Abstract

This study had two purposes. The first purpose was to determine whether certain aspects of the Japanese language were reflected in examples of the Japanese cultural construct of contemporary essays. The second purpose was to show how these aspects of the Japanese language reflect the intuitive, non-logical nature of Japanese thinking. ;Three characteristics of the Japanese language were first identified: orientation to a particular situation; relative freedom of word order; and ellipsis, especially omission of the subject. A contemporary Japanese essay was then analyzed at the syntactic level and compared to its English translation. It was found that at the syntactic level the Japanese essay showed greater freedom of word order than its English translation and that ellipsis of the subject was present in several places in the essay. Relative freedom to express different aspects of reality and to respond to reality in an emotional way were then discussed in relation to word order, and the Japanese way of approaching reality called "no-mind" was discussed in relation to ellipsis. ;Three additional Japanese essays and three additional English-language essays were then analyzed at the macrostructure level. It was found that the Japanese essays had a much stronger situational and natural aspect than the English essays, that they had a much less rigid structure according to the rules for constructing essays in English, and that they had a much weaker logical aspect. The ways in which these four aspects of the macrostructure of the essays allow the writer to write according to his feeling or emotion, especially about nature, and how they reflect the intuitional, non-logical nature of Japanese thinking was then discussed. ;Thus at both the syntactic and at the macrostructure level, the contemporary Japanese essays exhibited aspects which are characteristic of the Japanese language and that reflect the intuitive, non-logical nature of Japanese thinking