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In:Emancipatory Pragmatics: Innovative approaches to pragmatics incorporating the concept of “ba”
Edited by Yoko Fujii, William F. Hanks, Sachiko Ide, Scott Saft and Kishiko Ueno
[Culture and Language Use 24] 2025
► pp. 275–298

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Articulation of self in Japanese and English

An interpretation based on the concept of basho

 | Notre Dame Seishin University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 2 December 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.24.11uen
Abstract
This comparative study explores the articulation of self in English and Japanese, focusing on terms of self-reference (“I” vs. “watashi”, “boku”) and expressions of immediate emotional states (“I am sad” vs. “kanashii”). It examines how self-awareness is expressed in these languages through Kitaro Nishida’s concept of basho (place), where consciousness develops from the pure experience of non-separation of subject and object to the separation of subject and object, leading to cognition, judgment, and thought. The study argues that the articulation of self in English is realized through the fixation of “I”, ensuring unified subjective experience, whereas in Japanese the articulation of self is triggered by ba — the whole open to the outside, encompassing relationships, scene, situation, and context.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Basho
    • 2.1Basho and Rubin’s Vase
    • 2.2Basho, language, and self-referential systems
  • 3.Terms of self-reference in English and Japanese
    • 3.1First-person pronoun “I”
    • 3.2The use of “I” in English discourse
    • 3.3Terms of self-reference in Japanese
    • 3.4The use of terms of self-reference in Japanese discourse
  • 4.Expressions for immediate emotional state: “I am sad” vs. “kanashii”
  • 5.Basho and articulation of self
    • 5.1Terms of self-reference: The two realms of the explicit and the implicit
    • 5.2Terms of self-reference: “Basho of absolute nothingness” and “continuity of discontinuity”
    • 5.3Expression of the immediate emotional state: Basho open to ba
  • 6.Conclusion: Toward a linguistics of ba
  • Note
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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