4. THE BIRTH OF JAPANESE AS A NATIONAL LANGUAGE

“‘Foreigners are beautiful, aren’t they?’ he said.”

This line occurs toward the beginning of Sanshirō (1909),¹ a novel by Natsume Sōseki, modern Japan’s greatest novelist. Sanshirō, a young man from the sleepy southern island of Kyushu, is riding a train to the capital where, to his great pride, he will become a student at Tokyo Imperial University. A bearded and rather unimpressively attired passenger is sitting diagonally across from him, and they start a conversation. As the train comes to a stop, they see a Western couple on the platform, whereupon the man makes the observation about foreigners:

Sanshirō could think of nothing to say in reply. He nodded and smiled.

“We Japanese are poor things next to them,” the bearded man continued. “We can beat the Russians, become a first-class power, but it doesn’t make any difference. We still look like this, we still don’t amount to anything. Even the buildings we build, the parks we make, they’re just what you’d expect from people with faces like ours. . . . This is your first trip to Tokyo, isn’t it? Then you’ve never seen Mount Fuji. We go by it a little farther on. Take a look. It’s the best thing in Japan, the only thing we can brag about. The trouble is, it’s just part of nature, something that’s always been sitting there. We certainly didn’t create it.” He was grinning again.

Sanshirō had never expected to meet anyone like this after the Russo-Japanese War. The man scarcely seemed Japanese. He said defensively, “But from now on, Japan is sure to develop.”

“Japan’s headed for a fall,” the man said coolly.

In 1908, three years had passed since Japan unexpectedly won the Russo-Japanese War, a war rife with symbolic meaning: for the first time, a non-Western nation had defeated a Western power. The precariousness of Japan’s victory notwithstanding, the achievement was indisputable. The West had to accept that the ability to build a modern nation-state was not its exclusive prerogative; any ethnic group or race could do so. All the unequal treaties that Japan had been forced to sign with the Western powers since 1858 were nullified. The colonial ambitions toward Japan that the powers still harbored after the Meiji Restoration finally subsided, and Japan emerged as their rival in the Far East.

The bearded passenger, Sanshirō later learns with surprise, teaches at an elite preparatory college affiliated with Tokyo Imperial University, the educational pinnacle of modern Japan. His line, “Japan’s headed for a fall,” could as well be an authorial comment, as Sōseki himself once taught at that very college. Sōseki must have been well aware that Japan, despite its historic victory, was still immature as a modern nation. Indeed, after the publication of Sanshirō, Japan transformed from Asia’s star of hope into another aggressor and then “fell” in less than half a century. One fact nonetheless remains: already in the first decade of the twentieth century, a novel like Sanshirō could be serialized in a major national newspaper and widely read—a novel exemplifying national literature in which a character critiques his own country and people from a global perspective, and that furthermore is a truly fine piece of literature, always fresh no matter how many times one rereads it.

The modern novel emerged in the West in the mid-eighteenth century. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published more than half a century later, in 1812, and by the mid-nineteenth century classic representatives of the genre had blossomed in profusion. Stendhal’s The Red and the Black came out in 1830. Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy started appearing around the same time and continued to his death in 1850. The Brontë sisters’ Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were written in 1847; William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, in 1848; Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, in 1850. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary came out in 1856. George Eliot’s Middlemarch was published a little later, in 1872. In Russia, Tolstoy’s War and Peace was published in 1869; Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in 1880.

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 thus occurred just when the novel was at its peak in the West. Japan’s own first modern novel, Futabatei Shimei’s Floating Clouds (Ukigumo), dates from 1889, barely twenty years after the Restoration. Although unfinished, it is one of the enduring monuments of Japanese modern literature. Moreover, it was followed in quick succession by a slew of brilliant works: Higuchi Ichiyō’s “Child’s Play” (Takekurabe) and “Troubled Waters” (Nigorie), both in 1895;2 Natsume Sōseki’s Botchan (1907), Sanshirō (1909), and Light and Dark (Meian, 1916); Izumi Kyōka’s Song and Lantern (Uta andon, 1910); Mori Ōgai’s The Abe Clan (Abe ichizoku, 1913) and Shibue Chūsai (1916); Arishima Takeo’s A Certain Woman (Aru onna, 1919); Naka Kansuke’s The Silver Spoon (Gin no saji, 1921); Nagai Kafū’s A Strange Tale from East of the River (Bokutō kidan, 1937); and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s A Portrait of Shunkin (Shunkinshō, 1933) and The Makioka Sisters (1948). Together these remarkable, distinctive works filled the Japanese mind—and language—with inestimable riches.

That there should have been such a profusion of modern novels in Japan following the Meiji Restoration may at first glance seem only to be expected. Japan encountered the overpowering West; its people began writing modern novels emulating the overpowering West. What could be more natural, you may say. Yet things didn’t work out that way in most other non-Western countries.

The question then poses itself as to how this was possible in Japan. The answer is beguilingly simple: after the Restoration, the Japanese language quickly established itself as a national language both in name and in practice—precisely the kind of language that makes possible the writing of novels and that the novel celebrates. The real question is how this came about. The answers could be as multifarious as the phenomenon was complex; I will begin by pointing to two conditions that have hardly been explored by scholars of Japanese literature but that seem to me to have been key in enabling the Japanese language to transform into a national language when the Great Powers of the West started eyeing the Far East. First, Japan already had a written language that was quite mature and held in high regard. Second, it enjoyed what Benedict Anderson calls “print capitalism” during the preceding Edo period, which enabled the written language to circulate widely.

JAPANESE AS LOCAL LANGUAGE

One crucial historical fact (again, virtually unexplored by literary scholars) must be made clear before moving on to a discussion of how Japanese transformed itself into a national language. For over twelve hundred years, the country remained part of the Sinosphere—the cultural sphere that used the Chinese writing system as a universal language. And, it must be noted, during that whole time the Japanese language was a local language. Despite the high level of maturity the Japanese language attained prior to the Restoration, it had nonetheless been a mere local language ever since people began writing in their own language. This point cannot be stressed enough.

That premodern Japan belonged to the Sinosphere may seem obvious—to everyone but the Japanese. Of course, children are taught in school that Chinese characters were brought to Japan by settlers from the neighboring Korean Peninsula and that the Japanese writing system grew out of those characters. Yet this historical fact is rarely truly appreciated. The Japanese are left thinking that if Chinese characters had not reached Japan, their resourceful ancestors would have invented their own writing system anyway, which seems hardly likely. Until the dawn of the Western age of exploration in the fifteenth century, much of the globe had no writing. It was only because of Japan’s proximity to the Korean Peninsula that a writing system was introduced by the fifth century (or even earlier) and, by pure geographic luck, an oral culture was able to transform itself into a written culture. Other, more isolated Pacific islands followed a different course.

Let us go back to ancient Japan, as it became part of the Sinosphere. What reached the archipelago were bundles of precious scrolls with writing on them, scrolls that the Japanese learned to read from Korean settlers. To be sure, there were only a handful of Japanese bilinguals in the beginning, but their presence enabled Japan to join the Sinosphere alongside Korea and Vietnam. The Japanese thus gained entry into the library of Chinese texts, the library of an “external language”—the universal language of the region. And by gaining entry into this library, they also entered a society in which there was a linguistic double structure of “universal/local language,” just as in the pre-Gutenberg societies of Europe—or indeed as in many premodern societies.

