7. THE FUTURE OF NATIONAL LANGUAGES
What will become of all the national languages that are not English?
This is our ultimate question. And the answer depends ultimately on what each population—and the government of that population—wants to do with its language in this age of English. Theoretically, the optimal solution for a nation to survive and thrive in this age might be to turn every citizen into a bilingual. This new bilingualism would have to differ from premodern bilingualism in two essential ways. Before, only a limited number of the cultural elite were bilingual, and only the universal language was taken seriously. Now everyone would be bilingual and would take his or her own language seriously, respecting its heritage. English would be the vehicle of much scholarly writing, yet not only literature but scholarship too would flourish in the indigenous language, including translations from other languages. Citizens of such an ideal nation would also learn other foreign languages to counterbalance the hegemony of a single language as a means of international communication. Blessed would be the fate of national languages if every nation could achieve such linguistic virtuosity. In practice, however, for most nations, realizing such a goal—even imperfectly—is nearly impossible.
More likely, each nation will be conflicted between encouraging English fluency and protecting its own language. All non-Anglophone nations will be affected by this conflict, each in a different way. Moreover, the asymmetry between Western and non-Western languages will inevitably come into play as we try to picture what the future holds for various languages.
Of the Western nations, those best suited to attain the new kind of bilingualism are the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, and Germany—their languages being Germanic, as is English. In the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, the younger generation is already more or less bilingual because of public education systems that emphasize English acquisition from an early age. Germans as a whole straggle, Germany being a much more populous country and thus linguistically self-sufficient, but generally those who are educated are bilingual. However, linguistic affinity with English may be a mixed blessing. There is a risk that the population might eventually become more attuned to contemporary Anglophone culture than to its own heritage. Because writing in English comes easily for users of Germanic languages, more and more writers might even be tempted to write novels, poems, and plays in English with a world audience in mind. And English words and grammar could infiltrate the language with ever greater ease.
Western nations using non-Germanic languages such as Greek and the Slavic and Romance languages, for example, naturally lag far behind in bilingualism. The awkward English of the French is a century-old cliché. Nevertheless, a shared history of Greek and Latin borrowing and intertranslation makes even those languages—including non-Indo-European languages such as Hungarian and Finnish—vulnerable to the mixed blessing that haunts the Germanic languages.
The prospects for major European languages, nonetheless, are not too dismal provided people’s will to preserve their language is strong—as it actually is among the French, for one. When I think of the future prospects of these languages, I cannot help recalling my childhood experience of reading with wonderment the literature of various European countries, albeit in Japanese translation. While English will no doubt long reign supreme as the language of scholarship, and the fate of minor languages remains precarious, the world may well continue to be blessed with fine works of literature in the major languages—or, at least, I dearly hope so.
Non-European languages face predicaments that are necessarily more varied and more uncertain, however similar the underlying conflict may be. First of all, though the fact is not obvious to most people in the West, many non-Western languages do not yet function as national languages. A nation must have a strong national language (or languages) even to begin aiming at the new kind of bilingualism; yet many nations—mostly former colonies, protectorates, or mandates of European powers—do not have a functioning national language despite having earned their independence well over half a century ago. Most often, this is because numerous regional or ethnic languages are spoken in one nation. The “national” boundaries that Western powers drew in the past simply disregarded local linguistic diversity. Tension exists not just between the former colonial power’s language and the nation’s own but also among the different local languages. Nationalism impels the people in such nations to have a unifying national language. Yet because they never spoke the same language to start with, they often resist what the authorities declare to be their country’s national language. English or French thus ends up circulating as the lingua franca of government, higher education, and interregional commerce. As a result, while indigenous poetry may flourish, prose often fails to reach a level of sophistication high enough to satisfy the truly cultivated.
India’s case is well known. After more than 150 years of British rule, the independent government sought to dispose of English and gradually replace it with Hindi, making Hindi the country’s sole national language. Non-Hindi speakers resisted. Violence even erupted. The central government was forced to give more than twenty other languages official regional power while allowing the continued use of English. The current policy is confusing. The government is trying to encourage the spread of Hindi as India’s national language while remaining under obligation to strengthen regional languages as well. Moreover, all this effort at multilingualism naturally does not stop middle- and upper-class parents from sending their children—society’s future elite—to private schools where the classes are taught in English. Will the day come when Hindi becomes India’s true national language? Or will the other major regional languages—Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu—each come to function alongside Hindi as one of many national languages? Poetry will certainly continue to be written in these languages. But will Indian intellectuals ever start using them rather than English to write serious prose or to pursue scholarship?
Not all non-Western countries espouse Indian-style multilingualism. The Philippines, for one, is heading in the opposite direction. In the centuries of Spanish rule (1521–1898), Spanish was its official language. Then when the United States took over the country in 1898, both Spanish and English became official languages. The Philippines gained independence in 1946, and finally in 1973, well over a quarter of a century on, its constitution declared Filipino the country’s national language. English, which is still widely used, remains an official language alongside Filipino, but the nation’s current policy is to turn Filipino into a true national language, not just a nominal one—a policy disputed by many because “Filipino” is merely another name for Tagalog, a dialect spoken by less than one-third of the population. Moreover, owing to the English-centered public education system implemented by the United States in the past, the majority of the population still has a working knowledge of English. Given that most Filipinos can handle English fairly well and it remains the language of choice for the elite, will the government continue devoting resources to turning Filipino into a true national language in the age of English, especially if the effort means making Filipino people less attuned to English?
Most former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa face a situation even more inimical to the creation of a national language. Though saddled with a plethora of languages, they face pressing problems stemming from war and poverty that leave little room for language policy debates. That said, the spread of Swahili, initially promoted by colonial powers baffled by the multiplicity of tongues, is showing some success. Swahili is now an official language in some states and is slowly turning into the lingua franca of East Africa. It is nonetheless a second language for most people who use it and still has a long way to go before it becomes a true national language.
