Honshitsu (本質). The thing itself. True nature.
From very early in life, we are surrounded by B.S. The trick is not to rid the world of B.S., but to train our eyes to see through it. It’s a bit of challenge to do, because the honshitsu is opaque to most people (and kept that way by our wider society), but once you can do it, once you can see clearly, you live on a higher plane of existence, a state made higher still by the fact that most everybody else is living blind. It’s sort of like being able to read — unquestionably advantageous in any society, and doubly so if you’re surrounded by illiterates.
Broadly speaking, there are two types of honshitsu to see, or, more accurately, two directions in which to see the honshitsu. Up, and down. Downward honshitsu vision (downside clairvoyance)is the kind we usually think of — it’s what we’re talking about when we point out that something isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Exposed to our downward honshitsu vision, some people may accuse us of sour grapes, but that accusation is, often enough, itself merely a special kind of sideways-interference B.S., made by misguided people and intended to protect other, deeper B.S. from scrutiny.
Example: Investing legend Ken Fisher, author of “The Ten Roads to Riches”, has long maintained that creating a company and then taking it public is one of the worst ways to get rich, because it involves permanent exposure to high levels of what Australians (as portrayed by actors on the TV show “Neighbours”) call “aggro” — nonsense, hassle.
Just ask Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg how it feels to have people you freaking hired kick you out of the company you created, or force you to go to places you don’t want to go, wearing clothes you don’t want to wear, to talk to people you don’t want to talk to, about things you don’t want to talk about. Ken Fisher was able to see downward through the the B.S. into the honshitsu, and realize that the start-up-to-IPO dream can lead to money without wealth, responsibility without freedom.
End of example. Moving swiftly on, let’s talk about upward honshitsu vison (upside clairvoyance). Downward honshitsu vision is great. But upward honshitsu vision is equally important. Perhaps more so. And it is the kind of vision that AJATT is mostly about. Upward honshitsu vision allows you to see how apparently useless actions can lead to great results.
Just like the news media work hard to prevent our downward honshitsu vision (and have us believe that the state of being a celebrity, professional athlete, public intellectual or public company CEO is awesome), similarly, the education system works overtime to blur our upward honshitsu vision.
Where clearly seeing downward honshitsu invites accusations of jealousy, clearly seeing upward honshitsu invites accusations of daydreaming and impracticality.
Ignore the brainwashing. Free your mind. Open your eyes. Both ways, but especially up.
Perhaps you are, metaphorically, in “the” gutter. And perhaps you want to be in the stars. In order to do that, you need to see upward clearly. Brutally, crystal clearly. You need to see how your in-gutter actions are valuable. You need to see how a ladder is as valuable as a spaceship (if only because you’re gonna need to use multiple ladders both long before boarding and in order to board your interstellar vessel); you need to see how the ladder that gets you out of the gutter is, in a very real sense, an appendage of the spaceship insofar as it is part of a wider system of tools that will take you there — and without which you would never get there.
How does all this pseudo-profound, ersatz continental philosophy big talk connect to your getting used to Japanese?
Easy.
Worry more about what you’re playing, than about what you’re watching or listening to. Focus on playing Japanese, and the listening and hearing will take care of itself. Focus on putting books under your eyes, and the reading will take care of itself. See the upward honshitsu. See how seemingly useless actions connect to big, awesome chain reactions and results. Don’t love working software but hate doing print-tracing or jotting down algorithms on pen and paper. Don’t love having a clean home but hate taking out the trash. Don’t love air but hate air molecules. Don’t love big explosions but hate atoms.
P.S. I’ve used the word “clairvoyance” here, fully aware of its supernatural connotations but intending it in a very literal, materialistic, woo-free, secular sense that is common to all humans, namely that of having the “ability to perceive matters beyond the range of ordinary perception”, “seeing objects or actions removed in space or time from natural viewing”, and “perceiving objects or events in the future or beyond normal sensory contact”, as various online dictionaries define it. It’s a simple form of “mindsight”; it is one of the original human superpowers (right up there with horizontal inheritance [vertical inheritance is where the next generation improves, horizontal is where extant individuals improve, usually via meme transfer]), and you can get it through thinking (insight), experience (experiment) or just plain research.