Like the Bible in Latin or the Qur’an in Arabic, which spread far and wide as sacred texts, what first reached Japan were Buddhist scriptures in Chinese, which, significantly enough, were themselves translations from Sanskrit. Initially, facing these beautiful calligraphic scrolls, Japanese people probably never dared imagine that they were anything other than texts to be deciphered with veneration—“texts to be read.” The idea that the same characters used in them might be used to represent their own language—the language they chattered in the streets—would have seemed preposterous, all the more so because Chinese characters are ideograms and not phonograms; that is, they represent meaning and not sound. (More precisely, most Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds, having a dual function, but I will use the term “ideogram” to simplify my argument.) Nonetheless, the general rule that a local language acquires a written language by translation of a universal language applies to Japanese as well. For it was through translation that the Japanese people started to use these characters to express their own language.

The process was a tortuous one that took centuries, not only because Chinese characters are ideograms, but because the Chinese and Japanese languages are totally unrelated. In fact, it seems almost surreal that two languages could be so far apart, given the geographic proximity of the two countries. Word order is opposite. Chinese follows the same subject-verb-object order as English, but this is reversed in Japanese; “I love you” becomes “I you love.” Moreover, Chinese, especially Classical Chinese, is what is called an “isolating language,” while Japanese is an “agglutinative language”: in Chinese, each semantic unit is directly followed by another; in Japanese each semantic unit must be followed by a particle or suffix—a little bit of “glue”—that connects it to the next. So, in the example, in Japanese two particles must be inserted to mark the subject and object: “I (wa) you (wo) love.” What is most astonishing and instructive to us who are the products of modernity is that, even faced with such a seemingly insurmountable linguistic barrier, Japanese people never thought of just going ahead and inventing their own letters or their own writing system to better represent the language they spoke—that it was as a by-product of the act of translation that they eventually acquired their own method of writing.

The Japanese who first learned to read Chinese from Korean settlers in the fifth or sixth century must have read it in the original word order, though this is impossible to establish. What we do know is that sometime during the Nara period (710–784), people were already reading Chinese as if it were Japanese, inverting the word order and adding small inversion marks to the text to indicate where and how the inversions should take place—a method still used today to read the Chinese Classics. This practice, called “Chinese writing, Japanese reading” (kanbun kundoku), was a primordial form of translation. (The Korean language has word order similar to that of Japanese, and Koreans may have already been doing something similar.) The next step was to add, in small lettering alongside the inversion marks, the particles and suffixes necessary to read the text as Japanese. Of course, at this point, the Japanese still had no distinctive letters of their own to represent the sounds of their language. They compensated by taking the meanings away from certain Chinese ideograms and using them simply for their sound value, as phonograms. Using this method of writing, they gradually succeeded in amassing a vast collection of indigenous poetry that is still read and loved today: Ten Thousand Leaves. Visually, the poems appear to be Chinese, but phonetically and semantically they are Japanese. Chinese characters used this way are called man’yōgana (letters of Ten Thousand Leaves).

The following Heian period, when Lady Murasaki Shikibu wrote the masterful Tale of Genji, represents the true birth of vernacular writing. Since the seventh century, the Japanese government had been sending missions regularly to China to learn from the higher culture, but the practice came to a halt at the beginning of the Heian period for various reasons, the collapse of the mighty Tang dynasty being one. (The final mission was canceled in 894.) Chinese influence remained strong, but without any direct and centralized contact with China, indigenous culture began to flourish. More self-confident, Japanese people turned their method of translation into something more elaborate.

Besides the little inversion marks, particles, and suffixes, people began to write full translations alongside the text, still using Chinese characters as phonograms. These additions—interlinear texts of a sort—first appeared in minuscule writing, as if they knew they didn’t belong. Gradually, the characters used for this purpose were simplified, requiring fewer brush strokes and slowly evolving into distinctive letters in their own right. In the process, they split into two systems of phonograms or “syllabaries,” as they are known, each letter representing a syllable of Japanese. Thus were born today’s katakana and hiragana, the indigenous products of translation.

To give you an idea of what these syllabaries look like, here is the word “katakana”—which originally meant “partial characters”—written in katakana: カタカナ. It is composed of straight lines, exuding masculinity. And here is the word “hiragana”—which originally meant “easy characters”—written in hiragana: ひらがな. As you see, unlike katakana, hiragana is composed of curved lines, exuding femininity. The word “kana” is used when referring to both syllabaries. Chinese characters, meanwhile, were called magana or “real characters,” written 眞仮名. The difference between kana and magana is visually obvious.

Why two sets of kana? True, the language could perhaps have done just as well with one. It ended up with two because of the split created by the very binary between the universal language and the local language. Katakana continued to be used when translating the universal language and long remained subordinate to it. As Japanese people became more comfortable writing in their own language, interlinear texts using the two syllabaries grew larger and bolder, but because of katakana’s close relation to the universal, its process of enlargement took much longer than its counterpart.

Hiragana became distanced from Chinese early on as it was quickly relegated to the role of writing the local language. First it became the medium of choice for writing indigenous waka poetry—poetry in syllabic groupings of 5-7-5-7-7 that was a precursor to haiku. Then it was used in headnotes, prose descriptions of the situations in which those short poems were composed, like this one from the first imperial anthology of waka poetry, compiled in 905: “On hearing the call of a wild goose and thinking of a friend who had gone to Koshi.”3 These descriptions grew longer—often longer than the poems they introduced—and eventually evolved into short fictional narratives centering on poems. And who should be the greatest users of hiragana but well-educated ladies, for whom it was socially unacceptable to write in Chinese? (The exclusion of women from learning the universal language is the norm in any society where there is a binary between the universal and the local.) Ladies began writing prolifically in various prose genres—fiction, essays, literary diaries—using hiragana. The association with women’s writing became so close that hiragana was often referred to as “women’s hand” (onnade) in those early years. Such writing in hiragana also became known as yamato kotoba, literally “Japanese words,” to distinguish it from writing in Chinese. The Tale of Genji, a work of astounding psychological subtlety, is the greatest exemplar of yamato kotoba.

However, it would be naïve to assume that yamato kotoba was something like a direct expression of the Japanese soul (yamatodamashii). Waka, literally “Japanese song,” must have had its origin in oral incantation, but as a literary form it was created by readers familiar with Chinese poetry who gradually shaped their own poetry with Chinese models in mind. A nationalistic myth, both modernist and romantic, long had it that many of the poems in Japan’s oldest collection, Ten Thousand Leaves, were composed by men and women from all walks of life, including soldiers garrisoned on the frontier, using man’yōgana, the precursor of yamato kotoba. Many scholars now believe, however, that these poems were most probably composed by aristocrats well versed in Chinese poetry. The first imperial waka anthology, which came out about a century and half later, includes not just allusions to but innovative adaptations of Chinese poems. If it is generally the rule that writing in a local language is created derivatively through the act of translation, Japanese follows this rule to a tee.

Some might ask how a language that produced the glorious Tale of Genji could be called a local language. Some might even consider the term an affront to Japanese literature. It is true that Heian court ladies turned their forced linguistic exclusion into an advantage by writing in their own language, in the process giving birth to Genji and other works of literature that continue to delight the world a thousand years later. They triumphed brilliantly by standing the patriarchal taboo on its head. And yet that triumph was recognized only in the modern era, when the “ideology of national language” was imported to Japan and scholars reconstructed the history of Japanese literature, playing down the importance of Chinese texts. During the Heian period, the hierarchy between the universal language and the local language was an absolute given that not even the brilliance of The Tale of Genji could alter. Male bilinguals not only read and wrote official documents and pursued knowledge in Chinese but also composed poetry in that language—a practice that persisted into the twentieth century. The ability to compose Chinese verse was the hallmark of a highly cultured man.

