Right brain

I attended a conference at Shinjuku last weekend. Since there wasn't much time for sightseeing, I decided to visit a bookstore that is open till night.

It's hard to limit yourself to the English session at a bookstore in Japan; it is either too small or nonexistent. Many readers may be having problem understanding Japanese book, as I did. But I'm fine with the children's books. Picture books make use of a universal language that connects us beyond country. "Just as the mode of the rational mind is words, the mode of emotions is nonverbal," writes Daniel Goleman. No surprise, then, that my daughter loves the story book that I bought even that is written in English but translated into Japanese. She likes the boy wearing a balaclava and rescuing a beached whale. A lot.

My daughter can read the expression and intuit the boy's emotion. We created a name for the boy, came up with our own ideas what the Japanese text should have meant, and laughed together.

And this is exactly what Paul Ekman has shown before, when he traveled to Japan, Argentina, Brazil and Chile, bringing along photos of faces in different expressions. Asians and South Americans interpreted the expressions the same way Americans did. Still, the psychologist wasn't sure if television could have influenced the common interpretations. Ekman went to the highlands of New Guinea and showed the same set of facial expression photos to tribesmen. The same.