Clearly, people in nearly all former European colonies in sub-Saharan Africa still live within the linguistic double structure that characterized premodern society: the language of their former colonial power is the universal language used by a relatively small number of bilingual elites, while their own languages are local languages used by a monolingual mass. The ideology of national language is strong, and, among writers, there is constant tension between writing in the universal language and writing in the indigenous language. The world-famous Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o (b. 1938), who recalls in his essay “Decolonising the Mind” that “one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Gĩkũyũ in the vicinity of the school,”1 has switched from writing in English to writing in Gĩkũyũ. What will be the future linguistic policies of former British colonies in sub-Saharan Africa? Will these nations continue to allocate resources to building their own languages? Even if they do, will members of the ruling class ever stop sending their children to elite schools to ensure that English becomes their first written language? And what of the former French colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa? Will they keep French as an official language or will they veer away from it like the former French protectorates in Southeast Asia—Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos—and become more intent on adopting English? What will be the fate of their national literatures?
TEACHING JAPANESE IN JAPANESE SCHOOLS
Despite this unpredictability that casts a shadow over non-European languages as a whole, many of them—including Mandarin, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Turkish, Hebrew, and Indonesian—are now full-fledged national languages with a flowering national literature. Others, like Arabic, boast a vigorous literary tradition not limited to one country. Yet perhaps no non-European language has been as historically fortunate as Japanese, as we have seen. Even so, remarkably, Japanese people themselves are undoing this historical good fortune. To clarify this perplexing situation, I will begin by tracing how Japanese people have mistreated their language since the end of World War II. And to do so, I must first put into words something that most readers of this book will find only too obvious: the importance of a literary canon.
People in Western countries generally share a pervasive belief that their own country’s literary canon should be read and passed on to the next generation. By “literary canon,” I mean not works that have already been relegated to the domain of specialists but works written since the rise of the national language—works that the populace can read without great difficulty and that they return to frequently, even maintaining a constant, lifelong dialogue with them. This is why in Western countries compulsory education in the national language has two aims: the attainment of reading and writing proficiency and the appreciation of the canon. Of course, just which works constitute the canon is a matter for debate, with calls for more female authors, more nonwhite authors, more foreign authors, and so on. Dissenters even question whether there should be any such thing as a canon in the first place. This is especially true of Americans, who, without any real need to defend their culture or language, can afford to challenge conventional wisdom. Still, the vital premise stands: Westerners basically believe that having students acquire not just reading and writing skills but familiarity with the canon, cherished works of literature written in the national language, ought to be the basis of education in the language arts, even in junior high and high school.
Today, when information a week old appears ancient, this approach to education may seem quaint. But the concept of transmitting national cultural heritage remains a cherished notion in the West, and educators engaged in the activity still focus chiefly on literature—the written word—before painting, music, dance, and other arts. Our written language is our ultimate spiritual homeland. We can no longer speak as naïvely as before in this age of swelling immigrant populations of “native literary heritage”; and yet I would submit that the reason for the deep connection among native speakers of the same language is simply that they read and are in dialogue with the same classics, however tangentially. And in order for the transmission of cultural heritage to occupy an important place in compulsory education, the entire nation must share that basic understanding.
Sadly, the Japanese nation does not.
The concept of a canon does exist in Japan. With the spread of the “ideology of national language” in the Meiji period, the government led the way, assisted by scholars, in defining the canon of premodern Japanese literature. Works written in Chinese, previously held in high regard, were eliminated, and a selection of works dating all the way back to Ten Thousand Leaves was newly enshrined. The modern canon was established in a more spontaneous way, without the government stepping in, as society matured and publishers began competing to put out literary anthologies; works by Natsume Sōseki, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Higuchi Ichiyō, and others emerged as the greatest modern classics. By the beginning of the Shōwa period, all educated Japanese were well versed in those works as a matter of course. But after World War II, the belief that such classics constitute a heritage to be read and passed on to each new generation gradually faded from society.
The little emphasis given to the modern canon of Japanese literature shows most blatantly in the astonishing paucity of the school curriculum for the study of language arts. In 2008, after seeing children’s learning abilities fall year by year, the Ministry of Education undertook a sweeping revision of class hours.2 A glance at the new distribution of class hours for the third year of junior high school (the final year of compulsory education) shows that English, mathematics, and social studies all increased from three hours per week to four, with science doubling from two hours per week to four. Only the study of Japanese remained unchanged, at three hours per week. Why? Why not have pupils devote at least four or five hours a week to the study of their own language and literature, as in Western countries?
Roughly nine of every ten Japanese children graduate from high school. High school education is thus almost part of compulsory education, but the Ministry of Education has less say over the high school curriculum, and individual schools have more freedom. One might suppose, then, that the number of hours devoted to instruction in Japanese language and literature would increase—but the reverse is true. Some high schools get away with allocating seven hours a week to English and only two to Japanese. Not only that, most colleges and universities do not require students to take any course that would be equivalent to, let us say, “English 101” in the United States. Even at the elite University of Tokyo, where students are required to take at least three semesters of English, it is possible—it is, in fact, normal—to graduate without having taken a single semester of Japanese.
What is still more astonishing is the meager content of junior and senior high school textbooks for courses in Japanese language arts. These textbooks are not made by the Ministry of Education; rather, various private companies make them, and those that win the ministry’s approval are used in schools. They are all pretty much alike, but the ones used most commonly in junior high schools, with over 60 percent of the market share, are put out by a company named Mitsumura Tosho. Let’s take a look at its 2013 textbook for the ninth grade, the final year of compulsory education. Bear in mind that this textbook covers not a semester but an entire year’s curriculum.
The textbook itself is gorgeous, full of color drawings, photographs, and diagrams, but it is a mere 1.25 centimeters (0.5 inch) thick. The print is big, as if for a children’s picture book. Of the total 301 pages, there are only 115 pages of actual readings—and I am being generous in the count. The longest work is, for some reason, a 12-page short story by Lu Xun (1881–1936), the father of modern Chinese literature, translated from the Chinese. The next longest is 8.5 pages. Most of the reading materials are excerpts. Besides fiction, there are essays on science, newspaper articles, and such. Three little-known poems are also included. The remaining two-thirds of the book consists of practice in writing Chinese characters, exercises for vocabulary acquisition, and grammatical explanations. Mixed in with these are inane suggestions on topics like “how to speak effectively,” “how to write persuasively,” and “how to read purposefully,” with colorful illustrations. A literate teenager could easily read the entire textbook in one sitting.
