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Abstract
Naikan has been viewed as a culturally specific therapy aimed at resocializing clients into conservative Japanese social norms. The Ajase complex is used to support this view by illustrating specifically Japanese therapeutic needs arising from the Japanese mother-child dynamic. Based on ethnographic work conducted in Japan and Austria from 1997 to 2003, this article traces the logic of this conservative view and the challenges posed to it by Naikan's increasing success outside Japan. Reexamining Naikan and Ajase in light of the Buddhist tradition from which they stem shows that Naikan's efficacy lies in its mechanism of deconstructing fixed, unrealistic notions of self and other and replacing them with a new understanding of relationality that recognizes individuality as existing only within interdependence. This better explains Naikan's success abroad and shows that the efficacy of culturally situated therapies may be less limited than previously thought if they are based on psychological principles with cross-cultural relevance. [Naikan, Ajase complex, Japan, Buddhism, mother-child relationship]
As a "native" anthropologist, I conducted 14 months of field research on Naikan in Japan from August 1997 until early October 1998 and later, in summer 2001, visited Naikan centers that had been opened in Austria. My interest was to learn more about this therapeutic practice of looking within oneself. I was intrigued to discover how it functions, why people do it, what it is effective for, and what the differences are between indigenous Japanese therapies and Western ones. Like many Japanese, I had some popular notion of the practice of Naikan but no firsthand knowledge. My father, for example, responded with laughter when I told him what I would be studying, exclaiming, "You mean that practice where you cry and cry and say, 'Mommy, forgive me!'?" His statement reflects a common notion about Naikan: that it is a culturally conservative practice that plays on Japanese feelings of guilt and a particular mother-child relationship and that it is therefore unsuitable for modern-minded Japanese, much less nonJapanese. In fact, Naikan is even referred to by some as Nakikan, a wordplay that changes its name to imply it is a "crying practice."
I had no reason to doubt this popular interpretation of Naikan, but I wanted to investigate the practice myself. Upon starting my research...