Anim Cogn (2003) 6 : 293–299
DOI 10.1007/s10071-003-0197-4

O R I G I N A L A RT I C L E

Frans B. M. de Waal

Silent invasion: Imanishi’s primatology and cultural bias in science

Received: 29 July 2002 / Revised: 5 November 2002 / Accepted: 1 September 2003 / Published online: 10 October 2003
© Springer-Verlag 2003

When it comes to our relation with nature, there is no escaping the tension between perception and projection.
What we discover in nature is often what we put into it in
the first place. Consequently, the way naturalists havecontributed to humanity’s know-thyself mission can beunderstood only in the context of the stained glasses
through which they stare in nature’s mirror. Given thatthese glasses cannot be taken off, the next best thing is tocompare alternative ones.
The present essay explores cultural bias in the context
of my own little corner of science, which is the behaviorof monkeys and apes. Inasmuch as the way we look atother animals reflects the way we look at ourselves, thestudy of animal behavior is subject to far greater cultural
preconceptions than many other fields of the natural sciences. For example, one can look at organisms as cooperative ventures – both on the inside, among cells within thebody, and on the outside, when animals cooperate to survive. But one can equally well stress cut-throat competition and so-called “selfish” genes. It is not hard to support
either position, but in the West we certainly love to depict
nature as red in tooth and claw.
The founder of Japanese primatology, Kinji Imanishi(1902–1992), saw nature as inherently harmonious. Species fit together in a large organic whole, each species
finding its own niche. That the contrast with the Western
approach persists today was related to me by Tijs Goldschmidt, a Dutch biologist, who works on cichlids in Lake
Victoria (Goldschmidt 1998). Goldschmidt once visited
Japanese colleagues working on the same fish family innearby Lake Tanganyika. Whereas Goldschmidt’s own
team explained the species explosion in these lakes interms of competition and mutual exploitation, the Japa-

The first Imanishi-Itani Memorial Lecture of Primatology, Kyoto,
18 February 2002
F. B. M. de Waal (✉)
Living Links, Yerkes Primate Center, Emory University,
GA 30322 Atlanta, USA
Fax: +1-404-7273270,
e-mail: dewaal@emory.edu

nese saw it in terms of complementary roles within theecosystem. While the two teams agreed on the data, they
operated on the basis of strikingly different outlooks.
East–West disagreements about the naturalness of competition versus cooperation go back at least to the late 19th
century debate between Thomas Henry Huxley and Petr
Kropotkin, in which the former took a “gladiatorial” viewof nature and the latter advocated a more synergistic model(Todes 1989; de Waal 1996). These disagreements rarely
show a clear winner. They rather tend to have the flavor ofthe-glass-is-half-full versus the-glass-is-half-empty debate.
A prime instance of such a debate was the reaction to
Imanishi’s views by British paleontologist, Beverly Halstead, who found it necessary to travel all the way to Japanto set the old master straight. In 1984, armed with a heavy
load of prejudice and admitting no firsthand knowledge of
Imanishi’s writings, Halstead came to confront Imanishi.
In his unpublished English manuscript (a copy of which
can be found in the Kyoto University Library), he noted:“In my Western way, I came to Kyoto, the home of Imanishi and his School seeking the man and his ideas, but I
came as an avowed opponent” (Halstead 1984, unpublished manuscript). After handing the 82-year-old emeritus
professor a gift – a bottle of whisky – he presented him witha document translated into Japanese containing statements
such as “Imanishi’s evolution theory is Japanese in its unreality” and “You see the wood, but the trees are not in focus”. No wonder that Imanishi’s face, as Halstead recalled,
betrayed profound regret at having agreed to the meeting.
What could have compelled Halstead to be so rude?
Why, upon his return to Britain, did he write an article that
trashed not just Imanishi’s views, but his entire country as
well? How did Nature dare run it with the following patronizing introduction: “The popularity of Kinji Imanishi’s
writings in Japan gives an interesting insight into Japanesesociety” (Halstead 1985)? Could not the same subtitle beapplied to, say, Darwin’s theory? As has been pointed out
many times, it can hardly be coincidental that ideas aboutfree-market capitalism and the struggle for existence aroseat the same time in the same place. The common habit offraming evolutionary questions in terms of costs and benefits leaves little doubt about this connection.

