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Japanese Self'
GORDON MATHEWS
In this article I dispute the view offered in recent analyses that "the
Japanese self' is profoundly sociocentric, to argue, from a pheno-
menological perspective, thatJapanese selves must be seen as both
a part of and apart from their existing social worlds. On the basis
of intensive interviewing of adultJapanese of various ages, I depict
"theJapanese self' as culturally shaped at three levels: a deep level
of the taken-for-granted, at which selves do not comprehend their
shaping; a middle level of shikataga nai-"what can't be helped"-
at which selves comprehend but cannot easily resist their shaping;
and a shallow level of the cultural supermarket, at which selves pick
and choose who they are from a vast arrayof potential self-identities
and self-justifications. This three-tiered model enables us to con-
ceptualize the processes through which culturally shapedJapanese
selves culturally shape themselves over the lifecourse. Japanese
selves' key motivation in their shaped shaping is to be found in
ikigai, broadly defined as "that which most makes one's life seem
worth living," most often expressed as family, work, or personal
dream. Selves shape themselves and formulate and justify their
ikigai over the lifecourse so as to maintain the sense that life within
their real or imagined social worlds truly is worth living. By consid-
ering the self s cultural shaping through ikigai, we can come to a
718
ANTHROPOLOGICALDEPICTIONS OF
"THEJAPANESESELF"
What is "the Japanese self"? If there is one point that most
anthropologists of Japan seem to agree upon, it is that "theJapa-
nese self' is contextual and sociocentric. To take just a few exam-
ples, Takie Sugiyama Lebra has written (citing Shintaro Ryu) that
"the Japanese individual seems to feel really alive only when in a
group" (1976:27); RobertJ. Smith has written that in Japan, "the
identification of self and other is alwaysindeterminate in the sense
that there is no fixed center from which, in effect, the individual
asserts atlnoncontingent existence" (1983:81); and David W. Plath
has written that while "the American archetype ... seems more
attuned to cultivating a self that knows it is unique in the cosmos,
theJapanese archetype [seems more attuned] to a self that can feel
human in the company of others" (1980:218).
These analysts do allow for a Japanese self that is, in Smith's
words, "not entirely sociocentric" (1991); as Lebra has written, "we
know thatJapanese are as concerned about maintaining the indi-
vidual's independence and freedom as are other peoples" (1976:
156). For all their different cultural shapings, Japanese do indeed
have separate selves, as do other peoples, these scholars say; but
more recent writings call such a self into question, in stressing the
otherness of "theJapanese self' as compared to "the Western self."
Esyun Hamaguchi (1985) labels theJapanese self kanjin,aJapanese
term of his coinage meaning "the contextual," as opposed to the
Western kojin,"the individual";social scientists studyingJapan have
not understoodJapanese selves, he argues, because of their immer-
sion in "methodological individualism,"causing them to seeJapan
only through "the emics of Euro-American societies" (1985:291).
Dorinne Kondo, in the theory surrounding her ethnography of
Japanese workers (1990), writes of"seemingly incorrigible Western
assumptions about ... the boundedness and fixity of personal
identity" (1990:26). "Contemporary anthropologists," she writes,
"myselfincluded, are in the process of grappling with the difficul-
ties and paradoxes of demonstrating the cultural specificity of
What does "self mean? Melford Spiro has recently discussed "the
lack of terminological and conceptual clarity"in social scientists'
uses of the term (1993:113). Many anthropologists, he writes,
assume that cultural conceptions of self are isomorphic with actors'
own senses of themselves (1993:117, 119), and "viewthe self itself,
not only conceptions of the self, as whollyculturally constructed"
(1993:110, emphasis in original); he sees these assumptions as
unwarranted. Extrapolating from Spiro's argument, I define self as
"locus of consciousness": I maintain that selves of different cultures,
despite their different cultural moldings, may be compared as
physically separate consciousnesses experiencing the world in part
through that separation. Selves are constructed and construct
themselves through cultural conceptions; but while cultural con-
ceptions of self clearly shape subjective awareness of self, they do
not determine that awareness-selves use an array of cultural
conceptions to comprehend themselves and their experiences, but
use those conceptions with varying degrees of self-awareness and
critical distance, and manipulate those conceptions for their own
self-defining and other-defining ends.
