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

Nothing better illuminates the truth of this statement than the fact that, at the outset, most university courses in Japan were not taught in Japanese by Japanese professors. Universities erected brick buildings modeled on Western architecture and purchased mounds of leather-bound books from the West, but no Japanese could teach the necessary subject matter of “Western learning”—the Western academic disciplines. Universities therefore hired foreign teachers, turning not just to qualified Westerners already residing in Japan but also to scholars from afar. These teachers were considered so invaluable that many are said to have earned more than cabinet members. Only gradually were they laid off and replaced by Japanese back from studying in the West. And it was when such returnees began teaching in their own language what they had learned abroad that the Japanese language began transforming into a language in which the pursuit of knowledge was legitimately possible — that is, into a national language not only in name but also in practice.

This was a good start, yet such is the nature of asymmetry between West and non-West that this auspicious turn of events did not make Japanese universities centers of learning in quite the same sense as Western universities. Rather, they came to function above all as major institutions for translation. Early in the Meiji period, there naturally were no Japanese books in which to study the Western subjects that students were supposed to learn; acquiring knowledge necessarily went hand in hand with acquiring proficiency in Western languages. The main role of Japan’s higher education was therefore to teach Western languages. Entry to national universities, which resembled today’s graduate schools, was preceded by preparatory classes at national colleges where students were required to learn two of the three major European languages, one as a major, the other as a minor. Learning these languages played such a fundamental pedagogical role that students were grouped according to the language of their concentration and, after intensive training, often formed a lifelong bond with their classmates, like troops in a hard-won battle. Students earned pocket money through translation.

After graduating from universities, some of them went on to become educators-cum-translators, making what they had learned accessible to the general public by writing straightforward translations or introductory, explanatory, or interpretive books in Japanese. They were called “scholars” in Japan and certainly considered themselves as such, but from a larger perspective (and I say this without any intention of disparaging their endeavors), they were basically translators — transmitters, not creators, of knowledge. Generation after generation of these dedicated men — and later women — ultimately made it possible for nearly all important Western knowledge to be available in Japanese, so that today’s university students no longer have to read a single book in the original to know what the world expects them to know. Other bilingual or polyglot university graduates who did not become educators or translators per se read widely in European languages and then wrote in Japanese, contributing en masse to transforming Japanese into a language that presumed a global consciousness. The ideology of national language would later have it that a humble peasant who tilled the soil and did not know what “democracy” meant even in Japanese was held up as the true sage, possessing a kind of wisdom that the educated could not possibly attain. This jaundiced view of higher education was possible only for those Japanese who could take for granted the existence of the Japanese language as it is today, who came late enough to be blissfully ignorant of how their language and literature developed.

The Englishman Daniel Defoe was, as we have seen, one of the pioneers of the novel. Writing in English in the eighteenth century already meant writing in one of the universal languages, and Defoe had no need for an Oxford or a Cambridge education to achieve what he did. The same was not true for Japanese writers. Of all the male Japanese writers born in the nineteenth century, each one a pioneer in his way, the number who attended Tokyo Imperial University or its college (both of which were closed to women) and thus were bilinguals, if not polyglots, is astonishing. In fact, it is mind-boggling, bizarre even. Beginning with Natsume Sōseki, the list is virtually endless: Tsubouchi Shōyō, Mori Ōgai, Masaoka Shiki, Yamada Bimyō, Ozaki Kōyō, Ueda Bin, Osanai Kaoru, Suzuki Miekichi, Saitō Mokichi, Shiga Naoya, Mushakōji Saneatsu, Naka Kansuke, Kinoshita Mokutarō, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yamamoto Yūzō, Uchida Hyakken, Kishida Kunio, Kume Masao, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Osaragi Jirō, and Kawabata Yasunari, among many others. As if that weren’t enough, well-known private universities such as Keio and Waseda simultaneously produced their own schools of literature and their own set of leading writers. Going to university meant being at least bilingual, and, however counterintuitive it may seem now, bilingualism was a sine qua non of becoming a standard-bearer of Japanese national literature — for male writers, anyway.

That said, remaining in academia and pursuing a career there in nineteenth-century Japan was not an attractive choice to young men of aspiration, especially those with literary inclinations. Virtually all the university curriculum consisted of Western disciplines that seemed to have no direct bearing on the country at the dawn of its modernity. The two societies, Western and Japanese, were too far apart. Natural sciences, of course, had universal relevance to any society. Yet it was not so with other disciplines, especially those falling under the rubric of “liberal arts.” Aside from traditional fields of learning — Buddhist studies, the classics of China and Japan — all other disciplines in the liberal arts were basically Western: philosophy, sociology, psychology, linguistics, history, anthropology, aesthetics, musicology, literature, and so forth. Their study was inseparable from the study of Western languages. There was an underlying Eurocentrism in all of them, a tendency to perceive the world from the Western perspective and find human universality in Western modes of being.

The pursuit of that kind of knowledge in academia was bound to prove frustrating and alienating for Japanese men of talent and ambition. First, no matter how brilliant such a man might be, his work could not really enter the global chain of “texts to read” as long as he wrote in Japanese, which he almost inevitably did. He had to remain in the role of a translator, introducing Western learning to Japanese readers. Second, no matter how much he wrote in Japanese, as long as he remained within the confines of academia, his prose had to read like a translation of some Western treatise and so be cut off from Japan’s rich literary tradition. No allusions to poetry could be allowed, either Japanese or Chinese, nor any of the rhetorical devices specific to Japanese prose that make fine writing so much more than a mere message. Third, the Western academic disciplines gave a writer no way to capture vividly the excitement of what was happening right in front of him — the messy reality of a Japan rapidly transforming after the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships. From trams and gaslights to hats and shoes, the everyday look of Japan was mutating at dizzying speed, and how was one to write about that? Writing as an academic must have felt to many men of talent and ambition like being forced to write with both hands tied.

And yet these challenges were a blessing for modern Japanese literature. Remember, this was the era that celebrated national language, the era when the language of literature was regarded as transcendent over the language of scholarship. And precisely because of the challenges that Japanese intellectuals faced, there was a far greater urgency in Japan than in the West for the language of literature to transcend. The language of literature carried the heavier intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic burden of making sense of the maelstrom of change. Writing fiction was a somewhat disreputable profession at the time, but these men overcame the opposition of teachers, parents, and wives and chose that path, forsaking the chance for a more stable and respectable career.