As astonishing as this lack of substance is the total lack of commitment to the idea of introducing the modern literary canon. Dead authors and living are jumbled together, and the living vastly outnumber the dead: of sixteen passages of prose and free verse, eleven are by living authors, and of the remaining five, two are by authors recently deceased. Of works in the canon, only a short story by Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) would qualify. Toward the end of the book is a six-page section on masterworks of ancient and modern literature, introducing pre-Meiji and post-Meiji works in no particular order. From Sōseki, there are six lines taken from his novel Grass Pillow. That’s all.
High school textbooks do no better at introducing the modern canon. By far, most of the selections are from currently popular contemporary writers. And in junior and senior high alike, students are never required to read a single work of literature other than their textbook. Textbooks do contain sections with recommendations for further reading, but here again, works by popular contemporary writers are greatly in the majority.
To repeat, the sad truth is that assigning any book of Japanese fiction—let alone a modern classic—to be read from first page to last never happens in any Japanese classroom from primary school through college, with the possible exception of college classes for literature majors. My own experience long ago as a student in the American public school system was vastly different. At one time or another, I was placed in every level of the streamed classes, from what the students called the “dumb class” to the regular class to the honors class. Only in the “dumb class” did we use a textbook. In the regular class, we read Shakespeare and Dickens as a matter of course, and in the honors class, where we were expected to learn the fundamentals of Western culture, we also read Greek mythology and the entire Odyssey. This was long ago, as I say, and whether education in language arts is still this orthodox in the United States, I wouldn’t know; but I strongly doubt that things have reached the point where a person could complete compulsory education without having read at least one play by Shakespeare.
WORLD WAR II AND THE JAPANESE LEFT
Why has education in Japan not taught the canon of modern Japanese literature? Why has the Japanese language not been treated with due respect? Behind the surface reasons lie deeper reasons, with still deeper reasons beyond; no simple explanation is possible, but I would like to start by illuminating the postwar intellectual scene in Japan, where the phenomenon began.
Every country has its right wing and left wing, but anyone reading about Japan in the English-language media would have little idea that there has been a strong left wing in Japan since World War II. News items about Japan in the English-language media generally treat topics relating to the economy, popular culture, or, in recent years, the Fukushima reactor disaster. Moreover, the presence of the Japanese right wing is regularly noted. Rightists’ shameless deeds and words unfailingly make headlines. Yet the continual coverage from such an angle gives a skewed view of Japanese society, which certainly has its own share of zealots, but no more so than other countries. What is nearly totally suppressed in the English media—and probably in most foreign media—is the significant role played by Japanese leftist intellectuals. This utter lack of interest displayed by the world about the presence of the Japanese leftist intellectuals cannot be dismissed lightly as mere indifference. People generally seek coherent narratives that do not upset their worldview. For foreigners, Japanese people “have to be” basically traditional or even reactionary, surrounded though they may be by every latest gadget; anything that does not fit this fixed view disturbs the narrative and so gets left out. But from the end of World War II until recently, Japanese intellectuals were predominantly left-wing—far beyond just liberal. Any who were not were automatically labeled “reactionary” to distinguish them from the majority.
In the twentieth century, Japan plunged into a reckless war and was defeated. As a result, Japanese intellectuals—everyone from students at elite universities to primary and secondary schoolteachers, university professors, writers, and editors—turned against all that represented the Japan of the past and their “tainted” cultural heritage. On fire to create a new Japan, they embraced Marxist ideology and swung in unison to the left, as often happens in impoverished developing countries; many of them became members of the Communist Party. During and following the Occupation (1945–1952), while the Japanese populace wholeheartedly and unabashedly embraced all things American, these intellectuals saw the United States as a corrupt capitalist nation. Based on Marxist historical materialism, they envisioned a Communist or socialist country as the final, ideal stage.
The most influential among these leftists were naturally “public intellectuals” (bunkajin) who published their writings in the country’s two most prestigious venues: the publisher Iwanami Shoten and the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, which claims to have a circulation of 7.5 million, second only to the Yomiuri.The Japanese reading public revered these public intellectuals as postwar spiritual guides. Though their influence began to wane as the years went by, even in the 1970s and early 1980s being intellectual meant being leftwing. University faculties of political science, history, and economics continued to be dominated by Marxist ideology. (To this day, Das Kapital is taught in utter seriousness at many Japanese universities.) What dealt a major blow to the status of these intellectuals was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But by then, the damage done to modern Japanese literature and the Japanese language was all but irreversible.
THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION AND THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION
History sometimes serves up unexpected farces. Japan’s leftist intellectuals staked everything on two principles: pacifism and egalitarianism. Their devotion to the former is certainly understandable. But their trumpeting of the latter was not only because egalitarianism forms the basis of leftist thought. It was also because they saw the military and government elite as the perpetrators of World War II, and the common people in Japan and other countries as the war’s victims. In other words, to sever Japan as completely as possible from its imperial past, they were fiercely against patriotism and elitism. Just as the word collaboration was tainted in postwar France, so in postwar Japan the words “patriotism” and “elite” became tainted, used only in a pejorative sense. The situation turned farcical because their antiestablishment stance led Japan’s leftist intellectuals to side unawares with the language policy proposed by the very Occupation forces—and the Occupation-controlled Japanese government—that they regarded as their enemy. This led them ultimately and ironically to also side unawares with the Ministry of Education, with which they were constantly fighting when it came to interpretations of the country’s recent history, but with which they happened to share similar views when it came to the question of language.
The leftist intellectuals, the Occupation forces, and the Ministry of Education agreed on one thing: that written Japanese should espouse phoneticism. The intellectuals’ equation of egalitarianism and antielitism led them to believe that all Japanese people were potentially not just readers of books but writers, and only the difficulty of the language stood in their way. Anyone who is born and grows up in Japan can speak the language, they reasoned; therefore, if the written language were made easier to reflect the spoken language more closely, then everyone, no matter how far removed from books his or her daily life might be, could write—the rice farmer and the factory worker no less than the literary lion. In their idealism, these leftists wound up sharing the same goal, in principle, as the occupying forces, who, taken aback by the mysteries of the incomprehensible signs all around them, were calling for the complete romanization of the Japanese writing system. They thus also wound up sharing the same goal as the Ministry of Education, which, from its inception in Meiji, was a citadel of phoneticism.