Katakana and hiragana long maintained their respective roles, but the distinction grew increasingly lax, and toward the end of the Heian period a new kind of writing emerged that would become the foundation for modern Japanese prose. Using kana as the base, the new writing mixed in Chinese characters with varying degrees of frequency. Some texts were densely Sinicized, while others were heavily vernacular with only scattered bits of Chinese. This flexibility allowed the Japanese people to read and write almost anything, and so they began reading and writing more and more in Japanese. Indeed, after Heian, through the Kamakura (1185–1333), Muromachi (1337–1573), and Edo (1603–1868) periods, prose writing in pure Chinese gradually became confined, aside from official documents, to the domain of Buddhist and Confucian texts.

Even so, during this time the hierarchy between writings in Chinese and Japanese never disappeared, not even during the Edo period, when the local culture thrived as Japan closed its doors to the outside world and the government allowed only limited access by Koreans, Chinese, and Dutch. Any attempt by native Japanese to leave the country was punishable by death. This period of hothouse seclusion led to striking literary achievements epitomized by the Genroku era (1688–1704), which is now remembered for three towering literary figures: a poet, a novelist, and a playwright, all of whom wrote not in Chinese but in Japanese. Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) wrote a seventeen-syllable haiku about the splashing sound made by a frog that led later generations to spend a million syllables speculating on its meaning: “The ancient pond / a frog jumps in / the sound of the water.” Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) wrote stories on a whirlwind of topics, everything from business cunning to amorous adventures, both hetero- and homosexual in variety; and Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725) is best known for his lyrical love-suicide plays. Yet this perception of Genroku literary achievement is the product of a particular narrative, a narrative of national literary history created after the importation of the “ideology of national language.” For despite this remarkable flowering of literary genius in the Japanese language, at the time Chinese writings by Confucian scholars such as Itō Jinsai (1627–1705) and Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728) possessed by far the greater prestige. Kaitai shinsho (New book of anatomy), published more than half a century after the Genroku era in 1774, is usually described as the first Japanese translation of a Western book—Ontleedkundige Tafelen (Anatomical tables, 1734), itself a translation into Dutch from the original German work, Anatomische Tabellen (1722) by Johan Adam Kulmus (1689–1745). Yet the translators actually rendered the text not into Japanese but into Chinese, as was proper, since it was a book on human anatomy—a book of knowledge. Japanese-language texts remained caught in the “universal language/local language” hierarchy.

The first official document ever issued in Japanese—though heavily Sinicized—was the Five Charter Oath (1868) proclaimed by the Meiji Emperor. The event marked the beginning of a new era, one in which Japan saw itself as a modern nation-state no longer confined to the Sinosphere. A society cannot throw away tradition overnight, however. Children of the educated class continued to begin their studies by learning Classical Chinese. It took a couple of decades before the emphasis shifted to learning to read and write in their own language. It took nearly a century for people well versed in the Chinese language to fade away.

The following anecdote shows something of the lingering prestige and influence of the Chinese idiom at this transitional period.

Uchimura Kanzō (1861–1930), the well-known founder of the Nonchurch (Mukyōkai) movement in Meiji Japan, embraced monotheist Christianity at a young age and enthusiastically engaged in evangelical work to spread the faith. However, to his great dismay, his own father expressed no interest. As Uchimura Kanzō wrote in his English-language autobiography, How I Became a Christian, “The arch-heretic was my father, who with his learning and strong convictions of his own, was the hardest to approach with my faith. For three years I had been sending him books and pamphlets. . . . But nothing could move him.”4

One day, Uchimura came up with a fine idea. At the time, the five-volume Commentary on the Gospel of St. Mark by Dr. Ernst Faber, a German missionary in China, was gaining acclaim. The commentary was written in literary Chinese without inversion marks, and Uchimura wrote, “I thought the difficulty of reading it, if not any thing else, might whet my father’s intellectual appetite to peruse it.” He thus spent his savings on the five volumes and presented them to his father. The elder Uchimura initially threw the books away, but his son persistently put them back on his desk, and in time he began to read them. Uchimura exulted, “Finally . . . I prevailed; he went through the first volume! He stopped to scoff at Christianity!” As the father read through the second, third, and fourth volumes, he began to change. “He would not touch his wine any more” (emphasis in original).⁵

Uchimura appears to have been greatly moved by the power of Christianity to make his father stop drinking. I, however, am more struck by the picture of an old-time samurai sitting erect, turning page after page of Western religious philosophy written in Chinese. I can’t help thinking what a huge transformation in the literate life of the Japanese people was to come in the ensuing hundred-odd years.

THE ESCAPE FROM THE CHINESE IMPERIAL EXAMINATION SYSTEM

That the Japanese language remained for over a millennium merely a local language is perhaps typical. That its writing was created through the act of translating a universal language is indeed typical. What is surprising is the level of sophistication written Japanese attained. Usually, the nature of a local language is such that even if a learned man wrote in it, he would be writing not for his peers but rather for his wife or children. Yet Japanese developed into a language shared by male intellectuals.

To see how this turn of events came about, let us start by picturing the Japan archipelago lying in the sea by the Chinese mainland. If its proximity allowed it to become part of the Sinosphere and acquire a written culture, its distance benefited the development of indigenous writing. The Dover Strait, separating England and France, is only 34 kilometers (21 miles) wide. A fine swimmer can swim across it. In contrast, the shortest distance between Japan and the Korean Peninsula is five or six times greater, and between Japan and the Chinese mainland, twenty-five times greater. The current, moreover, is deadly. The missions the Japanese government sent regularly to China between the sixth and ninth centuries were life-risking endeavors often ending in shipwreck. Japan’s distance from China gave it political and cultural freedom and made possible the flowering of its own writing.

Nowhere is the effect of Japan’s distance from the continent more manifest than in the country’s escape from the powerful pull of the imperial examination system invented by the Chinese. As is well known, the imperial examination was a means of soliciting the most brilliant minds from all over China to become high-ranking bureaucrats. The earliest example of democratic examinations in the world, the system demonstrates how advanced Chinese civilization once was. Begun in the sixth century, the examination system lasted for an amazing fourteen centuries and exerted control over Chinese politics and culture. The content of the examination changed little with the times, however, and once China entered modernity and fell prey to the imperialistic ambitions of the West, the system proved practically useless and was abolished in 1904. The imperial examination system became symbolic of the stagnation of Chinese civilization.

What concerns us is the relationship between such a system and the learned male population. Because the imperial examination was initially implemented to counter the power of the military, it was thoroughly literary in nature. The content was based on Confucian scholarship and required memorization of the Classics; the system produced not just officials but scholar-officials. On top of this, every conceivable mechanism encouraging fierce competition was built into the system: the examination was supposedly open to any male regardless of origin (though in reality only those of the learned class had the means to prepare for such an examination); once someone passed the exam, his entire clan would share in his power, glory, and wealth; and the top three successful candidates were assured particularly prestigious positions.

It is easy to see what would come out of such a system. Those in the learned class would select the brightest boy in the clan, and the whole clan would invest in his education. All across China, boys who particularly excelled in reading and writing would spend their entire childhood, youth, and even part of their adulthood studying single-mindedly for the examination. The average successful examinee was around thirty-five. That such a system lasted not only one or two hundred years but well over a millennium means that every bright male in the country was continually drawn deep into the changeless Chinese civilization—deep into the vast library of Classical Chinese writing.

Moreover, Classical Chinese was an “external language” even for Chinese themselves. For erudite Romans in the first century B.C.E., Seneca’s prose, literary as it was, must have been comprehensible by ear. But Classical Chinese texts, so concise and dense, had little tie to the spoken language of ordinary people at any point in history. This is true quite aside from the fact that the Chinese spoken languages—Cantonese, Shanghainese, Fukienese, Mandarin—vary so greatly that they could be considered different languages altogether. Thus, while preparing for the imperial examination enabled educated Chinese to communicate in a highly sophisticated manner, it hindered them from creating vernacular writing. Vernacular fiction began appearing only in the sixteenth century and was never held in high regard.

