午夜剧场

The word "ma-ai" is truly elusive. While the body certainly feels it, it is a highly implicit phenomenon that cannot be fully expressed in a single word. Perhaps for this reason, there has been little research exploring "ma-ai" in the past. This is a brand-new challenge from cognitive scientists who have explored the cognition of embodied knowledge and communication.

"Ma" means space or distance. However, as one can see by considering interpersonal sports (such as Kendo), "ma-ai" is not a concept that can be captured solely by the physical distance or physical time lag between bamboo swords or between bodies. "One's own ma-ai" is a state of mind and body where the opponent is frozen in place and only you can launch an attack. The presence of "ai" (meaning "to meet" or "to fit") makes this concept even more difficult.

It is not a concept limited to competitive scenes. As an example of cooperative ma-ai, consider a scene where you are standing and talking with someone. From a second-person perspective, while empathizing with the other person's thoughts and physical sensations, you casually make temporal adjustments—such as intentionally overlapping speech or leaving pauses—and spatial adjustments, such as standing position, distance, and body orientation. The totality of these elements, including tone of voice, intensity of speech, facial expressions, gaze, and gestures, constitutes cooperative ma-ai.

This book suggests that ma-ai is ubiquitous in all aspects of life. It takes up baseball, soccer, and jiu-jitsu as examples of interpersonal sports, and casual conversation and the interaction between dentist and patient in dental treatment as examples of daily life. The rapport that develops between a field researcher and the target community (in this book, the members of a local festival management body and the researcher) is also an interesting case study.

"Ma-ai" is not limited to interpersonal situations. The book also introduces the hypothesis that the sense of comfort in architectural spaces might be a form of "ma-ai" where people and space (existing objects and their arrangement) meet.

All of these inquiries are based on moving from the laboratory into the field of the world, focusing on phenomena occurring on-site, and observing and describing the interactions occurring between one's own body, others, and objects from a first-person perspective. Research on ma-ai cannot be done without this. This book also questions what academia should be like for the exploration of implicit knowledge.

Masaki Suwa

Shunjusha

272 pages, 2,200 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are those at the time of publication.