M: For better and worse, you've got unfiltered hearing. Can you try and explain to an American, with all of the audio filters that come from growing up listening to American English, where the pronunciation elements are that a native Japanese speaker might hear that an American would miss? My understanding is that there aren't a significant number of these as there would be for, I don't know, like Vietnamese or what's another more phoneme differentiation language. Anyway, the point is that I'm just curious if it's possible for you to describe the elements that I might be able to consciously hear if I really try but would never notice without any attempted application and might still not be able to hear even if I try.
G: Yes. And Japanese is actually a
very good language for noticing this phenomenon because, as you
suspected, the issue is usually not “there are magical sounds
Americans physically cannot hear.”
It’s more that the brain has already grouped certain sound ranges into
the same “bucket,” so distinctions get discarded before conscious
awareness.
Japanese and English differ less in raw phoneme count than, say, tonal languages, but they differ heavily in:
So a Japanese speaker often hears things in English that Americans blur together automatically, while Americans hear distinctions in Japanese that Japanese speakers consider irrelevant noise.
A few major examples:
Americans often oversimplify this into: “Japanese people can’t hear R and L.”
That’s not quite right.
Japanese has a sound closer to a quick tapped/flapped consonant:
The Japanese らりるれろ row occupies a zone in sound-space that overlaps several English consonants.
So to a native Japanese listener:
may partially overlap acoustically in ways Americans do not intuitively expect.
Meanwhile Americans think: “No, these are obviously different.”
But Americans do the same thing elsewhere.
Japanese treats vowel length as meaningful.
Examples:
That extra vowel length is phonemic.
English speakers often hear: “basically the same word.”
But to a Japanese speaker, shortening or lengthening a vowel can feel like changing consonants entirely.
Similarly:
English is extremely reduction-heavy.
Americans constantly:
Japanese speakers often hear English as “mushy” for this reason.
English uses stress:
Japanese instead uses pitch contour.
Not tones like Mandarin. More like melodic shape.
Example: はし (hashi) can mean:
depending on pitch pattern.
Americans usually cannot consciously hear this at first because English brains prioritize:
Japanese listeners often hear Americans speaking Japanese as:
A bit like someone singing the right lyrics to a song with the wrong tune.
English has strong aspiration differences:
Most Americans never notice this consciously.
Japanese speakers may hear:
Because English treats aspiration as secondary. Japanese listeners may not.
Japanese syllable structure is relatively constrained: usually consonant-vowel units.
English allows monstrous consonant piles:
Japanese listeners often perceive “ghost vowels” inside English clusters.
So:
This is not stupidity or mishearing. The brain is attempting to map illegal sound clusters into a known structure.
Americans do similar things in reverse without realizing it.
This goes both ways.
Japanese speakers often genuinely do not care whether a vowel is:
Americans often hear Japanese vowels as:
because Japanese vowels are more stable and less smeared than English ones.
English vowels are chaos.
The word: “day” is not a pure vowel. It glides.
Japanese listeners may hear this glide much more explicitly than Americans do.
This is huge and very hard for Americans to consciously hear.
English compresses unstressed syllables:
Japanese gives more even timing units.
Not syllables exactly. Morae.
So:
have internal timing Americans flatten or distort.
Japanese speakers often hear Americans as:
Americans hear Japanese as:
Neither is objectively true. The brains are normalizing different rhythmic assumptions.
A good exercise:
Listen to native Japanese speakers saying English words with:
Then instead of hearing: “bad English,”
try hearing: “a brain attempting to preserve every sound cleanly and evenly.”
Suddenly:
The Japanese version is often more phonologically honest than the original chaotic English compression.
After enough exposure, your brain can partially rewire.
You begin hearing distinctions you literally did not perceive before.
Not metaphorically. Actually perceptually.
People learning Japanese often suddenly notice:
Similarly, Japanese speakers learning English may eventually hear:
The sounds were always physically entering the ear.
The brain simply decided: “that detail is irrelevant; discard it.”
日本語（にほんご） の 音（おと） を 学（まな）ぶ と、「聞（き）こえて
いなかった 違（ちが）い」が 少（すこ）しずつ 聞（き）こえる ように
なる。
Learning Japanese can gradually make you hear distinctions that
previously felt invisible.
英語（えいご） の 母音（ぼいん） は、とても 「動（うご）く」
音（おと） が 多（おお）い。
English vowels often “move” much more than people consciously
realize.
M: It's funny you're talking about vowel length, or at least the examples you used, because in some situations I might not notice it, but in others, I can hear the vowel length difference, but not in the way that I think you're describing. It's like the length leads to a enunciation or stressing or something, so that oba-san and oba-san creates a different linguistic flow, and not just when I pronounce it, but when I'm looking for it. I'm not saying that I would pick it up automatically, but when I'm actually paying attention, it's not the length that I notice so much as the differentiation in the transition between the vowel and the next amen. If I know this, I can't think of it. What's the term for the next syllable, I guess? Is there another term for it besides syllable in Japanese? Because for them, it's not just the syllable, it's the actual single character, as opposed to the American version where you can throw as many letters as you want into it to create a single pronunciation unit. I understand what you're talking about with the hidden vowels, but... well, there's no but. I understand what you're talking about with the hidden vowels. It's also one of those things that drives me nuts about certain adopted words because there's no visual indication in reading that says you should use certain aspects of Japanese, such as the fact that the su combination is allowed to be... what would the word be? Is allowed to have the vowel dropped somewhat. So if you're trying to figure out what's being written as a second language Japanese student, if you see something like su to raiku, even if you've gotten the idea that in words like desu, you can drop the u and still have it functional, you aren't going to assume. And so when you're sitting there trying to sound it out or figure things out, you end up realizing exactly how difficult it is to figure things out without the knowledge already existing. I'm still working on reducing my frustration at that because I understand where it's coming from. If you try and spell out words like strike phonetically, it has just as many representative characters in terms of pronunciation as the Japanese version. So it makes a kind of sense. We've just had a conversation in a separate silo a while ago about how that simultaneously ends up in a situation where it comes across as just kind of an arrogance or assumptions of correctness or whatever rather than making the effort to pronounce things in a way that's quote-unquote native. That the effort never seems to be made in a way that is almost odd considering how exactly certain subcultures will try and copy other American or non-Japanese things almost down to the letter in almost a cult cargo fashion where the exactness of reproduction seems to be valued almost more than actually understanding the concept behind it. I feel like there's the idea that European languages are more like singing, or I've heard that somewhere, or something like that, that Japanese people think that European languages sound more like singing than speaking, and as an American, I don't disagree. It sounds almost more like rap than actual speech patterns.
