Japanese Cultural Psychology and Empathic Understanding: Implications for Academic and Cultural Psychology

This article examines personally divergent ways that Japanese individuals understand and act on the cultural script of empathy (omoiyari). Through interviews with highschool students and observations of people in real‐life situations, I shall show the contradictory and multidimensional motives that do not always fit into the culturally idealized patterns of empathic behavior. In so doing, I shall critique Markus and Kitayama's and Wierzbicka's use of hypothetical problems and situations to generalize from cultural norm to individual subjects. Implications of the empathic and experiential approach to academic and cultural psychology are discussed.