shape each other. I believe in linguistic relativity, not linguistic determinism. Admitting your mother tongue influences the way you think does not equal stating your mother tongue restricts you from thinking in any other way. Otherwise how would we be able to truly learn other languages? I am able to understand those nuances of Japanese and Koreans explicitly expressed in such languages but not in my mother tongue. That concept is something I can grasp even though my language does not stress it or express it explicitly. I do believe there is a universal grammar like Chomsky claimed, but I don’t believe that confutes my thesis.
All of this is to say, such linguistic tendency of stressing the universal / the context / the group over the particular finds a parallel in how Japanese and Korean society are generally considered to be collectivist societies instead of individualistic societies. Group comes first; family come first; the company comes first. You as an individual are first and foremost part of a collective. (It might be a quick and overly-simplifying explanation but please bear in mind this is a space and time restricted Sunday newsletter and not an academic paper).
Now, I grew up in Italy, which is considered to be the West, and Western societies are generally considered to be individualistic2. However, I grew up not just in Italy, which is definitely not as individualistic as the UK or the USA3, but in Southern Italy, which has way more collectivist tendencies than its Northern counterpart. I found a confirmations to my point here and in this article where it is stated that: "[...] there seems to be some evidence that the prevalent cultural theme in Italy falls between the United States and Korea in terms of the individualism-collectivism dimension [...]". As I have often told my friends, I have easily adapted to South Korea not just because I was already familiar with the culture but also because I have found many commonalities between Southern Italian and South Korean culture, values, and behaviour; more than between Southern Italy and the UK, where I have lived for 6 years. The UK might be closer geographically and share a longer history with Italy; on the other hand people in my hometown often think of South Korea as this deeply culturally different, very far away country. And yet, I believe this is very much the case: The importance of family is an example.
Southern Italian culture - even though I wouldn’t say I grew up in a stereotypical Southern Italian family - has definitely played a role in shaping my personality, and so this partly explains my initial claim. This aside though, I do feel my specific personality, also shaped by many other factors including my experiences and the interests I have developed throughout my life (By chance? Because of my DNA? Why are we attracted to some things instead of others?), fits with South Korean culture, as not only I feel in my bones that their way of writing dates and the precedence of the group over the individual just makes more sense, but also I tend to behave spontaneously in the way people behave here, sometimes even in contrast to how people behave back home. An example would be not calling someone on the phone while I ride the subway because I am thinking of the people around me first.
Nuts because instead of following a descending order (from bigger to smaller, higher to lower, 3-2-1) or an ascending one (from smaller to bigger, lower to higher, 1-2-3), it goes big-smaller-bigger or 2-1-3. It is just counterintuitive.
Please bear in mind that nothing in this world is either black or white, hence no country is 100% collectivist or 100% individualistic. Each country falls on a spectrum.