What would happen when countries surrounding China adopted such a system is then apparent. Their bilinguals—seekers of knowledge—would be absorbed into the Chinese library in a similar way. Without the participation of those bilinguals, writings in those countries’ local languages would inevitably fail to mature.

Both Korea and Vietnam, which are located on geographic extensions of the Chinese mainland, adopted the system, as did later the Ryūkyū Kingdom (present-day Okinawa), which is much closer to China than to Japan. The Japanese made an attempt to adopt the system once during the Heian period. Yet as the country stopped sending regular missions to China and centralized, direct ties with China gradually ended, there was no longer any incentive for Japanese to follow the Chinese model. This turn of events was a blessing for the Japanese language. Japanese bilinguals, because they were not forced to compete fiercely in order to excel in written Chinese, soon began to read and write in the local language as well. These men had no qualms about using hiragana, the “women’s hand.” On the contrary, they apparently used it whenever occasion permitted.

When the first imperial anthology of waka poetry was compiled, the poet Ki no Tsurayuki (872–945) wrote two prefaces, one in Chinese and the other in Japanese, mostly hiragana. He then went on to write the groundbreaking Tosa Diary (Tosa nikki, 935), which describes, in Japanese, a long journey to the capital. (Some scholars speculate that he kept a diary in Chinese during his travels and rewrote it after his return.) Moreover, to experiment once again in writing hiragana-based Japanese, he went so far as to adopt the persona of a woman. Writing a diary was something men did more often than women, but male diarists of his time invariably wrote in either Chinese or Sinicized Japanese—never in hiragana.

The opening passage of Tosa Diary is quite perverse: “Men write diaries, but I, a woman, will try my hand at it too.” This one sentence, written mostly in hiragana, crystallizes the wonders of Japan’s literary history. Men were not “supposed” to be writing in hiragana, except when composing waka, but they were reading it (and probably writing it, too). Even before Tosa Diary, there already existed a collection of anonymous short stories called The Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari, mid- to late ninth century). Because each story is a narrative revolving around waka, it is written in hiragana, but the collection, sometimes bawdy, was certainly not meant just for women. Nothing in Tosa Diary suggests that it was meant just for women either. And there is more. Even women authors, who always wrote in hiragana, were far from having a solely female readership in mind. The two lady rivals, Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji, and Sei Shōnagon, author of The Pillow Book (Makura no sōshi, 1002), were both well versed in Chinese Classics—though they made their erudition known only by slipping in allusions here and there—and they reveled in compliments from male readers. By writing brilliantly in their own language, they must have given men the desire to do the same. The binary of the universal and the local did not coincide with the binary of the educated and the uneducated in Japan.

As men began to write more freely in hiragana, hiragana writings began to incorporate Chinese characters more freely, increasingly blurring the difference between hiragana-based and katakana-based texts. Some Buddhist writers began using hiragana for their less scholarly works. Then, during the Edo period, with the emergence of protonationalism and a school of thought called kokugaku (national philology), there even appeared some scholarly texts that were hiragana-based. When kokugaku apologists criticized the dominance of “foreign” Chinese learning, they were in fact criticizing the dominance of universal language while using what circulated as merely a local language. In their writings, the local language had become a language that bore intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic burdens, just like the universal language; it had come to function almost like a national language.

Chinese people, proud of their advanced civilization, were highly Sinocentric. They little knew or cared that people across the sea had created their own strange system of writing by using and adapting Chinese characters for their own purposes. They little knew or cared that that system of writing was being used to compose poems about cherry blossoms, autumn leaves, and the transience of life. What they did know was how poor Japanese mastery of the Chinese language was compared with that of Koreans and Vietnamese. Japanese people’s Chinese was generally looked down on inside the Sinosphere, doubtless with good reason.

Yet from a modern historical perspective, the Japanese achievement in developing a local language and literature early on was quite remarkable. The Western experience was different. In medieval Europe, learned bilinguals remained absorbed in the library of the universal language of Latin for a thousand years under the authority of the Church, very much like those absorbed in the Chinese library under the imperial examination system. European vernacular writing started appearing only in the twelfth century and began to flourish from the Renaissance period on: Dante’s Divine Comedy in the early fourteenth century and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales later that century, followed by François Villon’s poems in the mid-fifteenth century and Shakespeare’s plays in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Moreover, all these works—with the exception of some parts of The Canterbury Tales—were poetry or plays, not prose. Not until the seventeenth century did the first pinnacle of prose fiction in the West, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, appear—some six centuries after The Tale of Genji.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN THE EDO PERIOD

Let us next briefly touch on the second condition that I believe enabled the Japanese language to quickly establish itself as a national language: the development of what Anderson calls “print capitalism” during the Edo period. However refined, Heian court literature alone, known only to a handful of aristocrats and their entourage, would not have led to the speedy establishment of a national language. What was needed was a thriving bourgeois literature, widely enjoyed by middle-class townsmen.

Under the more than 250 years of peace during the Edo period, Japan, though basically cut off from the rest of the world, enjoyed steady economic growth. Living in a mountainous island country with many rivers and inlets proved handy during the premodern age, when water was the principal means of conducting trade. Added to this topographical advantage was the system called sankin kōtai (alternate residence) by which the Edo shogunate required feudal lords, or daimyo, to reside in Edo and their domain in alternate years: this system created a strong need for cash for the daimyo, to make the costly annual journey and to reside in the capital with style. The Edo period saw increasingly heavy trade between the capital and the provinces as well as among the provinces themselves, and the country soon became the wealthiest in the non-West—though the Japanese had no idea of this. The development of capitalism is always accompanied by a rise in literacy; one must be able to count and read and write to join the marketplace. Thus by the end of the Edo period, the country was filled with schools, including public schools for members of the samurai class and temple schools for children of ordinary people. Japan boasted a literacy rate among the highest in the world. Print technology (mainly woodprint) had existed well before the Edo period, but now the active economy and high literacy rate combined to create Anderson’s “print capitalism.” To be sure, a unified written language did not yet exist. A bewildering variety of forms of written language coexisted. Moreover, none of them was anything close to the spoken language, and there was no such thing as a unified spoken language either. (The diversity of dialects at the time is unimaginable for Japanese today.) And yet Anderson’s point that the development of print capitalism leads to the increased circulation of writings in the local language holds true in Japan, too. The growing market for books came to absorb more and more monolinguals. Indeed, by the time of the Meiji Restoration, Japanese writing was circulating on a scale scarcely seen in any premodern society.

It was against this background that, soon after the Restoration, two books appeared back to back and became Japan’s first best sellers. Self-Help (1859) by Samuel Smiles, a Scottish reformer, was translated and published in 1871, only three years after the Restoration. It became an instant must-read and sold a million copies altogether. Then in the following year came An Encouragement of Learning (Gakumon no susume) by Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901),6 an influential educator who played a key role in the Westernization of Japan. (We will be touching on his fascinating autobiography later.) Written in a relatively simple style that Fukuzawa claimed “even a monkey could read,” it was initially published in pamphlet form and sold so well—700,000 copies in all, plus pirated editions that led him to complain about the lack of enforcement of copyright law—that he decided to issue it in book form in 1880. The book went on to sell an astonishing three million copies.

To reiterate, Japan was fortunate first in its geographic position—close enough to China and Korea to receive an early introduction to writing, far enough away for its own indigenous writing to grow and flourish—and second in its economic development, which allowed that writing to spread among the population at large. These were the two conditions, virtually ignored by literary scholars, that made it possible for Japanese to establish itself as a bona fide national language shortly after the Meiji Restoration. However, while these two were prerequisites, they alone were insufficient. For the Japanese language to transform itself into a national language so swiftly, there was yet another, absolutely indispensable, historical condition, one that has been not just ignored but virtually suppressed: Japan had to escape from the Western powers.