The United States Education Mission to Japan arrived in March 1946, seven months after the end of the war. The mission, which played a decisive role in reforming Japan’s public education system, ended its brief stay with a declaration confirming the opinion of the general headquarters (GHQ) of the American Occupation forces that the best thing to do with the Japanese language would be to romanize it. It was as if the Ministry of Education had heard a resounding voice from above, confirming the legitimacy of its cherished belief in phoneticism. As a step in simplifying and modernizing the Japanese language, at the end of that year, just over a year after the country’s surrender, the ministry unilaterally enforced three language “reforms” through compulsory education and the mass media: the number of Chinese characters to be used was restricted, the form of many characters was simplified, and the traditional kana orthography was altered to reflect pronunciation more accurately.
When print language is established, it is only natural that the written language should somehow regulate itself to meet the demands of the market. Governmental intervention may also come into play, depending on circumstances. In Japan, it made sense to put limits on the number of Chinese characters used in official documents and media and to simplify the most frequently used ones in some logical way. Likewise, it made sense to alter the use of kana to fit the modern language. But spurred by the declaration of the GHQ and the United States Education Mission, the Japanese Ministry of Education acted with inappropriate haste and unforgivable cavalierness, implementing drastic change before anyone realized what was happening. Out of a pool of tens of thousands of Chinese characters, the ministry limited the number for everyday use to 1,850—without consulting experts, let alone seeking public opinion. (The number may still seem huge, but the reader should bear in mind that learning Chinese characters is akin to learning vocabulary.) Further, those characters were simplified in a haphazard way, taking out a line here and a dot there, as if it didn’t matter that omitting a single stroke can sever a character from its semantic roots. Perhaps most damaging was the switchover to phonetic kana, which obscured the roots of a wide array of words. In English it would be almost as bad as enforcing a new spelling of philosophy as “filosofee.”
Then, in August 1948, to establish how detrimental the use of Chinese characters was to Japanese literacy, a nationwide survey was conducted under the orders of John Pelzel, an officer in the Civil Information and Educational Section of the GHQ. The survey was extensive, testing a random sampling of 16,814 men and women ages fifteen to sixty-four. Given its long-standing espousal of phoneticism—the first minister of education was Mori Arinori, who had recommended adopting English as the national language—the Ministry of Education would likely have had no objection to implementing romanization if the GHQ had insisted, however impractical and ultimately impossible that course might have been. But unexpectedly, the results demonstrated no such need: a mere 2.1 percent of those tested proved to be functionally illiterate.
Pelzel apparently found this outcome hard to accept. One day, he summoned to his hotel room a budding linguist named Shibata Takeshi, who had helped conduct the survey, and asked him point-blank to rewrite the results. Though a strong lifelong supporter of romanization, Shibata refused on the grounds that “as a scholar” he could not do such a thing. Pelzel did not force the issue. And so, with this brief conference in a hotel room, where two men talked sitting on a bed side by side, the country was spared the fate of adopting romanization—at least for the time being.3
The survey results did not halt the movement to switch to the Roman alphabet. Romanization remained an ultimate goal of the Occupation’s GHQ and a goal considered well worth pursuing by the Ministry of Education, which had direct control over Japan’s language policies. And since the Ministry of Education was solidly in favor of phoneticism, the movement continued to gain steam even after the departure of the U.S. forces. A new National Language Research Council was established to explore the merits of such a change, and school curriculums were redesigned to increase the number of school hours devoted to writing Japanese in rōmaji, Roman letters. On top of all this, the emergence of the typewriter, ubiquitous in American films and television dramas as a symbol of modern times, added urgency to the debate: those in favor of romanization threatened that unless the Japanese abolished Chinese characters forthwith, they would be left behind in the dust, unable to use that epitome of modern civilization. The debate over how to do this went on for years; as at the dawn of Japan’s modern era, not only those in favor of romanization but proponents of various phonetic writing styles (hiragana, katakana, or some brand-new form of writing yet to be invented) all strenuously made their case.
“REACTIONARY” INTELLECTUALS
In retrospect, it seems almost bizarre that the hastily implemented changes and ongoing push toward romanization aroused no opposition at the time. But those who were aware of what was happening to the Japanese language—the media that had to use new printing and the schoolteachers who had to teach a new way of writing, not to mention the editors involved in drawing up new textbooks—consisted of virtually all those who had swung left after the war. People who might have had qualms voiced no protest, perhaps because they dared not. Most disturbing in the face of such governmental control over the language was the silence of public intellectuals—the nation’s “spiritual guides,” those who could have spoken out and been heard. As writers themselves, not all of them could have been insensitive to the government’s tampering with the written language as they knew it. Behind their silence lay the unpleasant historical fact that the Japanese Empire left muddy footprints in Asia, including forcing the Japanese language on its colonies in Taiwan and Korea—something we shall come back to later.
The first public intellectual to speak up against phoneticism was Fukuda Tsuneari (1912–1994), a scholar of English literature and respected translator of Shakespeare whose name came to be preceded with the derogatory label “reactionary.” In 1958, more than ten years after the changes had been implemented, Fukuda began publishing a series of journal articles that informed the Japanese reading public for the first time of the offhand manner in which the Japanese language had been tampered with. Then in 1961, several writers who had participated in the National Language Research Council quit, declaring publicly that the council was stacked in favor of phoneticism and there was no point in continuing the debate. This made headlines. The following year, the committee on romanization was disbanded. And in 1966, the head of the council, Education Minister Nakamura Umekichi, held a news conference laying out for the first time in Japan’s modern history an official policy on what the written language should be: a mixture of Chinese characters and Japanese kana. This declaration must have come as a surprise to the general public, most of whom were unaware that these debates were going on and never dreamed that their language could be written otherwise. And so—exactly one hundred years after Maejima Hisoka’s petition to the shogun to eradicate Chinese characters—the issue was finally laid to rest.
All this is mere orthography, you may say. But it is not mere orthography. Fukuda’s articles, which came out in book form in 1960 under the title Watashi no kokugo kyōshitsu (My Japanese language classroom), place special emphasis on how irrational and impossible it would be for the Japanese language to adopt a strictly phonetic writing system. In this, he was absolutely right. For one thing, the enormous prevalence of homophones among ideogram compounds, which are most often used for abstract concepts, makes abolishing Chinese characters out of the question. Depending on the characters used, the word seikō, for example, has a multitude of totally unrelated meanings, including “success” (成功), “precision” (精巧), “starlight” (星光), “propensity” (性行), and “sexual intercourse” (性交). Fukuda’s discussion, however, concentrates on something less obvious to the Japanese public: the loss they suffered through kana reform.
