La vita come cerimonia. Un rapido sguardo ai comportamenti rituali pubblici e privati del Giappone.

Form and content: a continuous tirade for linguists and translators, but also historians and sociologists. The Saussurian langue / parole dichotomy lives as never before in a civilisation like the Japanese one, where the sign is everything: it is both symbol and meaning, it is all-encompassing. In the Empire of Signs, as Roland Barthes calls it, this dichotomy dissolves into the ritual, of small daily gestures as well as of great state celebrations, passing through the tea ceremony, ikebana, the theatrical forms of kabuki and nō, and is accomplished in calligraphy, the art of elevating the ideogram or pictogram to a symbol not only of a word, physical object or abstract concept, but of an entire world. The Japanese themselves embody ritualism in their lifestyle and this paper, analysing their gestures and their even more hidden aspects from those who are fascinated by Far Eastern culture, will help to understand its functions and limits, thus opening a section of the journal LISTEN that, from time to time, will deal with various cultural aspects of the Land of the Rising Sun, as they appear to both an external and internal Western eye.