THE ESCAPE FROM THE WESTERN POWERS

From the nineteenth century to the twentieth, Western powers spread through Asia and Africa, colonizing nearly all the non-West. Japan, however, managed to escape this fate (though it soon enough turned neighboring nations into colonies of its own). At the time of the Meiji Restoration, non-Western countries besides Japan that were not colonies or protectorates, and also not divided or leased, could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In Eurasia there were Korea, Thailand, Afghanistan, and part of the Ottoman Empire; in Africa—not counting Liberia, founded by freed American slaves with the aid of the U.S. government—there was only Ethiopia. Japan was thus one of the lucky few.

This came about thanks to a group of clear-sighted men who saw that Japan’s only hope lay in dismantling its isolationist policy, engaging in international trade, and transforming as quickly as possible into a modern nation-state. Once again, geographic location helped. Situated at the extreme eastern end of the world (from the Western perspective), Japan was far removed from the West, including the United States, whose maritime route to Asia at the time went through the Indian Ocean.

The neighboring Qing dynasty (1644–1912) had resisted the West, only to end up fighting the disastrous Opium Wars, a fate that Japan observed with horror. In the years leading up to the wars, the British treated China in a way they would never have dared to treat any Western country, illegally exporting large amounts of opium they grew in India in an effort to acquire Chinese silver. The First Opium War started in 1839 when the Qing emperor, understandably alarmed at opium’s rapid spread, banned the underground traffic. Britain countered with military force. Lacking a modern army, China was quickly defeated and subjected to humiliating conditions: concession of Hong Kong, large indemnities, unequal treaties. Then in 1856, Britain found a pretext to wage the Second Opium War. This time, the other European powers got in the act, and China was half colonized. Alert patriots in Japan saw all too clearly what the consequences would be if their country did not voluntarily open its doors to the West and modernize, but fast.

Along with geography, history worked in Japan’s favor, or else the patriots’ goal might have remained elusive. Japan was indeed a tempting country to colonize: it was conveniently located for maritime trade; it produced copper, silver, tea, silk, and porcelain that the Western importers coveted; and it had a large population and a developed capitalism that made it a good market for Western exporters. The Western powers could have tried to grab some of its land for lease or tried to divvy it up; even worse, one of them could have colonized it outright. The vastness of China limited their ambitions to obtaining concession territories along the coast and sharing prerogatives, but Japan was an easy target.

None of this happened, however. Commodore Matthew Perry’s squadron entered the port of Uraga in 1853, surprising the Japanese with four huge navy vessels known forever after to the Japanese as “black ships” and demanding that the country open its doors. Perry came back the following year to Yokohama, this time with nine vessels, making the same demand. Faced with cannonballs for the first time in their history, the Japanese had no choice but to agree to supply American ships with fuel, water, and food; then the Europeans joined in, all demanding more concessions. Things looked dark for Japan, but history soon intervened as a series of wars broke out among the Western powers. The Crimean War, fought by Britain, France, and Turkey against Russia, took place between 1853 and 1856. The American Civil War began in 1861 and lasted until 1865. The Franco-Prussian War was fought in 1870 and 1871. These wars debilitated the Western powers for a while; in the meantime Japan began to turn itself into a modern nation-state, complete with a modern military.

What if Japan had become a Western colony? Today, nearly a century and a half after the Meiji Restoration, the possibility may appear all too distant and far-fetched. Yet for Japanese living at the time, the possibility was all too real. In his celebrated and wonderfully funny autobiography, published in 1899, Fukuzawa Yukichi, the aforementioned best-selling writer and one of the key figures in Japan’s modernization, reflects back on the tumultuous years immediately following the Restoration from the perspective of an “old man” (he was sixty-four) and reveals how precarious Japan’s independence actually was.

Through many an intrigue and skirmish between the Edo shogunate and the rebels who favored restoring imperial rule, the shogunate finally fell. Yet the situation was a complicated one. Often the very ones who worked to bring about the Restoration were incensed by the shogunate’s weak-kneed dealings with the West and yearned to rid the country of Western influence once and for all. Those in favor of opening up the country were initially in the minority. Fukuzawa writes that he was unsure if the new Meiji government was willing to embrace change, which he knew was the only way that the country could maintain its independence: “In truth I could see that the officials of the government knew nothing better than the dregs of the Confucian philosophy with which to guide their actions. They were simply lording it over the people with arrogance and pretense.”7 He further writes that Western diplomats who initially favored Japan’s self-governance turned skeptical on arriving in the country and seeing its people firsthand, citing the example of Lincoln’s secretary of state, William H. Seward, who asserted that “after seeing the condition of things, he could not say much more in commendation of Japan. He was sorry, he said, but Japan with her inflexible nature could hardly be expected to keep her independence.” Fukuzawa knew that unless the country opened in the true sense of the word, there was a good chance that it would be colonized even after the Restoration.

Fukuzawa reflects:

I have never told anyone of the dire, helpless state of my mind at that time. But I am going to confess it now. Watching the unfortunate condition of the country, I feared in reality that we might not be able to hold our own against foreign aggressiveness. . . . If in the future there should come signs of foreign aggression and we were to be subjected to insult from foreigners, I would probably find some way to extricate myself. But when I thought of my children who had longer lives to live, again I was afraid. They must never be made slaves of foreigners; I would save them with my own life first. At one time I thought even of having my sons enter the Christian priesthood.⁸

This last was an outlandish idea, since Fukuzawa himself was a nonbeliever—a thorough rationalist. Whether having his sons “enter the Christian priesthood” would have spared them humiliation at the hands of foreigners remains an open question. For Fukuzawa’s fears did not materialize: fortunately the new government, once in power, quickly grasped the course it had to take and began implementing drastic reforms. Fukuzawa concludes, “As I look back today—over thirty years later—it all seems a dream. How advanced and secure the country is now! I can do nothing but bless with a full heart this glorious enlightenment of Japan today.”9

Let us here consider the “what ifs” that Fukuzawa feared.

To start with, what if the American Civil War had not broken out so soon after Perry’s squadron entered the port of Uraga? Japan could have become a United States colony. Preposterous, one might scoff, but not if one exercises an imagination informed by modern history. At the time, every non-Western country was up for grabs. Itself a former British colony, the United States was divided over whether to join European countries in colonization—but that did not stop it from taking the Philippines from Spain.

What if Japan had become a United States colony like the Philippines—what would have happened to the Japanese language? Like all other colonized countries, Japan would surely have become a bilingual society where the languages of the colonizer and the colonized were used side by side. Unlike that previous bilingual era when Japan belonged to the Sinosphere and people’s access to the Chinese language was more or less limited to written texts, a colonial power would have exercised far more direct and extensive influence. Americans would have arrived in person and trod all over Japan, whether in muddy military boots or shiny civilian shoes, controlling everything from foreign relations to internal governance, including the three branches of government as well as businesses and, of course, higher education. Naturally, English would have become the official language. Under such conditions, as is always the case with colonized countries, the best upward path for locals would have been to excel in English and serve as liaisons, relaying orders from above and claims from below. If the system for selecting such liaisons were fair, it would have attracted the brightest minds from all over the country, encouraging more and more people to become bilinguals and receive higher education in English. The best Japanese minds would have been absorbed into the library of English.