With great erudition, love of Japanese, and concern for his country, as well as a puckish wit befitting a scholar of English literature, Fukuda describes how phonetic kana notation confused the Japanese language and dulled people’s awareness of word roots. He writes, “Words are not tools for the transmission of culture; they are culture. They are our very selves.”4 To linguist Matsuzaka Tadanori, a member of the council who espoused romanization, he issues this challenge: “Mr. Matsuzaka, come to your senses. Does writing exist for the typewriter, or the typewriter for writing?” Little did he know that the invention of the computer would one day make this argument obsolete—and prove him right in his assertion that technologies exist for humans, and not vice versa.
Fukuda ends his book with these words:
And so during the postwar confusion, a time when people’s attention was fixed on food and clothing with no room to spare for other matters, the orthodox notation that so many scholars of the past had sweated blood to defend was hastily overturned—a truly lamentable, irretrievable turn of events. Moreover, people went right on jabbering about tradition and culture, while disdaining the words on which tradition and culture depend. What tradition, what culture, pray tell? Now I see, this is what it means to lose a war.5 (Emphasis in original)
Even now those final words, “Now I see, this is what it means to lose a war,” wring my heart.
Chinese characters per se luckily survived. The cap on the number of characters designated for everyday use was eventually raised from 1,850 to 2,136. Yet the simplification of these characters and the phonetic use of kana remain unadjusted and haphazard to this day.
What is crucial to realize is that these so-called reforms did not merely impoverish the Japanese language but also, by altering the written language that until then everyone had been able to read, created a needless cultural gulf—unlike the previous one (see chapter 4), which was necessitated by the force of history. The year 1946 was the watershed: generations born after that were increasingly exposed to the new, poorer orthographic style and gradually became reluctant to read anything written before the changes unless it was rewritten in that style. In this way, Japan began to produce generations for whom reading anything prewar in its original form is increasingly a struggle. Older, premodern texts have of course become even more remote.
What an utter waste! The books I read from around age twelve (when, as I have mentioned, my father was transferred to New York and our family went there to live) belonged to an early anthology of modern Japanese literature we had around the house. I devoured them without even realizing that they were written in traditional style. They did not strike me or my sister, who wasn’t as much of a bookworm, as particularly hard going. But back in Japan, the number of people who had scarcely laid eyes on anything but the new Japanese was steadily increasing.
Written language is a mere representation of the sounds of spoken language: this mistaken assumption underlying the belief in phonetic writing reflects a view of language that inevitably arises in cultures using a phonetic alphabet. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) gave the name “phonocentrism” to this view, which he saw as a Western ideology and around which he developed a critique of Western metaphysics. Phonocentrism places higher value on spoken language as being more primary than and thus superior to written language, which it conceives as necessarily corrupting the original intention of the Subject—the center of meaning.
The problem is, the introduction of Western ideology into a non-Western context often does unimagined harm. Transported to a different culture, thought often loses its subtlety and can even rampage like a wild beast. The damage inflicted on the Japanese language by postwar revisions arose because belief in the superiority of phonetic notation was in fact a mark of utopianism imported from the West. Touting primitive communism, egalitarianism, and the Self freed from the shackles of the past, this utopianism wreaked cultural havoc even in the West. But in the non-West, it wreaked havoc of an entirely different order of magnitude. China’s Cultural Revolution saw invaluable cultural treasures wiped from the face of the Earth and book lovers strung up and humiliated. Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge massacred the entire literate population. Though it may sound extreme to speak of Japan’s postwar language revisions in the same breath with such atrocities, they all arose from similar utopian dreams. The Chinese revolution took place under one-party rule, and the Khmer Rouge massacres were a ripple effect of years of colonial rule followed by a corrupt regime and the Vietnam War; yet in postwar Japan, during a time of peace, prosperity, and freedom of speech, mindless actions of the country’s leaders, both political and intellectual, produced a generation increasingly estranged from its rightful literary heritage.
LINGERING GUILT, OVERCONFIDENCE, AND SELF-DOUBT
From here, let us start delving deeper into possible reasons why the Japanese language has suffered such undeserved treatment at the hands of the Japanese people themselves.
It is not that Japanese people are uninterested in their language. On the contrary, they often fret that the younger generation in particular is making a hash of it. Bookshops overflow with books on the proper use of honorifics and other language-related topics. Coffee-table magazines aimed at women are incessantly putting out special issues devoted to “beautiful Japanese”—much the same way they feature innocuous topics like “the aesthetics of Japanese lifestyle” or “the health benefits of Japanese cuisine.” There are television quiz shows on language usage. Many people fascinated by Chinese characters, including children, are taking examinations to test their ability. But giving serious thought to their language from a world-historical perspective is a different matter.
One reason lies in Japan’s relatively recent history. As mentioned earlier, because the Japanese language was forcibly imposed on Taiwanese and Koreans, Japan’s imperial past still makes many Japanese, especially intellectuals, feel a need to feel guilty. The fall of the Berlin Wall finally freed any intellectuals from the fetters of the left, allowing them to begin trying to come up with a more balanced understanding of their past: rather than looking on the nation’s path from the Meiji Restoration to World War II as an inexorable slide into evil, it became possible to take a positive view of Japan’s successful modernization—quite a natural view to take, when you think of it—without being automatically labeled “reactionary.” Nonetheless, inhibition persists when talking about the Japanese language. Anyone who calls for people to value the language that evolved through that same process of modernization is still automatically labeled reactionary, or worse, right-wing. And until very recently, to suggest that Japanese are lucky to have such a rich heritage of modern literature was in a real sense taboo.
Yet, there is a second, underlying reason that Japanese have never given serious thought to the need to protect their linguistic and literary heritage. I am referring to Japan’s geographic location, which, as we have already discussed, has conferred great advantages. Because Japanese people have never suffered any foreign invasions, they have always viewed their language and culture as givens that nothing can ever take away. To them, Japanese language and culture are inseparable from themselves, eternally safe as long as they, the Japanese people, exist—as if the historical constructs of Japanese language and culture were permanently embedded in Japanese DNA. This naïve overconfidence is ubiquitous even among those in a position to actively defend Japanese language and culture.