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What we have here, then, is the familiar case of one culture perceiving another’s biases more acutely than its own.
Even if Imanishi’s ecological and evolutionary ideas are
now considered problematic, he and his followers wereright about quite a few other things. This is clear from thefundamental change that has taken place in the study of animal behavior over the past few decades: Western scientists
have on a grand scale adopted Japanese concepts and approaches, albeit often ignorant of their origin. It is unclear ifthey have also embraced the underlying outlook, which israther far removed from their own, yet they certainly havebeen receptive to the observation techniques and specificconcepts, such as individualized relationships and culturaltransmission, first employed within Japanese primatology.

Imanishi’s legacy
Imanishi was an extraordinarily prolific, widely known
author in the life sciences: the Stephen Jay Gould ofJapan. He started out as an entomologist, but was also an
ecologist, anthropologist, primatologist, mountaineer, andphilosopher. He received an official faculty position – inthe humanities, not the sciences – only after he was approximately 50 years old. Being of wealthy descent, he
could do whatever he wanted without the obligations thatcome with salary. He had only one room at Kyoto University with no furniture other than a low desk at which hewrote his books sitting in lotus position on a tatami: an ascetic, cultured man of immense influence.
Apart from being a Himalayas climber, Imanishi had
two main interests. One was the interconnectedness among
all living things and the environments in which they arefound. Even though he rarely mentioned those who influenced him, he was widely read and elements of his approach are traceable to outside influences, ranging from
Jacob von Uexküll to Petr Kropotkin, and perhaps most of
all Kitaro Nishida, founder of a school of philosophy thatwas particularly influential in the 1930s and 1940s. I cannot judge this for myself, as my information comes fromsecondary sources, but Imanishi’s emphasis on intuitionand perception of the whole, his dislike of reductionism,and his view that the individual is secondary to the society
probably derived from Nishida, the Kyoto philosopher of“nothingness,” who used to think deep thoughts while
strolling along a rustic little river lined by cherry trees –still known as the philosopher’s way – that runs past theuniversity campus (Yoshimi 1998).1
1 In the fall of 1998, I visited China and Japan for several months on ascholarship provided by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). During this time, I spoke with many different primatologists and other academics both at my home base, Kyoto, and throughout Japan, from the north to the south. This included a discussion
with the late Jun’ichiro Itani, who offered me a firsthand glimpse of
Imanishi’s early ideas and their reception both in Japan and in theWest. It also included a visit to Koshima and discussions with Satsue
Mito, who from the start assisted the studies of potato-washing on theisland. The reader is referred to de Waal (2001), for a more comprehensive account of my impressions of Japanese science and the connections and differences to the Western approach.

Imanishi did most of his research on mayfly larvae inthe much larger Kamogawa River that runs throughKyoto’s heart. His work on aquatic life led him to develop
the idea of habitat segregation, meaning that different but
related species select their own distinct lifestyles and microhabitats, which allows them to coexist harmoniously inthe same environment. Imanishi did not seek to explain
how segregation might have come about, and was vehemently opposed to explanations that involved strife.
The second interest and lasting legacy of Imanishi concerns the study of primate behavior. Here, the approach
was very innovative thanks to the absence of human–animal dualism. Being the product of a culture that does not
set the human species apart as the only one with a soul,
Imanishi had trouble with neither the idea of evolution northat of humans as descendants of apes. To the Buddhist
mind, this is eminently plausible, even likely, and has nothing insulting about it (Asquith 1991; Sakura 1998; Matsuzawa 2003).
Plato’s “great chain of being”, which places humans
above all other animals, is absent from Eastern philosophy. In most Eastern belief systems, the human soul canreincarnate in many shapes and forms, so all living things
are spiritually connected. A man can become a fish and afish can become a god or goddess. The fact that primates,
our closest animal relatives, are native to China and Japan,
has only helped to strengthen the belief in the interconnectedness of life. Unlike European fables, which are populated with ravens, rabbits, foxes and the like, Japaneseand Chinese folk tales and poetry are laced with references to gibbons and monkeys, such as the three wise
macaques of Tendai Buddhism (“see no evil, hear no evil,
speak no evil”).
Feeling humility towards animals affects the way westudy them. The study of animal behavior in Japan has
never been contaminated by feelings of superiority or anaversion to acknowledging humanlike characteristics inanimals. According to Imanishi’s most respected student,
the late Jun’ichiro Itani (1926–2001): “Japanese culture
does not emphasize the difference between people and animals and so is relatively free from the spell of anti-anthropomorphism ... we feel that this has led to many important discoveries.” (Itani 1985; see also Asquith 1984,1986). Thus, Japanese primatologists plotted kinship relationships over multiple generations, assuming that animals
must have a complex family life, just like we do. They
started all of this before any Western scientists thought ofit (e.g. Kawamura 1958; Yamada 1963), and years before
William Hamilton (1964) developed kin selection theory.
Kinship networks were a true discovery, perhaps the greatest of Japanese primatology (Reynolds 1992).
In fact, the smooth acceptance of one major aspect ofevolutionary theory – the continuity among all life forms– meant that questions about animal behavior were, fromthe start, uncontaminated by the human/animal divide assumed in the West. As a result, Imanishi’s students moved
ahead rapidly with a distinctly anthropological agenda: bystudying other primates, they sought to understand theorigins of the human family and society. In all of this,295

