from Nihongo
Japan Times, 2001
Ah, Nihongo. Of all foreign languages, this is the one that keeps you on your toes, lest you lose your footing. An Occidental beginner might be forgiven for suspecting the Japanese did it on purpose - sowed their language with mines and pitfalls to thwart non-native penetration. Sixteenth-century European missionaries who came bearing the word of God vented their frustration on the devil. Japanese, they said, was the devil's language, impossible to learn, Satan's fiendish device for depriving this otherwise promising island race of Christian salvation.
The Japanese take pride in the difficulty of their language. Even now, when Japanese-speaking foreigners are commonplace, the view persists that real Japanese can only be spoken by real Japanese. English is for the world, for everyone - anyone can master it. Perhaps this good-natured contempt explains in part the conspicuous Japanese failure to do so. Japanese, on the other hand, with its nuances, studied ambiguities and pregnant silences, is more than a language, it's an art, conferring on its native speakers the distinction of being born artists.
Artists, or devils? To us matter-of-fact post-moderns, either notion seems quaint and faintly laughable. "No," laughs Harvard Japanese literature professor Jay Rubin in his book Making Sense of Japanese, "Japanese is not the language of the infinite. Japanese is not even vague. The people of Sony and Nissan and Toyota did not get where they are today by wafting incense back and forth. The Japanese speak and write to each other as other literate peoples do."
Do they? And does successful industrialization prove it? Well into the 20th century, the prevailing view was that they didn't. "The ideas of this people," wrote Lafcadio Hearn in 1904, "are not our ideas; their sentiments are not our sentiments; their ethical life represents for us regions of thought and emotion yet unexplored, or perhaps long forgotten." Anthropologist Ruth Benedict, writing in 1946, noted the language's relentlessly hierarchical quality: "Every greeting, every contact, must indicate the kind and degree of social distance between men" - still more between men and women. On the other hand, observed scholar Basil Hall Chamberlain circa 1900, Japanese "is honorably deficient in terms of abuse. It affords absolutely no means of cursing and swearing."
"Could you learn all the words in the Japanese dictionary," continued Hearn, "your acquisition would not help you in the least to make yourself understood in speaking, unless you had learned to think like a Japanese - that is to say, to think backwards, to think upside down and inside out, to think in directions totally foreign to Aryan habit."
Does that reflect the true state of the language, or merely the befuddlement of an imperfect speaker? Japanese, it is often said, is an "ambiguous" language, favoring the delicate hint over the plain fact, poetic allusion over scientific precision. If that sort of thing appeals to you, you say Japanese is "rich in ambiguity." If it doesn't, you throw up your hands with Hearn, consigning the language and its people to the unexplored regions - to the devil, in short.
Bastard child of ponderous complexity and surreal simplicity, Japanese is masterable as a foreign language, but not hospitable. Its writing system, requiring thousands of characters to do what the Western alphabet does with 26, will cow all but the most dedicated students (including Japanese students - kanji illiteracy is a serious problem in high schools). The grammar, on the other hand - unspecific as to tense, mute as to singular-plural distinction, reticent as to sentence subject, shy regarding personal names - is simple to a fault. Precision is not beyond it, but not native to it either. Edward Seidensticker, translator of the 10th century literary diary known in English as The Gossamer Years, introduces a certain lady as the diarist's sister but adds in a footnote, "Whether this is the sister who left for the provinces on page 55, or the sister who left the author's house on page 39, or neither, or both, is not clear. In fact it is not even clear whether it is a sister or a brother."
Centuries of linguistic evolution separates us from that ancient personage, whoever he or she was, and yet in the year 2000, in a book advocating the adoption of English as a second official language, Asahi Shimbun diplomatic correspondent Yoichi Funabashi identified what he sees as Japan's greatest 20th century failure. It was, he said, a failure of communication.