There is no single cultural conception of self in contemporary
complex societies such asJapan, but rather an arrayof overlapping
and often contradictory conceptions that selves may use in various
combinations in constructing themselves. Recent analyses of "the
Japanese self' (Bachnik 1994; Doi 1973, 1986; various of the con-
tributors to Rosenberger's 1992 edited volume) use terms in the
Japanese language-uchi/soto, amae, omote/ura, tatemae/honne,ki,
kejime-to set forth models of "theJapanese self," but for the most
part leave aside questions of distribution and of agency. Do these
different models apply to all Japanese selves? To most selves? To
some selves more than others? To what extent do these models
presumably operate at a fully conscious level, and to what extent at
an unconscious level? To what extent do people choose these
structures, resist these structures, or unthinkingly imbibe these
structures? In an attempt to delineate more clearly someJapanese
experiences of self, allow me to offer a phenomenological theory
of the cultural shaping of self, a theory exploring how selves-in
Japan, and perhaps in other contemporary mass-mediated societies
as well-comprehend and seek to manipulate their culturalshaping.5
nitions from both Japan and abroad, a variety of which were used
by the people I interviewed.
To give just a few examples, a sarariiman in his forties justified
his devotion to company in terms of hisJapaneseness; ifJapanese
companies can continue their success in the world, "wemay really
be able to say we're superior as a race [jinshu]."A management-
track corporate employee in her thirties justified her devotion to
her work in terms of the American feminism and French existen-
tialism she had read. An insurance company employee in his forties
found himself neither through work nor family, but through his
dream of self-realization, although he could not imagine what that
might consist of. An elderly woman conceived of herself as an
ancestor soon to be worshipped, while another, a Catholic, sought
only to be united with God. More extremely, I interviewed a dentist
in his late thirties whose office was decorated to resemble an
American Wild West saloon; he wore cowboy boots to work and had
a beard, grown, he told me, to look like that of a Western sheriff;
and I interviewed a biological man in his thirties who culturally
chose to be a woman, working as a hostess at a transvestite bar and
attending our interviews in a miniskirt. These people, and indeed
all those I interviewed, formulated and justified themselves
through their choices from the cultural supermarket.
We can see from the foregoing examples thatJapanese indeed
have separate selves, at least insofar as they explained those selves
to me in our interviews.6Self-identity seemed for these people to
be a function of all three of the levels we have discussed. On the
basis of a cultural shaping of self that is prior to self, these people
experienced themselves as fitting or resisting the structures and
strictures of the social and institutional world they found them-
selves within; and they justified, legitimated, or dreamed beyond
those selves with all the cultural materials they could bring to mind
for that task. But the question remaining from all this is, what
motivated these people in shaping themselves as they had? What
motivated them in their lives? What made them tick? To try to
answer this question, let us now consider ikigai in Japanese lives.
not feel such ikigai; but if Japanese selves were only sociocentric,
then these selves would "naturally"find their ikigai in the primary
group and role to which they belong, rather than pursuing, reject-
ing, or agonizing over ikigai, as they so very clearly do. The term
ikigai is a testament to the fact that the selfs commitment to its
existing social world inJapan is not automatic, but must be earned.
In terms of the cultural shaping of self, shaping at the deepest
level in Japan seems to be directed in part toward "natural"com-
mitment to one's primary group, but this shaping does not always
seem to stick. Thomas Rohlen has discussed how the family is the
model of social ordering in Japan. Japanese mothers, he writes
(citing William Caudill), are "inclined to view the child as born
asocial with the implied goal of child-rearing to be teaching the
child to integrate with others, to become social" (1989:18). Sub-
sequent Japanese institutions, such as schools and work groups,
continue this emphasis but may be greeted with skepticism and
resistance, since "among adults attachment is rarely as certain or
as complete as it is between parents and children" (1989:31). The
molding of the child within the family is at the deepest level of
cultural molding, since, among other things, selves come to self-
consciousness as children only after having been in large part
already molded. Subsequent molding, particularly molding of the
self to feel one with the company-such as, for example, the
corporate marathon described by Rohlen (1974) and the "ethics
retreat" described by Kondo (1990)-attempts to replicate or rein-
force this earlier familial molding but has varying degrees of
success. If this later molding is successful, then selves will feel ikigai
for their company or other large social group;8if it is not successful,
then selves may feel ikigai elsewhere in their lives and view their
relation to their companies as a matter of shikata ga nai.