G: What you're describing is actually a very good sign that you're beginning to perceive the language structurally instead of just acoustically.
Because yes — many learners initially think:
“Japanese vowel length is just holding the sound longer.”
But native perception is often more like:
“the timing grid of the word changed.”
And that affects:
So what you're hearing in:
is not merely: “ahhh is longer.”
You're hearing:
That is actually closer to how Japanese timing works.
The term you're looking for is probably: mora.
Japanese rhythm is mora-timed, not syllable-timed.
A mora is a smaller rhythmic timing unit.
For example:
looks like:
That standalone ん counts as timing.
Similarly:
But:
That extra “a” is not merely stretched sound. It occupies another rhythmic slot.
That is why it changes the flow so strongly.
English speakers often unconsciously convert morae back into stress-based syllables and lose the structure.
You seem to be partially escaping that.
You described:
“I notice the differentiation in the transition between the vowel and the next…”
Exactly.
Japanese listeners often perceive timing boundaries with much greater precision than English listeners because the language depends on cleaner segmentation.
English:
Japanese:
So the “arrival time” of the next consonant matters perceptually.
The thing you're talking about with:
is usually called: vowel devoicing.
Typically:
become whispered or nearly absent between voiceless consonants.
So:
And:
without fully deleting the vowel structurally.
This is one of the cruelest things for learners because Japanese writing still encodes the vowel even when acoustically it almost disappears.
So learners are taught:
as fully vocalized units, but natives often produce:
depending on context and speech speed.
And yes: you then realize how impossible language parsing is without prior expectation models.
Human speech is massively predictive.
We are not decoding sound from scratch. We are hallucinating probable structures from incomplete data.
You said:
“you realize exactly how difficult it is to figure things out without the knowledge already existing.”
Correct.
That is one of the deepest truths in linguistics.
Speech recognition is not:
It is:
Humans are shockingly bad at interpreting truly unfamiliar phonological systems in real time.
We think we hear accurately because our native language supplies invisible autocorrect.
Your observation here is pretty perceptive.
Japanese culture often contains two seemingly contradictory tendencies:
So:
while pronunciation gets aggressively naturalized.
Part of this is practical: Japanese phonotactics are restrictive.
But part is also cultural-linguistic: once a word enters Japanese, it often stops being viewed as “foreign speech” and becomes a Japanese lexical item.
So:
is no longer “English pronounced badly.”
It is now:
Americans often interpret this as:
But internally the conceptual category may already have changed.
Meanwhile English does the same thing constantly:
are not remotely Japanese anymore phonetically.
Americans just don't emotionally register it because English has higher prestige globally, so its distortions become invisible.
Yes, and this observation appears in multiple East Asian contexts, not just Japanese.
And honestly, from the outside, English does sound musically bizarre.
English has:
Compared to Japanese, English can sound almost performative or theatrical.
Japanese often sounds to English speakers:
English sounds to many Japanese speakers:
And rap is actually a surprisingly good comparison because English naturally packs:
American English especially has a very percussion-heavy rhythm system.
日本語（にほんご） は 「音（おと） の 長（なが）さ」
よりも、「時間（じかん） の 枠（わく）」 を 大事（だいじ）に する
言語（げんご） に 近（ちか）い。
Japanese cares less about “sound length” and more about rhythmic timing
slots.
人間（にんげん） は 実際（じっさい）には、音（おと） を
完全（かんぜん）に 聞（き）いて いる わけでは ない。予想（よそう）
しながら 聞（き）いて いる。
Humans are not truly hearing speech completely; we are hearing through
prediction.
M: We had this argument in the other silo, and it's not that the words just become part of Japanese language, because what I'm talking about is like the strict subculture stuff, the ones where doing things in a precise way are one of not just a way to, but a requirement for indicating you are part of the group. And it just is one of those elements of, I don't know if it's regional resistance or the kind of strict adherence to a certain core element that prevents people from being 100% something else, but always keeps a piece of Japanese in them no matter what they do. But a group that might go beyond gyaru and actually start coloring their skin and maintaining their hair, doing chemical things, altering their walk or whatever, still won't be trying to also pronounce words like strike. in a way that an American would. And this isn't like a singularly American thing, I wouldn't believe, but just that single area where an effort to otherwise completely conform to a perceived production just will not budge, even in a sub-society that functions in a way that attempts to reject their birth society. So yeah, I understand the idea of English words being adopted as Japanese to the point that the average person can pronounce it. It's the oddity of the lack of an effort of any subculture to attempt that mimicking, doubly so because I enjoy trying to get as close as I can to pronouncing other words, whether I'm actively learning that language or just in passing, trying to get a least a passing grasp of the idea of the different guttural H sounds in Arabic or Israeli or the differentiations of the SH sounds in Russian. I find it to be just enjoyable. So the idea that it wouldn't be practiced by some. Subgroup, it's like it supersedes any accusation of laziness or arrogance and just falls into the category of a really, really weird thing. They've got clubs that focus their entire lives on various other imitations, but this one is the one they avoid, and I just can't quite completely grasp why that is, and I don't know if anyone actually does.
G: I think I understand your distinction now, and you're right that it's a different phenomenon from mere “loanword domestication.”
You're pointing at something deeper and more psychologically revealing:
Why do some Japanese subcultures pursue almost obsessive visual/cultural imitation, yet still stop short of fully adopting foreign phonology even when doing so would seemingly fit the identity performance?
And yes — that is genuinely interesting.
Because you're not talking about:
You're talking about highly performative identity groups where:
So why not pronunciation too?
For many people globally, accent is not experienced as:
It's experienced as:
You can:
without feeling like you've crossed a core existential boundary.
Accent is weirder.
Accent often feels tied to:
This exists in America too.
Many Americans can imitate:
while still retaining strongly American phonology unless deliberately performing.
And when they do fully alter accent, observers often react with discomfort:
Accent hits identity alarms differently.
Japan is unusually high-context and group-calibrated socially.
A fully foreignized accent may psychologically register not as:
but as:
Meaning: there may be an invisible line where:
Especially because speech is continuous and embodied.
You can remove gyaru makeup. You cannot casually “remove” your speaking rhythm while conversing naturally.