Imanishi was well ahead of the celebrated Western paleontologist, Louis Leakey, who developed a similar agenda.
Leakey sent several primatologists out to study great apes
in the wild in the belief that these animals could provide us
with information about the earliest stages of human evolution. But by the time he did so, in the 1960s and 1970s, thequestions and techniques that would prove useful in thisendeavor had already been developed by Japanese primatologists, who had individually identified their monkeys
and followed them long enough to understand the extraordinary complexity of primate society, and the degree
to which every group was different. Most importantly,
Imanishi had formulated the question of animal culture ina way that invited further study (see following discussion).
But instead of comparing Imanishi with Leakey, the more
appropriate parallel is with Ray Carpenter, the American
primatological pioneer. Carpenter was a trained physiologist, but also a first-rate behavioral scientist who preferred
the field over the laboratory. He worked on rhesus
macaques released on the Caribbean island of Cayo Santiago as well as on wild howler monkeys and gibbons. He
was interested in social relationships and drew sociograms
that mapped group structure (Carpenter 1964). He did not
go nearly so far in this as the Japanese primatologists, whowere able to distinguish over a 100 monkeys and trace theirfamily ties over generations, but Carpenter shared withthem a distinctly “sociological” outlook. It is not surprising,
therefore, that Carpenter was the first Westerner to becomea staunch supporter of Japanese primatology (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Kinji Imanishi (1902-1992) and Ray Carpenter (19051975), in front of Pennsylvania State University, where Carpenter
was working during Imanishi’s visit to the United States. Carpenter is holding the first ever issue of the journal Primates, the oldest
journal in its field, now published by Springer-Verlag. The photograph was taken by the late Itani in 1958. Copyright: Jun’ichirou
Itani Memorial Visual Archives of the Primate Research Institute,
Kyoto University. With special permission from Tetsuro Matsuzawa

Imanishi’s approach to primate behavior amounts to aparadigmatic shift that today has been adopted by all ofprimatology and beyond. Thus, if we no longer perceive
anthropomorphism as the problem it once was (Mitchell
et al. 1997; de Waal 1999), and if students of long-lived
animals in the field – whether they watch dolphins or elephants – routinely identify individuals and follow themover their life span (de Waal and Tyack 2003), then we are
employing techniques from the East initially mocked andresisted by the West.