Ikigai as family and children seems less inherently problematic
than ikigai of work in that it involves the actual replication of the
family in a later generation rather than its metaphorical replica-
tion. As we will shortly discuss, the women I interviewed generally
seemed more comfortable with the idea of family as ikigai than did
men with work as ikigai. However, the conflict between ittaikan and
jikojitsugen crossed gender lines. Most of the women and many of
the men I interviewed in the prime of life seemed to find their ikigai
in family and in company, respectively;yet, as noted earlier, many
of these people had doubt as to the ikigai they held, expressing,
on the career he had not followed: "IfI'd taken the path of politics,
I might have been a city assemblyman now. Then I'd have been
able to say that the purpose of my life is to make this city a better
place to live in. I can't say that now.... I didn't choose this
company because I really wanted to work here. I chose it because
it was the best of the companies that happened to be hiring, and I
happened to pass the exam." A rock musician turned construction
worker in his mid-thirties found his present ikigai in his family, he
said (as did several of the blue-collar workers I interviewed),'? but
his dream of music remained: "I like myself because I'm working
hard for my family, but I dislike myself because I gave up music....
I'm not a bad father, I think-I'm supporting my family-but
maybe it would be better for my kids if I showed them a father who's
pursuing his dream."
As I pointed out above, family as ikigai tended to breed less
ambivalence than work. One reason for this seemed to be that
women experienced more flexibility than men in their entrance
into the realm of work and family as what they are to live for. The
white-collar men I interviewed almost uniformly entered their
companies in their late teens or early to mid-twenties, at latest.
Women, on the other hand, tended to have married in their late
twenties, following years of work (which they were not expected to
make their ikigai); they sometimes did not have children until years
after that. Their gradual assumption of family as ikigai was often
seen as negotiable. One woman I interviewed, a mother of three in
her late thirties, had put off having children for a year, during
which she went (with her husband's reluctant agreement) to the
United States to study English, fulfilling a lifelong dream. I talked
to no man who was able to negotiate the ikigai of work, as this
woman had negotiated her ikigai of family. As she told me, "Now
my children are my ikigai; but I might not feel this way if I hadn't
had the chance to go to America to study."11
This is one reason for the lesser ambivalence felt by women than
by men toward their ikigai of family and company; but a more
fundamental reason is to be found in the very nature of these ikigai.
A mother in her thirties explained this as follows: "Some men
realize that in their work they'rejust a cog [haguruma]in a machine,
but others don't; they believe that they're essential, that without
them the company couldn't survive. These men are being fooled.
But family is different. It's not like a company: you can't simply
dropping over the last two decades and is now just 1.45 children
per woman in her lifetime (Japan Times1994). Yet both Japanese
media and my own interviews seemed to reveal women's general
satisfaction with their ikigai of children, a satisfaction often not
shared by white-collar men who may be viewed by women and to
some degree by society at large as objects not of envy but of pity for
their corporate enslavement (Iwao 1993; Takayama 1990).
If the people I interviewed in their twenties expressed a conflict
between the realm of cultural potentialities and the strictures of
social pressure, people in their thirties, forties, and early fifties
often expressed a merging of these realms. Generally, the cultural
supermarket became, as they aged, the source not of conflict with
their shikata ga nai roles, but ofjustification for those roles as those
roles became, progressively, not an infringement on self but the
very stuff of self. For some this shift was expressed straightforwardly,
as in the above examples of people saying, in effect, "Igave up my
dreams for the sake of work/family, but this path is after all the best
path for me to take"-as if work and especially family were suffi-
ciently powerful ideals of self as to require no culturaljustification.
