What is the philosophical significance of Heidegger’s interpretation of the Japanese notion of kotoba (言葉) for Japanese philosophy? Was his conversation with Tezuka Tomio a real dialogue or not? To answer to these correlated questions, I elucidate Heidegger’s 1954 essay “A Dialogue on Language” by following a topological mode of thinking, and I inquire into the way-making of a “thinking conversation”. First, I problematize whether Heidegger engaged in a genuine dialogue with Tezuka. To that end, I distinguish the hermeneutic horizon (...) of the actual encounter between Tezuka and Heidegger from Heidegger’s essay which places Tezuka (the Japanese) and Heidegger (the Inquirer) in a fictional philosophical conversation. Second, I argue that Heidegger’s topological method of interpretating kotoba can be read as a poetic means of thematizing East-West dialogue. Third and finally, exploring the topological sense of kotoba, I engage with third generation Kyoto School thinker Ueda Shizuteru’sideaof“hollow words” of language, situated in a twofold view of the world. I conclude that the true character of Heidegger’s conversation with Tezuka can be identified neither in Heidegger’s “actual” encounter with Tezuka, nor merely in Heidegger’s “hollow” essay. Departing from Ueda’s account of kotoba, it appears that a genuine conversation with language can be located in the dialogue of actuality and hollowness, which finds it expression in poetic language. (shrink)

East Asians and Westerners differ in various aspects of perception and cognition. For example, visual memory for East Asians is believed to be more influenced by the contextual aspects of a scene than is the case for Westerners (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). There are also differences in visual search: for Westerners, search for a long line among short is faster than for short among long, whereas this difference does not appear to hold for East Asians (Ueda et al., submitted). (...) However, it is unclear how these group-level differences originate. To investigate the extent to which they depend upon environment, we tested visual search and visual memory in East Asian immigrants who had lived in Canada for different amounts of time. Recent immigrants were found to exhibit no search asymmetry, unlike Westerners who had spent their lives in Canada. However, immigrants who had lived in Canada for more than two years showed performance comparable to that of Westerners. These differences could not be explained by the general analytic/holistic processing distinction believed to differentiate Westerners and East Asians, since all observers showed a strong holistic tendency for visual recognition. Results instead support the suggestion that exposure to a new environment can significantly affect the particular processes used to perceive a given stimulus. (shrink)