The Advantages of Using Both Sides of Your Brain!

何故日本人は
優秀な人々なのか
There can be no argument that the Japanese have been remarkably successful in their arts and crafts, their architecture, their social customs, and even their military endeavors, for more than a thousand years.

Since the end of the Shogunate era in the 1870s, which maintained a policy of virtually prohibiting change in the country, the Japanese have proven equally adept at adapting foreign technology as well as inventing new technology.

I attribute the special knowledge and skills of the Japanese to the premise that they are primarily right-brain oriented as a result of their vowel-heavy language—a linguistic circumstance they fully share with only one other group of people: the Polynesians of the South Pacific.

Japan’s noted brain authority Dr. Tadanobu Tsunoda [author of The Japanese Brain and many other works] says the Japanese tend to first process information in the right side of their brains—the side that deals with feelings rather than facts; a factor that is readily discernible in their arts and crafts as well as in their traditional management practices.

In the Japanese mindset, aesthetics and form play an equal role with functionality and it is this cultural element that is responsible for the extraordinary beauty of such common things as their bowls, vases, paper doors, room dividers, kimono and yukata.

The fact that the Japanese are able to use both sides of their brains has given them significant advantages over strictly left-brained people [the rest of the world!] in designing and manufacturing products, from arts and crafts to electronic devices.

In my book WHY THE JAPANESE ARE A SUPERIOR PEOPLE! I address such topics as emotions vs. reason, the “fuzzy” [holistic] thinking of the Japanese vs. the linear thinking of other people, the diligence factor in Japanese behavior, and quality vs. profit, and identify a long list of views and practices that distinguish the Japanese from left-brain oriented people—and are important for foreigners to know about.

For foreign readers, one of the more interesting topics in the book may be what foreign women have to do to cope with their left-brain oriented male counterparts. The book is available from Amazon.com.