To be sure, the Japanese written language, already mature and widely used, would have remained in circulation. People would have continued to use the traditional epistolary form to write letters. They would have continued to compose waka and haiku in their leisure. They would even have continued to compose Chinese poetry for a while. New works of the popular traditional fiction called gesaku (playful writing) would have continued to be written, depicting the new society. The general population would most probably have been taught reading and writing in Japanese.

Yet colonization would have had drastic effects on how the Japanese language developed. First of all, it is likely that the use of Japanese in critical thinking would gradually have been abandoned. What is known as the genbun itchi (unification of spoken and written word) movement, a movement to create a standard form of prose closer to the spoken language, probably would not have come about, or, if it did, would not have attained much sophistication. Moreover, it is even possible that the ruling Americans would have enforced the use of the Roman alphabet. (As I will discuss later, after Japan’s surrender in World War II, the United States Occupation forces proposed this very change.) All this on top of the fact that Japanese society itself would have become polarized, as is typical of colonized societies, with a deep gap between a small number of bilinguals and a large number of monolinguals.

In short, if Japan had become a colony, the Japanese language would in all likelihood have been reduced to a typical local language. Of course, the age of colonization would eventually have come to an end. Nationalism would demand that, with independence, the Japanese language would transform into a national language. Nonetheless, to what extent could it have become a national language in a true sense?

Thanks to the expanse of the British Empire, by the time Perry’s “black ships” appeared off Japanese shores, the English language was already the world’s most dominant language. At the same time, the United States was well on its way to becoming the world’s richest and most powerful nation, so if Japan had indeed been a U.S. colony, by the time it regained its independence, English dominance would have been even more entrenched. Unlike the people in Japan’s former colonies of Taiwan and Korea, who did not hesitate to abandon the Japanese language once they were liberated, the Japanese people might easily have chosen to stick with English. Even if they had decided to relegate it to the status of “second official language,” which language would the government actually have used? The universities? Which language would novelists have elected to write their novels in?

THE BIRTH OF JAPANESE AS A NATIONAL LANGUAGE

The Japanese language escaped threats from the outside. Yet the path to becoming a national language is fraught with difficulty, as is shown by what happened next. After the Meiji Restoration—however incongruous this may seem—the Japanese language was faced with threats from inside, from the Japanese themselves. Many Japanese intellectuals at the time doubted whether their language could be turned into the language of a modern nation-state. One such doubter was Mori Arinori (1847–1889), a contemporary of Fukuzawa’s who became the first minister of education. Mori implemented important educational reforms, but he remains a controversial figure, mainly because he initially advocated that Japan abandon the use of its language and adopt English instead.10 In 1873, he wrote a short article in English for American readers entitled “Education in Japan.” Here is an excerpt:

The absolute necessity of mastering the English language is thus forced upon us. It is a requisite of the maintenance of our independence in the community of nations. Under the circumstances, our meager language, which can never be of any use outside of our islands, is doomed to yield to the domination of the English tongue, especially when the power of steam and electricity shall have pervaded the land. Our intelligent race, eager in the pursuit of knowledge, cannot depend upon a weak and uncertain medium of communication in its endeavor to grasp the principal truths from the precious treasury of Western science and art and religion. The laws of state can never be preserved in the language of Japan. All reasons suggest its disuse.¹¹

Notice Mori’s descriptions of the Japanese language: a “meager language, which can never be of any use outside of our islands . . . doomed to yield to the domination of the English tongue”; “a weak and uncertain medium of communication”; a language in which the “laws of state can never be preserved.” The Japanese who today criticize Mori for his seemingly unpatriotic assessment of his own language lack historical imagination. They fail to see that Japan was in such precarious circumstances that someone like Mori, who was fluent in English and could look at the world from a global perspective, felt compelled to consider the radical option of abandoning Japanese altogether. To remain independent, Japan needed a language that would allow it to function as a modern nation and gain parity with the Western powers. Many intellectuals, even those who opposed Mori’s proposal, were genuinely skeptical as to whether their language was equal to the task.

Mori’s proposal for the adoption of English was rejected before he became minister of education. It was not compatible with the ideology of national language, which was gradually penetrating Japan from the West. The new ministry made no attempt to adopt English but tried instead to come up with various ways of reshaping the language into one befitting a modern nation. The heated discussion dragged on for years. Nonetheless, those involved in the task were nearly unanimous on one point: they all wanted to do away with Chinese characters. Not only did Chinese characters symbolize an “external language,” which went counter to the ideology of national language—worse, they were ideograms, then thought to be a symbol of underdevelopment.

At the time of the Meiji Restoration, alongside the ideology of national language, social Darwinism was also in full force in the West. In Japan, the works of its advocate Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) began appearing in translation around 1880. Social Darwinism, which saw Western civilization as the pinnacle of human evolution, was applied to writing systems as well, suggesting that human writing evolved from ideograms to phonograms. Among the varieties of phonograms, syllabaries like hiragana and katakana that combine a consonant and a vowel in one letter were considered less evolved. Those that separate consonants and vowels and thus are closer to phonetic signs were considered more developed, and somehow the Roman alphabet was given a privileged status. (It is perhaps no accident that powerful Western nations happened to use the Roman alphabet and not Cyrillic.) In other words, social Darwinism was inextricably connected to phoneticism or, more precisely, what would a century later be criticized as “phonocentrism”—an understanding of language that gives primacy to spoken language as a spontaneous expression of the human mind, thus reducing written language to the status of mere representation of spoken sounds.

Chinese characters, by exemplifying ideograms, went blatantly against such phoneticism. Though regarded as more evolved than Egyptian hieroglyphs, they came to symbolize the backwardness of East Asia, crystallized in China’s defeat in the Opium Wars. Such a view was bound to influence how people in the former Sinosphere regarded their own writing systems. In fact, as we shall see in the final chapter, the fall of the Qing dynasty presaged the fall of Chinese characters in the former Sinosphere, as country after country came to espouse the ideology of phoneticism.

In Japan as early as 1866, six years after the Second Opium War and two years before the Meiji Restoration, a pro-Western intellectual named Maejima Hisoka submitted a proposal to the fifteenth and final shogun to abolish the use of Chinese characters. The new Japanese government, which had assigned the Ministry of Education the task of “improving” the Japanese language, in 1890 sent linguist Ueda Kazutoshi to study in Germany, where the ideology of national language reigned and a linguistic group called Young Grammarians (Junggrammatiker), focusing its attention on languages’ sound, was attracting brilliant minds. Ueda returned to Japan in 1894 even more passionate a proponent of phoneticism than before, and later the Ministry of Education appointed him to head the newly founded National Language Research Council.

The council kept soliciting illuminati who upheld phoneticism in various forms. Some advocated using only katakana or hiragana; others—among them Mori, who had previously called for abandoning Japanese in favor of English—advocated using the Roman alphabet; still others advocated creating a totally new system. However different their solutions were, their goal was the same: to gradually reduce the use of Chinese characters until they were entirely gone.

Their goal never materialized. While the illuminati in the National Language Research Council under the Ministry of Education were debating how to get rid of the accursed Chinese characters, a practical kind of written Japanese was already taking shape, one that continued the tradition of mixing kana and Chinese characters and that depended on those very characters as never before. This development, which involved orders from higher levels of the government, arose from the urgent need to translate Western languages. And it arose precisely because Japan had so far managed to escape colonization. Not only Fukuzawa but those who were running the country knew all too well that in the eyes of the Western powers, the Restoration meant little more than a regime change in a small, vulnerable nation off in the Far East. The only way to avoid the indignity of further unequal treaties, or division or even an outright takeover, was for Japan to seize on knowledge accumulated in the West and get it speedily translated. Orders to translate as many Western books as possible, as soon as possible, were issued by the Great Council of State (Daijō-kan) and the Chamber of Elders (Genrō-in), followed by the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Education, and more. To accomplish such a formidable task, Chinese characters, being ideograms, could not have been better suited for the task.

