By taking as background a few examples from Japanese culture and society, as well as an ethnographic insight, this article reconsiders the way anthropology usually deals with and talks about issues regarding cultural differences in human relations. These issues, which start from the fact that different cultures articulate human relations in different ways, have as one of their main theoretical outcomes the analysis around the categories of “self” or “person.” However, within this move lies something akin to a “gestalt misconception” that reduces a shared moral understanding (human relations) to an analysis of conceptual categories and their cognitive, psychological, subjective (or other) processes. Alternatively, the article proposes a more dialogical approach informed by Gadamer’s idea of “dialog” and “fusion of horizons,” where one aims to learn from other cultures and not about them. As a result, some reflections of a philosophical, moral, and practical character are presented, leaving theoretical formulations about the “Japanese self” out of the equation. This article’s general purpose is not an exploration of “Japaneseness,” but rather a probe into the possibilities of Being.

本文以日本文化和社会的一些例子以及人种学的见识为背景，重新考虑了人类学通常处理的方式，并讨论了有关人际关系中文化差异的问题。这些问题源于不同文化以不同方式表达人类关系这一事实，而围绕“自我”或“人”的分析作为其主要的理论成果之一。但是，在此举中存在类似于“格式塔误解”的概念，这种概念误解将共同的道德理解（人际关系）简化为对概念类别及其认知，心理，主观（或其他）过程的分析。另外，本文提出了一种更具对话性的方法，以加达默尔（Gadamer）的“对话”和“视域融合”思想为指导，旨在学习来自其他文化，而不是关于它们。结果，提出了对哲学，道德和实践性的一些反思，而关于“日本自我”的理论表述则不在考虑之列。本文的总体目的不是探索“日本性”，而是探究存在的可能性。