the Japanese language...has no tenses either
My memory of this is a little unclear, mostly because there's not too much for me to remember, but.
(And a little googling seems to have bolstered my paucitic memory) Japanese has more or less two tenses, past and non-past. Usage is not through changes made directly to the verb (and this can be a source of confusion for those of us who do change the form of words for grammatical purposes) but by use of particles. This technique is used for most grammatical functions in Japanese, including markers showing what we, with our dependency on the ancient Latin grammarians, would call case structure. The failure(sic) of a language to change the form of a verb to recognize past/present/future or perfection/imperfection does not necessarily imply that the speakers of that language have a sense of time radically different from (than, nor) ours. We could, for example, in English say "I go to the store yesterday/tomorrow" and get across the idea of past or future without changing the form of the verb to go. Such things are accomplished in other languages that do not feel the need to change the form of the verb in the process.
I suppose one could define tense as the alteration of the form of a word for the grammatical purpose of indicating relative time, but to extrapolate a lack of time sense in the speakers of a language from
the lack of tense in that language is, in my opinion, unwarranted.
