Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

Telepathy

Dorothea’s response to finding out that I have a mobile phone—she was “completely wogboggled”—provoked a sense of panic that I might be expelled from the Introvert’s Guild. I’ve already pointed out that I have the phone switched off most of the time (in fact, I rarely carrry it with me) and that I delete any voicemail messages without listening to them. To avoid any accusations that I’m not a bona-fide introvert, allow me to explain how I came to have one.

Like Dorothea I couldn’t imagine anything more intrusive. Then, a couple of years ago, at a time when I had to attend a ten-day seminar, my mother spent a couple of days in hospital and I found myself asking a colleague if he’d mind my using his phone to check her progress. The second time I did this I thought to myself: “I can’t rely on payphones to make these calls, I’ll have to get my own mobile phone.”

At the back of my mind was a story I’d heard about certain Amish who eschew the use of modern technology until there’s an accident or a child is ill—then it’s suddenly OK to use a non-Amish neighbor’s telephone. It felt hypocritical to me to be rabidly against mobile phones but to use someone else’s.

I mentioned to my former girlfriend Natsuko, with whom I remain close friends, that I’d decided to get a mobile phone. She immediately said, “You can have mine. I don’t need it anymore.” (Originally a freelance designer, she’d recently secured a fulltime job.) I took her somewhat clunky Phillips Twist phone to the Telstra store, got a new number, and organized a monthly plan. Every month I pay about $25 not to use it. This month, because I’ve been to Melbourne a couple of times, I’ve used it instead of calling from the ludicrously expensive hotel phone.

I was astonished and impressed by Dorothea’s intuitive realization that my mobile phone was a “living-in-Japan thing” because, if I did live in Japan, I would have a mobile phone and I’d use it constantly. Why the turnaround? Because I’m much less introverted when I’m in Japan—I talk to anyone about anything in order to practise my Japanese. When I’m traveling alone, my favorite part of the day is having dinner in a tiny restaurant, where—as inevitably happens when the other customers realize that I drink alcohol and can carry a conversation—I can spend a few hours drinking and chatting. (My Japanese becomes noticeably more fluent when I’ve had a beer or three.) I’d also use the mobile to send and receive SMS messages since that would allow me to practice reading and writing Japanese.

But Dorothea rejected my suggestion of “the ideal relationship (between introverts who can intuitively share their thoughts and feelings).”

Jonathon. Dude. Wrong. Wrong ever so. Introverts are introverts, not mind readers. Trust me on this one.

Interestingly, this idea also happens to be a Japanese thing. In conversations with Japanese about relationships, the term ishin-denshin frequently crops up as one of the characteristics of the “ideal relationship.” The first and third characters mean “by means of” and “transmit, communicate” respectively, whereas the second and fourth character means “heart, mind, spirit.” The dictionary definition of ishin-denshin is “tacit understanding; telepathy; communion of mind with mind” while my Kodansha Dictionary of Basic Japanese Idioms renders it as “from one heart to another” and offers the following supplemental meanings:

immediate communication from one mind to another, telepathy, telepathic communication between people, tacit understanding, intuitively shared thoughts or feelings, to be able to read each other’s mind.

The example sentences suggest how the term might be used by Japanese speakers:

Don’t make me spell it out. You must know what I’m getting at, surely.

Dad didn’t have to say a word. I knew exactly what he was thinking.

He and I know each other so well that we can tell what the other’s thinking.

The entry for ishin-denshin cross-references a related term, isshin-dōtai, rendered as “one heart, the same body” (which is exactly what the four characters mean, respectively). The supplemental meanings are:

of one heart and mind, as one mind and body.

The first example sentence is similar to those in the entry for ishin-denshin:

We’re one and the same, you and me. You can tell me anything.

But the second could have been written by Dorothea herself:

When they say man and wife are of one heart and mind, isn’t that just a fantasy (illusion)?

It intrigues me that the idea of telepathic communication between lovers or spouses has such a strong resonance in Japanese culture; and I wonder whether this is because Japanese speech and writing are so oblique compared to English. Much of the meaning of a Japanese sentence is inferred rather than stated—for example, I’ve heard it it said that 60% of Japanese sentences lack a subject—and I have to admit that it’s this indirect, elliptical quality that particularly attracts me to Japanese and to the Japanese. I never quite know quite what’s going on and consequently, whether I’m reading or listening or watching, I feel constantly engaged. That is, of course, the antithesis of ishin-denshin, but I only ever cited it as an ideal.

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