Understanding the Japanese
According to Mr. Masahiko Fujiwara, a mathematician and author, there are three sophisticated emotional merits in Japanese:
1) An exquisite and delicate sense of beauty,
2) An inclination to see, find, recall, and think of people, deeds, environment, and work of mind of their own and others gently with affection and nostalgia, and
3) Sensitivity to other people's unhappiness.
Of course, necessity for life, business, competition, politics, and diplomacy require Japanese citizens to be tough, cool, rational, and ugly; but these merits are not eradicated from hearts and minds of the Japanese.
The issue is how these precious traits have been nurtured and built up in hearts and minds of the Japanese.
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In the Japanese Islands so mountainous 34,000 years ago, there were people who used a knife made of stone ware which seems to have been brought in from Northern China.
In the Japanese Islands full of forests from 12,000 years ago to 2,800 years ago, there were people who used a specific type of earthenware vessels (called the "Jomon" ware), living in a hunter-gatherer economy.
Then 2,800 years ago, Japanese people started to be engaged in wet-paddy rice agriculture in the land monsoon-soaked in summer and dry or snowy in winter.
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This information may be a key to understanding the Japanese people and their merits.
I hope that this information can be of your help (especially if you need to understand a Japanese even though he is not EE(E) Reporter).
"...The Angels Ordered the Stump to be Left in the Ground..."