Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture
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54 Takami Kuwayama
Notes
1. Goodenough (1968).
2. Tyler (1969).
3. Harris (1968).
4. Headland, Pike and Harris (1990).
5. Befu (2001).
6. The Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology, formerly known as the Japanese
Society of Ethnology, was founded in 1934.Asof2007, it had a membership of
approximately 2000 people.
7. Takeo Doi (1973).
8. Hamaguchi (1985).
9. Nakane (1970).
10. Watsuji (1971).
11. Takeo Doi (1973: 18).
12. Benedict (1946: 145).
13. Kuwayama (2004: 89).
14. Takeo Doi (1973: 75).
15. Kimura (1972: 149).
16.
¯
Otsuka, Kawashima and Doi (1976: 27–33).
17. Young-Bruehl and Bethelard (2000).
18. Frank Johnson (1993: 197–200).
19. Hamaguchi (1988:
15–20).
These remarks are based on Hamaguchi’s Japanese-language
book published in 1988. The book was originally published in 1977, then re-published
in 1988 under the same title, but with a different publisher. Between the two editions,
Hamaguchi summarised his ideas in a 1985 English-language article (1985).
20. Nakane (1967b: 86).
21. Befu (2001).
22. Hall (1966).
23. Hamaguchi (1985: 289).
24. See Kuwayama (2001) on how it developed in the study of ie or family.
25. Sullivan (1970: 392).
26. Mead (1934: 223).
27. Burke (1993: 94).
28. Prost (1991: 84).
29. See Kuwayama (2004: 15–17) for cross-cultural implications on this point.
30. Sugimoto and Mouer (1989: 15).
31. See Toshinao Yoneyama (1985) for a synoptic review.
32. Aruga (1954).
33. Sugimoto (2003: 23).
34. Gilligan (1982).
35. Tsunoda, de Bary and Keene (
1964: 282).
36. Wa
tsuji (1935).
37. See Berque (1996) for a review of the notion of f
¯
udo.
38. Watsuji (1935: 141–5; 1971: 141–4).
39. See Bellah (2003) for an excellent critique.
40. Kuwayama (2001).
Emic conceptions 55
41. Nakane (1970: 10).
42. Kawamura (1989).
43. Bachnik and Quinn (1994).
44. Lee (1984: 10–13).
45. Quoted in Takeo Doi (1979: 267).
46. Quoted in Takeo Doi (1979: 267).
47. Balint (1992: 69).
48. Fromm (1980: 28–9), emphasis added.
49. Parsons (1969).
50. Takeo Doi (1973: 16).
51. Goodenough (1970).
52. Goodenough (1970: 112).
53. Befu (1989: 341).
54. This is best illustrated by Kunio Yanagita (1875–1962). His determination to create a
distinctively Japanese approach to the study of folklore sprang from his intellectual
nationalism. This in turn was aroused by his intense sense of rivalry against Western
science, as well as by his resentment of self-appointed Western spokesmen for Japan,
such as Lafcadio Hearn. For details, see Kuwayama (2005).
Further reading
Befu, Harumi (2001), Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihon-
jinron, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press.
Headland, Thomas N, Kenneth L Pike and Marvin Harris (eds) (1990), Emics and Etics:
The Insider/Outsider Debate, Newbury Park: Sage.
Kuwayama, Takami (2004), Native Anthropology: The Japanese Challenge to Western
Academic Hegemony, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press.
hugh clarke
3
Language
Language reflects social change. This is perhaps nowhere better illus-
trated than in Japan, where massive upheavals in the use of language have
occurred over the past two hundred years. These changes have affected not
only the Japanese language itself, but also Japanese attitudes to their own
and other languages. Neither are these attitudes constant. They fluctuate
over time, reflecting the prevailing political or social climate, or the views,
whether progressive or conservative, of the protagonists in the language
debate. As with other aspects of Japanese culture, the story of language in
modern Japan reverberates with the tensions between the centripetal forces
of standardisation, unity and nationalism on the one hand and the centrifu-
gal imperatives of diversity, regional identity and internationalism on the
other.