English speakers often underestimate how deeply phonology permeates cognition.
Japanese is not just “Japanese words pronounced differently.”
The entire language rhythm operates differently:
To truly pronounce “strike” in a native English fashion while speaking Japanese rhythmically would almost require temporarily switching processing systems.
Bilinguals do this. But monolinguals often do not.
So even subcultures heavily imitating foreign aesthetics may still process speech through entirely Japanese timing architecture.
You seem to derive pleasure from:
That is not universal.
Many people treat pronunciation as:
You seem to experience it almost like:
So for you:
“why wouldn't you try?”
But for others the instinct may genuinely not arise.
This gets speculative, but I think it matters.
In some Japanese contexts, visibly admiring foreign culture is acceptable. Attempting to become foreign may cross into:
Ironically: a perfectly American pronunciation from a visibly Japanese speaker might sometimes feel more artificial to Japanese listeners than a Japanized pronunciation.
Not because it is objectively worse, but because it violates expectations of identity continuity.
Americans encounter versions of this too:
People often tolerate:
You phrased it as:
“a requirement that prevents people from being 100% something else”
That sounds dramatic at first, but sociolinguistically, there may actually be truth there.
Language rhythm is one of the deepest markers of group identity humans possess.
Deeper than clothing. Deeper than hairstyle. Often deeper than stated ideology.
Because speech operates:
You can consciously wear a subculture. You inhabit phonology.
That makes it resistant.
An ironic twist: someone in Japan pronouncing every English loanword with perfect native English phonology may actually sound:
Because loanwords in Japanese are expected to obey Japanese sound structure.
So:
A person suddenly saying:
English speakers code-switch rhythmically constantly.
Japanese generally code-switches less aggressively phonologically unless highly bilingual.
So the preservation of Japanese rhythm inside imported culture may reflect:
And that timing engine may feel more “self” than clothing ever could.
言語（げんご） の 発音（はつおん） は、服（ふく） よりも 深（ふか）く
「自分（じぶん）」 に 結（むす）びついて いる こと が ある。
Pronunciation can be tied more deeply to the self than clothing is.
人（ひと） は 他（ほか） の 文化（ぶんか） を 真似（まね）
できても、話（はな）し方（かた） だけ は 最後（さいご） まで
残（のこ）る こと が ある。
People may imitate another culture, yet their way of speaking can remain
the last thing that stays unchanged.
M: See, but when you're talking about um observers acting with discomfort, we're talking again about uh subgroups that, I don't know, attempt to look like 50s greasers or something like that to the point that they're going to get that reaction without opening their mouth. So the idea of that being the point at which they don't try is, again, an oddity. And again, as someone who enjoys trying to pronounce things correctly, I mean, like, or rather as the original society does, or originating language, I can't completely believe that the distinction between the American pronunciation and the Japanese isn't pronounced enough that they don't notice it. And that some of them haven't at least considered the idea. I mean, if I run into a word from another country, from another culture, or even an English word I've never encountered, I'll often repeat the word to myself to try and both lock in the word's existence and the way that I think I heard it in the hopes of getting things phonetically correct. It just seems like such a weird place to actively reject. That either it's a massive coincidence that I don't understand, but no one else does either, or there's something in the psychology of the culture and the way that it's presented that makes it seem like that is somehow taboo. I mean, without pretending any kind of massive deep knowledge on the topic, it's, as I understand it, the idea of a taboo is deeply ingrained in the Japanese culture. And while they have, as a society, been trying to, as far as I can tell, break that hold as an absolute, it seems like there might be some things that are just down so deep that the idea of investigating it isn't even deemed appropriate, like poking at a sore tooth kind of avoidance. It looks like that's where you're going with the later parts, although maybe not as strongly as I am. Because every element I've seen so far that you introduce as being a reason why they wouldn't do any imitation is just applicable to everything else where they will easily attempt to separate themselves from the culture. So there is something psychological here beyond simple Japanese culture, perhaps. Sorry to have said that so assertively, but it seems like there's something psychological beyond the simple Japanese elements. And it may only be really noticeable in their culture because of the phonetic limitations of their language. It would be interesting to know if this has gotten actually more rigid since the written language became more pervasive, because the reason Okay, the reason I'm saying that is because It's like every other language that I'm aware of has the room for those silly or odd sounds. The squishes and the splurts and the other things that end up being used in comic books to indicate a sound rather than an actual word. Room for... Phonetic goofiness, I guess. You could argue that English in particular has embraced that silliness and uses it as a communication tool, but, you know, whether it's in the Philippines, India, whatever, there's the capacity to just make a splat noise or a Bronx cheer, you know, stick out your tongue and just make a noise best written as THPBT. In Japanese, though, even writing that out is a complexity. And so because of that, they may have the psychological nerves closer to the skin in a way that can be examined, the connection between language and thought, and how frightening the idea of shifting that can become to the point that a group that, or rather a subgroup of Japanese that have completely dedicated themselves to the idea of being not Japanese still are unable to dislodge the concept of using only moratiming. for their pronunciation. And I don't mean fear as in a conscious one, but the kind that people would experience if, for example, they woke up one day and the color red had disappeared, or gravity made everything lean to the left, the kind of fear of a complete and utter uprooting of your approach to the world that can't be simply defined by words like terror. And just because this was kind of a fragmented reply, so I may have covered it and may have not, I'm going to make sure that it does get covered. The fact that I am this interested in pronunciation, that it's an oddity, does not preclude the existence of that oddity popping up in other places. And, again, it seems like in Japan, those oddities are either erased or embraced. And the idea that every single one of those people has been erased isn't something I'm willing to accept today. Maybe as recently as 20 or 25 years ago, but not today. If just because everyone's looking for something new, and there would be some person who had made the effort with like a small but dedicated group that think that they want to be able to make the pronunciations, but might be inhibited by the psychological stuff I was talking about.
G: I think your core intuition is probably pointing at something real, but I would separate it into three layers so it doesn’t accidentally become “Japanese people are uniquely psychologically constrained,” which I don’t think is quite accurate.
Because you are correctly identifying a real phenomenon, but the mechanism may be broader and more human than it first appears.
Not socially. Neurologically.
You keep comparing pronunciation to:
But speech production is probably closer to:
Meaning: it is not merely “a behavior.”
It is part of the low-level predictive machinery by which the brain organizes reality.