Language barrier
In 1958, Imanishi and his students toured American universities to report their findings. They encountered a great
deal of ridicule for humanizing their subjects, and profound skepticism about the ability of mere humans to distinguish all those monkeys. People found it hard to believe that such a feat was even possible, expressing disbelief in front of their visitors (Itani, personal communication). We should also not forget that it has been only a few
decades since university professors in the West used towarn primatology students against the atheoretical approach, the anthropomorphism, and the general lack of
relevance of papers by Japanese colleagues, while discouraging reference to any of this literature (Asquith 1996).
So, how is it possible that the basic tenets of Imanishi’s
school are now all but taken for granted in the West? To
understand how this “alien invasion” of ideas could havetaken place under our noses, we need to look at Easternculture, and also appreciate how linguistic monopoly affects science (Gibbs 1995).
The answer to the first question is, as we have seen,that Eastern science had no fondness for the traditional
Western human/animal dualism. The advantages of ignoring this dualism were immediately obvious to openminded scientists, such as Carpenter, who helped speed up
a process in the West that might have occurred anyway.
The answer to the second question lies in language(Bartholomew 1998; Asquith 2000). It is hard for nonEnglish speakers to make themselves heard in an Englishspeaking world. Since English is not my native tongue,
I am familiar with the effort involved in writing and speaking another language – even though my native Dutch isprobably the closest any other language comes to English.
As a student, all of my textbooks were in two foreign languages (German and English), and when I later started
writing papers I spent an inordinate amount of time searching through thick dictionaries to express my thoughts in
English. This effort, which has to be multiplied by ten forJapanese scientists, is blithely ignored by native English
speakers.
The typical native English speaker is monolingual.
Lack of familiarity with other languages makes him or her
imagine that these must be copies of English. Other languages have not only different words and grammars, theyalso represent different worldviews. They are conceptually different, so that many expressions and nuances are un-296translatable. For example, Dutch is richly sprinkled withdiminutives – nonexistent in most languages – which convey a cuteness befitting a small, tidy country. And the way
the French talk about food is not even imaginable for mostEnglish-speakers. The differences go far deeper than this,though: they determine the way we construct reality. Thus,
if Chinese words often serve as both nouns and verbs, thismakes it natural for the Chinese to see objects as events,
and to understand the world as consisting of processes instead of entities.
English, which through an accident of history has
emerged as the world’s dominant tongue, is a perfectly finelanguage. To have a single language for international papers and conferences is far preferable, in my mind, than tohave a number of competing languages. So, English itself
is not the problem: the problem is the attitude of native
English-speakers.
Naturally, you speak your own language faster thanany other. This can make it impossible for those who are
not native English speakers to keep up at international
meetings. It is worse on those occasions when an English
speaker does not pull any punches while debating a scientist whose English is poor. I have seen it happen often.
The English speaker rises from the audience, articulates apenetrating question, sometimes with a joke mixed in, andbarely takes the time to listen to the clumsily phrased reply of his opponent. Since native English speakers dominate all discussions, they form a class of great minds strutting around in the secure knowledge that no one will darechallenge them.
Good ideas formulated in bad English either die or get
repackaged. Once the idea has been moved into the domain of good English, its origin tends to be forgotten. It isa bit like a movie interpretation of a French play (e.g.
“The Birdcage” – ”La Cage aux Folles;” “Beauty and theBeast” – ”La Belle et la Bête”): once the movie has comeout, the vast majority of people believe that the idea musthave arisen in Hollywood. Once expressed in English, anidea becomes English or American. This is a natural process that probably applies to any language, yet in science
we should give intellectual credit where credit is due.
So, one reason Eastern thinking could creep into thestudy of animal behavior unnoticed is that it filtered into
the literature through awkward formulations and translations that native English speakers found easy to improveupon. In the process, they proceeded to erase part of thecredit for the new ideas. Hence, even though Imanishi put
us on track of animal culture – which is now about thehottest topic in our field – Western scientists rarely, if
ever, mention his name in this context.

Animal culture
As far back as 1952, when European ethologists were
working on instinct theories and American behaviorists
were rewarding rats for pressing levers, Imanishi wrote a
paper that criticized established views of animals (Imanishi

1941, 1952). He inserted a debate between a wasp, a monkey, an evolutionist, and a layman, in which the possibility was raised that animals other than ourselves might
have culture. Hirata et al. (2001) provide a translation of a
portion of this imaginary debate. The proposed definition
was simple: if individuals learn from one another, their
behavior may, over time, become different from that inother groups, thus creating a characteristic culture (Itaniand Nishimura 1973; Nishida 1987).
This approach brought culture down to its lowest common denominator: the social rather than genetic transmission of behavior. It was confirmed within a few years of thebook’s publication, from observations of Japanese macaques
washing sweet potatoes on Koshima island. We now knowthat cultural learning is widespread, and includes birdsong(e.g. West et al. 2003), the use of tools by chimpanzees(e.g. Whiten et al. 1999), and the hunting techniques ofwhales (e.g. Rendell and Whitehead, 2001). New examples are discovered almost daily.
Until recently, however, Western scientists have resisted
the idea of animal culture, mainly by insisting on highly
specific mechanisms of social transmission – such as teaching and imitation – that many animals may not show, andthat even human culture may not rely on to the degree thatthese authors assume (Premack and Premack 1994; Tomasello 1994). In a direct challenge to Imanishi’s school, Galef(1992) wrote an influential critique of the Koshima studies in which he claimed that (1) food provisioning on theisland may have been conducted selectively so as to reward individuals who showed desirable behavior, such as
potato washing, and (2) individual learning might suffice
as an explanation of the spreading of the habit. Galef, who
himself never set foot on Koshima, relied on a couple ofsentences in Green (1975), who did visit there in 1968 and1969.
By that time, staff on Koshima would occasionally accommodate people who wanted to see monkeys perform
potato washing. They did so by feeding the monkeys close
to the ocean and making sure the best “performers” wereat hand. Green (1975), who attended only one potato feeding during his entire stay, was aware that the method ofprovisioning was intended to benefit tourists and visiting
researchers, such as himself. His anecdotal account from
more than 15 years after the start of potato washing cannot
possibly tell us how the habit originated or spread. For
this, we need to turn to the careful documentation by Kawai(1965), which covered a much earlier period in which few
outsiders ever showed up on Koshima.
My own discussions with Satsue Mito (who conducted
the potato feeding in the early years), raised serious doubtsthat the procedures imagined by Galef (1992) had everbeen applied (de Waal 2001). First of all, this would nothave been logical. For a behavior to spread, it is criticallyimportant that individuals who do not show the behavior
get an opportunity to do so. Hence the need to provide sweet
potatoes to non-washing monkeys. Second, one cannot
feed a troop of monkeys any way one wishes without causing incredible turmoil. One needs to feed “down” the hierarchy. If one were to feed low-ranking and young mon-

