As you can see from the fact that the word “identity” is translated as “sameness,” or the state of being identical in Japanese, it means “the condition of being oneself in itself.” But here, identity does not refer to a certain material such as gold. Rather, it is something that is profoundly related to human being and especially to the question of self. This you can roughly guess from the context in which the word is used.

The foundation of identity was “mostly sought, in the history of philosophy of modern Europe, in self-ownership, in which one’s consciousness continues to ‘own’ one’s past consciousness lost in the passage of time” (Washida: 1995: 125-126, cf. Washida 1993/1994).

Self-ownership here means that the self dominates, as a property, the self, including its body and abilities. This conception of modern thinkers such as John Locke, who sought the foundation of the autonomous self in this self-ownership, i.e., “possessive individualism” in the terminology of Macpherson, had a fundamental influence on the development of the modern world.

Macpherson defines possessive individualism as follows: “The human essence is freedom from dependence on the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession. Society becomes a lot of free equal individuals related to each other as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise. Society consists of relations of exchange between proprietors” (Macpherson 1962: 3).

Exchange mentioned in this passage refers to the exchange of commodities; there is no need to mention that it is one of the cornerstones of the modern world system.