This chapter aims to provide a broad overview of language in mod-
ern Japan, dealing not only with Japanese, but also with Ryukyuan, Ainu
and English. Within each section the focus is on sociolinguistic matters,
including language diversity, change, regulation, attitudes and controversy.
1
A secondary aim of the chapter is to provide readers with a guide to
research resources accessible in English, both on the printed page and on the
internet.
Historical overview
Contrary to long-held assumptions that language changes at a constant rate,
recent research suggests that languages tend to go through cycles of relative
stagnation followed by periods of rapid change.
2
The stimulus for change is
often external pressure exerted through contact with different languages and
cultures. The greatest changes we can observe in the history of the Japanese
Language 57
language have occurred after periods of major external impact. The first of
these in the historical period was the introduction of Chinese language and
culture with the advent of Buddhism in the middle of the 6th century.
3
The
next major foreign influence on Japanese culture came through contact with
Portuguese and Spanish missionaries in the 16th century. Then followed two
centuries of isolation under the ‘closed country’ (sakoku) policy, in which
the only window to the outside world was through limited contact with
Dutch and Chinese traders at the tiny island outpost of Dejima in Nagasaki.
4
While these early European contacts contributed a few dozen words to the
Japanese vocabulary (e.g. pan ‘bread’, botan ‘button’ and tabako ‘tobacco’
from Portuguese and mesu ‘scalpel’ and korera ‘cholera’ from Dutch),
5
their
influence is negligible when compared with the next great wave of foreign
contact that began pounding the shores of Japan from the mid-19th century.
These early encounters with the English language acted as a catalyst for
unprecedented change in Japanese language and society which, reinforced
with the second impact of English after Japan’s defeat in the Second World
War, continues to exert a considerable influence to the present day.
In addition to these spontaneous changes triggered by contact with
other languages and cultures, deliberate measures were debated from the
last decades of the 19th century, and continued under successive Japanese
governments, about how to ‘modernise’ the Japanese language. The major
changes advocated fall roughly within the areas of simplification of the
written language through the unification of written and spoken Japanese
(genbun’itchi) and the establishment of a standard national language.
Characteristics of the Japanese language
The Japanese language is characterised by a simple phonetic system, SOV
(subject, object, verb) word order, a highly developed respect language and
a rich system of sound symbolism. It has a hybrid vocabulary made up
of native Japanese words, loanwords from Chinese, English and other lan-
guages and a large number of Sino-Japanese neologisms, many created in
Japan, fashioned to translate terms denoting Western ideas and technol-
ogy. Japanese is unique in the sense that all languages are unique – it is
their uniqueness that distinguishes them as discrete languages. Conversely,
despite the claims to special status for the Japanese language often advocated
by proponents of the Nihonjinron, Japanese is no more or less remarkable
than most of the world’s several thousand languages. In grammatical struc-
ture it is almost identical to Korean and it shares many features, such as
58 Hugh Clarke
the tendency to employ suffixes and particles (or postpositions), with other
SOV languages, like Mongolian or Turkish. The simple consonant plus
vowel sound system is similar to Polynesian and elaborate respect language
is also found in Javanese, Hindi, Korean, Thai and many other languages.
Roy Andrew Miller has written at some length on what he sees as the
irrational relationship many Japanese have to their language and how myths
about Japanese are kindled and perpetuated in the popular writings of schol-
ars of the Japanese language.
6
Indeed, since the end of the 1990s there has
been a new boom in popular publications on the Japanese language. Sait
¯
o
Takashi’s Koe ni dashite yomitai Nihongo (Japanese to be read aloud), pub-
lished in 2001, sold over a million copies and inspired ordinary citizens all
over Japan to enrol in classes for the recitation of Japanese texts, r
¯
odoku.
This up-turn in interest in Japanese may be in response to embarrassment
over Japan’s poor international showing in English proficiency tests; or
it may be through nostalgia and the psychological need to feel pride in
Japanese language and culture at a time of economic recession.
7
Debate over origins
Despite well over a century of conjecture and research regarding the genetic
affiliation of Japanese, producing scores of books and hundreds of articles
relating it to a large number of languages and language families as divergent
as Hittite, Indo-European, Korean, Proto-Altaic,
8
Dravidian, Ainu and
Austronesian, scholars have failed to reach a consensus on the origins of the
language and many among them see it as a language isolate like Basque or
Ainu.