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keys before the rest, they would get harassed to a lifethreatening degree by the higher-ups. Mito understood
this, and fed the adult males and high-ranking females first.
Despite this provisioning technique, potato washing started
with the young and low-ranking individuals. In fact, theolder males never learned even though they were fed first.
It is furthermore obvious from the excellent reviews by
Kawai (1965), Watanabe (1994), Hirata et al. (2001), andothers, that potato-washing spread among the monkeys ina manner consistent with the troop’s social relationships.
Thus, the first individuals to show the behavior after Imo,a juvenile female, had started the habit were her age peers
and mother. What would be the probability of this happening by chance? In a post hoc analysis of extant data,
the speed of learning appeared consistent with a socialtransmission model. Lefebvre (1995) argued that social
learning can be distinguished from individual learning by
the rate with which a novel behavior spreads. Social learning can be expected to produce an accelerating function,
as the increase in the number of practitioners of the new
behavior increases the likelihood of naïve individuals being exposed to it, whereas individual learning can be expected to produce a linear function. Based on these assumptions, Lefebvre concluded that most analyzable primate traditions were consistent with social learning. Thereis no urgent reason, therefore, to abandon potato-washingon Koshima as an example of social transmission of a specific habit in a monkey population (de Waal 2001).
This is not to say that the issue brought up by Galef etal. of the mechanism of transmission is irrelevant. Whereas
biologists consider mechanism secondary to function, certainly at the level of the definition of a phenomenon (e.g.
we do not define locomotion or respiration by the way it
is accomplished), the various ways in which cultural transmission is achieved remain a puzzle, and demand full attention. It should be added, though, that learning psychologists, coming out of a tradition in which single animals
are tested on artificial tasks, may not have the best approach available to tackle this puzzle. This can be illustrated by Galef’s (1992) confident claim that imitated acts
will automatically extinguish if they fail to deliver rewards.
Whereas this is logical from a reinforcement perspective, we know a lot of examples of culturally transmitted
behavior without any reward value. Just two examples are
the stone handling of Japanese monkeys on Arashiyama,
which appears to be a functionless activity (Huffman 1996),
and the nut-cracking attempts of immature chimpanzees.
Infant and juvenile chimpanzees lack the skill, strength,
and coordination to crack nuts, yet in their games combine stones and nuts in a manner that eventually leads tothe cracking of edible nuts. Their first successes occur
only after many years of unrewarded activity, however(Inoue-Nakamura and Matsuzawa 1997). In fact, contrary
to Galef’s claim, extrinsic reinforcement may have little
relevance for the spreading of cultural habits (de Waal
2001).
An ecologically valid approach to social learning would
require that we consider the context in which it takes
place in nature. For example, the currently popular imita-tion experiments, in which nonhuman primates or otheranimals face models of another species (always ours), or
witness a single demonstration of a novel act, are miles
removed from the circumstances under which social
learning evolved. In nature, observers and models belong
to the same species and usually copy behavior after having witnessed it over and over again. This is the sort oflearning context that we need to know more about.
Rather than focusing on reinforcement, new conceptualizations assume that social learning rests on identification with models and an urge to act like them. Such conformist assumptions underlie de Waal’s (1998, 2001)
Bonding- and Identification-based Observational Learning (BIOL) as well as Matsuzawa et al.’s (2001) education
by master–apprenticeship. These theories have no trouble
explaining why imitation experiments with human models
have occasionally failed: they assign a critical role tocloseness between the observer and its behavioral model,
which, together with a desire to behave like others, promotes the behavioral convergence of which culture ismade. The proposed mechanisms are socio-emotional as
much as cognitive.