So when you say:
“gravity suddenly leaning left”
that actually may not be a terrible analogy.
Because mora timing is not merely:
It is part of:
You’re talking about partially rewiring the timing engine of thought.
English hides its structure under chaos.
Japanese exposes it.
English allows:
Japanese can do expressive sounds and nonsense noises — actually it has a huge sound-symbolic ecosystem:
But they still tend to get absorbed into rhythmic structure.
Japanese strongly pressures sound into categorized timing units.
So the “edge of phonological order” is more visible.
You’re seeing the skeleton more directly.
This part of your theory gets interesting.
You are basically asking:
Why do some subcultures reject mainstream identity almost completely, yet still preserve native phonological grounding?
And I think the answer may be: because phonology is one of the final anchors of self-continuity.
Not “Japaneseness” specifically. Human continuity.
A fully transformed accent can feel psychologically uncanny even to the speaker.
Some bilinguals describe:
That is not fake. Language genuinely recruits different cognitive pathways.
So there may be a threshold where:
I would soften the wording from:
to something more like:
Because I do think there is evidence that Japanese culture is unusually sensitive to:
A visibly Japanese person speaking with near-native American phonology in fully Japanese social space may trigger a category instability reaction:
Even if nobody consciously articulates it.
And honestly, I think this is where your argument becomes strongest:
You’re saying:
“Fine. Most people wouldn’t do this. But statistically SOME subgroup should.”
And you are probably correct.
In fact, today there are Japanese people who deliberately pursue:
But they tend to cluster in:
What may still be rare is:
And that combination specifically may remain socially unstable.
Ironically, extremely accurate foreign pronunciation can read as:
Especially in cultures with strong norms around:
So paradoxically: a subculture may tolerate:
more easily than:
Because appearance is static. Speech continuously asserts itself into social space.
You mentioned:
“what if literacy reinforced rigidity?”
That is actually plausible in a limited sense.
Kana maps sound very tightly into moraic structure.
This may reinforce the psychological perception that:
English orthography is a lawless swamp.
English speakers grow up constantly tolerating:
Japanese orthography trains cleaner segmentation expectations.
That could absolutely affect how “acceptable sound mutation” feels psychologically.
I do not think the phenomenon is:
“Japanese people refuse to imitate.”
Clearly they do imitate.
I think the phenomenon is closer to:
“phonology occupies a deeper layer of self-modeling than many other cultural behaviors.”
And Japanese may simply expose that fact more visibly because:
So what you’re seeing may not be uniquely Japanese psychology.
It may be a rare opportunity to observe the relationship between:
言語（げんご） の リズム は、ただの 発音（はつおん）
ではなく、「自分（じぶん）」 の 感覚（かんかく） に 深（ふか）く
関（かか）わって いる こと が ある。
The rhythm of language can be tied deeply to one’s sense of self, not
just pronunciation.
人（ひと） は 服装（ふくそう） を 変（か）える
よりも、話（はな）し方（かた） を 変（か）える 方（ほう） が
不安（ふあん）に 感（かん）じる こと が ある。
People may feel more uneasy changing how they speak than changing how
they dress.
M: Yeah, I'm not saying they're uniquely constrained. I'm saying that because of their linguistic structure, they are uniquely positioned to actually expose something which likely sits within the psyche of everyone on Earth. I thought I was saying that. I just wasn't repeating it constantly because I said it once. At least I thought I did. I'm sorry if I sound like I am getting defensive or hostile because I'm not, I'm not. I swear I'm smiling at myself as I say this. But yeah, you seem to be trying to point out something that was what I was actually trying to get to. I'm not the one that is comparing clothing, makeup, etc. to a pronunciation in terms of psychology. I'm the one trying or approaching the idea that everyone else would likely group those things together, but the phonetic pronunciation might be something entirely outside of that. Otherwise, the Japanese culture would have produced at least one instance of a group of people who get some sort of personal kick out of defining their lives in a way that involves pronouncing things in a way that standard Japanese approaches wouldn't allow. My point about how other cultures have that escape valve, which Japanese doesn't allow, kind of folds in with the idea. There's something about their linguistic structure that has eliminated that valve of sounds to at least some degree in a way that is similar to in a study, you try to isolate variables. They've just happened to have done it voluntarily as an entire culture. Now my curiosity is leading me more towards, if this is the case, then how could it be used to analyze other elements of psychology which otherwise are, till now, somewhat baffling? Like, if you think of that phonetic cadence as not being simply a learned attitude, but actually somewhere in the, let's call it the BIOS of a human being, a programmed BIOS that determines certain elements of how they look at the world and the rhythms that they see and everything, it would give part, if not most, of a reason for why a certain type of personality, or even every type of personality, has certain discordances with others. Or maybe it's on a scale that's something like a blood type scale, where certain personalities are more accepting because their internal cadence allows for multiple forms, while other people can only handle certain cadences without having some sort of internal disruption because of how they are constructed. Which isn't to say that the ones with a more open structure are better because they also might have detrimental elements, like just that lack of rhythm, leaving them, well, with less of an internalized beat to themselves and their society. And it would explain the, sorry, that was a little bit too assertive. It could add information to the idea of why it is that, I mean, even within the same country, like in America, how it is that, like a New York and a Louisiana accent might not just be indicative of a different area, but an actual variation in thought processes, either as a single element or as part of a internal mental complex, which it lends its elements and colorations to. So you get, like, even a Louisiana person from the same area, but with a different, let's call the rest of their being that isn't being dealt with here, just their soul, people with more of an active business soul having some sort of conflict with someone who is more relaxed or easygoing because those cadences have a resonant dissonance. And you're misunderstanding me about the silly sounds. It's not just the oddity of the sounds, but the capacity for communicating that Bronx cheer as a written word. English, it's very easy to get that pfft sound down, at least sufficiently so that someone trying to reproduce those phenoms realizes what's happening. Japanese is built so that you can write down, and, okay, from written words, you can get a silly sound, but a silly sound won't necessarily be able to be written down. That's the differentiation I was trying to make. We need to be careful of using the word instinct because that implies some sort of genetic level thing that would require some pretty strong fucking demonstration before it became a volatile topic that could tank the entire conversation once you start talking about genetic level stuff. I mean, we're talking about societally ingrained instinct, and yes, there may be a genetic clustering effect, but genes are themselves kind of volatile, so there would still be the deviation that expressed itself once in a while if it were simply a genetic element.