For others, however, these ideals seemed to require extrinsic justi-
fication. The female management-track corporate employee I
interviewed justified her work in terms of her feminist ideals-"I
work incredibly hard because I represent what women can do if
they're given the chance"-but also through her readings of phi-
losophy: "I work, really, for the sake of 'intellectual exercise.' It's
not easy to study something that's a little beyond you, but once you
master it, it builds your character.... Before you die, you have the
chance to be conscious of your death, you want to feel that your
life has been lived well. When I die, that moment when I recognize
my own existence is all I'll have."She had read extensively in French
existentialism and seemed to use ideas gleaned from her reading
to justify having to devote herself to her work, which, she told me,
she fundamentally detested. A male company employee used an
ideal of masculinity to justify his life of work: "I've never said 'no'
to any of myjob assignments.... I sacrificed my family a lot for my
work. I like men who do that: manly man [otokorashiiotoko],like
Western cowboys." Another older sarariiman justified his long
hours of work in terms of his generation and theirJapaneseness:
"People of my generation ... felt we could endure anything think-
one thing I haven't told you. There was a woman I loved. It was
during the war, and I couldn't say that I loved her-I wrote her a
letter once or twice. But she later married someone else; she died
of tuberculosis a few years after that. I still keep her photograph in
my desk drawer. I look at it sometimes late at night."
Some old people I interviewed were able to continue fully pur-
suing their ikigai of their earlier years. The aforementioned callig-
rapher sought to continue his calligraphy until he dies: "If I had a
year to live, maybe I'd drink a little sake,but I'd do a lot of shodo
[calligraphy]! The other day I thought about what I'd do if I had
cancer-all that came to mind was shodo." His wife, although
bedridden and on dialysis,vowed to live on: "Ican't die, leaving my
husband and my daughter and grandchild behind-not yet, any-
way."These people's ikigai may indeed sustain itself until they die;
but for most, their ikigai remained a shadow of their former
years-having shed dream for role, the loss of role may leave only
memories.13Having made the shikata ga nai level from outside the
self the very stuff of self, justified at the level of the cultural
supermarket, and perhaps sensed as "natural"at the taken-for-
granted level, many of the elderly Japanese men and women I
interviewed found themselves back at the shikata ga nai level:
forced by the ways of the world to surrender their roled selves, and
having no other selves left to which to return. At the close of their
perceptive essay on old people inJapan, Misawaand Minami write,
"Young people live for their future; middle-aged people are ex-
pected to live for their work or families. But old people have no
such burden. Freed from their social obligations, they can live as
they themselves desire" (1989:231). But, of course, to do so, they
must have selves left; and as Misawa and Minami's essay describes,
many old people plug away at their hobbies each day merely as a
way of killing time (1989:210), having killed themselves.14
CONCLUSION
What does the foregoing analysis teach us about "the Japanese
self'? I have discussed how at a certain point in Japanese history
(1989-90) young people tended to live for their dreams, middle-
aged people for their roles, and old people for their roles' remnants
or their memories. Because my analysis is confined to a single point
in the lives of people of all ages, I cannot saywith any certainty how
much the shifts in self we have seen are due to lifecourse-to one's
changing sense of who one is as one ages-and how much to
history: to changing senses of self in Japan, perhaps leading young
people today to have different senses of self than young people of,
say, 40 years ago. Both factors clearly are at work, and Japanese
commentators debate their relative weight.15
However, although there are certainly many more varied models
of self available from the cultural supermarket in Japan at present
than 40 years ago, most of the older people I interviewed indicated
that in their youths they too had held dreams that had been
supplanted by the roles of their middle years, which in turn had
become attenuated in their later years. "TheJapanese self,"it seems
apparent, is not static but shifts in its sense of itself and of what it
lives for over the lifecourse. This shift is clearly notjust a matter of
the Japanese selfs sociocentrism, as if that self were a chameleon
blending without resistance into its surroundings; rather, it is due
to the self s often agonizing construction and deconstruction of its
sense of commitment and thus identity over the lifecourse, before
the passage of dreams and the strictures of reality. Ikigai is the
Japanese selfs sense of what it lives for vis-a-visits own dreams and
the pressures of others and the institutional coercions and encour-
agements of society at large. The shifts and constancies of ikigai
over the lifecourse may be viewed as heroic, tragic, banal, or
pathetic, but they are not mindless: they reflect selves' efforts to be
selves as a part of and apart from others in a world in which they
dream but which they cannot control.