It seems almost certain that there is a connection between Japanese and
Korean, but it remains unclear whether this is the result of early borrowing
or shared inheritance. The most likely candidates for relatives of Japanese
seem to be the Altaic languages to the north and west or the Austronesian
languages to the south. The only language that can be indisputably assigned
to the same genealogy as Japanese is Ryukyuan, which, as we shall see
below, Japanese linguists in general consider to be a group of Japanese
dialects. One scholar at least, Murayama Shichir
¯
o, claimed that Japanese is a
‘mixed language’ with an Austronesian vocabulary and an Altaic grammar.
9
Vocabulary
Japanese has drawn its vocabulary from a variety of sources. By far the
largest outside contribution to the Japanese lexical stock has come from
Language 59
Chinese. The Chinese language brought with it not only a large corpus of
specialised abstract and technical vocabulary, much of it coined in China
from Sanskrit originals to explain the practice and doctrine of Buddhism,
but the writing system itself. Despite the semantic basis of the Chinese
script, the characters are primarily representations of the sounds of the
syllables of Chinese words.
10
Until modest changes in the shapes of some
characters were introduced independently in Japan and China after the war,
the shapes of the Chinese characters had changed very little in the 25 cen-
turies since Confucius. The pronunciation of the characters, however, had
changed considerably. As a result, the same Chinese character, borrowed
into Japanese in different Chinese words at different times in history, may
have two, three or more separate quasi-Chinese pronunciations (called on
readings) in addition to the native Japanese translations (kun readings) rep-
resenting the meaning of the character, rather than its original sound in
Chinese.
The influence of English
The use of English loanwords in Japanese covers virtually all registers and
genres of the language, ranging from rippu s
¯
abisu (lip service) – used to refer
to former Prime Minister Abe Shinz
¯
o’s responses to Western journalists –
to the chairudo rokku (child lock) button on the simple washing machine in
my Tokyo flat. In some cases, Japanese even makes distinctions in the use of
loanwords that are not made in the original English. There are two words
in Japanese that convey the English noun ‘strike’, sutoraiki for an industrial
strike and sutoraiku for a strike in baseball. Similarly, glass, the substance
from which windows and bottles are made, is garasu (an old loanword from
Dutch), but the glass you drink from is gurasu or koppu. This latter term
(also from Dutch) should not be confused with kappu (a cup), the china
vessel with a handle from which one drinks Western, but not Japanese,
tea.
Indeed, the influx of loans from English continues at such pace and
volume that the National Institute for Japanese Language (Kokuritsu
Kokugo Kenky
¯
ujo) has felt the need to intervene. In 2003 the Institute
established a foreign loanwords committee to survey the use of foreign
loanwords in Japanese, issue guidelines and suggest substitutes for dif-
ficult or unnecessary borrowings from English and other languages. In
four meetings up to March 2006 the committee suggested alternative
Japanese translations for one hundred and seventy-six words.
11
The list
of words targeted for remedial action includes two words from German,
torauma (Trauma) and biot
¯
opu (Biotop), and one from French, komyunike
60 Hugh Clarke
(communiqu
´
e). The remainder are from English, including well established,
but apparently little understood, words like aidentitii (identity),
12
abbrevi-
ations like infura (infrastructure) and words coined in Japan from English
roots like nonsuteppubasu (literally ‘non-step bus’, bus with wheel-chair
access). The committee recommends that these be replaced respectively
with the Sino-Japanese compounds, dokujisei (individuality) or jiko nin-
shiki (self awareness), shakai kiban (social foundation) and mudansa basu
(level-floor bus).
The composition of the Japanese vocabulary, then, is a mix of native
Japanese (wago), Chinese (kango), and other foreign, mainly English, com-
ponents (gairaigo). Chinese character compounds, kango, frequently appear
in written texts or in more formal spoken registers. Compare the usual native
Japanese word for ‘tomorrow’, ashita, with its more formal kango equiva-
lent, my
¯
onichi, or the native colloquial word for cooked rice, meshi, with
the more genteel kango word, gohan,orthegairaigo alternative, raisu.In
practice this last term, derived from the English word rice, is restricted in
meaning to designate rice served as an adjunct to a Western meal. Unlike
meshi or gohan, which comes in a bowl and is eaten with chopsticks, raisu
generally comes on a flat plate and is eaten with a fork.
