The other day I was asked to review a manuscript that cited (as an authority) Hajime Nakamura’s Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples–a book I hadn’t thought about for forty years or so. From it you learn that Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Tibetans, etc., can’t think logically or metaphysically the way Europeans can. Already as a curious twenty-year-old, I recoiled from it as from a bad smell.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been called Ways of Speaking of Eastern Peoples.

“You’re not a fish, so how do you know how the fish feel?”

“You’re not me, so how do you know I’m not a fish?”