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

What a brutal shock it must have been when, having made this superhuman effort to study Dutch, Fukuzawa realized that the language was nearly useless. With the Dutch golden age a thing of the past, the Dutch language was of minor importance in the world. Some in Japan already suspected this, but Fukuzawa did not face the fact until later, when he visited Yokohama.

In 1858, the Okudaira domain belatedly accepted the need to learn Dutch and summoned Fukuzawa to its Edo compound to teach the language. That was the year when the Ansei Five-Power Treaties were signed and Westerners first began living in Yokohama. One day, Fukuzawa decided to try out his Dutch and walked all the way from the Edo compound to Yokohama, a distance of about 30 kilometers (19 miles). “There was nothing of the town of Yokohama then — a few temporary dwellings had been erected here and there by the foreigners, and in these the pioneer merchants were living and showing their wares” (97). Yet to his astonishment, those foreigners did not understand Dutch:

To my chagrin, when I tried to speak with them, no one seemed to understand me at all. Nor was I able to understand anything spoken by a single one of all the foreigners I met. Neither could I read anything of the signboards over the shops, nor the labels on the bottles which they had for sale. There was not a single recognizable word in any of the inscriptions or in any speech. It might have been English or French for aught I knew. (97)

Faced with this unexpected reality, Fukuzawa turned on his heel and walked back to Edo in shock: “I had to leave home just before the closing hour and return before the same hour of the next day. This meant that I had been walking for twenty-four hours” (98).

Far greater than his physical exhaustion was the mental blow he had received — yet what is astounding is his quick recovery:

[T]he fatigue of my legs was nothing compared with the bitter disappointment in my heart.

I had been striving with all my powers for many years to learn the Dutch language. And now when I had reason to believe myself one of the best in the country, I found that I could not even read the signs of merchants who had come to trade with us from foreign lands. It was a bitter disappointment but I knew it was no time to be downhearted.” (98)

He was back on his feet the very next day:

Those signs must have been either in English or in French — probably English, for I had had inklings that English was the most widely used language. A treaty with the two English-speaking countries had just been concluded. As certain as day, English was to be the most useful language of the future. I realized that a man would have to be able to read and converse in English to be recognized as a scholar in Western subjects in the coming time. In my disappointment my spirit was low, but I knew that it was not the time to be sitting still.

On the very next day after returning from Yokohama, I took up a new aim in life and determined to begin the study of English. (98)

So began his study of English. The only person rumored to know some English in the whole of Edo was too busy to teach him. And even that person did not know very much. English — Japanese and English — Chinese dictionaries were nonexistent, and even an English — Dutch dictionary was hard to come by. When he invited his former classmates from the academy to join him in studying English, they took off, groaning that they could not bear to go through such an ordeal all over again. He finally met someone willing to study with him, and the two of them did whatever they could to learn English, latching on to children who lived near foreigners and had picked up scraps of the language or former shipwreck victims who had been stranded abroad. In the course of time, they realized that English was not too different from Dutch after all, and their former efforts were by no means a total waste.

The following year, in 1860, Fukuzawa pulled strings and managed to wangle a ride to the United States aboard the Kanrin-maru , the first Japanese navy vessel — built by the Dutch. He stayed for a few months and brought back one of the first two copies of Webster’s dictionary to enter Japan. After that, he continued his study of English while teaching the language at the school he had founded originally to teach Dutch. Soon he was sought out as a translator by the shogunate’s Gaikoku-kata, corresponding to today’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in 1862 they dispatched him to Europe with other government officials. As a sign of his untiring pursuit of knowledge, he alone used his entire stipend, a substantial amount, to purchase English books to bring back. He kept climbing the social ladder as he rode the wave of Japan’s opening to the world.

Fukuzawa Yukichi is remembered today as the founder of Keio, one of Japan’s top universities, but he made an even more fundamental contribution through his translation work. Words that he coined using Chinese ideograms include enzetsu (public speaking), sansei (agreement), tōrōn (discussion), and hanken (copyright). 13Today, nobody in Japan thinks of Fukuzawa when using these common, everyday words. But translations by him and other knowledge-hungry men of Meiji — Nishi Amane, Mitsukuri Rinshō, Nakae Chōmin, Tsubouchi Shōyō, and others — helped the Japanese language to evolve so that writers could address the same issues as the rest of the world, with global consciousness and synchronicity. Japanese began transforming into a national language. And by doing so, it turned into a language in which Japanese writers could write modern literature — especially the novel, a celebration of national language.

Universities and creative geniuses may seem strange bedfellows when it comes to art, including literature. Of course, plenty of universities nowadays offer courses on creative writing that are taught by acclaimed writers. Yet the romantic in us wants to believe in geniuses who dwarf the annoyingly erudite in their ivory towers. That romantic belief harks back to the golden age of national literature, an age when literature was separated from academic disciplines and transcended them as a source of knowledge. But in non-Western countries, universities had to play a crucial role in creating a national literature — however unromantic the fact may be. Genius was not enough.

The previous chapter was devoted to the discussion of three conditions that enabled the rapid establishment of the national language in Japan after the Meiji Restoration: a mature written language when the country was still part of the Sinosphere, a robust print capitalism during the preceding Edo period, and freedom from Western colonization at a time when nearly all the non-West was colonized. We will begin this chapter by first directing our attention to something that was made possible only by the last of the three: Japan’s founding of its own universities.

First, let us revisit the question of what might have happened to the Japanese language if Japan had become a colony of the United States. Quite assuredly, the Japanese universities we now know, where classes are taught in Japanese as a matter of course, would never have existed. The children of the wealthy would have crossed the Pacific to study in American universities, and other bright youths would have been selected in large numbers to do the same. Sooner or later, universities would surely have sprung up on Japanese soil, but the courses would have been taught in English. (When Japan founded universities in its colonies, Taiwan and Korea, the courses were taught in Japanese.) Only the escape from colonization allowed Japan to build its own universities, which, in turn, made it possible for Japanese people to pursue knowledge in their own language.