Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture

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64 Hugh Clarke

200km

Sea of

Japan

Pacific

Ocean

See inset

Kyushu dialects

North & Eastern dialects

Western dialects

Kagoshima dialects

Hokuriku dialects

Kinki dialects

Chugoku dialects

Izumo-Tottori dialects

Shikoku dialects

Izumo-Tottori

Chugoku

Shikoku

Kinki

Hokuriku

Hokkaido dialects

Tohoku dialects

Kanto dialects

Tokai-Tosan dialects

Hachijojima dialect

Hachijojima

Hokkaido

Tsugaru

Tohoku

Kanto

Tokai-Tosan

Kagoshima

Western dialects

Eastern dialects

–

––

–

––

–

Amami dialects

Okinawa dialects

Amami

Islands

Okinawa

Miyako

Yonaguni

Yaeyama

Islands

Northern Ryukyuan

Miyako dialects

Yaeyama dialects

Yonaguni dialect

Southern Ryukyuan

Figure 3.1 The major dialect divisions of Japanese and Ryukyuan.

Source: after T

o Misao and Uemura Yukio,

modiﬁed by the author.

It is not surprising, after nearly a hundred years of active suppression of

local dialects and rigid enforcement of standard language education, that few

communities in Okinawa now conduct their daily lives through the medium

of their traditional dialect. Nor are local dialects being passed down from

parent to child in the natural intergenerational transmission that occurs

with healthy, robust languages. Consequently, many Ryukyuan dialects are

in grave danger of disappearing within the next generation. Despite the loss

Language 65

of traditional dialects, however, Okinawans have, for the most part, man-

aged to retain an identity distinct from that of other Japanese by drawing on

their traditional music, ritual culture, food and subtropical natural environ-

ment; and over the past decade or so we have seen the emergence of a new

lingua franca for the whole prefecture. Nicknamed Uchinaa Yamatuguchi

(Okinawan Japanese) this new dialect incorporates features of Ryukyuan

phonology, grammar and lexicon into modern Japanese, resulting in a means

of communication which can be more or less understood anywhere in Japan,

but clearly marks anyone speaking it as an Okinawan. In this respect, it

goes some way toward ﬁlling the void caused by the loss of traditional

dialects and contributes to the establishment of a new prefecture-wide Oki-

nawan identity that has been lacking since the dialect of Shuri lost its role

as the Ryukyuan lingua franca with the fall of the Ryukyuan kingdom

in 1879.

It is worth noting here that attempts to revitalise Ryukyuan, or at least

Uchinaaguchi, could succeed even at this late hour if given adequate gov-

ernment support. The experience of Spain in moving from a policy of

suppression of local languages and customs under the Franco regime to

active government support for regional autonomy, including the use of the

languages Basque, Catalan and Galician in the domains of local govern-

ment and education, has shown that the process of language decline can be

reversed.

But, despite recent signs that the Japanese government is moving

towards acceptance, and even encouragement, of cultural diversity, it seems

very unlikely that it will abandon its centralised education system in time

to halt the demise of the Ryukyuan dialects.

The writing system

It is difﬁcult to imagine a language with a more complicated writing system

than Japanese. Chinese may employ a greater number of characters, but

Japanese, with its two syllabaries, 3000 or so Chinese characters (kanji)in

regular use, plus the Roman alphabet, must take the cake for complexity. The

system is further complicated by the fact that each kanji generally has from

twotoasmanyas10 or more pronunciations depending on the context.

While, technically, either one of the syllabaries, the cursive hiragana or the

more angular katakana, could adequately convey the sounds of the Japanese

language, the Japanese penchant for incorporating elements from various

sources and their reluctance to discard anything they have thus acquired

has aided the retention of this unwieldy writing system.

66 Hugh Clarke

Japanese is generally written without spaces between words, in vertical

columns from right to left, or in horizontal lines running from left to

right. Newspapers, magazines and most books are printed in vertical script,

though there is an increasing tendency for books on technical topics to be

written horizontally, as English is. This latter solution makes it easier to

incorporate alpha-numeric data into the Japanese text. The lack of spaces

between words does not impede comprehension, as the alternation of kanji

and kana characters breaks the sentence into natural phrases or breath-

groups (bunsetsu).

