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

All this is mere orthography, you may say. But it is not mere orthography. Fukuda’s articles, which came out in book form in 1960 under the title Watashi no kokugo kyōshitsu (My Japanese language classroom), place special emphasis on how irrational and impossible it would be for the Japanese language to adopt a strictly phonetic writing system. In this, he was absolutely right. For one thing, the enormous prevalence of homophones among ideogram compounds, which are most often used for abstract concepts, makes abolishing Chinese characters out of the question. Depending on the characters used, the word seikō , for example, has a multitude of totally unrelated meanings, including “success” (成功), “precision” (精巧), “starlight” (星光), “propensity” (性行), and “sexual intercourse” (性交). Fukuda’s discussion, however, concentrates on something less obvious to the Japanese public: the loss they suffered through kana reform.

With great erudition, love of Japanese, and concern for his country, as well as a puckish wit befitting a scholar of English literature, Fukuda describes how phonetic kana notation confused the Japanese language and dulled people’s awareness of word roots. He writes, “Words are not tools for the transmission of culture; they are culture. They are our very selves.” 4To linguist Matsuzaka Tadanori, a member of the council who espoused romanization, he issues this challenge: “Mr. Matsuzaka, come to your senses. Does writing exist for the typewriter, or the typewriter for writing?” Little did he know that the invention of the computer would one day make this argument obsolete — and prove him right in his assertion that technologies exist for humans, and not vice versa.

Fukuda ends his book with these words:

And so during the postwar confusion, a time when people’s attention was fixed on food and clothing with no room to spare for other matters, the orthodox notation that so many scholars of the past had sweated blood to defend was hastily overturned — a truly lamentable, irretrievable turn of events. Moreover, people went right on jabbering about tradition and culture, while disdaining the words on which tradition and culture depend. What tradition, what culture, pray tell? Now I see, this is what it means to lose a war. 5(Emphasis in original)

Even now those final words, “Now I see, this is what it means to lose a war,” wring my heart.

Chinese characters per se luckily survived. The cap on the number of characters designated for everyday use was eventually raised from 1,850 to 2,136. Yet the simplification of these characters and the phonetic use of kana remain unadjusted and haphazard to this day.

What is crucial to realize is that these so-called reforms did not merely impoverish the Japanese language but also, by altering the written language that until then everyone had been able to read, created a needless cultural gulf — unlike the previous one (see chapter 4), which was necessitated by the force of history. The year 1946 was the watershed: generations born after that were increasingly exposed to the new, poorer orthographic style and gradually became reluctant to read anything written before the changes unless it was rewritten in that style. In this way, Japan began to produce generations for whom reading anything prewar in its original form is increasingly a struggle. Older, premodern texts have of course become even more remote.

What an utter waste! The books I read from around age twelve (when, as I have mentioned, my father was transferred to New York and our family went there to live) belonged to an early anthology of modern Japanese literature we had around the house. I devoured them without even realizing that they were written in traditional style. They did not strike me or my sister, who wasn’t as much of a bookworm, as particularly hard going. But back in Japan, the number of people who had scarcely laid eyes on anything but the new Japanese was steadily increasing.

Written language is a mere representation of the sounds of spoken language: this mistaken assumption underlying the belief in phonetic writing reflects a view of language that inevitably arises in cultures using a phonetic alphabet. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) gave the name “phonocentrism” to this view, which he saw as a Western ideology and around which he developed a critique of Western metaphysics. Phonocentrism places higher value on spoken language as being more primary than and thus superior to written language, which it conceives as necessarily corrupting the original intention of the Subject — the center of meaning.

The problem is, the introduction of Western ideology into a non-Western context often does unimagined harm. Transported to a different culture, thought often loses its subtlety and can even rampage like a wild beast. The damage inflicted on the Japanese language by postwar revisions arose because belief in the superiority of phonetic notation was in fact a mark of utopianism imported from the West. Touting primitive communism, egalitarianism, and the Self freed from the shackles of the past, this utopianism wreaked cultural havoc even in the West. But in the non-West, it wreaked havoc of an entirely different order of magnitude. China’s Cultural Revolution saw invaluable cultural treasures wiped from the face of the Earth and book lovers strung up and humiliated. Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge massacred the entire literate population. Though it may sound extreme to speak of Japan’s postwar language revisions in the same breath with such atrocities, they all arose from similar utopian dreams. The Chinese revolution took place under one-party rule, and the Khmer Rouge massacres were a ripple effect of years of colonial rule followed by a corrupt regime and the Vietnam War; yet in postwar Japan, during a time of peace, prosperity, and freedom of speech, mindless actions of the country’s leaders, both political and intellectual, produced a generation increasingly estranged from its rightful literary heritage.

LINGERING GUILT, OVERCONFIDENCE, AND SELF-DOUBT

From here, let us start delving deeper into possible reasons why the Japanese language has suffered such undeserved treatment at the hands of the Japanese people themselves.

It is not that Japanese people are uninterested in their language. On the contrary, they often fret that the younger generation in particular is making a hash of it. Bookshops overflow with books on the proper use of honorifics and other language-related topics. Coffee-table magazines aimed at women are incessantly putting out special issues devoted to “beautiful Japanese”—much the same way they feature innocuous topics like “the aesthetics of Japanese lifestyle” or “the health benefits of Japanese cuisine.” There are television quiz shows on language usage. Many people fascinated by Chinese characters, including children, are taking examinations to test their ability. But giving serious thought to their language from a world-historical perspective is a different matter.

One reason lies in Japan’s relatively recent history. As mentioned earlier, because the Japanese language was forcibly imposed on Taiwanese and Koreans, Japan’s imperial past still makes many Japanese, especially intellectuals, feel a need to feel guilty. The fall of the Berlin Wall finally freed any intellectuals from the fetters of the left, allowing them to begin trying to come up with a more balanced understanding of their past: rather than looking on the nation’s path from the Meiji Restoration to World War II as an inexorable slide into evil, it became possible to take a positive view of Japan’s successful modernization — quite a natural view to take, when you think of it — without being automatically labeled “reactionary.” Nonetheless, inhibition persists when talking about the Japanese language. Anyone who calls for people to value the language that evolved through that same process of modernization is still automatically labeled reactionary, or worse, right-wing. And until very recently, to suggest that Japanese are lucky to have such a rich heritage of modern literature was in a real sense taboo.