Language is Japan’s Own Great Wall

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June 30, 2015 | 1 Comment

By Tracy Slater

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Editor's Note: Tracy Slater is the founder of Four Stories, a global literary series in Boston, Osaka, and Tokyo, for which she was awarded the PEN New England’s Friend to Writers Award in 2008. She is most recently the author of the memoir The Good Shufu, and she joins Biographile to note some of the amusingly frustrating aspects of the Japanese language, a byproduct of the country's centuries of isolation. 

The Great Wall of China was built centuries ago to keep out foreigners. From what I know after marrying a Japanese man and moving to his country, the cultures of China and Japan are quite different. But trying (and mostly failing) to learn my husband’s language has convinced me of one similarity: Japan has its own Great Wall of sorts. Its language.

When I married Toru, I’d already completed a PhD in English and American literature and had been a French Lit major as an undergrad. So we figured it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for me to learn Japanese. We were wrong.

Japan is a famously insular country. It has one of the lowest rates of immigration among all developed countries. On our official family register -- a document every household by law must make in Japan -- my name exists only in the footnote field, because as a foreigner with a foreign name, I cannot legally occupy the main section, cannot stray beyond the margin.

I jest, at least in part, when I say that the complexity of its language is part of Japan’s insularity, some sort of overt historical campaign to keep outsiders outside. But much of the language does, in fact, reflect the unique character and culture of this country, whose borders were closed to virtually all foreigners (and whose citizens were prevented from leaving) for almost 300 years. Some examples:

1. Japanese boasts three separate alphabets. It’s main one, kanji, is based on the Chinese writing system of using characters to represent whole words or concepts. Japanese uses these characters but pronounces them differently from Chinese. (In fact, to my earlier point about the complexity of Japan’s lexicon, depending on how the kanji are ordered within one word or concept, the pronunciation within Japanese itself changes radically.) To be proficient enough to read the newspaper, one must know 1,500 kanji. To be completely literate in Japanese, one would know about 6,000, although only about 3,000 are used in everyday communication. Some of these kanji themselves reflect the values of the culture. The kanji for "like," for example, combines the characters for a woman next to a child.

2. The second Japanese alphabet, hiragana, is a syllabary (like our alphabet in English, with one letter representing one sound) of forty-seven marks and is used to write out words when the kanji for them would be obscure to the average reader. The third, katakana, is also a forty-seven-piece syllabary, but it is used for foreign words exclusively -- getting back to my point about the culture’s insularity being reflected in its language. So for instance, any foreign concept (take coffee) would be written in katakana (コーヒー; pronounced "Co-hee"), so as not to sully the purity of Japanese kanji or hiragana. My favorite illustration of how katakana reflects Japan’s own ideals about itself and stereotypes about outsiders is the word "sekuhara" (セクハラ), meaning "sexual harassment," which apparently is a concept imported from the uncivilized rest of the world.

3. Japanese has many different levels of conjugation for verbs, nouns, and adjectives. This conjugation depends, in part, on both where you and your conversation partner are in the social hierarchy. So one must know not just all the different variations of word-forms, but one must also understand and take into account such concepts as age (elders are higher in the hierarchy), relationship (family members are considered inside one's group, friends inside but not as far inside as family, and strangers totally outside), and professional or service role (so a shop clerk would use a different form of verb than his or her customer would when they are conversing).

4. Because Japan is such a group-oriented culture, one usually does not use a subject in a sentence. For instance, to say "I am going to the store," you would say something like "going to store" (or more accurately "store to go," since Japanese syntax is the complete reverse of English). The idea of the individual actor, of personal agency, gets completely elided in Japanese.

5. A final example, related to the concept of valuing the group over the individual: Japanese has few singular vs. plural forms.  The word for one man is the same as the word for twenty men. Or, in my case, the word for one (very confused) foreigner -- "gaikokujin," translated literally as "outside country person" -- is the same as the term for thousands of confused foreigners.