But that’s a very negative view, and there is a positive side to amae, too, especially as practised in Japan. Doi’s theory was that Japanese society never completely abandons the dependent phase of childhood, so that amae is reflected in the strictly hierarchical structure of many companies. It may take longer to establish a close business relationship, but once it’s achieved it’s likely to be marked by trust on both sides and a sense of personal responsibility. And it’s not just a one-way relationship.
The junior Japanese executive may profit from the advice and experience of his senior, while the older exec enjoys the respect and deference he receives and feels he deserves; the young woman in her car has her wheel changed for her, and the man who does it gets an agreeable if rather patronizing feeling of superiority.
The young woman visiting her parents, meanwhile, gets a tasty meal and a bag of freshly laundered washing. But if she steps too far out of line and demands too much, she’s not too old to end up on the naughty step.
Iktsuarpok
(Inuit)
The anxious and irresistible need to check whether who, or what, you’re waiting for has arrived yet
It can manifest itself in different ways.
Perhaps it’s waiting for a girlfriend to arrive – just aching to see her, anticipating the arrival of the person who might turn out to be the love of your life and turn your world upside down. You start glancing at the clock about an hour before the time you’ve arranged. Then you check that everything is ready – that the table is laid or the glasses are out ready to pour your first drink. And then – still ages before she is due – you peep out of the window to see if she might have arrived early. And finally you actually go outside and peer up the road to see if she is on her way.
Or perhaps, more prosaically, it’s standing in a bus shelter, craning your neck for the umpteenth time to see if the bus has turned the corner yet.
It’s not only about anxiety – you can feel the same mounting tension even if you know for certain that the person is going to come or if you haven’t got an urgent appointment that you’re going to miss if the bus is late. There’s a positive feeling of excited anticipation – you want the excitement of seeing whatever it is you’re waiting for as soon as you possibly can. Even so, you’ll only be absolutely certain they haven’t let you down once you see the person in the flesh or the bus in the road, so the little niggle of unease is there.
Whether it’s a bus or the love of your life, it doesn’t make sense – when they get here you’ll know, and they won’t arrive any more quickly because you keep leaping out of your chair or peering anxiously down the road. But you just can’t help yourself.
The Inuit of northern Canada have a word for it – iktsuarpok (ITT-suar-POHK) – which catches precisely that excitement and the physical activity that goes with it. It’s usually translated as ‘the feeling of anticipation when you’re expecting a visitor’, but, crucially, it also contains the sense that you try to ease the tension by getting up and going out to see if they are coming.
You want the excitement of seeing whatever it is you’re waiting for as soon as you possibly can.
It could also cover those secret glances at the telephone when you’re expecting a call, or the surreptitious checking of your email or Twitter feed to see if anyone has tried to contact you.
It’s surreptitious because you know, deep down inside, that it’s a sign of weakness, but it’s an appealing sort of weakness. It’s the opposite of composed self-possession – an involuntary admission of a lack of confidence. While we’re encouraged to strive to be the sort of person who breezes through life brimming with self-belief and with no thought for the possibility of failure or rejection, few of us really buy into it. So to see someone acknowledge, even with a silent downward glance at a mobile phone, that they’re anxious for something to happen and worried that it might not is to realize that we’re not alone in the world.
Fremdschämen (German)
Pena Ajena (Spanish)
Myötähäpeä (Finnish)
The empathy felt when someone else makes a complete fool of himself
Ask someone for an example of a foreign word that can’t be translated into English and they’re most likely to come up with the German Schadenfreude (SHAH-den-froy-duh), which means the guilty thrill of pleasure felt when someone else comes a cropper. Think Laurel and Hardy and a custard pie or, for a more scholarly approach, you could refer to the Summa Theologica of the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian St Thomas Aquinas on the eagerly anticipated delights of heaven: ‘That the saints may enjoy their beatitude more thoroughly, and give more abundant thanks for it to God, a perfect sight of the punishment of the damned is granted them.’
So, among the other joys of Paradise, one might experience an eternity of heavenly Schadenfreude while gazing down on the suffering, tortured souls below. There’s something horribly smug about the idea, but it’s a word that has been picked up from the German and is quite commonly used in English, so it’s clear we recognize the feeling.
A 2013 academic study in the United States concluded that taking pleasure in this way from other people’s misfortunes or failures is a ‘normal’ human response, but that doesn’t necessarily make it one we should be proud of.[23] Importantly, it’s not the only response possible when we see someone making a fool of themselves.
Imagine that you are at a wedding reception and the best man rises to make his speech. You realize first from the way that he is holding on to the table for support, and then from the slight slurring of his words, that he has been a bit too free with the beers, the wine and the champagne. And then he starts to speak. It is a car crash in slow motion. The jokes would have been too vulgar even for the stag night, and here the bride’s parents and her elderly relatives are starting to shift uneasily in their chairs. The bride is looking distinctly unhappy, and the groom has his head in his hands. But the best man is oblivious and ploughs drunkenly on …
Well, you might feel a sneaking sense of malicious delight in his predicament – Schadenfreude. But you might also, in a more sympathetic spirit, shudder with embarrassment on his behalf. If the words we use reflect the emotions that we feel, it’s rather worrying that we have one to describe that first unworthy feeling but nothing for the more generous response.
And yet Schadenfreude does have a more charitable opposite in German. Fremdschämen (FREMT-shah-mun) literally means ‘foreign-shame’, and it describes the feeling of being embarrassed on someone else’s behalf – that ‘No, don’t do it!’ feeling that you have as your drunken friend staggers to his feet. In fact, it needn’t be someone that you know, and they may not even be aware of how they are letting themselves down, but you can still feel your toes start to curl in vicarious embarrassment.
23
Professor Susan Fiske and Mina Cikara,
‘Their pain, our pleasure: stereotype content and schadenfreude’,