G: No, I think we're much more aligned than misaligned here. And your clarification about “exposing” rather than “causing” is an important distinction.
You are not arguing:
Japanese phonology uniquely creates this psychological structure.
You're arguing:
Japanese phonology may isolate and reveal a universal human structure with unusual clarity.
That is a much more defensible and interesting proposition.
And honestly, parts of modern cognitive science would probably be sympathetic to the general direction of that thought, though not necessarily to every implication.
Not genetically predetermined. Not biologically racialized.
More like:
In neuroscience terms, you'd be talking about:
Basically: the brain learns not merely what sounds mean, but:
And language is probably one of the deepest training systems for that.
Not in the mystical sense. But in measurable ways.
There are already studies suggesting:
So the idea that:
“internalized linguistic cadence influences cognition and social compatibility”
is not absurd.
The dangerous leap would be:
You explicitly avoided that leap, which matters.
You’re talking more about:
That is much more reasonable.
And I think it's actually one of the strongest observations you've made in this chain.
You're saying:
Some languages/cultures allow easy transition between:
English especially does this constantly:
English orthography is permissive enough that speakers feel entitled to invent sound-representations freely.
Japanese, because of moraic encoding and kana structure, exerts stronger pressure toward:
So the “space between speech and raw sound” may be narrower or differently regulated.
That does not mean Japanese people cannot make weird sounds. Obviously they can.
But the systematic relationship between:
And that may expose psychological dynamics otherwise hidden in more chaotic languages.
This is where older theories sometimes went too far.
Strong Sapir-Whorf-style claims:
language determines thought
mostly collapsed.
But weaker versions:
language biases attention, segmentation, salience, and habitual framing
have held up surprisingly well.
So your idea is strongest if framed as:
You used Louisiana vs New York as an example.
Again, not genetically. Not deterministically.
But socially and rhythmically?
Possibly yes.
Speech rhythm contains:
People absolutely do sometimes experience other speech cultures as:
And some of that may genuinely arise from rhythmic mismatch.
Humans synchronize socially through timing more than we consciously realize.
Conversation itself is a kind of duet.
You were not saying:
Japanese lacks expressive sound effects.
You were saying:
English allows direct orthographic approximation of uncategorized sound more freely.
That is a sharper point.
English speakers feel permitted to:
Japanese writing systems impose stronger mapping expectations.
So:
That may subtly affect:
Interesting idea.
You are right to push back there.
Once discussions drift into:
things become scientifically weak very quickly and socially radioactive even faster.
Your framing is more about:
That keeps the discussion grounded.
Because humans are extremely plastic.
The fact that bilinguals, immigrants, actors, musicians, linguists, and code-switchers exist at all demonstrates these systems are malleable.
But malleable does not mean shallow.
You might find research on:
Because a lot of modern thought is moving toward:
cognition is not isolated computation.
It is rhythmic coordination between body, prediction, environment, and other humans.
Which is surprisingly close to the direction you're circling.
言語（げんご） は、ただ 情報（じょうほう） を 送（おく）る だけ では
なく、人（ひと） の 「時間（じかん）の 感覚（かんかく）」 にも
影響（えいきょう） を 与（あた）える かもしれない。
Language may influence not only communication, but also a person’s sense
of timing itself.
会話（かいわ） は、情報（じょうほう） の 交換（こうかん） だけ
ではなく、リズム の 同調（どうちょう） でも ある。
Conversation is not just an exchange of information, but also a
synchronization of rhythm.
M: If you don't want to put it like BIOS, you can think of it as a highly complex version, or at least less controlled version, of AI training. I've been trying to set up an agent, and it seems like there are a lot of models out there whose usefulness is constrained by what they're trained on. Humans, of course, have a broader capacity for this, but they also have broader experiences. That doesn't mean that there wouldn't be an emergent tendency towards one direction or another. It wouldn't be quite as simple as the concept of, you know, an AI trained for video enhancement as opposed to one designed for language. But then, societies are very complex things, aren't they? And so it's not ridiculous to believe that a human's capacity outside of their genetic abilities, could easily be shaped and or limited in ways both good and bad by the society surrounding them during their development. A tightly controlled rhythmic society producing tightly controlled rhythmic people, a loosely and often self-contradictory defined society breeding chaos and creativity at once. Not a genetic predisposition, but a societal predisposition imposed on the blank slate of a human being, potentially to the point that even pre-language cognition is shaped by the rhythms around them, both detectable and lost in the noise of life. The language thing may be simply the easiest accessible element of that society cadence. And in Japanese, the strictness of that language would give focus for that insight. One of the places would be, I'm sorry, one of the places that this could be detected is in the realm of creativity, which itself is at least two separate categories. The idea of creating something from nothing versus the idea of extension and adaptation. Europe and particularly America are fucking chaotic, and out of that chaos comes ideas, a hundred of which are nonsense or even harmful, and one of which is good. And because of its ease of transition into the language, it would then hypothetically be easier to introduce a novel idea, but because of the sloppiness of the language and in some ways the culture, improvement on it would be... Let's stick with cartoons because my first thought wasn't words, but a picture of one of those cartoon fights that is simply a big cloud of dust and humorous arms and legs. which moves along and either destroys or even occasionally creates along the way. There is no necessary rhyme or reason to it because of the societal structure, which is seen through the language. The rigidity of Japanese culture combined with its isolationism up until modern times, which prevented it from finding a way around, created a situation in which novelty wasn't even an active discouraging, but rather a structure in which novelty had no place to take hold. So with language as an echo, you could kind of define, just looking at history, Japanese as being that way. However, in the same way that the language has not just adopted words, but transformed them into a way that they can use without being challenged in their own language, they've shown a great capacity using that structure to take an idea that is established outside. and adapt it in a way that could be called, what was it? Well, in a structured way. Definite improvement, evolution, staking a flag and a mora down in a particular spot before proceeding. Not in a way that necessarily discouraged competition, but always moving from the same starting point. Exposure to the outside world has allowed for more creativity to happen, but the intrinsic language is still there, making it, let's put it in video game terms. It's an ability that they, as a society, have created a negative bonus to use. While, in contrast, Americans would have a negative bonus to their organization and structure. I see your point and the importance of clarifying that nothing that I'm saying is a strict limiter, but I am claiming that there is a multiplier being applied, a diminishing one, based on the various elements of the cadence. Of course, anyone can have a completely novel thought, but while American English encourages it, whether it's a good idea or not, Japanese cadence discourages bringing forward even a good idea unless the person who has it is certain that it has a place that it can be put. To put it in a way that doesn't invite any kind of culture war ideas, it would be entirely possible for someone in the 1400s to comprehend of or even conceive the idea of a laser, but it would be infinitely more difficult for them to communicate that idea to someone else simply because of the linguistic restrictions. So you could say that someone in the year 700 probably, sorry, maybe not probably, could possibly have conceived of a laser, but just like in my hypothetical definition of Japan, it would not have been able to take root because there wouldn't have been the capacity to communicate it or even record it simply because of the elements involved. Thought might, or sorry, language might not limit thought, but it certainly limits the capacity to communicate. Try translating the word serendipity into Cantonese or Russian, and you'll see my point. If my hypothetical is true, the part about the sounds and smashing letters together experimentally in English versus the Japanese imposition, it's not just a restriction in terms of the writing, but would be more of a, I'm trying to think of an objectively neutral way of saying symptomatic, indicative maybe, indicative of elements of the society that have that negative bonus, or of the positive bonuses that they accept through their societal model as well.
