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It is surprising that Westerners have shown so little interest in Japanese psychoanalysis; more surprising that psychoanalysis should exist in so authoritarian a country. The Japanese child's status in the family and in society is determined at birth; the extent to which it remains obedient to its allotted position determines its personal security.
A Japanese psychiatrist writes of a Japanese psychoanalyst: '[He] seems bravely to lead patients "individualistically" and seems sometimes to cause trouble among their families'. Kosawa, the psychoanalyst, quotes a Japanese patient who, as he approached the successful conclusion of his treatment (by Japanese standards), said: 'During my vacation my mother told me on one occasion that I was now pleasing my father better again'. Kosawa says: 'His psychic state is now as harmonious a one as can ever be reached by human beings'.
Between 1932 and 1945, sixty thousand people in Japan were arrested for 'improper thoughts'. It could hardly be possible for analysts or their patients to survive under such a regime if analysis were practiced according to occidental standards. Examination of The Tokyo Journal of Psychoanalysis suggests that such standards do not exist for Japanese psychoanalysis.
In a typical contribution Kenji Ohtski, editor of the Journal and director of the Tokyo Institute for Psychoanalysis, concludes that the Japanese people are childish, untidy, and fickle. These, Ohtski says, are weaknesses of character; but if we examine carefully the meaning of these qualities, we find that they are qualities of open-mindedness or individualism. Elsewhere Ohtski writes, 'The racial characteristics of the Orientals are "id-ic" and feminine as compared with those of the Occidentals, which are "ego-ic" and masculine… Among the Orientals … the Japanese are relatively strong in ego and not so regressive as the Chinese… But the death instinct of the Japanese is crudely aggressive and not extensively sublimated into intell