A recent example is provided by Kawai Hayao (1928–2007), a prominent Jungian psychologist who headed the International Research Center for Japanese Studies and then the Agency for Cultural Affairs, a special body under the Ministry of Education. As we shall see, there was a brief movement around the turn of the twenty-first century to make English an official language of Japan. A reporter for the Asahi Shimbun observed to Kawai, the appointed leader of the discussion, that some people criticized the idea on the grounds that to do so would wreak harm on Japanese language and culture. Kawai responded with supreme aplomb: “They’re misguided. Nobody is saying English will take priority over Japanese. Japanese language and culture will be just fine. If Japanese language and culture are so frail that a little thing like this does them irreparable harm, then good riddance” (emphasis added).6
Or let us go back a little further in time and take the example of popular novelist Sakaguchi Ango (1906–1955), whose famous wartime essay “Nihon bunka shikan” (A personal view of Japanese culture) contains a pithy and sharply worded, if totally deluded, statement of his belief in the indestructability of Japanese culture. There is no need, he wrote, for the Japanese to cherish a building like the Hōryūji, a temple built in Nara in the first half of the seventh century and the world’s oldest wooden structure: “If necessary we should tear down the Hōryūji and build a railway station. The glorious culture and traditions of our people would by no means be destroyed as a result. Even without the Hōryūji, Japan would go on.”7 Ango makes another declaration about the Katsura Imperial Villa, an architectural gem from the seventeenth century whose beauties were brought to the attention of the Japanese people by German architect Bruno Taut in the 1930s. According to Ango, “Taut had to discover Japan, whereas we have no need to discover Japan, for we are actually Japanese. We may have lost sight of our ancient culture, but it is impossible for us to lose sight of Japan.” Since Ango wrote the essay during the war, his tone is defiant, yet his statement served only to reinforce the naïve overconfidence that Japanese have regarding their culture, and the essay continues to be extremely popular. What Ango and those Japanese readers who nod in agreement at his words do not realize is that other people around the world, by living through repeated foreign invasions, came indeed to “discover” their own countries. He concludes, “As long as the everyday life of the Japanese people is healthy, Japan itself will be healthy.”
Like Ango, Japanese people took it as an article of faith that even if they destroyed their cultural treasures, they would never “lose sight of Japan.” And what has been the effect of this cultural neglect on the Japanese cityscape? With no regulations on architecture apart from safety standards, the market drive to maximize floor area resulted in the wholesale destruction of old structures in favor of a motley assortment of commercial and office buildings of every shape, height, hue, and description; cheap blocks of stacked one-room flats; mismatched small residential developments; snakelike, twisting asphalt roads intersecting absurdly with elevated railroads; pedestrian overpasses with peeled paint where no one sets foot; a tangle of electric wires covering the sky like a spider’s web—in short, unutterable ugliness. I, for one, cannot go for a walk without feeling waves of anger, sorrow, despair. The survival of the Hōryūji is cause for rejoicing, but ordinary street scenes have greater impact on our daily lives.
“Japanese language and culture will be just fine,” Kawai blandly assured the nation, but a country’s urban landscapes are part of its culture, too. Japanese culture was not, after all, “just fine.” And, though Japanese people will not believe it, the language is not “just fine,” either. The only reason they are so confident is that historically, thanks to the favorable geographic location of the Japanese islands, there was never any need to defend the language. Most ethnic groups around the world have had occasion at some point in their history to defend their language passionately from incursions by other groups. The language of every ethnic group on Earth arose accidentally in the course of history, without any intrinsic need to exist. But a language exposed to risk becomes a defining marker of ethnic identity, thereby gaining necessity and becoming the object of passionate defense by its speakers, who regard it as “our own language.” A language that goes undefended will perish. Even if its written word is preserved in books, the books will go unread and so perish. Human history is also a history of war among languages.
Japanese people are now facing a situation without precedent since the birth of the Japanese language. The geographic isolation that long protected that language is a thing of the past in today’s technologically advanced age. “We have no need to discover Japan, for we are actually Japanese.” So wrote Sakaguchi Ango, but what kind of people are “actually Japanese”? The Japanese language is not embedded in anyone’s DNA. I know plenty of people overseas who are Japanese by blood yet cannot speak a word of the language. I know plenty of people even inside Japan who can speak the language yet can barely read a word of it. Can we say unequivocally that they too are “actually Japanese” and have not “[lost] sight of Japan”?
The third and final reason why I believe Japanese people have not prized their language is darker—and more tragic. However strange this may sound to Western ears, most people in Japan are skeptical as to whether their own language has true legitimacy. Yes, for a millennium and a half the Japanese language ranked below Chinese, as was only natural, since Japan was part of the Sinosphere. But people today hardly care about that long-ago era. At issue is the status of the Japanese language in the modern era. Despite their enthusiastic embracing of the ideology of national language, and despite the emergence of Japanese as a fully functioning national language, Japanese people remain unsure if their language is truly legitimate. Undergoing the “shock of the West” also meant seeing Westerners as model human beings and oneself as anything but, a bias that lingers to this day. Foreigners who visit Japan must find it incongruous that any of the faces featured in the advertising flooding the streets are Western. The bias extends to language: Western languages are seen as models for the whole human race to use. While taking justifiable pride in a vibrant literary heritage, Japanese people at some point, without even knowing it, became captive to the notion that only Western languages are valid. Various non-Western peoples surely share a similar sense of estrangement from their own language.
The use of Chinese ideograms naturally reinforced this pervasive self-doubt. Japan was by no means the only country to contemplate banishing ideograms outright after undergoing the “shock of the West.” There have been movements to abolish ideograms even in China, the place of their birth. The same impulse spread throughout the Sinosphere. Abstract concepts derived from ideograms are even more prevalent in Korean than in Japanese, yet in North Korea the use of ideograms is prohibited, and even in South Korea they have all but disappeared, replaced in both countries by hangul, a phonetic script unique to the Korean language. Vietnam, where a still higher proportion of abstract words was originally written in ideograms, switched to the Roman alphabet in the first half of the twentieth century. Even without ideograms, Vietnamese and Korean have continued to function as written languages largely because their pronunciation is more varied and complex than that of Japanese, resulting in fewer homophones.