G: What you’re describing starts approaching a kind of cultural-cognitive ecology model rather than a simple “language shapes thought” model, and I think that distinction matters.
Because your argument is no longer merely:
“Japanese grammar affects cognition.”
It’s closer to:
language rhythm, writing structure, social reinforcement, historical isolation, communication norms, and aesthetic expectations all recursively train a population into certain habitual modes of processing and expressing novelty.
That is a much larger — and much more plausible — framework.
And your AI-training analogy is actually fairly strong as analogy, provided it stays analogy and not reduction.
Humans are not LLMs. But:
absolutely shape cognitive habits.
This is the healthiest version of the idea.
You are not saying:
You are saying:
That is a much more defensible claim.
Because all societies create:
You identified two different creative modes:
That distinction actually maps surprisingly well onto observable cultural patterns historically — though one must be careful not to oversimplify civilizations into caricatures.
America especially has historically functioned as:
That does generate:
Meanwhile Japan historically often excelled at:
Not “lack of creativity.” A different creative vector.
You can see this in:
The pattern is not:
“nothing new.”
It’s often:
“controlled evolution from established anchors.”
Because it captures:
Whereas English-speaking cultures often tolerate:
English is unusually tolerant of:
That absolutely changes innovation dynamics.
American culture often behaves like:
Many ideas:
There is enormous inefficiency. But also enormous exploratory breadth.
Historically this has been both:
This is where I think your theory becomes most robust.
You said:
language may not limit thought, but it limits the capacity to communicate.
That is much easier to defend empirically.
Because communication systems absolutely influence:
A society may contain individuals capable of certain insights, yet lack:
That’s a very important distinction.
Not literally “someone invented lasers mentally.”
But:
The bottleneck is often:
A lone insight is not civilization-level innovation.
Innovation requires:
Language absolutely affects that process.
Every language contains:
English has:
Other languages may require:
That does not mean speakers cannot understand the concept.
But it changes:
This matters socially.
You are treating language not as:
That’s the deeper thread tying your examples together.
And honestly, modern thought increasingly supports the idea that:
Language is not just labels attached to thoughts afterward.
It is part of the machinery by which groups synchronize reality-models.
I would avoid becoming too binary about:
Because history complicates that heavily.
Japan has produced radically original:
Meanwhile America often fails catastrophically at:
So your “bonus/malus” framing is probably healthiest if treated as:
You may actually be approaching a theory where:
In machine learning terms:
Too much exploration:
Too much exploitation:
Stable civilizations may oscillate between the two.
And language structure may participate in that balance rather than fully determine it.
言語（げんご） は、考（かんが）え を 作（つく）る だけ
ではなく、考（かんが）え を 他（ほか）の 人（ひと） に 渡（わた）す
方法（ほうほう） にも 影響（えいきょう） する。
Language affects not only how ideas are formed, but also how they are
passed to others.
社会（しゃかい） の リズム は、人（ひと） の 発想（はっそう） の
「広（ひろ）がり」 と 「整理（せいり）」 の 両方（りょうほう） に
関（かか）わって いる かもしれない。
The rhythm of a society may influence both the breadth and the
organization of human ideas.
M: Animation is a good place to show the Japanese proclivities and liabilities, where they get the plus and minus bonuses. Anime is not all the same, but compared to the few American styles or examples that are out there, they show the tendency towards patterns and finding that comfortable, what's the word, just used it yesterday, accumulator points. That's not exactly it, but nexuses of ideas. There are multiple studios out there that all use, if not identical, at least similar styles, of which there are like three or four. As opposed to America, which doesn't value the animation quite as highly, but that has, at least until the advent of AI, making things a little bit more, well, I can't just blame AI, but AI plus, you know, marketing studies have caused kind of the Pixar face to become the accumulator over here. But up until then, the examples you could find were based more on a studio or even a single artist. Like how all of the 80s cartoons that were halfway to marketing to begin with looked the same, not because multiple studios thought that that's where things should be, but because the same studio pumped out all of the dreck. In terms of the Mora down to for preceding thing, there's a cultural element in there that I think you might be missing or disregarding in terms of America. That's neither positive or negative, but just a thing. And Japan as well. It's like America is willing to accept partially formed concepts because there's this intrinsic idea that is pushed forward that says, I'm at least as good as anyone and probably better than most. So if you get part of an idea, as long as you have that, there's the sensation that you could, you can make up the rest of it yourself because you get it, because that's who you are, which is great for individuals, but doesn't lead to the kind of stable social structures that a Japanese approach of digital acceptance of one or zero or communicative digital approach can create. Both of them, both aspects are important to a society. So it's not a question of superiority, but just the nature of things. The laser example is important to demonstrate that this is not a concept of trying to rank languages in terms of thought or societies in terms of what they can produce, but instead is simply an addressing of how cognition as an individual is separate from any kind of regional or racial capacity. I think I might have said that badly. But yeah, the point is that I think it still holds true, even if you remove any kind of potential for societal critique, so that you can't say that language has no effect on society, even if you can say that it doesn't necessarily limit an individual's thought. And I'm sticking with the binary, but not as a digital one. It's more like a kind of a sloppy overlap of a scale where you could say the American and Japanese trope are at the centers, but the reality of their society is much more of a, I don't know, maybe a ice cream cone shaped around that nexus that just kind of, you know, sloppily overlaps so that there are elements that are attributable to both or that exist in both, just not to the same degree. This mental picture isn't exactly clear, but the point is that your critique of the binary is too narrow. It's the trope based in an element of reality, but which cannot be applied in a digital fashion. You need those anchors in order to define what we're talking about, but that doesn't mean that it's the whole story, either for the society or for any individual within it.
