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

In Japan as early as 1866, six years after the Second Opium War and two years before the Meiji Restoration, a pro-Western intellectual named Maejima Hisoka submitted a proposal to the fifteenth and final shogun to abolish the use of Chinese characters. The new Japanese government, which had assigned the Ministry of Education the task of “improving” the Japanese language, in 1890 sent linguist Ueda Kazutoshi to study in Germany, where the ideology of national language reigned and a linguistic group called Young Grammarians (Junggrammatiker), focusing its attention on languages’ sound, was attracting brilliant minds. Ueda returned to Japan in 1894 even more passionate a proponent of phoneticism than before, and later the Ministry of Education appointed him to head the newly founded National Language Research Council.

The council kept soliciting illuminati who upheld phoneticism in various forms. Some advocated using only katakana or hiragana; others — among them Mori, who had previously called for abandoning Japanese in favor of English — advocated using the Roman alphabet; still others advocated creating a totally new system. However different their solutions were, their goal was the same: to gradually reduce the use of Chinese characters until they were entirely gone.

Their goal never materialized. While the illuminati in the National Language Research Council under the Ministry of Education were debating how to get rid of the accursed Chinese characters, a practical kind of written Japanese was already taking shape, one that continued the tradition of mixing kana and Chinese characters and that depended on those very characters as never before. This development, which involved orders from higher levels of the government, arose from the urgent need to translate Western languages. And it arose precisely because Japan had so far managed to escape colonization. Not only Fukuzawa but those who were running the country knew all too well that in the eyes of the Western powers, the Restoration meant little more than a regime change in a small, vulnerable nation off in the Far East. The only way to avoid the indignity of further unequal treaties, or division or even an outright takeover, was for Japan to seize on knowledge accumulated in the West and get it speedily translated. Orders to translate as many Western books as possible, as soon as possible, were issued by the Great Council of State (Daijō-kan) and the Chamber of Elders (Genrō-in), followed by the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Education, and more. To accomplish such a formidable task, Chinese characters, being ideograms, could not have been better suited for the task.

Chinese characters have the ability to succinctly express abstract concepts and, when combined, to create new words without end. Those people chosen as translators, being from the educated class, were well versed in Chinese and knew how to take full advantage of the conciseness and versatility of the ideogram. Writing in a style of Japanese with a generous admixture of Chinese characters, working day and night, these translators played a critical role in helping Japan to preserve its independence.

It is telling that one of the very first books to be translated from a Western language — via an original Chinese translation — was a guide to international law, Elements of International Law (1836) by Henry Wheaton (1785–1848), an American legal scholar. To rectify the unequal treaties, Japan first needed to learn the rules of the diplomatic game. Of course, that alone would not make the West willingly give up its gains. Japan also needed to build a modern military and manufacture its own guns and battleships. It had to build railroads and plumbing; it had to produce printing presses and monies; it had to provide modern education for its people. In short, Japan had to make each and every bit of Western knowledge and technology its own. And in the process, the act of translation, this time from a set of different universal languages, provided a new birth for the Japanese language. Now the Japanese language took its first tentative steps toward becoming a language capable of functioning on the same level as Western languages.

Furthermore, though the act of translation may have been prompted by the goal of sustaining Japan as an independent nation, it was not this alone that drove the translators of the time. The ultimate driving force behind any act of translation is the human desire to seek knowledge — a desire independent even of concern for one’s nation’s viability. This desire is what makes humans Homo sapiens . Translating Western languages as a national project in the early years after the Meiji Restoration resulted in an amazing quantity of translated materials. Even more amazing was the diversity of their subject matter. The government ordered translations on topics with no direct relevance to the nation’s survival, including even aesthetics — perhaps the most useless of topics as far as nation building is concerned.

The impetus to seek knowledge did not come just from the top. Many of those who became translators were primarily seekers of knowledge who truly wished to know the world better. Even before the Restoration, as these people glimpsed the libraries of Western languages, they immediately understood that here was an immense trove of knowledge, universal in its application. Overwhelmed by the richness of this trove, they tried mightily to gain access to it on their own. No book illustrates this process better than the autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi, written thirty years after the Meiji Restoration.

FUKUZAWA YUKICHI: FROM DUTCH TO ENGLISH

Fukuzawa tried to learn Western languages against all odds simply because he wanted to know more than he did. Or better, he wanted to know everything that humanity knew. Knowing more than his fellow samurai was also a way for him to challenge those in power; he was angry with the shogunate for maintaining a rigid social and political hierarchy and with the Confucian scholars who gave the shogunate legitimacy. Yet what drove him most profoundly was his sheer passion to learn. Concern over Japan’s fate came only later, when he realized that his country was headed for cataclysmic change.

Fukuzawa’s autobiography gives a vivid picture of his hungry search for knowledge in the years leading up to the Restoration. The image of Fukuzawa with cropped hair — a sign of modernity — is familiar to present-day Japanese through his image on the ten-thousand-yen bill, but he was born in 1835, when the great woodblock print master Hokusai was still active. He thus belonged to a generation of men used to wearing a topknot, and he experienced the Restoration as an adult in his thirties. His father, Momosuke, a low-ranking samurai in the conservative Okudaira domain located on the southern island of Kyushu, was stationed in Osaka to carry out market transactions for his domain, and it was there that Fukuzawa was born, though he grew up in Kyushu. In his youth, he excelled in the study of Confucian texts, like his father, a bibliophile and a Confucian scholar in his own right. But Momosuke was never able to rise above his inherited rank, which led to Fukuzawa’s well-known declaration, “Feudalism is my father’s mortal enemy.” 12Knowing firsthand the humiliations suffered by low-ranking samurai in the Okudaira domain, Fukuzawa was already thinking of somehow getting out when the news came that black ships had arrived off Japanese shores, threatening the country with cannons. Told by his older brother that the country needed people to study gunnery and that to study gunnery one needed first to study Dutch, he gleefully sought and gained permission from domain authorities to move to Nagasaki to learn the language: “I would have been glad to study a foreign language or the military art or anything else if it only gave me a chance to go away” (22). This was in 1854, when he was nineteen years old.