JAPAN IN BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
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Northern Africa, and the latter as the world-view of farming people who
lived on the humid and fertile land which extended from India to East
Asia. It should be interesting to translate these characteristics of the two
world-views described by Ishida into more empirically testable concepts
and see how such a grandly macroscopic view of world cultures helps us
to understand contemporary cultures and societies in the East and West.
We are accustomed to understanding human behavior in terms of particular
child rearing practices, role expectations, value systems and social structure,
and need some clarification of concepts in order to utilize the findings of
culture history in our understanding of contemporary human behavior.
In this connection, a book written by a Japanese scholar of French
history is of interest to us. In a book with an eye-catching title, Meat-eaters’
Thought, Professor Sabata (1966) boldly tried to explain many aspects of
Western values and social structure as deriving from the fact that Europeans
eat meat and bread. Sabata establishes that the Europeans are carnivorous
and the Orientals are herbivorous by pointing out that in Pakistan, India,
Ceylon, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan, more than 60% of total calorie
intake depends on starch or cereal, and less than 10% on protein. Con-
versely, in many European countries, the United States, and Canada, less
than 30% of total calorie intake depends upon starch or cereal, and more
than 40% to 50% depends upon protein. According to Sabata, people who
ate the animals they owned had to rationalize killing animals they loved,
and developed the idea that animals are made by god to serve and be killed
by men. In order to maintain such an idea, it was necessary to draw a clear
line of demarcation between humans and animals. The Christian dogma
emphasizing the discontinuity between humans and the rest of the animal
species, its resistance to the Darwinian theory of evolution, the condemna-
tion of sex as a sin (the sexual act makes animal and human look alike),
the strong taboo on bestiality and emphasis on spiritual love in marital
life, all reflect the basic attempt to separate the human from the rest of
the animals. The author further contends that humanism, the thought that
human beings are the center of the world, also stemmed from the same
background. The strong tendency to demarcate humans and animals, which
Sabata calls “danzetsu ronrf' or logic of discontinuity, is also observed in
the intolerant differentiation between Christians as perfect humans and
pagans as inferior species. It is also reflected in a clear-cut class system, in
which a small class rules a large population. For instance, in 1870 in Japan,
the ruling class of samurai comprised 5% to 6% of the total population,
whereas in 1789 in France, the ruling aristocrats and monks were only
0.5% to 0.6% of the total population. From the fact that the Europeans
depended on bread, according to Sabata, families developed a strong social
consciousness and the power of civilian community over the individual. In
the author’s view, democracy developed as the means of reconciling a