Chinese characters have the ability to succinctly express abstract concepts and, when combined, to create new words without end. Those people chosen as translators, being from the educated class, were well versed in Chinese and knew how to take full advantage of the conciseness and versatility of the ideogram. Writing in a style of Japanese with a generous admixture of Chinese characters, working day and night, these translators played a critical role in helping Japan to preserve its independence.

It is telling that one of the very first books to be translated from a Western language—via an original Chinese translation—was a guide to international law, Elements of International Law (1836) by Henry Wheaton (1785–1848), an American legal scholar. To rectify the unequal treaties, Japan first needed to learn the rules of the diplomatic game. Of course, that alone would not make the West willingly give up its gains. Japan also needed to build a modern military and manufacture its own guns and battleships. It had to build railroads and plumbing; it had to produce printing presses and monies; it had to provide modern education for its people. In short, Japan had to make each and every bit of Western knowledge and technology its own. And in the process, the act of translation, this time from a set of different universal languages, provided a new birth for the Japanese language. Now the Japanese language took its first tentative steps toward becoming a language capable of functioning on the same level as Western languages.

Furthermore, though the act of translation may have been prompted by the goal of sustaining Japan as an independent nation, it was not this alone that drove the translators of the time. The ultimate driving force behind any act of translation is the human desire to seek knowledge—a desire independent even of concern for one’s nation’s viability. This desire is what makes humans Homo sapiens. Translating Western languages as a national project in the early years after the Meiji Restoration resulted in an amazing quantity of translated materials. Even more amazing was the diversity of their subject matter. The government ordered translations on topics with no direct relevance to the nation’s survival, including even aesthetics—perhaps the most useless of topics as far as nation building is concerned.

The impetus to seek knowledge did not come just from the top. Many of those who became translators were primarily seekers of knowledge who truly wished to know the world better. Even before the Restoration, as these people glimpsed the libraries of Western languages, they immediately understood that here was an immense trove of knowledge, universal in its application. Overwhelmed by the richness of this trove, they tried mightily to gain access to it on their own. No book illustrates this process better than the autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi, written thirty years after the Meiji Restoration.

FUKUZAWA YUKICHI: FROM DUTCH TO ENGLISH

Fukuzawa tried to learn Western languages against all odds simply because he wanted to know more than he did. Or better, he wanted to know everything that humanity knew. Knowing more than his fellow samurai was also a way for him to challenge those in power; he was angry with the shogunate for maintaining a rigid social and political hierarchy and with the Confucian scholars who gave the shogunate legitimacy. Yet what drove him most profoundly was his sheer passion to learn. Concern over Japan’s fate came only later, when he realized that his country was headed for cataclysmic change.

Fukuzawa’s autobiography gives a vivid picture of his hungry search for knowledge in the years leading up to the Restoration. The image of Fukuzawa with cropped hair—a sign of modernity—is familiar to present-day Japanese through his image on the ten-thousand-yen bill, but he was born in 1835, when the great woodblock print master Hokusai was still active. He thus belonged to a generation of men used to wearing a topknot, and he experienced the Restoration as an adult in his thirties. His father, Momosuke, a low-ranking samurai in the conservative Okudaira domain located on the southern island of Kyushu, was stationed in Osaka to carry out market transactions for his domain, and it was there that Fukuzawa was born, though he grew up in Kyushu. In his youth, he excelled in the study of Confucian texts, like his father, a bibliophile and a Confucian scholar in his own right. But Momosuke was never able to rise above his inherited rank, which led to Fukuzawa’s well-known declaration, “Feudalism is my father’s mortal enemy.”12 Knowing firsthand the humiliations suffered by low-ranking samurai in the Okudaira domain, Fukuzawa was already thinking of somehow getting out when the news came that black ships had arrived off Japanese shores, threatening the country with cannons. Told by his older brother that the country needed people to study gunnery and that to study gunnery one needed first to study Dutch, he gleefully sought and gained permission from domain authorities to move to Nagasaki to learn the language: “I would have been glad to study a foreign language or the military art or anything else if it only gave me a chance to go away” (22). This was in 1854, when he was nineteen years old.

Just off the western tip of Nagasaki was a small, artificial island whose ports had provided the only window on the West ever since the Edo government imposed an isolationist policy in 1636. The policy was the outcome of a major peasant uprising organized by Japanese Christians who had converted to Catholicism through missionaries sent by the Portuguese. The shogunate feared the spread of Christianity but was not willing to put a total stop to trade. The Netherlands, a great sea power in the seventeenth century, promised not to engage in any missionary activities, and so the Dutch East India Company was allowed to establish a trading post on that little island. From then on, the meager information Japan managed to glean of the Western world came via the Dutch language. The few Japanese intellectuals who chanced to come into contact with Western knowledge were impressed, and so, despite the dire shortage of books and teachers, not to mention the near nonexistence of dictionaries, they established schools all over Japan to teach the Dutch language along with Western science, especially medicine. Some progressive domains encouraged such “Dutch learning” (later called “Western learning”), but the Okudaira domain, where the Fukuzawa family had served for generations, was not among them. The best way for Fukuzawa to absorb Dutch learning was thus to go to Nagasaki.

On arriving, he saw the Roman alphabet for the first time in his life and was shocked: “I could hardly believe these ABC’s to be signs of a language” (37). He quickly set about learning the language, but his one-year stay was not as fruitful as it could have been. The Okudaira domain saw no point in anyone seriously learning Dutch. Fukuzawa was assigned to stay as a nonpaying boarder, half-secretary and half-servant to a family that owned precious copies of Dutch books and drawings on gunnery and rented them out to inquirers from all over Japan. Put in charge of the family rental business, he soon acquired a good deal of knowledge about gunnery—without ever laying eyes on an actual gun—but was never allowed to officially learn the Dutch language. He had to pick up what he could by seeking out doctors who practiced Western medicine or interpreters who conducted trade negotiations. On uncovering a silly intrigue by a jealous rival who wanted him out of the way, he left Nagasaki, intending to go to Edo, present-day Tokyo, to start learning Dutch in earnest. An arduous journey without money took him only as far as Osaka, the place of his birth, where his older brother was temporarily stationed, their father having by then passed on. The brother urged him to take up the language then and there. It turned out to be good advice.

Osaka was home to Ogata Academy, run by Ogata Kōan (1810–1863), a doctor trained in Western medicine. It so happened that this was one of the best places to acquire Dutch learning in all Japan. Fukuzawa’s stay at the academy lasted for three years, and he made the most of it. At one point, the death of his brother required him to return to the Okudaira domain, but though he was now the head of the family he refused to stay and, unmoved by recriminations from his relations, headed back to the academy after raising money for travel expenses by selling off valuable family possessions. Only his aged mother, who would be left at home alone, gave him her blessing.

Fukuzawa’s vivid descriptions of academy life capture the rowdy mischief, anarchic behavior, abject poverty, and in-your-face filthiness typical of such Edo-period students—all of them frantically learning Dutch as if their lives depended on it.

One day, taken sick, Fukuzawa noticed that he had no pillow. He then realized that for the past year he had never actually had a decent night’s sleep:

I realized suddenly that I had not used [a pillow] for the whole year that I had been there. I had been studying without regard to day or night. I would be reading all day and when night came I did not think of going to bed. When tired, I would lean over on my little desk, or stretch out on the floor resting my head on the raised alcove (tokonoma) of the room. I had gone through the year without ever spreading my pallet and covers and sleeping on the pillow. So obviously the servant could not find my pillow, for it did not exist anywhere in the apartment. This incident may illustrate our intense manner of studying. In this I was not unusual; all my friends lived in this way. We could not have studied harder. (79)

Moreover, since the academy had only ten books in Dutch, in order to study students had to copy out the original, taking turns. They each had to soak rice paper in alum so the ink would not smear, and make their own quill pens. Furthermore, as for the essential Dutch–Japanese dictionary, three thousand pages in all, there was only one precious copy. Students gathered around it to look up words. Before exams there was always a line.