The broad shifts in ikigai over the Japanese lifecourse may be
viewed as the processes through which the powers that be inJapan
first manufacture and later discard Japanese selves. Japanese soci-
ety, requiring workers and mothers for its ongoing production and
reproduction, has devised a highly efficient system for the making
of acquiescent selves, professing their deepest allegiance to its ends:
the Meiji Era's Imperial Rescript on Education, with its claim of
nation as family (Smith 1983:9-36) has its clear echoes inJapanese
postwar claims of company as family (Kondo 1990:119-225). But it
may also be that the very success of this system is what has led to its
being challenged: Japanese affluence has led to the plethora of
media images of alternative lives that people now have the financial
means actively to pursue if they so desire;Japanese life expectancy,
now the longest in the world, gives Japanese selves decades of
potentially vital life once their social roles have ended. In terms of
the levels of cultural molding of self, it may be that, generally
speaking, the taken-for-granted level grows smaller, as the options
available on the cultural supermarket level are perceived as ever
more varied and ever more available. The taken-for-granted level
then becomes the shikata ga nai level, through which self is con-
strained by forces it sees as being external to itself, and thus
potentially resistable. How much shikata ga nai comes to be re-
sisted-whether dreams of self will become lived selves for millions
at some future point in Japan, or whether dreams will serve largely
to make tolerable the ongoing strictures of shikata ga nai reality-is
perhaps the pivotal cultural question facing Japanese selves and
society today and into the future.
The processes of the selfs cultural shaping over the lifecourse
that I have described have implications beyond Japan; while the
content of what I have discussed is particularlyJapanese, the larger
processes are perhaps not. The selfs pursuit of a life that seems
worth living through the shaped shapings of culture may be global
in today's world; it also may be global that selves' dreams of youth,
fueled by the possibilities of the cultural supermarket, are whittled
down by the shikata ga nai imperatives of the society one lives in
and the structural place one has come to occupy within that society
(see Caughey 1984 for discussion of American youths' mass-medi-
ated impossible dreams; see Brim 1992 and Levinson et al. 1978 for
discussion of American, mostly male dreams and their fadings over
the lifecourse). Walter Mitty reveries are inflated, then deflated,
then with luck all but forgotten by one's old age, when dreams have
gone past. Japanese society, in the rigidity of its social norms, the
strength of shikata ga nai-and in the ongoing rebellion of some
selves against those norms-may make this process particularly
apparent; but it is true here as well as there, for me and perhaps
for you as well as for them.
NOTES
Acknowledgments.The research upon which this paper is based was conducted through a
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, 1989-90. Ideas for this
paper were formulated while holding a postdoctoral fellowship at the Reischauer Institute
ofJapanese Studies, HarvardUniversity, 1993-94. I am grateful to these institutions for their
support. I am also grateful to Yoko Miyakawafor reading and commenting on this manu-
script. A much-abridged version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the
Association for Asian Studies, Washington, DC, April 9, 1995.
1. Lebra, Smith, and Plath are not, in my reading, guilty of placing an essentialized
Western self upon theJapanese of whom they write. Ifanything, they are guilty of postulating
an essentialized Japanese self. Who is "the Japanese individual" to whom Lebra refers? Is
there a single "Japanesearchetype" of selfand maturity,as Plath indicates? I see a multiplicity
of individuals, a number of competing archetypes.
2. It is interesting that Kondo and Rosenberger, apparently influenced by poststructural-
ism and postmodernism, offer arguments about the otherness of the Japanese self that
parallel those ofJapanese advocates of Nihonjinronsuch as Hamaguchi, as well as Aida (1972).
Nihonjinron, as discussed by Yoshino (1992), is a conservative discourse of cultural nation-
alism, describing the uniqueness of the Japanese; postmodernism in American anthropol-
ogy, as depicted by Kuper (1994), paints itself as politically radical. The two movements thus
make strange bedfellows.
3. It is, however, worth keeping in mind Hannerz's words (1992:35): "When it is claimed
... that identities become nothing but assemblages from whatever imagery is for the moment
marketed through the media, then I wonder what kind of people the commentators on
postmodernism know; I myself know hardly anybody of whom this would seem true."
4. I chose the people I interviewed-friends of friends and acquaintances of acquain-
tances-largely for their diversity. I suspect that some of the company employees and
mothers I spoke with are more representative of contemporaryJapan than are the Buddhist
nun and the transvestite; but I do not finally know what a "typical"Japanese person might
be like,just as I do not know what a "typical"American might be like. Whenever I interviewed
someone presented to me as "typical,"I invariably found key aspects of their lives to be
uniquely personal, shared by no one else I spoke with. At the same time, however,Japanese
readers of this manuscript have told me that most of the people portrayed therein are
recognizable to them asJapanese types, parallelingJapanese that they themselves know.