Put simply, the system works as follows. Most nouns and the stems of

verbs and adjectives are written in kanji; grammatical particles, sufﬁxes,

adverbs and exclamations in hiragana; words borrowed from foreign lan-

guages other than Chinese, the names of less common animals and plants

and onomatopoeia in katakana; and scientiﬁc names, numbers, dates etc. in

Roman script.

The following sentence, taken from an article on the development of the

next generation of high deﬁnition television sets (Yomiuri Shimbun, 14 Jan

2008, morning edn, p1), demonstrates the use of the four scripts – or ﬁve

if we acknowledge the Arabic origin of Western numbers – used to write

modern Japanese.

1990dddddNHKddddddddddddddddddddd

dddddddddddd

Transliterated into the Roman alphabet, with the original kanji in small

capitals, hiragana in bold font and katakana in italics, the sentence would

look like this.

1990nendainiha,NHKnadogaanaroguhousikidenihonnohaibijon-

gijutunokokusaihyoujunkawomezasita.

In standard Romanisation, with spaces added, the sentence becomes:

1990-nendai ni wa, NHK nado ga anarogu-h

oshiki de Nihon no

haibijon-gijutsu no kokusai-hy

ojunka o mezashita

AndinEnglish:

In the 1990s NHK and others aimed to make Japanese analogue-type

high-deﬁnition the international standard.

Table 3.1 illustrates the structure of the Japanese sentence. Here the kanji

are used in their quasi-Chinese ( on) readings in Sino-Japanese compounds

Language 67

Table 3.1 Structure of the Japanese sentence

1990-

nendai

ni wa,

NHK

nado ga

anarogu-h

oshiki

Nihon

haibijon-gijutsu

kokusaihy

ojunka

mezasita.

1990 year

period in

+TOP

NHK etc

+SUB

analogue-type

with

Japan

high-deﬁnition

(lit.‘high vision’)

technology of

international

standardisation

+OBJ

aimed

+TOP = topic particle, +SUB = subject particle, +OBJ = object particle

(kango), except for the ﬁnal verb, mezashita, meaning ‘aimed at/for’, writ-

ten with the characters for ‘eye’ and ‘to point’, plus a sufﬁx (written in

hiragana) indicating the past tense, which is read in the Japanese (kun)

pronunciation.

As complicated as the writing system is today, it is nevertheless a consid-

erably simpliﬁed version of the script employed in the Tokugawa period,

or even that in use up to the end of the Second World War. The move from

historical spelling to a system based on the modern pronunciation was made

in 1946, when most of the redundancy was removed from the system.

Language policy

While the new (1868) Meiji government delighted in denouncing as feudal

anachronism all that the nation had inherited from the preceding 250 years

of Tokugawa rule, it has become clear that the success of the government’s

language reforms can be attributed in large part to the relatively high levels

of literacy achieved under the previous regime.

In addition, the use of the

spoken language in the popular ﬁction (gesaku)oftheEdoperiodhelped

pave the way for the introduction of the colloquial written style of modern

Japanese.

In spite of an early consensus, achieved by the beginning of the 20th

century among novelists, playwrights and, to a lesser extent, poets, that the

colloquial style should provide the written norm, classical Japanese persisted

in some genres until the end of the Second World War. The decision to write

the new Constitution in the modern colloquial language sounded the death

knell for classical Japanese, driving it out of its ﬁnal stronghold as the

vehicle of written legal discourse. Prewar attempts to simplify the Japanese

script by restricting the number of characters or by replacing Sino-Japanese

characters (kanji) altogether with one or other of the phonetic scripts fell

68 Hugh Clarke

foul of ultranationalist ideology which regarded any tampering with Japan’s

traditional writing system as tantamount to treason.

After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, those advocating reform

of the script were able to exploit the tide of democracy and anti-militarist

sentiment to ﬁnally achieve limited success in implementing their aims. In

this task they had the encouragement of the Education Division of the Civil

Education and Information Section of the SCAP (Supreme Command for

the Allied Powers) Occupation that felt simpliﬁcation of the writing system

would raise levels of literacy and contribute to democracy by helping to cre-

ate an informed electorate. It was well known that certain inﬂuential ﬁgures

in the SCAP administration would have preferred a change to a Romanised

writing system. Suzuki Takao, Professor Emeritus of Keio University and

one of the doyens of the Japanese language establishment, has suggested

that Japanese readiness to adopt limitations on the number of characters

was driven in part by a fear that their traditional script might be replaced

by r

omaji (Roman letters). But J Marshall Unger refutes this claim, main-

taining that the modest progress achieved under the Allied Occupation was

a natural consequence of plans for script reduction that had begun before

the turn of the century and had continued even through the Second World

War.

