When Adam and Eve defied God, creator and master of the universe, and ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, what did they learn? To say "I."

They learned that they were "naked" — they were selves, egos. As such, there was no place for them in paradise. Their expulsion was "the fall of man," narrated in the biblical Book of Genesis.

This seems a long way from Japan. It is. Japanese myth records no "fall," no defiance of the undefiable, no primeval descent into selfhood. The Japanese ego evolved very differently from the Western one.