Respect language
Like many societies with a history of hierarchical social structure, Japanese
has an elaborate system of honorific language or keigo. Some consider
keigo a feudal anachronism and fail to see how it can remain relevant to
Japanese society in the 21st century, when virtually all Japanese consider
themselves members of the middle class. Despite the younger generation’s
complaints about the system’s complexity, it has survived by assuming the
new functions of adding value to interaction between service providers and
customers, smoothing social intercourse and maintaining harmony among
equals of little acquaintance. The tendency nowadays seems to be towards
reciprocity in the use of polite language and to confine the highest honorifics
to customers and those generally perceived to be performing important roles
in society, such as doctors, teachers and company presidents. Basically the
system works at two levels: politeness and respect. Every Japanese sentence
carries information about both categories. Politeness is directed towards
the addressee, while respect is shown to the subject (subject honorifics),
or direct or indirect object (object honorifics), of the verb. As the subject
of object honorific sentences is invariably the first person, ‘I’, or someone
closely associated with the speaker, traditionally the object honorifics were
Language 61
referred to as ‘humble’ or ‘deferential language’. The older terms are still
in general use, but specialists prefer ‘object honorifics’ as these forms show
respect to a socially designated superior and carry no connotations of self-
denigration on the part of the speaker.
While it is older Japanese who tend to have problems with the influx of
foreign words, respect language is the bane of younger speakers. With the
breakdown of extended families and the trend towards less formal school
environments, Japanese today are not exposed to the hierarchical features of
their society until they leave school and join the workforce. Consequently,
the responsibility for training in respect language often falls on employers.
Inevitably, variation creeps into the system and disagreements occur over
what constitutes correct usage.
Language and gender
Japanese men and women speak differently. This remains true in spite of
the protestations of older Japanese that young women these days speak
more like men and young males are speaking more like women. The differ-
ences between men’s and women’s language are less apparent in the polite
conversational style, though, even here, women tend to use more honorific
expressions than men and many overuse the elegant noun prefix o-. Con-
vention calls for the use of the prefix in words like o-kane (money) and
o-tsuri (change); women often use it with traditional vocabulary like o-sake
(sake), o-kome (rice) or o-miai (arranged marriage), but purists frown on
its use with loanwords like o-biiru (beer) or o-ninjin (carrot). The typical
sentence-final particles of female speech, wa (soft emphasis), kashira (mild
speculation) and no yo (gentle assertion), are often heard in the informal
style. Modern women don’t seem to find the use of feminine language
demeaning as they use it as much in the company of other women as in the
presence of men, but in general they now show resistance to sexist terms
from the past that suggest a lower social status for women. Consequently,
activists insist that the neutral term otto (husband) be used in favour of the
common term shujin that means master as well as husband. Similarly tsuma
(wife) is preferred to kanai (literally, ‘inside the house’).
13
Dialects
There is considerable regional variation in the Japanese language. Some of
these variants, like the Tsugaru dialect of Aomori prefecture at the northern
62 Hugh Clarke
tip of Honsh
¯
u and the Kagoshima dialect of southern Ky
¯
ush
¯
u, are mutu-
ally unintelligible and are of course incomprehensible to city dwellers of
Tokyo or Osaka. The dialects of the T
¯
ohoku region of northern Honsh
¯
u,
in particular, are characterised by the presence of the central vowels [
¨
ı]
and [( ¨
ɯ)] and various sound combinations not found in the central dialects
which provide the model for the so-called ‘common language’ (ky
¯
ots
¯
ugo).
