I woke up to the news that the Japanese parliament just elected its first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi (高市早苗). This is a laudable event, one I couldn’t have foreseen when I was a student of Japanese literature and culture in the early 2000s.
Earlier this year, I stopped consuming current events in my strongest languages, Mandarin and English, choosing to eliminate inputs that did not clearly add value or personal growth. As Nassim Taleb states (I believe in Antifragile, though I can’t recall the exact quote)1, what one chooses not to do is often as crucial as what one chooses to do when managing one’s well-being.
However, I do watch news clips in German and Japanese. Since my Japanese is much stronger than my German, I tend to focus more heavily on the German news. There is something profoundly cool and contradictory about processing news in a second language.
Things that might easily rile me up in my dominant languages seem to lose their sharp emotional edge when expressed in German. I feel almost like a child learning about complex adult issues, trying to figure out why the world is so upset. Conversely, if I am upset about something, trying to express that negative feeling in German immediately makes the emotion feel distant and easier to manage.
This distancing effect brings to mind lines from the Heart Sutra:
不生不滅。不垢不淨。不增不減
是故空中無色。無受想行識
(Roughly: Not created, not destroyed. Not tainted, not pure. Neither increasing nor decreasing. Therefore, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, perception, mental formation, or consciousness.)
See Thich Nhat Hanh’s new translation of the Heart Sutra here
While I’m not sure if the concepts are logically related in a Buddhist sense, acquiring information through a non-dominant language allows me to process it without being so tainted by worldly constructs and intense emotion.
I know the news of a female Japanese prime minister would have stirred strong hopeful emotions in me back when I was a student in Japan. But today, processed through the lens of a second language, it feels strangely neutral—a significant event observed, but one that does not claim my emotional energy.
- This concept is discussed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, where he argues for the heuristic of avoiding harm (negative inputs, stress, excess information) as the key to well-being, often citing the wisdom of via negativa. See pages 126-127 and pages 360-361. ↩︎