Assumptions versus theory
In her illuminating comparisons of Western and Japanese
primatology, Asquith pointed out many useful distinctions, such as the aforementioned lack of human–animal
dualism in Eastern religion. Asquith does not believe, as
Halstead (1985) did, that Darwinism was ever rejected by
Japanese scientists, but rather that Western scientists tended
towards either-or thinking (i.e., one is either for or against
an idea), whereas their Japanese colleagues simply drewon the most appealing elements from evolutionary theory,
ignoring the rest (Asquith 1986, 1991).
Japanese primatology was never as atheoretical assome Western scientists believed. My impression is rather
that not everyone in the world is comfortable formulatingideas in the fashion popular in the West. We set up theories that are testable, meaning that they can be falsified.
For us, science is a confrontational process that seeks todecide who is right and who is wrong. It takes a certain
mind-set to operate in this manner. Japanese scientists
have no lack of assumptions or expectations about theworld, but are reluctant to propose them in a way that invites disagreement.
Japanese primatologists hold clear expectations, whichis evident from a little-known historic example from field
primatology. Until the late 1960s, the Western view was
positively Rousseauian: apes were autonomous “noble savages”, free of social ties and obligations. All they did wastravel in haphazard combinations from one fruit tree to thenext. The ever-changing parties of chimpanzees that researchers were encountering in the forests of Africa
seemed to confirm that they lacked a coherent group life.
While Jane Goodall was describing female chimpanzees and their dependent offspring as the only bonded

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units (van Lawick-Goodall 1968), a Japanese team working a mere 130 km south of Gombe was working underquite different assumptions. How could a species that supposedly fills the gap between ourselves and other animals
lack a complex social life, they wondered. Eventually,
through persistent field observations, they cracked the
puzzle and showed that chimpanzees live in so-called unitgroups with a stable membership (Nishida 1968; Takasaki
2000).
Western scientists soon replaced the term “unit group”
by “community,” which did not facilitate the retention of
the discovery’s origin. The male-bonded society of thechimpanzee is now a staple of primatological knowledge– there is ample evidence for territorial aggression between different communities (e.g., Goodall 1986) – but
the initial discovery came from a firm conviction thatchimpanzees could not be nearly as “individualistic” asWestern science had made them out to be.
The important point of all this is that Imanishi’s views,
even though not phrased as formal theory and reaching theWest only with great delay, have clearly won out. Views
that were at odds with traditional Western dualisms (e.g.,
animal/human, nature/culture) slipped into our thinking
unnoticed along with observation techniques of greatvalue. This silent invasion from the East helped the Westchuck some of its cultural baggage. The way this happened, however, and the general lack of acknowledgment,
hint at the difficulties other cultural and linguistic groups
experience when they try to find a voice in science.
We should not be deceived by the West’s scientifichegemony: it is as unrealistic as that of one country thinking it can order the rest of the world around. The study ofnature cannot be left to a single priesthood who all think
the same. Each culture is too wrapped up in its own relation with nature to step back and see it as it is. To gain afull picture requires scientists with all kinds of backgrounds, who together take on a task equivalent to comparing the images in a range of fun-house mirrors. Somewhere in that heavily distorted information resides the truth.
Acknowledgements This essay could not have been written without my Japanese colleagues during my pleasant stay in their country. I am immensely grateful to Toshisada Nishida and Tetsuro
Matsuzawa, who invited me to Kyoto in 1998 and 2002, respectively, and to the late Jun’ichiro Itani, Pamela Asquith, Toshikazu
Hasegawa, Mariko Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, Michael Huffman, Suehisa
Kuroda, Satsue Mito, Osamu Sakura, Hideko Takeshita, Kunio
Watanabe, Soshichi Uchii, and many other colleagues for helpful
discussions. I also thank three anonymous referees of this journal
for constructive comments and supplemental references to the literature.

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