5. My phenomenological approach is steeped in the writings of Berger and Luckmann
(1966), Thomas Luckmann (1967), Alfred Schutz ([1940] 1978), and Schutz and Luckmann
(1973). My formulation of the self's cultural shaping is, however, my own.
6. It is possible that the Japanese I interviewed "made up" selves in response to my
questions-their sociocentric sensitivity leading them to present to me nonsociocentric
selves. When I suggested this possibility to several of those I interviewed, they reacted with
considerable indignation; but just as I cannot prove that the world of other people at large
is not a figment of my imagination, so too I cannot prove thatJapanese people have, "like
us," independent as well as interdependent selves.
7. This ikigai division reflects the stereotypical familial division of labor in Japan-one
recent surveyshowed that 71 percent ofJapanese women agreed that "husbands should work
outside the home and wives should mind the family" (cited in Amaki 1989:179). Many men
say that their ikigai is family rather than work and company, as the surveys cited by Mita
(1984:59-66) and Plath (1980:91) indicate (see also Minami 1989:129). However, judging
from my interviews, by this they tend to mean that they work hard to support their families,
rather than that they seek to devote more of themselves to their families rather than to their
companies.
8. Books such as Kawakitaet al.'s Ikigaino soshikiron(An organizational theory of ikigai)
(1970) and Noda's Ikigai shearingu:sangyo kozo tenkankino kinrOishiki (Ikigai sharing: the
attitudes of workers in a time of industrial transition) (1988) discuss managerial strategies
through which to win the worker's ikigai for the company.
9. In this article I give only brief glimpses of how dozens ofJapanese people I interviewed
formulated their ikigai. For comprehensive personal accounts of nine Japanese and nine
Americans describing what makes their lives seem worth living, see Mathews 1996.
10. One reason why the blue-collarJapanese workers I interviewed found ikigai in family
more than did white-collar workers may be time: unlike most of the white-collar workers I
interviewed, many of the blue-collar workers tended to be at home with their families rather
than off on company-related activities in the evenings. Several woman told me that their
white-collar husbands were like geshukunin-boarders-so little were they at home.
11. Americans to whom I describe this woman often say, "Whata waste! She never used
what she learned." But this women had never intended to be a professional at English, but
only to fulfill her youthful dream before assuming her primary role of mother. American
women with whom I have spoken sometimes seem to assume that gender equality means
above all equality in the workplace, and thatJapanese women are oppressed because they
lack that equality. However, with a few exceptions, the Japanese women I interviewed did
not feel this way; as several mothers of school-age children said to me, in their own words,
"Whywould I ever want to have to work as hard as my husband has to?"
12. If these men were wholly sociocentric-if their ikigai was felt solely in terms ofittaikan
toward their companies-then their sense of being corporate cogs would not be perturbing
to them, in that the essence of themselves would be their membership in their companies
rather than their individual work in their companies. Of all the workers I interviewed, only
one, the work-committed sarariiman cited in the text, seemed able to feel this way.
13. Men who must retire may often experience the loss of role more completely than
women, for whom the role as mother may be attenuated in old age, but never altogether
shed. Beyond this, the elderly men and women I interviewed who lived in three-generational
families often seemed able to live by a newly roled self-that of grandparent-more easily
than those who lived alone.
14. Surveys show that many old people say that their hobbies are their ikigai, but the
Japanese books on ikigai that I have read, whether defining ikigai as jiko jitsugen or as
ittaikan, consistently denigrate or deny the validity of hobby as ikigai. Only a very few old
people I interviewed claimed to find ikigai in the pursuit of a hobby.
15. Sakurai (1985) and Sengoku (1991) maintain that Japanese young people are
fundamentally different from their predecessors in earlier generations; and indeed, most
people I interviewed overage 50 bemoaned the youngergeneration as being utterlydifferent
from their elders. On the other hand, Minami (1989) convincingly argues that stages in
lifecourse, not history, are the primary factor shaping attitudinal changes between genera-
tions.
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