Just in the past twenty years or so, Japanese people have begun taking a more positive view of ideograms. During that time, it has become clear that China, while beginning to flex its muscles as a superpower, has no intention of abolishing its ideograms, albeit in simplified form for everyday characters. Furthermore, the technological revolution created by the computer has made ideograms far less inconvenient and antipopulist than before. More foreigners now willingly undertake their study. Though the tradition of classical Chinese writing may be lost, at least Chinese ideograms, with a history of over three and a half millennia, have gained a seat at the table. The human race has escaped the danger of losing its sole living set of ideograms.
But the mere acceptance of ideograms in the world is not enough to erase Japanese people’s persistent self-doubts about their language. As we have seen, the man who later became Japan’s first education minister called for the nation to adopt English. And as mentioned in chapter 2, the acclaimed novelist Shiga Naoya called for the defeated nation to abandon Japanese in favor of French. Even more surprisingly, ultranationalist thinker Kita Ikki (1883–1939), who would be executed as the brains behind the failed military coup of February 26, 1936, urged the nation to take up Esperanto. Since he was a socialist, perhaps his position should be no cause for surprise—and yet seeing an ultranationalist’s name in conjunction with Esperanto is startling. Why did this political extremist advocate the adoption of an international language based on Western languages? Because he considered Japanese to be “exceedingly inferior.” If Japanese people took Esperanto as their second language, then, he claimed, Japanese would “by the law of natural selection” vanish in fifty years. But there was more to his advocacy of Esperanto than this. In a book called Kokugo to iu shisō (The ideology of national language, 1997), written in Japanese, Korean sociolinguist I Yeonsuk quotes Kita as saying that should the Empire of Greater Japan spread to Russia and Australia, then forcing the language on those populations “the way we forced Koreans to use Japanese”8 would never do. (With understandable wrath, she adds, “The Korean nation compelled to use this ‘inferior’ Japanese was a pathetic sacrificial lamb.”)9 In any case, it is striking that these three influential men—one a high government official, one a celebrated novelist, and one a radical enemy of the state—all saw Japanese as irredeemable and urged its abolition.
Even now, when economically Japan stands shoulder to shoulder with the West, Japanese people’s pangs of perceived linguistic inadequacy linger unabated; if anything, they have intensified. Advertising is awash with the Roman alphabet (for Japanese brand names) and katakana (for expressions borrowed from English, French, Italian, Spanish, and more). Both styles are expressions of a deep-seated longing: If only Japanese were a Western language! The media are also infatuated by such words. And the Japanese government, instead of countering this trend by taking advantage of the superb word-building capacity of Chinese ideograms, goes happily along spewing out barely comprehensible “katakana English.” Phoneme pairs often become indistinguishable, as with “major” and “measure” (メジャー) or “chip” and “tip” (チップ)—not to mention “free market” and “flea market” (フリーマーケット). Confusion mounts. One has to sympathize with the seventy-one-year-old male who, in June 2013, sued NHK, Japan’s public television network, for mental suffering caused by the flood of incomprehensible loanwords.
In any case, the disquieting sense that one’s native language is somehow illegitimate is one of many tragic consequences of the rupture with their native heritage that people in Japan and other non-Western countries have undergone in modern times.
“UNIVERSAL BILINGUALISM” IN JAPAN?
And so, having no faith that Japanese literature should be passed on, no history of protecting the Japanese language, and no conviction that Japanese is even a legitimate language to begin with, the Japanese people were thrust into the age of English.
How have they dealt with the situation? As in most other countries, the need to learn English has been felt more pressingly than ever before. But for the Japanese, the feeling that they ought to know English has become an irrational obsession, a paranoia that has spread across the nation like a plague. This is probably because most people, despite years of suffering from mandatory English courses in junior high, high school, and college, end up with little or no grasp of the language. A highly educated few can read it, but hardly anyone can speak it or write it. Feeling defeated, and blaming themselves for the defeat, ordinary people have succumbed to a kind of mass hysteria, convinced despite all evidence to the contrary that they can and must master the language.
For years, city streets have been plastered with ads for English conversation schools. Television commercials promise that if you just listen to these English-language materials, you’ll soon be chattering away. Of Japanese podcasts accessed through the iTunes store in the education category on September 29, 2013, an astounding twenty-eight out of the top thirty were programs for learning English. Short-term stays abroad for the purpose of learning English are fast becoming de rigueur.
It was against this background that a movement arose in 1999 to make English the nation’s second official language. The movement sought to transform the entire population into bilinguals through a totally new system of public education. Though much discussed in media at the time (along with reports that some Koreans were calling for Korea to do the same), the movement gradually fizzled out. Given that the Japanese have a perfectly fine national language, many thought the idea preposterous. Even those who did not oppose the idea itself thought its implementation too costly and thus impracticable.
However, unlike the nation’s hysterical obsession with English, the sense of crisis underlying the movement to make English an official language had a clear motivation. At the center of the movement was a well-known figure named Funabashi Yōichi, a journalist stationed for years in New York as a foreign correspondent for the Asahi Shimbun. In 2000, he published a book entitled Aete Eigo kōyōgo ron (In spite of all, make English an official language),10 which contains a devastating account of how the inability of past Japanese officials and politicians to express themselves in English or even to understand what was said to them led to an accumulation of diplomatic blunders culminating in World War II. Funabashi also cites more recent examples to show how lack of English mastery at international negotiation tables places Japan and Japanese companies in a highly disadvantageous position.
Now that we have entered the age of English and the Internet, Japanese people’s helplessly poor English poses a greater potential threat to the nation than ever. International negotiations in English have become daily events. The Internet has ushered in continuous global publicity campaigns where information is creatively manipulated. What is well articulated in English on the Internet becomes “truth” the whole world believes in. Fama volat: rumor has wings. Or better, fama crescit eundo: rumor grows as it goes. And often rumors have no relation to the truth. Words can have a terrible power to turn white into black, and the more such treacherous words circulate, the more traction they gain. If Japan were subjected to a barrage of groundless verbal attacks, rebuttals in lame English, however numerous or earnest they might be, would serve no purpose. The only way to counter the attacks would be to patiently state the truth in articulate, persuasive English. And for this approach to be effective, people with more than sufficient command of English would have to exist on a certain scale. Backed by the intrinsic power of the truth, well-crafted English circulating widely might well have power to persuade the world.
