Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

“‘Foreigners are beautiful, aren’t they?’ he said.”

This line occurs toward the beginning of Sanshirō (1909), 1a novel by Natsume Sōseki, modern Japan’s greatest novelist. Sanshirō, a young man from the sleepy southern island of Kyushu, is riding a train to the capital where, to his great pride, he will become a student at Tokyo Imperial University. A bearded and rather unimpressively attired passenger is sitting diagonally across from him, and they start a conversation. As the train comes to a stop, they see a Western couple on the platform, whereupon the man makes the observation about foreigners:

Sanshirō could think of nothing to say in reply. He nodded and smiled.

“We Japanese are poor things next to them,” the bearded man continued. “We can beat the Russians, become a first-class power, but it doesn’t make any difference. We still look like this, we still don’t amount to anything. Even the buildings we build, the parks we make, they’re just what you’d expect from people with faces like ours. .. This is your first trip to Tokyo, isn’t it? Then you’ve never seen Mount Fuji. We go by it a little farther on. Take a look. It’s the best thing in Japan, the only thing we can brag about. The trouble is, it’s just part of nature, something that’s always been sitting there. We certainly didn’t create it.” He was grinning again.

Sanshirō had never expected to meet anyone like this after the Russo-Japanese War. The man scarcely seemed Japanese. He said defensively, “But from now on, Japan is sure to develop.”

“Japan’s headed for a fall,” the man said coolly.

In 1908, three years had passed since Japan unexpectedly won the Russo-Japanese War, a war rife with symbolic meaning: for the first time, a non-Western nation had defeated a Western power. The precariousness of Japan’s victory notwithstanding, the achievement was indisputable. The West had to accept that the ability to build a modern nation-state was not its exclusive prerogative; any ethnic group or race could do so. All the unequal treaties that Japan had been forced to sign with the Western powers since 1858 were nullified. The colonial ambitions toward Japan that the powers still harbored after the Meiji Restoration finally subsided, and Japan emerged as their rival in the Far East.

The bearded passenger, Sanshirō later learns with surprise, teaches at an elite preparatory college affiliated with Tokyo Imperial University, the educational pinnacle of modern Japan. His line, “Japan’s headed for a fall,” could as well be an authorial comment, as Sōseki himself once taught at that very college. Sōseki must have been well aware that Japan, despite its historic victory, was still immature as a modern nation. Indeed, after the publication of Sanshirō , Japan transformed from Asia’s star of hope into another aggressor and then “fell” in less than half a century. One fact nonetheless remains: already in the first decade of the twentieth century, a novel like Sanshirō could be serialized in a major national newspaper and widely read — a novel exemplifying national literature in which a character critiques his own country and people from a global perspective, and that furthermore is a truly fine piece of literature, always fresh no matter how many times one rereads it.

The modern novel emerged in the West in the mid-eighteenth century. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published more than half a century later, in 1812, and by the mid-nineteenth century classic representatives of the genre had blossomed in profusion. Stendhal’s The Red and the Black came out in 1830. Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy started appearing around the same time and continued to his death in 1850. The Brontë sisters’ Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were written in 1847; William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair , in 1848; Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield , in 1850. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary came out in 1856. George Eliot’s Middlemarch was published a little later, in 1872. In Russia, Tolstoy’s War and Peace was published in 1869; Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov , in 1880.

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 thus occurred just when the novel was at its peak in the West. Japan’s own first modern novel, Futabatei Shimei’s Floating Clouds ( Ukigumo ), dates from 1889, barely twenty years after the Restoration. Although unfinished, it is one of the enduring monuments of Japanese modern literature. Moreover, it was followed in quick succession by a slew of brilliant works: Higuchi Ichiyō’s “Child’s Play” (Takekurabe) and “Troubled Waters” (Nigorie), both in 1895; 2Natsume Sōseki’s Botchan (1907), Sanshirō (1909), and Light and Dark ( Meian , 1916); Izumi Kyōka’s Song and Lantern ( Uta andon , 1910); Mori Ōgai’s The Abe Clan ( Abe ichizoku , 1913) and Shibue Chūsai (1916); Arishima Takeo’s A Certain Woman ( Aru onna , 1919); Naka Kansuke’s The Silver Spoon ( Gin no saji , 1921); Nagai Kafū’s A Strange Tale from East of the River ( Bokutō kidan , 1937); and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s A Portrait of Shunkin ( Shunkinshō , 1933) and The Makioka Sisters (1948). Together these remarkable, distinctive works filled the Japanese mind — and language — with inestimable riches.

That there should have been such a profusion of modern novels in Japan following the Meiji Restoration may at first glance seem only to be expected. Japan encountered the overpowering West; its people began writing modern novels emulating the overpowering West. What could be more natural, you may say. Yet things didn’t work out that way in most other non-Western countries.

The question then poses itself as to how this was possible in Japan. The answer is beguilingly simple: after the Restoration, the Japanese language quickly established itself as a national language both in name and in practice — precisely the kind of language that makes possible the writing of novels and that the novel celebrates. The real question is how this came about. The answers could be as multifarious as the phenomenon was complex; I will begin by pointing to two conditions that have hardly been explored by scholars of Japanese literature but that seem to me to have been key in enabling the Japanese language to transform into a national language when the Great Powers of the West started eyeing the Far East. First, Japan already had a written language that was quite mature and held in high regard. Second, it enjoyed what Benedict Anderson calls “print capitalism” during the preceding Edo period, which enabled the written language to circulate widely.

JAPANESE AS LOCAL LANGUAGE

One crucial historical fact (again, virtually unexplored by literary scholars) must be made clear before moving on to a discussion of how Japanese transformed itself into a national language. For over twelve hundred years, the country remained part of the Sinosphere — the cultural sphere that used the Chinese writing system as a universal language. And, it must be noted, during that whole time the Japanese language was a local language . Despite the high level of maturity the Japanese language attained prior to the Restoration, it had nonetheless been a mere local language ever since people began writing in their own language. This point cannot be stressed enough.

That premodern Japan belonged to the Sinosphere may seem obvious — to everyone but the Japanese. Of course, children are taught in school that Chinese characters were brought to Japan by settlers from the neighboring Korean Peninsula and that the Japanese writing system grew out of those characters. Yet this historical fact is rarely truly appreciated. The Japanese are left thinking that if Chinese characters had not reached Japan, their resourceful ancestors would have invented their own writing system anyway, which seems hardly likely. Until the dawn of the Western age of exploration in the fifteenth century, much of the globe had no writing. It was only because of Japan’s proximity to the Korean Peninsula that a writing system was introduced by the fifth century (or even earlier) and, by pure geographic luck, an oral culture was able to transform itself into a written culture. Other, more isolated Pacific islands followed a different course.