In many of these northern dialects, for instance, words distinguished in the
pronunciation of Tokyo, like sushi (sushi), shishi (lion), susu (soot), shushi
(intention) and shishu (defending to the death) are all pronounced [s
¨
ıs
¨
ı]
or [s ¨
ɯs¨ɯ]. This confusion often leaves T
¯
ohoku dialect speakers the butt
of jokes in Tokyo and Osaka, where their dialect is unkindly referred to
as zuuzuuben (the zuuzuu dialect). Some northern dialect speakers, fewer
nowadays than under the language assimilation policy of the past, develop a
dialect inferiority complex because of their inability to modify their native
vowel sounds. Conversely, the dialects of the kamigata region (Kyoto and
Osaka) enjoy considerable prestige and are a source of pride to those who
speak them. They are frequently heard on national television and radio,
particularly in the traditional performing arts of manzai (comic dialogue)
and kamigata rakugo (storytelling).
Leaving aside for the moment the dialects of Okinawa and the Amami
Islands of Kagoshima prefecture, which I prefer to regard as dialects of
Ryukyuan, a closely-related, sister-language of Japanese, the dialects of
Japan can be divided into three broad groups on the basis of their phono-
logical, grammatical and lexical features. These are the eastern dialects, the
western dialects and the dialects of Ky
¯
ush
¯
u. The dialects of Hokkaid
¯
o
are included in the eastern dialect group. As the island was largely settled
in the Meiji period by immigrants from the Kant
¯
o region, the language is
for the most part close to the language of Tokyo. Settlements on the coast,
however, tend to share many features with the T
¯
ohoku dialects, due to a
long history of contact from the sea by fisherman from northern Honsh
¯
u.
Within each of the Japanese dialect groups there are several subgroups,
as set out in Figure 3.1. The major dividing line between the dialects of east
and west Japan is a fuzzy bunching of isoglosses (the dividing line between
different linguistic features) running through central Japan from the Pacific
coast along the western border of Aichi prefecture, extending through Gifu
prefecture to emerge on the Japan Sea coast between Toyama and Niigata
prefectures. The position of the border varies according to whether the focus
is placed on accent, other phonological features, vocabulary or grammar.
The Ky
¯
ush
¯
u dialects preserve some features of the verb conjugations of Old
Language 63
Japanese that have been lost in other areas of Japan. Kagoshima is famous for
its impenetrability, due to the fact that many final syllables in the common
language are reduced to a glottal stop in Kagoshima, and everybody knows
that in Nagasaki batten means ‘but’ and the suffix -ka is added to adjectives,
so the locals say yoka for ‘good’ in place of Tokyo ii (good) or Osaka ee
(good).
The subgroups contain numerous closely related dialects, often differing
from one village to the next, distinguished from one another by minor
differences in pronunciation, grammar or vocabulary.
Japanese speakers on the whole seem to be keenly aware of minor dif-
ferences in pronunciation, particularly in the pitch accent patterns, that are
the most obvious distinguishing features of the regional dialects. For this
reason, radio and television dramas often provide local colour or delineate
characters by introducing regional accents.
Ryukyuan
Ryukyuan is used here in preference to the more common term, Okinawan,
to describe those dialects spoken in the former Ryukyu kingdom; from the
Amami Islands (annexed in 1609 by Satsuma, in present-day Kagoshima
prefecture), to Yonaguni, a little over one hundred kilometres from Taiwan.
There is a clear dialect division running south of the Satsunan and Tokara
islands, separating Ryukyuan from the Japanese dialects. Further, the lack
of mutual intelligibility between any Japanese and any Ryukyuan dialect,
coupled with the traditional political authority of the language of Shuri as
the lingua franca and literary language for the entire archipelago, is a strong
argument against accepting the Japanese teisetsu (academic consensus) that
these are all simply dialects of Japanese.
While there is a great deal of variation among the dialects of Ryukyuan,
to the extent that virtually every community has its own dialect, the dialects
fall together into two major divisions and several dialect groups as set out
in Figure 3.1. There is debate over whether the Yonaguni dialect should
be included with the Yaeyama dialects or whether it constitutes a sepa-
rate dialect (or language). In Figure 3.1, for simplicity, I have arranged the
northern Ryukyuan dialects into two groups, the Amami dialects and the
Okinawa dialects. In fact, Uemura Yukio recognises six separate dialect
groups for the Amami islands and two groups for the main island of
Okinawa Island and its neighbouring islands.
14