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

The textbook itself is gorgeous, full of color drawings, photographs, and diagrams, but it is a mere 1.25 centimeters (0.5 inch) thick. The print is big, as if for a children’s picture book. Of the total 301 pages, there are only 115 pages of actual readings — and I am being generous in the count. The longest work is, for some reason, a 12-page short story by Lu Xun (1881–1936), the father of modern Chinese literature, translated from the Chinese. The next longest is 8.5 pages. Most of the reading materials are excerpts. Besides fiction, there are essays on science, newspaper articles, and such. Three little-known poems are also included. The remaining two-thirds of the book consists of practice in writing Chinese characters, exercises for vocabulary acquisition, and grammatical explanations. Mixed in with these are inane suggestions on topics like “how to speak effectively,” “how to write persuasively,” and “how to read purposefully,” with colorful illustrations. A literate teenager could easily read the entire textbook in one sitting.

As astonishing as this lack of substance is the total lack of commitment to the idea of introducing the modern literary canon. Dead authors and living are jumbled together, and the living vastly outnumber the dead: of sixteen passages of prose and free verse, eleven are by living authors, and of the remaining five, two are by authors recently deceased. Of works in the canon, only a short story by Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) would qualify. Toward the end of the book is a six-page section on masterworks of ancient and modern literature, introducing pre-Meiji and post-Meiji works in no particular order. From Sōseki, there are six lines taken from his novel Grass Pillow . That’s all.

High school textbooks do no better at introducing the modern canon. By far, most of the selections are from currently popular contemporary writers. And in junior and senior high alike, students are never required to read a single work of literature other than their textbook. Textbooks do contain sections with recommendations for further reading, but here again, works by popular contemporary writers are greatly in the majority.

To repeat, the sad truth is that assigning any book of Japanese fiction — let alone a modern classic — to be read from first page to last never happens in any Japanese classroom from primary school through college, with the possible exception of college classes for literature majors. My own experience long ago as a student in the American public school system was vastly different. At one time or another, I was placed in every level of the streamed classes, from what the students called the “dumb class” to the regular class to the honors class. Only in the “dumb class” did we use a textbook. In the regular class, we read Shakespeare and Dickens as a matter of course, and in the honors class, where we were expected to learn the fundamentals of Western culture, we also read Greek mythology and the entire Odyssey . This was long ago, as I say, and whether education in language arts is still this orthodox in the United States, I wouldn’t know; but I strongly doubt that things have reached the point where a person could complete compulsory education without having read at least one play by Shakespeare.

WORLD WAR II AND THE JAPANESE LEFT

Why has education in Japan not taught the canon of modern Japanese literature? Why has the Japanese language not been treated with due respect? Behind the surface reasons lie deeper reasons, with still deeper reasons beyond; no simple explanation is possible, but I would like to start by illuminating the postwar intellectual scene in Japan, where the phenomenon began.

Every country has its right wing and left wing, but anyone reading about Japan in the English-language media would have little idea that there has been a strong left wing in Japan since World War II. News items about Japan in the English-language media generally treat topics relating to the economy, popular culture, or, in recent years, the Fukushima reactor disaster. Moreover, the presence of the Japanese right wing is regularly noted. Rightists’ shameless deeds and words unfailingly make headlines. Yet the continual coverage from such an angle gives a skewed view of Japanese society, which certainly has its own share of zealots, but no more so than other countries. What is nearly totally suppressed in the English media — and probably in most foreign media — is the significant role played by Japanese leftist intellectuals. This utter lack of interest displayed by the world about the presence of the Japanese leftist intellectuals cannot be dismissed lightly as mere indifference. People generally seek coherent narratives that do not upset their worldview. For foreigners, Japanese people “have to be” basically traditional or even reactionary, surrounded though they may be by every latest gadget; anything that does not fit this fixed view disturbs the narrative and so gets left out. But from the end of World War II until recently, Japanese intellectuals were predominantly left-wing — far beyond just liberal. Any who were not were automatically labeled “reactionary” to distinguish them from the majority.

In the twentieth century, Japan plunged into a reckless war and was defeated. As a result, Japanese intellectuals — everyone from students at elite universities to primary and secondary schoolteachers, university professors, writers, and editors — turned against all that represented the Japan of the past and their “tainted” cultural heritage. On fire to create a new Japan, they embraced Marxist ideology and swung in unison to the left, as often happens in impoverished developing countries; many of them became members of the Communist Party. During and following the Occupation (1945–1952), while the Japanese populace wholeheartedly and unabashedly embraced all things American, these intellectuals saw the United States as a corrupt capitalist nation. Based on Marxist historical materialism, they envisioned a Communist or socialist country as the final, ideal stage.

The most influential among these leftists were naturally “public intellectuals” ( bunkajin ) who published their writings in the country’s two most prestigious venues: the publisher Iwanami Shoten and the newspaper Asahi Shimbun , which claims to have a circulation of 7.5 million, second only to the Yomiuri .The Japanese reading public revered these public intellectuals as postwar spiritual guides. Though their influence began to wane as the years went by, even in the 1970s and early 1980s being intellectual meant being leftwing. University faculties of political science, history, and economics continued to be dominated by Marxist ideology. (To this day, Das Kapital is taught in utter seriousness at many Japanese universities.) What dealt a major blow to the status of these intellectuals was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But by then, the damage done to modern Japanese literature and the Japanese language was all but irreversible.

THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION AND THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION

History sometimes serves up unexpected farces. Japan’s leftist intellectuals staked everything on two principles: pacifism and egalitarianism. Their devotion to the former is certainly understandable. But their trumpeting of the latter was not only because egalitarianism forms the basis of leftist thought. It was also because they saw the military and government elite as the perpetrators of World War II, and the common people in Japan and other countries as the war’s victims. In other words, to sever Japan as completely as possible from its imperial past, they were fiercely against patriotism and elitism. Just as the word collaboration was tainted in postwar France, so in postwar Japan the words “patriotism” and “elite” became tainted, used only in a pejorative sense. The situation turned farcical because their antiestablishment stance led Japan’s leftist intellectuals to side unawares with the language policy proposed by the very Occupation forces — and the Occupation-controlled Japanese government — that they regarded as their enemy. This led them ultimately and ironically to also side unawares with the Ministry of Education, with which they were constantly fighting when it came to interpretations of the country’s recent history, but with which they happened to share similar views when it came to the question of language.