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

Just in the past twenty years or so, Japanese people have begun taking a more positive view of ideograms. During that time, it has become clear that China, while beginning to flex its muscles as a superpower, has no intention of abolishing its ideograms, albeit in simplified form for everyday characters. Furthermore, the technological revolution created by the computer has made ideograms far less inconvenient and antipopulist than before. More foreigners now willingly undertake their study. Though the tradition of classical Chinese writing may be lost, at least Chinese ideograms, with a history of over three and a half millennia, have gained a seat at the table. The human race has escaped the danger of losing its sole living set of ideograms.

But the mere acceptance of ideograms in the world is not enough to erase Japanese people’s persistent self-doubts about their language. As we have seen, the man who later became Japan’s first education minister called for the nation to adopt English. And as mentioned in chapter 2, the acclaimed novelist Shiga Naoya called for the defeated nation to abandon Japanese in favor of French. Even more surprisingly, ultranationalist thinker Kita Ikki (1883–1939), who would be executed as the brains behind the failed military coup of February 26, 1936, urged the nation to take up Esperanto. Since he was a socialist, perhaps his position should be no cause for surprise — and yet seeing an ultranationalist’s name in conjunction with Esperanto is startling. Why did this political extremist advocate the adoption of an international language based on Western languages? Because he considered Japanese to be “exceedingly inferior.” If Japanese people took Esperanto as their second language, then, he claimed, Japanese would “by the law of natural selection” vanish in fifty years. But there was more to his advocacy of Esperanto than this. In a book called Kokugo to iu shisō (The ideology of national language, 1997), written in Japanese, Korean sociolinguist I Yeonsuk quotes Kita as saying that should the Empire of Greater Japan spread to Russia and Australia, then forcing the language on those populations “the way we forced Koreans to use Japanese” 8would never do. (With understandable wrath, she adds, “The Korean nation compelled to use this ‘inferior’ Japanese was a pathetic sacrificial lamb.”) 9In any case, it is striking that these three influential men — one a high government official, one a celebrated novelist, and one a radical enemy of the state — all saw Japanese as irredeemable and urged its abolition.

Even now, when economically Japan stands shoulder to shoulder with the West, Japanese people’s pangs of perceived linguistic inadequacy linger unabated; if anything, they have intensified. Advertising is awash with the Roman alphabet (for Japanese brand names) and katakana (for expressions borrowed from English, French, Italian, Spanish, and more). Both styles are expressions of a deep-seated longing: If only Japanese were a Western language! The media are also infatuated by such words. And the Japanese government, instead of countering this trend by taking advantage of the superb word-building capacity of Chinese ideograms, goes happily along spewing out barely comprehensible “katakana English.” Phoneme pairs often become indistinguishable, as with “major” and “measure” (メジャー) or “chip” and “tip” (チップ) — not to mention “free market” and “flea market” (フリーマーケット). Confusion mounts. One has to sympathize with the seventy-one-year-old male who, in June 2013, sued NHK, Japan’s public television network, for mental suffering caused by the flood of incomprehensible loanwords.

In any case, the disquieting sense that one’s native language is somehow illegitimate is one of many tragic consequences of the rupture with their native heritage that people in Japan and other non-Western countries have undergone in modern times.

“UNIVERSAL BILINGUALISM” IN JAPAN?

And so, having no faith that Japanese literature should be passed on, no history of protecting the Japanese language, and no conviction that Japanese is even a legitimate language to begin with, the Japanese people were thrust into the age of English.

How have they dealt with the situation? As in most other countries, the need to learn English has been felt more pressingly than ever before. But for the Japanese, the feeling that they ought to know English has become an irrational obsession, a paranoia that has spread across the nation like a plague. This is probably because most people, despite years of suffering from mandatory English courses in junior high, high school, and college, end up with little or no grasp of the language. A highly educated few can read it, but hardly anyone can speak it or write it. Feeling defeated, and blaming themselves for the defeat, ordinary people have succumbed to a kind of mass hysteria, convinced despite all evidence to the contrary that they can and must master the language.

For years, city streets have been plastered with ads for English conversation schools. Television commercials promise that if you just listen to these English-language materials, you’ll soon be chattering away. Of Japanese podcasts accessed through the iTunes store in the education category on September 29, 2013, an astounding twenty-eight out of the top thirty were programs for learning English. Short-term stays abroad for the purpose of learning English are fast becoming de rigueur.

It was against this background that a movement arose in 1999 to make English the nation’s second official language. The movement sought to transform the entire population into bilinguals through a totally new system of public education. Though much discussed in media at the time (along with reports that some Koreans were calling for Korea to do the same), the movement gradually fizzled out. Given that the Japanese have a perfectly fine national language, many thought the idea preposterous. Even those who did not oppose the idea itself thought its implementation too costly and thus impracticable.

However, unlike the nation’s hysterical obsession with English, the sense of crisis underlying the movement to make English an official language had a clear motivation. At the center of the movement was a well-known figure named Funabashi Yōichi, a journalist stationed for years in New York as a foreign correspondent for the Asahi Shimbun . In 2000, he published a book entitled Aete Eigo kōyōgo ron (In spite of all, make English an official language), 10which contains a devastating account of how the inability of past Japanese officials and politicians to express themselves in English or even to understand what was said to them led to an accumulation of diplomatic blunders culminating in World War II. Funabashi also cites more recent examples to show how lack of English mastery at international negotiation tables places Japan and Japanese companies in a highly disadvantageous position.

Now that we have entered the age of English and the Internet, Japanese people’s helplessly poor English poses a greater potential threat to the nation than ever. International negotiations in English have become daily events. The Internet has ushered in continuous global publicity campaigns where information is creatively manipulated. What is well articulated in English on the Internet becomes “truth” the whole world believes in. Fama volat : rumor has wings. Or better, fama crescit eundo : rumor grows as it goes. And often rumors have no relation to the truth. Words can have a terrible power to turn white into black, and the more such treacherous words circulate, the more traction they gain. If Japan were subjected to a barrage of groundless verbal attacks, rebuttals in lame English, however numerous or earnest they might be, would serve no purpose. The only way to counter the attacks would be to patiently state the truth in articulate, persuasive English. And for this approach to be effective, people with more than sufficient command of English would have to exist on a certain scale. Backed by the intrinsic power of the truth, well-crafted English circulating widely might well have power to persuade the world.