The sense of crisis underlying the proposal to make English an official language of Japan is thus quite understandable. Yet in addition to the objections raised earlier, there is a major problem with this goal: proponents are intent on making all Japanese people bilingual. They hold that the current system of English education, with its abysmal results, needs to be changed drastically, as by bringing in native speakers en masse. But as long as the goal is universal bilingualism, such methods will never result in the high-level bilingualism Japan now requires. The only realistic way to develop a cadre of skilled bilinguals is to head in exactly the opposite direction—that is, to give up on the notion of universal bilingualism. This means abandoning once and for all a principle held inviolable (at least on the surface) by the Ministry of Education and the Japanese populace ever since World War II: the principle of egalitarianism. By giving special education opportunities to a select stratum, Japan must choose a path it has until now shunned, a path it has seen as morally wrong.
The national budget cannot be expanded indefinitely to accommodate English education. Not every child is eager to learn English (in fact, English is the most abhorred subject in Japanese schools). It makes no sense to spend the nation’s limited resources equally on those who do want to learn English and those who do not. Those resources should be devoted to a limited pool of talent, the government leading the way. That sort of training cannot be left solely to market forces because doing so would make it accessible only to the rich. Worse, doing so would diminish the likelihood of Japan’s ever gaining the bilinguals it truly needs. Without some guiding principle, the tenets of the market will simply respond to consumers’ demand for more English by creating people who speak English like Americans—a meaningless ability in and of itself. Nor should Japan try to create mere government puppets. The bilinguals Japan truly needs are people capable of defending or criticizing their own country as informed citizens. This requires, first and foremost, thorough grounding in Japan and the Japanese language.
Japanese proponents of nationwide bilingualism often cite Singapore as a model. (Scandinavians are also bilingual, but they look too different from Japanese.) If Singaporeans, who look so much like us, are on their way to achieving bilingualism, then so can we, they argue. Taking Singapore as a model, however, is ludicrously wrong-headed. Unlike Japan, Singapore—a multiethnic, multilingual, former British colony—needs a common language among its diverse population, which is part Malay, part Chinese, and part Tamil. And because it is a multiethnic country, it espouses multilingualism, encouraging people to maintain their ethnic identity by making it compulsory in public schools for children to master their mother tongue—or Mandarin, in the case of ethnic Chinese. This multilingual educational policy may make Singaporeans appear bilingual on the surface, but insofar as written language is concerned, they are in fact Anglophone. The language of instruction in primary and secondary education gradually involves more English, and it is totally English at the college or university level. (Some university courses in Malay, Chinese, and Tamil language and literature are available.) Singaporean writers write predominantly in English. Moreover, as some members of the younger generation are even beginning to use English at home, Singapore might end up becoming a true Anglophone country. To think of it as an ideal bilingual nation is to miss the basic assumption of the new bilingualism, which requires reading and writing proficiency in two languages.
People in the English-speaking world are so used to others speaking in English that they may perhaps have trouble understanding the monumental difficulty of achieving universal bilingualism, and the near impossibility of doing so for native speakers of non-Western languages. But what if all Americans, say, were required to learn Japanese at school—not just to speak the language but to read and write it as well? A little exercise of the imagination will show what fantastic effort it would take to achieve that goal. For Japan, universal bilingualism is not an option.
The Japanese government needs strong conviction to counter the mass hysteria that cries incessantly for more and more English. Above all, it needs to make it its mission to defend the Japanese language by giving it priority over English. One’s identity derives not from one’s nation or blood but from the language one uses; what makes Japanese people Japanese is not their nation or their blood but the Japanese language that they use.
PROTECTING JAPANESE
My proposals for language education are simple. First, concerning English education, teach the fundamentals so that all children acquire a basis for reading proficiency. The importance of being able to read the universal language circulating the globe in this age of the Internet can scarcely be overemphasized. Reading also provides the key to understanding elevated discourse. Then, have only those who wish to study further do so. For a select number, allocate special funds, whether government or private, to develop the cadre of bilinguals that Japan needs. That’s all. (The only thing I might add would be to encourage the study of other foreign languages as well.)
Many Japanese would call such a policy elitist. They would protest, “Think of the feelings of the children left behind!” But children are stronger than that. Those who fear “elite” education also say it will lead to an economically stratified society. Look around, however, and you will see that the existence in Japan of a large middle class renders unlikely the opening of an economic gap between a chosen few and the rest. And, given the thorough education people already receive and the vast number of translated materials available, an information gap seems equally unlikely. Most important, consider what will happen if Japanese thinking does not change and such a policy is not adopted in the schools. Japan will not gain the bilinguals it so desperately needs, but that’s not all. Little by little, before anyone knows it, fine prose writing will meet its demise as people take their own language less seriously in a vain attempt to “globalize.”
This brings me to my second point. The Japanese language arts curriculum should be designed with one basic principle in mind—ensuring that the modern classics continue to be read. If that principle is upheld, the educational reforms I envision will inevitably follow: hours of Japanese language instruction in primary and secondary schools will increase. Students will read a number of works of modern Japanese literature from about a century ago, cover to cover. And in colleges and universities, they will deepen their familiarity with the modern canon.
Of course, I am not suggesting that other types of reading are unworthy. All of us, in the course of our lives, naturally encounter and enjoy all sorts of books, which is well and good—but for most people the world of fine literature is sadly remote. Education has to open doors that the home environment and the marketplace cannot.
These proposals will sound like mere common sense in most Western societies. However, for Japan, a non-Western country, returning to texts dating from the time of the formation of its national language would have far deeper significance. In the West, modern texts are bound culturally with earlier classical texts. However distant the age of Greek classics and the Bible, figures like Apollo, Hercules, and Venus, as well as Noah, Job, and Mary Magdalene, live on in today’s literary works. But such is not the case in Japan. The new literature that arose from what Sōseki called a “sudden twist” becomes more cut off from earlier literature with every passing day. Hence all the more reason to instill the habit of reading classics that date from around the time of that sudden twist, a seminal time when writers still privy to the nation’s full literary heritage drew excitedly on it to give birth to a new language and literature. If Japanese people could reconnect to those modern classics, then despite having twice lost sight of themselves as a nation in the upheavals of recent history, first during the Meiji Restoration and again in the defeat of World War II, they would be able to connect, however hazily, with the Japanese of their ancient forebears and sense that in the Japanese written word they have a true spiritual homeland.
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.