JAPANESE GUESTS AND EUROPEAN INQUIRERS: CULTURAL BARRIERS OR FLAWED HERMENEUTICS?1

Martin Heidegger's Dialogue on Language2 between himself and a Japanese who visited him at his home in Freiburg in March 1954 is the best known but not a singular event of this kind in the last century, either in respect to the topic (the opposition between the East and the West) or setting. The three cases we are referring to in this paper are all communications of the Platonic kind, that is, sites of debate on cultural differences. Generally perceived as statements in the unsurpassable distinctions of mental make-up mapped onto geographical frontiers, these European-Japanese encounters seem, at a closer look, to convey quite the opposite meaning encrypted, however, at a deeper, subconscious level of a false consciousness nourished by fashionable ideas of the moment.