In Naoko Mikami's calligraphy, the kanji for kokoro or shin often appears. Kokoro is hard to translate into a single English word; this idea is deeply intuitive and nuanced in Japanese culture, making kokoro a rich and complex term.
Kokoro encompasses emotions, intellect, and spirituality
Nick: So that's what I love, too, I love the learnings from studying calligraphy. And what I've noticed, in general and in your work on LinkedIn, you often mention or you often have calligraphy pieces that mentioned the word shin or kokoro.
I guess in the West, we might understand kokoro as heart, but it's more than that. I have this idea that it conveys mind, heart, and spirit—almost as one entity. So it took me a while to understand kokoro. How would you define shin or kokoro.
Naoko: The other day, during our zoom call you said the same. You said it's difficult to translate kokoro into English with just one word. That's very true. Kokoro is a difficult concept to explain, like many Japanese things which are kind of vague.
So Japanese people intuitively understand it. But it's generally difficult for us to explain it to foreigners. Basically, as you said, it can mean at the same time, heart, mind, and spirit. But even in English, for me, it's difficult to differentiate mind and spirit. So I think it's fundamentally a difficult concept to explain. Kokoro is emotions, intellect, and spiritual.
Nick: Yeah, that's really interesting, because we often have this expression, ‘think with your mind, feel with your heart.’ And we’re almost separating the two, like, the kokoro kind of conveys the idea that you cannot live or function without both working together.
And then there's the spirit, which we probably don't… We're so busy in the modern world, we don't connect to spirit that often. Some people might not even believe there is the spirit, they might only think it's, ‘Oh, it's just your mind.’ And the heart just pumps blood. And that's all.
So I guess there's far more reflection behind these concepts of Japanese words, I think, compared to modern Western thinking, and a lot of history. So that's why it's probably hard for Westerners to understand.
And typically in the West, we're kind of looking for a quick answer, like, ‘Just tell me what it is, don't worry about the details.’ Which is not really the best way to approach learning. I think words in any language, the deeper you go, obviously the better you can understand and communicate.