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

Once the great Library comes into being, works will never go out of print. One day, it will be possible to access every work of literature ever published. But literature is not merely something to be stored. Its life is renewed through each act of reading. The richness of a national literature depends not on how many “texts to read” its library contains but on how much the average person reads them. Suppose that fifty or a hundred years from now in Japan, no one but specialists in the history of modern literature ever reads Sanshirō . It would be as if the miracle of modern Japanese literature had never taken place; as if back in the nineteenth century, Japan had become a U.S. colony after all.

Nor is that all. From a global perspective, defending the Japanese written language is something Japanese people owe not just to themselves but to the world. I say this with full awareness that it sounds bombastic. Yet only we Japanese, through our use of this unusual written language, are in a position to counter the widespread belief in phoneticism. As a spoken language, Japanese is not particularly special. But as a written language, it is: in mixing ideograms with two different sets of kana, it uses a method of notation unlike any other in the world. This is not to say that the Japanese language is special in its visual appeal. Even phonograms have visual appeal, as we all know. The Arabic script that adorns mosque fronts has solemn beauty, like a dancer momentarily arresting her movement in the air. The Devanagari alphabet used in writing Hindi languages looks playful, like toy soldiers in a row. Even the Roman alphabet retains a strong visual aspect, as seen in the variety of typefaces available on any computer; a simple change of typeface can make the same sentence appear old-fashioned or modern. Such connections between visual effect and the production of meaning can occur using any set of signs, whether ideograms or phonograms.

However, using different sets of signs to affect the production of meaning is something on a different level altogether, something unique to Japanese. It does not happen in Chinese writing, which uses only ideograms. (For a brief time, during the Japanese Occupation and slightly beyond, Korean also was written by mixing the phonetic hangul and Chinese ideograms.) The shades of meaning that arise from using different sets of signs for different purposes occur whether the writing is done by brush in beautiful calligraphy or by ballpoint pen in a deplorably clumsy hand, whether it is set in Ming or sans-serif typeface. The semantic difference comes from something unrelated to such visual effects. It comes from writing the very same words, pronounced the very same way, but using completely different letters that belong to different systems. Again, the very existence of a written language using such a remarkable method of notation is a living counterargument to phoneticism.

Let us return to the opening lines of the short poem by Hagiwara Sakutarō that we examined in chapter 2:

I should like to go to France,

But France is far too far.

So I shall don a new suit

And roam where fancy leads. 11

Here, much of the effect of the poem comes from writing the word “France” in hiragana, which is almost never used for foreign place-names: ふらんす. This device lends the lines an ineffable softness and suppleness appropriate to the “woman’s hand.” Write the same word in Chinese characters and the effect vanishes: 仏蘭西. Write it in katakana, the usual way of writing foreign place-names, and one is left with the ordinary, prosaic expression of an ordinary sentiment: フランス. No written language but Japanese can play with the production of meaning in this bewitching way. Don’t tell the French, but the fall of written Japanese, with this striking capability that demonstrates the irreducible and fundamental difference between spoken language and written, represents a far greater loss to humanity than even the fall of the glorious French language.

Of course, to the rest of the world’s inhabitants, the fact that Japan had a national language and a modern literature before any other non-Western country matters not in the least. The designation of Japanese literature as a “major literature” will be forgotten as other non-Western literatures become increasingly “major.” Even the fact that written Japanese stands as a living counterargument to phoneticism will fade, once the theoretical pitfalls of phoneticism are grasped. But that all seekers of knowledge should use the identical language to think and to read and write is not a development to which humanity can remain indifferent. Reality is constructed by languages, and the existence of a variety of languages means the existence of a variety of realities, a variety of truths. Understanding the multifaceted nature of truth does not necessarily make people happy, but it makes them humble, and mature, and wise. It makes them worthy of the name Homo sapiens .

Finally, I would like to point out that now in the age of English, choosing a language policy is not the exclusive concern of non-English-speaking nations. It is also a concern for English-speaking nations, where, to realize the world’s diversity and gain the humility that is proper to any human being, people need to learn a foreign language as a matter of course. Acquiring a foreign language should be a universal requirement of compulsory education. Furthermore, English expressions used in international conferences should be regulated and standardized to some extent. Native English speakers need to know that to foreigners, Latinate vocabulary is easier to understand than what to the native speakers is easy, child-friendly language. At international conferences, telling jokes that none but native speakers can comprehend is inappropriate, even if fun. If native speakers of English — those who enjoy the privilege of having their mother tongue as the universal language — would not wait for others to protest but would take steps to regulate themselves, what respect they would earn from the rest of the world! If that is too much to ask, the rest of the world would appreciate it if they would at least be aware of their privileged position — and more important, be aware that the privilege is unwarranted. In this age of global communication, some language or other was bound to become a universal language used in every corner of the world. English became that language not because it is intrinsically more universal than other languages, but because through a series of historical coincidences it came to circulate ever more widely until it reached the tipping point. That’s all there is to it. English is an accidental universal language.

If more English native speakers walked through the doors of other languages, they would discover undreamed-of landscapes. Perhaps some of them might then begin to think that the truly blessed are not they themselves, but those who are eternally condemned to reflect on language, eternally condemned to marvel at the richness of the world.

PREFACE

1. Mizumura Minae, Nihongo ga horobiru toki: Eigo no seiki no naka de (Tokyo: Chikumashobō, 2008), 59. All citations from Japanese works are translated by either Mari Yoshihara or Juliet Winters Carpenter unless otherwise indicated.

INTRODUCTION

1. Minae Mizumura, “Renunciation,” Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 81–97.

2. FROM PAR AVION TO VIA AIR MAIL

1. Hagiwara Sakutarō, “Ryojō” (On a journey), in Junjō shōkyokushū (Amazon Services International, ASIN: B009IY9L0Y, 1925), Kindle ed.

2. Shiga Naoya, “Kokugo mondai,” Kaizō , April 1946.

3. Minaé Mizumura, “La littérature moderne japonaise: Deux temps,” in Le Temps des oeuvres / Mémoire et préfiguration , ed. Jacques Neefs (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2001). Revised by the author.