One day, Ogata Kōan brought an expensive Dutch book on loan from a daimyo, Lord Kuroda. Kōan first called in Fukuzawa, who was the student representative, and handed him the book. “It was a new text on physical science recently translated from English,” Fukuzawa wrote. “The contents seemed to hold much that was new to us, especially the chapter on electricity.” The book described the structures of a battery, and his “heart was carried away with it at first sight.” His ability to perceive at a glance that this book represented the latest developments in science is testimony not only to his own ability but to the high scholarly level at the academy. When he took this “text on physical science” to show the other students, they “rose up as one and crowded around” (88) in awe.

The book was theirs for only two nights, while Lord Kuroda was visiting Osaka. Just to stare at it was meaningless, and to copy a thousand-page book in two nights was impossible. But Fukuzawa wanted to copy at least the part about electricity, and he mobilized everyone for the task:

If we could have broken the book up and divided the copying among the thirty or fifty “ready-quill men,” the entire contents might have been kept. But of course injuring the nobleman’s possession was out of the question. However, we worked at full speed, and the Ogata students could work expertly. One read aloud; another took the dictation; when one grew tired and slowed down, another was waiting with his quill, and the exhausted one would go to sleep regardless of time, morning, noon, or night.

Thus, working day and night, through meal hours and all, we finished the whole chapter in the time allotted, and thus the section on electricity, about three hundred pages including its diagrams, remained with us in manuscript. (88–89)

The students wanted to copy more, but there was just not enough time: “[W]hen the evening of Lord Kuroda’s departure came, we all handled the book affectionately in turn and gave it a sad leave-taking as if we were parting with a parent” (89). The image of young men affectionately caressing the book that was a repository of human knowledge and bidding it a sad farewell is striking.

Looking back, Fukuzawa himself seems puzzled over why they sought knowledge at such cost, and in the end he suggests that intellectual snobbery or pride may have been at work:

[H]owever much we studied, our work and knowledge had practically no connection with the actual means of gaining a livelihood or making a name for ourselves. Not only that, but the students of Dutch were looked upon with contempt by most men. Then why did we work so hard to learn Dutch? It would seem that we were simply laboring at difficult foreign texts for no clear purpose.

However, if anyone had looked into our inner hearts, he would have found there an untold pleasure which was our consolation. In short, we students were conscious of the fact that we were the sole possessors of the key to knowledge of the great European civilization. However much we suffered from poverty, whatever poor clothes we wore, the extent of our knowledge and the resources of our minds were beyond the reach of any prince or nobleman of the whole nation. If our work was hard, we were proud of it, knowing that no one knew what we endured. “In hardship we found pleasure, and the hardship was pleasure.” To illustrate, our position was like that of someone taking bitter medicine without knowing exactly what it was good for. We simply took it because nobody else could take it—the more bitter it was, the more gladly we took it. (90–91)

What a brutal shock it must have been when, having made this superhuman effort to study Dutch, Fukuzawa realized that the language was nearly useless. With the Dutch golden age a thing of the past, the Dutch language was of minor importance in the world. Some in Japan already suspected this, but Fukuzawa did not face the fact until later, when he visited Yokohama.

In 1858, the Okudaira domain belatedly accepted the need to learn Dutch and summoned Fukuzawa to its Edo compound to teach the language. That was the year when the Ansei Five-Power Treaties were signed and Westerners first began living in Yokohama. One day, Fukuzawa decided to try out his Dutch and walked all the way from the Edo compound to Yokohama, a distance of about 30 kilometers (19 miles). “There was nothing of the town of Yokohama then—a few temporary dwellings had been erected here and there by the foreigners, and in these the pioneer merchants were living and showing their wares” (97). Yet to his astonishment, those foreigners did not understand Dutch:

To my chagrin, when I tried to speak with them, no one seemed to understand me at all. Nor was I able to understand anything spoken by a single one of all the foreigners I met. Neither could I read anything of the signboards over the shops, nor the labels on the bottles which they had for sale. There was not a single recognizable word in any of the inscriptions or in any speech. It might have been English or French for aught I knew. (97)

Faced with this unexpected reality, Fukuzawa turned on his heel and walked back to Edo in shock: “I had to leave home just before the closing hour and return before the same hour of the next day. This meant that I had been walking for twenty-four hours” (98).

Far greater than his physical exhaustion was the mental blow he had received—yet what is astounding is his quick recovery:

[T]he fatigue of my legs was nothing compared with the bitter disappointment in my heart.

I had been striving with all my powers for many years to learn the Dutch language. And now when I had reason to believe myself one of the best in the country, I found that I could not even read the signs of merchants who had come to trade with us from foreign lands. It was a bitter disappointment but I knew it was no time to be downhearted.” (98)

He was back on his feet the very next day:

Those signs must have been either in English or in French—probably English, for I had had inklings that English was the most widely used language. A treaty with the two English-speaking countries had just been concluded. As certain as day, English was to be the most useful language of the future. I realized that a man would have to be able to read and converse in English to be recognized as a scholar in Western subjects in the coming time. In my disappointment my spirit was low, but I knew that it was not the time to be sitting still.

On the very next day after returning from Yokohama, I took up a new aim in life and determined to begin the study of English. (98)

So began his study of English. The only person rumored to know some English in the whole of Edo was too busy to teach him. And even that person did not know very much. English–Japanese and English–Chinese dictionaries were nonexistent, and even an English–Dutch dictionary was hard to come by. When he invited his former classmates from the academy to join him in studying English, they took off, groaning that they could not bear to go through such an ordeal all over again. He finally met someone willing to study with him, and the two of them did whatever they could to learn English, latching on to children who lived near foreigners and had picked up scraps of the language or former shipwreck victims who had been stranded abroad. In the course of time, they realized that English was not too different from Dutch after all, and their former efforts were by no means a total waste.

The following year, in 1860, Fukuzawa pulled strings and managed to wangle a ride to the United States aboard the Kanrin-maru, the first Japanese navy vessel—built by the Dutch. He stayed for a few months and brought back one of the first two copies of Webster’s dictionary to enter Japan. After that, he continued his study of English while teaching the language at the school he had founded originally to teach Dutch. Soon he was sought out as a translator by the shogunate’s Gaikoku-kata, corresponding to today’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in 1862 they dispatched him to Europe with other government officials. As a sign of his untiring pursuit of knowledge, he alone used his entire stipend, a substantial amount, to purchase English books to bring back. He kept climbing the social ladder as he rode the wave of Japan’s opening to the world.

Fukuzawa Yukichi is remembered today as the founder of Keio, one of Japan’s top universities, but he made an even more fundamental contribution through his translation work. Words that he coined using Chinese ideograms include enzetsu (public speaking), sansei (agreement), tōrōn (discussion), and hanken (copyright).13 Today, nobody in Japan thinks of Fukuzawa when using these common, everyday words. But translations by him and other knowledge-hungry men of Meiji—Nishi Amane, Mitsukuri Rinshō, Nakae Chōmin, Tsubouchi Shōyō, and others—helped the Japanese language to evolve so that writers could address the same issues as the rest of the world, with global consciousness and synchronicity. Japanese began transforming into a national language. And by doing so, it turned into a language in which Japanese writers could write modern literature—especially the novel, a celebration of national language.