I recently had a conversation on YouTube (good ones occasionally do happen) where my correspondent said this: "It's all about being independent, in the rawest sense of the word. You cannot be independent if you are defined by another person's interpretation of you. Be they man or woman. Your identity must be your own choice, not something given to you or recommended by society. Otherwise there's nothing truly distunguishing you from any other person, no way of acting in a truly free and autonomous manner."

I take this to be a very North American (or Western) attitude toward identity.

My question is, the Japanese having a strong sense of the collective, by what measure do they self-identify? I'm not sure if I'm asking the question clearly. I would assume that each person thinks of themselves as "me, the possessor of X traits and characteristics attached to my consciousness". In NA, the notion of independence is highly valued. It seems to me that independence must obligatorily imply a self-locus, "me" is differentiated from the collective.

How do they deal with this, compared to Western folk?