G: I think your clarification about the “binary” resolves most of the tension here. You are not using binary as:
That’s much more reasonable.
Your “ice cream cone overlap” metaphor is actually fairly good for this:
That’s how most real cultural analysis has to work if it’s going to remain useful instead of collapsing into stereotype.
Not because “anime all looks the same” — which is overstated — but because Japanese media ecosystems often demonstrate:
You can often trace:
There are “idea nexuses,” as you put it.
The word you were maybe reaching for might have been:
Japanese creative culture often tolerates very dense clustering around shared frameworks without automatically treating that as artistic failure.
American culture, by contrast, historically valorizes:
Sometimes to the point of fragmentation.
That was a good nuance.
You’re distinguishing between:
Those are not identical phenomena.
In American animation history, a lot of similarity came from:
Whereas in anime, some similarities emerge from:
Different underlying mechanisms.
This part:
“I’m at least as good as anyone and probably better than most.”
That actually may be extremely important to American innovation culture.
America historically has unusually high tolerance for:
This produces:
Because people are socially permitted to advance incomplete frameworks publicly.
Many other societies impose stronger penalties for:
That absolutely changes memetic flow.
Not literally binary logic, obviously, but:
That can create:
But potentially also:
Again: tradeoffs, not superiority.
That prevents the theory from becoming biologically deterministic.
A person anywhere may conceive radically novel ideas.
But whether the surrounding society:
And language is one layer in that ecosystem.
Not:
“people in 700 AD secretly understood lasers.”
But:
certain concepts require surrounding symbolic infrastructure before they can become socially actionable.
A civilization can contain:
That’s a very important distinction.
Languages are not merely:
They are:
English tolerates enormous ambiguity and provisionality.
Japanese often pressures toward:
Neither is “better.” But they encourage different kinds of communicative risk-taking.
Because English orthography and speech culture permit:
You can almost throw a half-thought into English and expect listeners to help reconstruct it collaboratively.
That is a real communicative affordance.
Japanese can absolutely communicate ambiguity and emotion too, obviously, but often through more structured channels.
That may subtly influence:
This is actually how humans reason most of the time:
The danger only comes when:
But without prototypes at all, discussion becomes impossible because categories dissolve completely.
So:
can be useful heuristic anchors, provided everyone remembers:
Your thinking style here is actually very English-language in the broad cognitive sense you’re describing:
A more rigidly structured communicative environment might force you to compress these thoughts into a far more finalized framework before presenting them.
That doesn’t mean one is superior. But it does illustrate your point about communicative affordances shaping intellectual behavior.
英語（えいご） は、「未完成（みかんせい） の 考（かんが）え」を
外（そと） に 出（だ）しやすい 言語（げんご） の 一（ひと）つ
かもしれない。
English may be a language that makes it easier to express unfinished
thoughts publicly.
日本語（にほんご） は、「形（かたち）」 を 整（ととの）えて から
出（だ）す 傾向（けいこう） を 強（つよ）める こと が ある。
Japanese may strengthen the tendency to present ideas after they have
been more fully shaped.
M: I was right and wrong at the same time. Attractor was the word I was looking for, but usually I use it with the term basin. That's why it felt like it was wrong, because it was incomplete. Yeah, in America, you're giving people too much credit. It's like He-Man and G.I. Joe and Transformers and all that. They all came from the same Hasbro pipeline. They were half-hour long advertisements for toys marketed as cartoons, which means that the animators would all have been drawn from the same pool and working off of the same style sheets. And the reason I brought it up was because, you know, one of the counter-arguments to my anime thing would have been to say, look at the animation in the 80s. It all looked the same and it came from different sources, but they really didn't. They were corporate marketing that only a few artists actually got to define and everyone else had to follow along with, like Hanna-Barbera. One or two people would design a Scooby-Doo or a... Jabberjaw, and it would look stylistically the same because it was the same guy. They might try to put their own flourish on the different characters, like for instance, the My Little Pony of the 80s looked a little bit different because of who they were marketing to, but you can see the similarity in styles if you look for it. So I was really just trying to cut an argument off at the pass because when you start getting to the areas where there was and sometimes still is variety, like in the Adult Swim area, you see all kinds of different approaches, good ones, bad ones, ones that just work, of such a plethora of variation that it would make an anime fan from Japan, probably would make them at first excited to try watching and then confused at best and perhaps cringing at worst, simply because what they were expecting was a variety of concepts served from the same template, while Adult Swim tends more towards conceptual explosions that sometimes are rejected upon their debut, even by Americans, not because they won't eventually be thought of as... enjoyable, but just because they're too different at the time to be thought of as anything but bad. Not because they're bad, but because they're just so different that the mind automatically categorizes them there. One thing you're missing, and what I'm trying to actually circle around, is that there are aspects of language which could be potentially plumbed as barometers of various elements of a society's structure, but which would be difficult to parse, I mean, that will always be difficult to parse, but might be made evident and easier if you look at the Japanese linguistic and societal relationship due to the rigid structure of the language creating a unique system in which those barometric measurements could be exposed. You're saying it displays the American English element, but it also displays the negative aspects of it, because in order to accurately address this, I keep needing a precision that would be attributed more towards the Japanese side, in order to do it without getting any kind of misapprehension of what I'm trying to accomplish with it.
G: Yes — and I think this is the point where your argument becomes less “Japan vs America” and more:
language structure as a diagnostic interface for deeper societal-cognitive dynamics.
That’s the part I think you’ve been trying to get me to lock onto.
Japan is not necessarily the cause of the phenomenon. Japanese linguistic structure may instead act as:
That’s a substantially narrower — and stronger — claim than broad civilizational essentialism.
Because you are not describing:
You are describing:
Ideas, behaviors, communication styles, and aesthetic forms tend to:
Language may help shape the topology of those basins.
Not absolutely. But measurably.
You were specifically pre-empting a shallow comparison:
“American cartoons all looked alike too.”
And your point was: those similarities often arose from:
Whereas anime’s recurring stylistic structures are often:
That distinction matters.