Under the Allied Occupation, measures were introduced to limit to

1850 the number of Sino-Japanese characters (kanji)tobeusedinofﬁcial

documents and newspapers and to be taught in the nine years of compulsory

education. These were called T

okanji(Characters for Interim Use); the

inference behind the term being that this was to be a ﬁrst step towards

further reduction in the number of kanji and possibly the eventual adoption

of a phonetic script for Japanese.

In addition, a revised system of kana

spelling that, except for the spelling of three grammatical particles, followed

the pronunciation of contemporary spoken Japanese, replaced the system of

historical spelling that had reﬂected the pronunciation of the court language

of Kyoto in the 11th century. In the post-Occupation years, continuing

right up to the present, there has been a history of sporadic government

intervention into language planning, with the introduction of a number

of ofﬁcial regulations, some of which have had the effect of peeling back

the reforms instigated during the Allied Occupation. Far from phasing out

the use of kanji, the recent changes have actually increased the number of

characters to be learnt in the years of compulsory education and established

the principle of ‘meyasu’ (a recommended guideline) in favour of the former

mandatory restrictions on the number of kanji to be used.

Language 69

A number of researchers writing in English have examined the history of

script reform in Japan.

They tend to emphasise the political machinations

and government involvement in the debate between the traditionalists and

the reformers. Often, they appear to lament the fact that some of the mod-

erate reforms achieved in the immediate postwar years have been reversed

and that the traditionalists have emerged as victors in the debate. Invariably,

a win by the traditionalists is interpreted as a swing to the right in Japanese

politics or even a dangerous re-emergence of Japanese nationalism. Even

those reluctant to draw political conclusions from the language data see

the defeat of the reformers as a lost opportunity. While it is true that it

would be much easier for students of Japanese, both native speakers and

foreign learners, to learn to read and write the language if it were written

in a phonetic script, we cannot ignore the fact that many, perhaps most,

Japanese actually quite like their complicated writing system and do not

feel particularly hampered by it. The burden of remembering how to read

and write a large number of characters has been made considerably lighter

by the advent of electronic word processors and computers, which supply

the correct characters in response to the user’s Romanised input. The task

of the writer then is simply to distinguish which of a number of homo-

phones is appropriate in a given written context. Conversely, the number of

characters available in computer generated fonts has swelled to over seven

thousand.

Setting the standard

The celebrated modern novelist and playwright, Inoue Hisashi, has written

a satirical drama for television entitled Kokugo gannen (National language –

year one) dealing with the difﬁculties the new Meiji government faced in

creating a standard language. This task was seen as a major priority in

building national unity and introducing the universal system of education

necessary for Japan’s goal of ‘catching up with the West’. The situation

was exacerbated by the fact that many of the s enior bureaucrats in the new

government were from those areas distant from Edo (renamed Tokyo in

1868) that had been instrumental in the overthrow of the Shogun, and were

themselves speakers of divergent dialects quite unlike the language of the

new eastern capital. In Inoue’s play we meet ﬁve-year old Nang

utar

born of a Satsuma (Kagoshima) mother and a Ch

osh

u (Yamaguchi) father. In

his childish innocence J

utar

o understands how delighted his father is when

he hears the boy using Ch

osh

u dialect and that his mother and grandfather

70 Hugh Clarke

love to hear him speaking in the language of Satsuma. But the poor child

becomes confused and is at a loss to know which dialect to use in the

presence of both his parents together.

