At present I must confess that the argument seems to me utterly fallacious, and for the sufficient reason that the personal element is introduced, if not always explicitly yet at least implicitly, in almost every sentence uttered.  The method of its expression, it is true, is quite different from that adopted by Western languages, but it is none the less there.  It is usually accomplished by means of the titles, “honorific” particles, and honorific verbs and nouns.  “Honorable shoes” can’t by any stretch of the imagination mean shoes that belong to me; every Japanese would at once think “your shoes”; his attention is not distracted by the term “honorable” as is that of the foreigner; the honor is largely overlooked by the native in the personal element implied.  The greater the familiarity with the language the more clear it becomes that the impressions of “impersonality” are due to the ignorance of the foreigner rather than to the real “impersonal” character of the Japanese thought or mind.  In the Japanese methods of linguistic expression, politeness and personality are indeed, inextricably interwoven; but they are not at all confused.  The distinctions of person and the consciousness of self in the Japanese thought are as clear and distinct as they are in the English thought.  In the Japanese sentence, however, the politeness and the personality cannot be clearly separated.  On that account, however, there is no more reason for denying one element than the other.

So far from the deficiency of personal pronouns being a proof of Japanese “impersonality,” i.e., of lack of consciousness of self, this very deficiency may, with even more plausibility, be used to establish the opposite view.  Child psychology has established the fact that an early phenomenon of child mental development is the emphasis laid on “meum” and “tuum,” mine and yours.  The child is a thoroughgoing individualist in feelings, conceptions, and language.  The first personal pronoun is ever on his lips and in his thought.  Only as culture arises and he is trained to see how disagreeable in others is excessive emphasis on the first person, does he learn to moderate his own excessive egoistic tendency.  Is it not a fact that the studied evasion of first personal pronouns by cultured people in the West is due to their developed consciousness of self?  Is it possible for one who has no consciousness of self to conceive as impolite the excessive use of egoistic forms of speech?  From this point of view we might argue that, because of the deficiency of her personal pronouns, the Japanese nation has advanced far beyond any other nation in the process of self-consciousness.  But this too would be an error.  Nevertheless, so far from saying that the lack of personal pronouns is a proof of the “impersonality” of the Japanese, I think we may fairly use it as a disproof of the proposition.