Would you jump off a bridge if your friends did?

    It’s a natural tendency for humans to mimic the actions of other humans. Infants grow and watch their parents actions and begin to repeat words, gestures and motions they see their parents perform. Anyone who has taken a basic psychology class may know about phenomena such as group think or diffusion of responsibility in groups of adults. Even in our daily interactions we tent to follow, or be followed, the actions of other people we spend time with.

 

An example of this occurs almost daily in my life with my study group. Every day we meet up to do homework but no matter how much more homework we still feel we need to complete that day the second one of us three mentions that we don’t want to study anymore we all pack up and leave. Staying and finishing my work or leaving early both produce feelings of relaxation but in leaving I produce more stress for myself in the future. The reason people generally follow others is because they know the result of what happened when their friend or parent did something, so it must produce the same result for them. However at midnight every night me and my study group separately at our homes finish our work in twice the amount of time we could have done so together earlier, yet none of us sees the other struggle or stress. Because of this we don’t tend to associate this stress with the decision made with each other earlier. This human nature is seen in many ways through the novel An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro.

The novel is a narration by Mr. Ono, who seems to be a middle/upper class retired artist living in post WWII Japan in a district of Nagasaki. In the first sentence of the novel Ono describes his grand house at the top of a path leading up from a small wooden bridge known as ‘The Bridge of Hesitation’. The Bridge of Hesitation is an important symbol introduced by Ono because it stands as a physical comparison to events in his life; past and present. A bridge can be thought of as an ends to a mean of moving from one area to another separated by some void, but often we find ourselves stuck in this void as does Ono in his story.

An example of this is apparent in Ono’s relationship with his nephew Ichiro. Ono is stuck in an area between disciplining and passing his knowledge and love for art to Ichiro with another side of accepting Ichiro’s interests and letting him continue with his desired path. We first see this in the middle of page 30 when Ono tries to explain that pretending to be a Japanese hero would be much more fun than pretending to be a western cowboy. When Ichiro does not listen to his grandfather’s attempts to interest him Ono snaps at Ichiro shouting his name in protest for him to be quiet. As Ichiro recoils in shock Ono questions his actions and apologizes saying “I’m sorry, Ichiro, I shouldn’t have interrupted. Of course you can be anyone you like. Even a Cowboy. You must forgive your Oji-san. He was forgetting for a moment.” Ono seems to be making a conscious effort to move toward a side of letting Ichiro follow his own desires, but it is inherent in Ono from his father that his discipline should be taught to the next generation.

We as humans spend so much time worrying about our condition changing after making a decision that we often take the easier rout, one that has been traveled before. But in worrying about which side of the bride to be on, to do homework or to be finished with homework, to instill traditional discipline or to allow Ichiro to follow his own path, we fail to see the benefit of being in this void between two sides. In the desire for the gratification of stopping or finishing my homework I neglect the fact that I’m studying to enrich my life and the things that I learn will lead to much more gratification in my future. In Ono’s case I feel it doesn’t matter which direction he takes with Ichiro or if he stays in the middle of the bridge because Ichiro is heading down a one way bridge toward adulthood and Ono’s decisions will do nothing to gain more time to spend with his young grandson. If one were to only view a bridge as a separation of one area from another, they would miss many beautiful rivers.