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

However, it would be naïve to assume that yamato kotoba was something like a direct expression of the Japanese soul ( yamatodamashii ). Waka , literally “Japanese song,” must have had its origin in oral incantation, but as a literary form it was created by readers familiar with Chinese poetry who gradually shaped their own poetry with Chinese models in mind. A nationalistic myth, both modernist and romantic, long had it that many of the poems in Japan’s oldest collection, Ten Thousand Leaves , were composed by men and women from all walks of life, including soldiers garrisoned on the frontier, using man’yōgana , the precursor of yamato kotoba . Many scholars now believe, however, that these poems were most probably composed by aristocrats well versed in Chinese poetry. The first imperial waka anthology, which came out about a century and half later, includes not just allusions to but innovative adaptations of Chinese poems. If it is generally the rule that writing in a local language is created derivatively through the act of translation, Japanese follows this rule to a tee.

Some might ask how a language that produced the glorious Tale of Genji could be called a local language . Some might even consider the term an affront to Japanese literature. It is true that Heian court ladies turned their forced linguistic exclusion into an advantage by writing in their own language , in the process giving birth to Genji and other works of literature that continue to delight the world a thousand years later. They triumphed brilliantly by standing the patriarchal taboo on its head. And yet that triumph was recognized only in the modern era, when the “ideology of national language” was imported to Japan and scholars reconstructed the history of Japanese literature, playing down the importance of Chinese texts. During the Heian period, the hierarchy between the universal language and the local language was an absolute given that not even the brilliance of The Tale of Genji could alter. Male bilinguals not only read and wrote official documents and pursued knowledge in Chinese but also composed poetry in that language — a practice that persisted into the twentieth century. The ability to compose Chinese verse was the hallmark of a highly cultured man.

Katakana and hiragana long maintained their respective roles, but the distinction grew increasingly lax, and toward the end of the Heian period a new kind of writing emerged that would become the foundation for modern Japanese prose. Using kana as the base, the new writing mixed in Chinese characters with varying degrees of frequency. Some texts were densely Sinicized, while others were heavily vernacular with only scattered bits of Chinese. This flexibility allowed the Japanese people to read and write almost anything, and so they began reading and writing more and more in Japanese. Indeed, after Heian, through the Kamakura (1185–1333), Muromachi (1337–1573), and Edo (1603–1868) periods, prose writing in pure Chinese gradually became confined, aside from official documents, to the domain of Buddhist and Confucian texts.

Even so, during this time the hierarchy between writings in Chinese and Japanese never disappeared, not even during the Edo period, when the local culture thrived as Japan closed its doors to the outside world and the government allowed only limited access by Koreans, Chinese, and Dutch. Any attempt by native Japanese to leave the country was punishable by death. This period of hothouse seclusion led to striking literary achievements epitomized by the Genroku era (1688–1704), which is now remembered for three towering literary figures: a poet, a novelist, and a playwright, all of whom wrote not in Chinese but in Japanese. Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) wrote a seventeen-syllable haiku about the splashing sound made by a frog that led later generations to spend a million syllables speculating on its meaning: “The ancient pond / a frog jumps in / the sound of the water.” Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) wrote stories on a whirlwind of topics, everything from business cunning to amorous adventures, both hetero- and homosexual in variety; and Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725) is best known for his lyrical love-suicide plays. Yet this perception of Genroku literary achievement is the product of a particular narrative, a narrative of national literary history created after the importation of the “ideology of national language.” For despite this remarkable flowering of literary genius in the Japanese language, at the time Chinese writings by Confucian scholars such as Itō Jinsai (1627–1705) and Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728) possessed by far the greater prestige. Kaitai shinsho (New book of anatomy), published more than half a century after the Genroku era in 1774, is usually described as the first Japanese translation of a Western book— Ontleedkundige Tafelen (Anatomical tables, 1734), itself a translation into Dutch from the original German work, Anatomische Tabellen (1722) by Johan Adam Kulmus (1689–1745). Yet the translators actually rendered the text not into Japanese but into Chinese, as was proper, since it was a book on human anatomy — a book of knowledge. Japanese-language texts remained caught in the “universal language/local language” hierarchy.

The first official document ever issued in Japanese — though heavily Sinicized — was the Five Charter Oath (1868) proclaimed by the Meiji Emperor. The event marked the beginning of a new era, one in which Japan saw itself as a modern nation-state no longer confined to the Sinosphere. A society cannot throw away tradition overnight, however. Children of the educated class continued to begin their studies by learning Classical Chinese. It took a couple of decades before the emphasis shifted to learning to read and write in their own language. It took nearly a century for people well versed in the Chinese language to fade away.

The following anecdote shows something of the lingering prestige and influence of the Chinese idiom at this transitional period.

Uchimura Kanzō (1861–1930), the well-known founder of the Nonchurch (Mukyōkai) movement in Meiji Japan, embraced monotheist Christianity at a young age and enthusiastically engaged in evangelical work to spread the faith. However, to his great dismay, his own father expressed no interest. As Uchimura Kanzō wrote in his English-language autobiography, How I Became a Christian , “The arch-heretic was my father, who with his learning and strong convictions of his own, was the hardest to approach with my faith. For three years I had been sending him books and pamphlets. .. But nothing could move him.” 4

One day, Uchimura came up with a fine idea. At the time, the five-volume Commentary on the Gospel of St. Mark by Dr. Ernst Faber, a German missionary in China, was gaining acclaim. The commentary was written in literary Chinese without inversion marks, and Uchimura wrote, “I thought the difficulty of reading it, if not any thing else, might whet my father’s intellectual appetite to peruse it.” He thus spent his savings on the five volumes and presented them to his father. The elder Uchimura initially threw the books away, but his son persistently put them back on his desk, and in time he began to read them. Uchimura exulted, “Finally… I prevailed; he went through the first volume! He stopped to scoff at Christianity!” As the father read through the second, third, and fourth volumes, he began to change. “ He would not touch his wine any more ” (emphasis in original). 5

Uchimura appears to have been greatly moved by the power of Christianity to make his father stop drinking. I, however, am more struck by the picture of an old-time samurai sitting erect, turning page after page of Western religious philosophy written in Chinese. I can’t help thinking what a huge transformation in the literate life of the Japanese people was to come in the ensuing hundred-odd years.