The Meiji government, however, felt the need for a common spoken lan-

guage to facilitate the integration of a new national army and central bureau-

cracy based in Tokyo. With the introduction of compulsory education the

need arose for textbooks written in ‘correct national language’ (tadashii

kokugo), i.e. ‘common colloquial language’ ( ky

ots

ogo). The ﬁrst edition

of the Journal of the Ministry of Education (Monbush

o Zasshi) published in

January 1874, lamented the fact that communication was being hampered

by the great number of dialects unintelligible to residents of the capital

and called for the production of appropriate colloquial language teaching

materials to be used in schools across the country. That year, a number of

‘conversational readers’ (kaiwa tokuhon) appeared, but suddenly in 1875

the attitude of government authorities changed and the production of these

textbooks came to an end. The reasons behind this sudden about-face seem

to have been a realisation among educationalists that there was as yet no

‘correct national language’ based on the common colloquial on the one

hand, and a conservative backlash against the progressive policies of the

Meiji enlightenment on the other. The emphasis moved back to the written

word. Even the few magazines that had initially adopted a colloquial style

reverted to the classical grammar with an abundance of Chinese characters

(kanji) that characterised the writing of early Meiji.

It was only 10 years later that authorities again seriously considered the

question of an appropriate common colloquial language.

This was largely

the result of a good deal of prodding from the scholar Ueda Kazutoshi,

who had studied philology under Basil Hall Chamberlain at Tokyo Impe-

rial University and later in Germany under the dialect scholar, Wenker. In

1902, when Ueda was professor of linguistics at Tokyo Imperial University,

he was seconded by the Ministry of Education to head the Kokugo Ch

osa

Iinkai (National Language Investigation Committee) established within the

Ministry of Education and ﬁnally, in 1904, questionnaires on 29 points

of pronunciation were sent out to city and prefectural ofﬁces, teachers’

colleges and other educational establishments covering the seventy-odd old

kuni divisions all over Japan. The reports were collated and published along

with 29 distribution maps in 1905 under the title On’in Ch

osa H

okokusho

(Report of the Phonological Survey). The validity of the ﬁndings is open

to question as very few of the investigators had had any training in pho-

netics and many of the questionnaires were incomplete. Nevertheless, the

Language 71

report and particularly the maps represent a milestone in Japanese language

research as the ﬁrst attempt at a comprehensive survey of the Japanese

dialects. (Interestingly, the dialects of Okinawa prefecture were not included

in these original surveys.)

The standard language that emerged was based on the speech of the

educated classes of Tokyo with a sprinkling of honoriﬁc expressions from

western Japan to accommodate the relocation of the emperor and the aris-

tocracy in the former Shogun’s capital.

Ainu

Ainu (Ainu itak) is the language of the indigenous inhabitants of Hokkaid

The Ainu homeland (Ainu moshir) previously also included southern

Sakhalin, the Kurile Islands and parts of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Ainu

place names in northern Honsh

u suggest that Ainu also lived in this area

before they were driven out by, or absorbed into, the expanding Japanese

population. The name Ainu, applied to both the ethnic group and their lan-

guage, is simply the Ainu word for ‘person’ or ‘human being’ but excludes

Japanese, who are called sisam and Westerners who are called huresisam

(red[-haired] foreigners).

Ainu is generally considered to be a language isolate like Basque; that is

to say, its genetic relationship with other languages cannot be demonstrated.

Japanese has taken in a number of words from Ainu to describe the ﬂora

and fauna of Hokkaid

o and the material culture of the Ainu. The ubiqui-

tous salmon, now a major item in the Japanese diet, is known by its Ainu

name shake (or sake). Other Ainu loanwords in Japanese include rakko (sea

otter), tonakai (reindeer), atsushi (Ainu paper cloth), konbu (sea weed) and

shishamo (smelt [ﬁsh]). Although Ainu seems not to be related to Japanese,

the word order of the two languages is virtually identical. The major gram-

matical feature of Ainu not found in Japanese is that pronominal subjects

and objects are incorporated into the verb in the manner of polysynthetic

languages like Inuit.