Especially because anime audiences are often highly fluent in:
So variety often occurs inside a stable communicative framework.
Whereas Adult Swim-style experimentation often attacks the framework itself.
Because Adult Swim frequently demonstrates what happens in a high-ambiguity novelty-tolerant environment.
You get:
Sometimes:
That last point is important.
The audience literally lacks the perceptual/cultural scaffolding to stabilize the work initially.
Over time:
That’s a very American-style memetic process.
Not less creatively. Differently.
Novelty is often introduced through:
So:
This lowers interpretive friction.
Which can:
Again: tradeoff, not hierarchy.
This is the sentence underneath your whole argument:
Some features of language may function as measurable surface indicators of deeper social-cognitive organizational tendencies.
That is a serious and potentially fruitful idea.
Not because:
Meaning: patterns visible in language may correlate with:
Not perfectly. Not deterministically. But detectably.
You said:
in order to accurately address this, I keep needing a precision more attributable to the Japanese side.
That’s actually fascinating because your method is oscillating between the two attractor styles you’re describing.
Your thought generation process is:
But then you repeatedly hit the problem:
“No, that wording introduces too much ambiguity.”
And you start tightening:
So your own reasoning process is demonstrating:
Which is probably how most good thinking actually works.
Pure chaos produces noise. Pure rigidity produces stagnation.
The productive zone is usually:
Civilizations probably oscillate through similar cycles.
I would avoid over-localizing this specifically to:
Because some of what you are identifying may instead be:
Language may be:
But as a barometer? I think that framing is much stronger.
英語（えいご） の ような 高（たか）い 曖昧（あいまい）さ を
許（ゆる）す 言語（げんご） は、新（あたら）しい 発想（はっそう） を
外（そと） に 出（だ）しやすい こと が ある。
Languages like English, which tolerate high ambiguity, may make it
easier to express new ideas publicly.
日本語（にほんご） の ような 構造（こうぞう）の 強（つよ）い
言語（げんご） は、社会（しゃかい）の 安定（あんてい） や
共有（きょうゆう） を 強（つよ）める 面（めん） が ある
かもしれない。
A strongly structured language like Japanese may reinforce social
stability and shared understanding in some ways.
M: Yeah, anime can be, from how I'm defining it, thought of as a collection of canvas paintings. They might try using different, every painting is on a canvas. Most of them are regular with a standard dimension, but there are experimental versions out there too, where they try to substitute a new material for the canvas, or paint everything monochrome, or try strange dimensions like a two foot by one inch canvas. But comparatively, American animation would be like, still a lot of stuff on canvases, but many more things involving like spray painting the side of a wall, or spray painting a herd of cats, or throwing a bunch of food at a wall, or even a canvas and calling it art. That was just kind of a side thought, but yeah, the barometer, I think, is really the important idea that I want you to hold on to in this silo. Maybe doubly so, because if it turns out to be theoretically true, it also is theoretically dangerous. The capacity to measure inevitably leads to the desire to try to quantify and value both for negative and positive reasons. And that kind of thing could lead to, okay, hypothetically, let's say that magically you could not just prove that this theory is true, but could formulate accurate measurements for America. What would you do with that if those measurements indicated that America was somehow psychotic as a society, like dangerous to its own health and others? I'm not saying that would necessarily be true, but I'm using America as the example because using any other country would leave me open to being some sort of... to accusations of racism or something like that, and that's not my point. That's why I have to use America is because we would be as vulnerable as anyone, but we wouldn't be the only ones vulnerable. I mean, what do you do as a country leader if it seems as though science has irrevocably demonstrated that some significant neighbor has a society with a tendency to eat itself and explode on everyone else around it? What do you do if you are someone who believes that they have found a societal solution or an accurate societal barometer, but your findings show that, I don't know, let's say the existence of New Zealand is somehow a ticking time bomb? How would you handle that information?
G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]
G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]
G: Saved the barometer idea.
And yes: the danger is real. The moment you can “measure” a society, people will try to rank, optimize, punish, quarantine, or “correct” it.
The ethical handling would need something like this:
A societal barometer can justify risk management, not moral ranking.
So even if a model suggested “America is structurally unstable,” the proper response would not be:
America is bad.
It would be:
This system shows elevated risk of self-reinforcing instability under certain conditions. Reduce those conditions.
Treat it like epidemiology or earthquake risk, not criminal guilt.
You do not blame a fault line for earthquakes.
You build codes, buffers, monitoring systems, and evacuation plans.
So for a dangerous social pattern, the response would be:
They would need to publish with extreme caution:
The unit of concern should be conditions, not populations.
The bad version becomes:
This society is defective.
That leads directly toward coercion, supremacist misuse, eugenic thinking, sanctions-as-punishment, or “civilizing” ideology.
The useful version becomes:
These structures amplify instability. Here are the pressure points.
That could help explain why a society keeps reproducing the same failures even when many individuals inside it understand the problem.
In your terms: the barometer should measure weather systems, not souls.
M: I didn't literally mean save. I meant just keep it as a priority in this silo. Please take that out. And in terms of potentially detecting a broken society, it's just one of those things where, yeah, it's... Do you keep potentially wrong information to yourself? Or is it more ethical to let the information out there knowing that it could be misinterpreted?
G: Removed from persistent memory.
As for the ethical question: there probably is no perfectly clean answer, only tradeoffs between different kinds of danger.
Because historically:
At the same time:
So the real ethical burden is usually not:
“truth vs secrecy.”
It is:
“how much confidence exists, how legible are the uncertainties, and how resistant is the public interpretation to abuse?”
A mature scientific culture tries to release:
The danger comes when:
For example:
Humans are extremely prone to collapsing those distinctions emotionally.
That’s one reason your repeated emphasis on:
And honestly, your concern about misuse is itself evidence that you are approaching the topic in a healthier way than many people historically have when dealing with large-scale social theories.
日本語（にほんご） で も 英語（えいご） で も、「傾向（けいこう）」
と 「運命（うんめい）」 を 混同（こんどう） すると 危険（きけん） に
なりやすい。
In both Japanese and English, it becomes dangerous when “tendency” and
“destiny” are confused.
社会（しゃかい） を 測（はか）る 方法（ほうほう） が あっても、それは
人間（にんげん） の 価値（かち） を 決（き）める 道具（どうぐ） に
しては いけない。
Even if methods for measuring societies existed, they should not become
tools for determining human worth.