To assimilate the Ainu into the Japanese population the Meiji govern-

ment banned the use of the Ainu language, outlawed hunting and traditional

rituals and relocated many Ainu communities onto poorer land. As a result

of this early disruption to the patterns of traditional Ainu life and the neglect

of successive governments well into the ﬁnal decades of the 20th century,

Ainu has long ceased to be the ﬁrst language of any group or individual. Yet

we should not conclude that Ainu is on the verge of extinction. In fact, there

72 Hugh Clarke

are indications that the language is undergoing a modest revival. As long

ago as 1987, STV Radio Hokkaid

o began broadcasting Ainu lessons.

addition, the ‘Act for the Promotion of Ainu Culture & Dissemination of

Knowledge Regarding Ainu Traditions’ that came into effect in 1997 pro-

vided the necessary legislative framework for the revitalisation of the Ainu

language and has led to an increase in the number of courses of instruction

throughout Hokkaid

It is difﬁcult to estimate the number of Ainu, let alone the number of

speakers of the Ainu language. Because the deﬁnition of Ainu ethnicity

is largely a matter of self-selection exhibiting a willingness to be identi-

ﬁed with a stigmatised group, estimates vary widely, ranging from around

24 000 to as many as the 300 000 claimed by some activist groups.

DeChic-

chis identiﬁes four categories of Ainu speakers: archive speakers, Ainu-

Japanese bilinguals, token Ainu speakers and learners of Ainu as a foreign

language.

The archive speakers, most of them long deceased, are those

native speakers of Ainu who grew up using the language in its social con-

text. They left behind the corpus of recordings and transcribed material that

provides the basis for the revitalisation of the language. The Ainu-Japanese

bilinguals use Japanese in their daily activities, but retain enough of the

Ainu they learnt in their childhood to act as teachers and informants for

others wishing to acquire a knowledge of the language. The token speakers

identify themselves as Ainu, but generally know only a few words of the

language in very limited contexts. The non-native learners include not only

citizens with an interest in Ainu culture, but researchers and academics with

a sophisticated practical command of the language. DeChicchis, writing in

1995, reports that the Ainu revitalisation effort has progressed to the stage

where it is now possible to ﬁnd enough teachers, judges and contestants to

hold Ainu language speech contests.

English

In addition to the national language, from the earliest years of the Meiji

period, educated Japanese were expected to be well versed in English.

In the early Taisho period, one third of the time in the middle school

curriculum was devoted to the study of English. This proportion dropped

off gradually into the 1920sand1930s and the teaching of English was

banned for a period during the war years. English was reintroduced into the

middle school and high school syllabus in 1947 as an elective, but was taken

by virtually all students, as it was inevitably a requirement of university

Language 73

entrance examinations. With the introduction of the ﬁve-day school week

and the new syllabus in 2002, foreign language study, which usually meant

English, became mandatory for all secondary school students. Since 1987,

large numbers of native-speaking English teachers have been employed to

teach practical communicative English in Japanese schools under the JET

(Japan Exchange and Teaching) program, jointly run by the Ministry of

Education and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Yet despite these efforts,

Japan ﬁnished 180th of 189 United Nations member countries in the 1998

international Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) examinations.

There has been considerable debate in Japan over the interpretation of the

results, as far more Japanese students, many with low levels of proﬁciency

in English, sit the exam than is the case in other Asian countries, where a

higher proportion of elite students take the test. Nevertheless, as a result

of the perception rather than the reality, the result was taken so seriously

in Japan that an advisory group to Prime Minister Obuchi went so far as

to suggest that English should be designated an ofﬁcial language in Japan.

Given the large number of English loanwords in the Japanese language and

the continuing Japanese infatuation with North American culture, it is dif-

ﬁcult to explain the low levels of attainment in English. Miller, writing in

1982, blamed the university entrance examination system and cramming

colleges for perpetuating the abstract study of grammar and the rote learn-

ing of literary texts with little bearing on the practical use of English in the

modern world.

Although the situation has improved considerably over

the past 25 years, there is still a long way to go before ordinary Japanese

function effectively on the world stage using English as an international

lingua franca.

Conclusion

Language will continue to be a burning topic of debate in Japan. Govern-

ment agencies, private think-tanks and TV panel discussions will continue

to examine what constitutes ‘beautiful Japanese’, or suggest ways to arrest

the decline in grammar and respect language. Nationalists will worry about

the effect of English loanwords on the spirit of the Japanese language and

those advocating respect for regional diversity will continue to argue for

the need to foster local identity through the revitalisation of dialects and

minority languages. Internationalists will lobby more strongly for better

English language education and possibly add Chinese to the linguistic skills

appropriate for Japanese in the 21st century. But the history of language in