Nihongo: In Defence of Japanese 9781474247214, 9781474284936, 9781474247221

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contensts
Introduction
1 The Language and the Script
2 Square Pegs, Round Holes
3 Native Guides and Foreign Tourists
4 The Semantic Fallacy
5 Time, Tense and Aspect
6 Translation and Translators
7 The Chicken or the Egg
Postscript
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Nihongo

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Nihongo In Defence of Japanese Roy Andrew Miller Linguistics: Language Studies BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC COLLECTIONS

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 1996 by The Athlone Press This edition published by Bloomsbury Academic 2015 © Roy Andrew Miller 2015 Roy Andrew Miller has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-4721-4 ePDF: 978-1-4742-4722-1 Set: 978-1-4742-4732-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Series: Bloomsbury Academic Collections, ISSN 2051-0012

Printed and bound in Great Britain

NIHONGO In defence of Japanese

NIHONGO In defence of Japanese ROY ANDREW MILLER

THE ATHLONE PRESS LONDON

First published in Great Britain in 1986 by The Athlone Press 44 Bedford Row, London WC1R 4LY Copyright © 1986 Roy Andrew Miller

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Miller, Roy Andrew Nihongo : in defence of Japanese. 1. Japanese language I. Title 495.6 PL523 ISBN 0-485-11251-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Miller, Roy Andrew Nihongo : in defence of Japanese. Bibliography: pp. 247-58 Includes index. 1. Japanese language. I. Title. PL523.M4943 1986 495.6 85-23007 ISBN 0-485-11251-5

Typesetting by Photobooks (Bristol) Ltd Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge

Contents Introduction

1

1 The Language and the Script

5

2 Square Pegs, Round Holes

46

3 Native Guides and Foreign Tourists

88

4 The Semantic Fallacy

117

5 Time, Tense and Aspect

144

6 Translation and Translators

177

7 The Chicken or the Egg

221

Postscript

242

Notes

247

Index

259

. . . non entia enim licet quodammodo levibusque hominibus facilius atque incuriosius verbis reddere quam entia, veruntamen pio diligentique rerum scriptori plane aliter res se habet. Albertus Secundus, Tract, de cristall. spirit. Ed. Clangor et Collof. lib. I, cap. 28

I consider it incumbent upon me to analyze the sentences I hear on the basis of the words that they actually contain, without reference to other words that might have been used instead of or beside these. Bernard Bloch Letter of 28 October 1948

Introduction

This is a book about the Japanese language - not a book that aims at teaching the language, or even at suggesting how best to go about learning it, but rather a book that attempts to answer the principal questions that Western readers generally have about the language. Many of these questions are much the same whether the reader has studied Japanese or not; and while the answers suggested in this book will, in the nature of such things, probably carry more conviction for the reader who does know some Japanese, they have been presented in such a way as to make both the answers as well as the questions readily understood by anyone interested in Japan, whether or not he or she has ever studied the language. The title of this book is likely immediately to give rise to a question in the mind of the reader, and indeed, it is intended to do just that. Why, the reader will surely ask, should the Japanese language require defence and if it does, why should that be the business of anyone but the Japanese themselves? Rather than addressing this perfectly proper query in this Introduction, I would ask the reader's permission to postpone the issue posed by the book's title until after he or she has read the seven chapters that follow. By that time I hope the answer will have become apparent, leaving only a few miscellaneous loose-ends that I attempt to tie-up in the Postscript with which the book concludes. Meanwhile, a brief survey of the subjects treated in each of the book's chapters may be useful to the reader, if only because the chapter-titles have generally been kept brief and are as a consequence sometimes a trifle cryptic. The Japanese writing system is, without question, the most complicated and involved system of script employed today by any nation on earth; it is also one of the most complex orthographies ever employed by any culture anywhere at any time in human history. No Westerner observes the graphic intricacies and beauties of the Japanese writing system with indifference. Sometimes, in fact, Western fascination with the Japanese script has taken precedence over Western interest in the language itself - when, for that matter, these two quite distinct facets of the subject, the language as against the script, have not actually been lumped together. Chapter 1 attempts to describe, in simple but accurate terms, what the Japanese writing system consists of and how it operates vis-a-vis the language. Keeping in mind the reader who has no Japanese, this chapter (like the rest of 1

2

Introduction

the book) does not introduce actual specimens of the orthography (which would be meaningless for the reader without Japanese, while superfluous for the reader with the language); instead it concentrates on describing the nature of the Japanese script, and its essential relationship to the language. Chapter 2 deals with the grammatical structure of the modern Japanese language, first offering a brief sketch of the language's principal features, and then exploring some of the ways in which our view of the language's structure and grammar has frequently been deflected, when not actually obscured, by unnecessary and unwise attempts to force the description of the language into European grammatical categories. Quite surprising things have frequently been said and written about the Japanese language. It has been called 'highly unnatural. . . very much opposed to good sense. . .marked by perverse laws for which no good reason can be given'; it has been dubbed 'among the world's vaguest'; and its speakers have even been characterized as 'vague and deliberately deceptive'. The summary description of the language's grammar and structure in Chapter 2 prepares the reader for Chapter 3, which suggests a responsible evaluation of these and similar charges, so frequently made by Japanese critics and scholars as well as by foreign observers. Most charges and allegations of the kind discussed in Chapter 3 have their origin (when they are not the result of simple misunderstanding or lack of information) in an important and probably universal semantic phenomenon that makes itself apparent whenever we go back and forth between one language and another, particularly when the languages concerned are genetically unrelated to one another. Chapter 4 explores this phenomenon of inter-linguistic semantic congruence and incongruence, particularly as it has influenced the description of Japanese, and also as it has helped determine the course of the sort of things that have often been said about the language, and about the mentality and character of its speakers. Within the general area of these same semantic questions, probably none are more striking than those involved with chronological time and grammatical tense, particularly since the Japanese language's representation in this segment of the grammar and vocabulary are significantly different from most of those with which we are familiar from English and the other European languages. Chapter 5 investigates this particular aspect of the overall problem posed by semantic divergencies between Japanese and other major world languages, incidentally demonstrating some of the ways in which this question has troubled translators of Japanese literature.

Introduction

3

Translation of Japanese literature into English is also the concern of Chapter 6, particularly the linguistic aspects of a number of such published translations, and the extent to which they do or do not provide the English-language reader with accurate and responsible guides to their originals. Finally, Chapter 7 considers a number of issues of particular relevance to the Japanese language in the extremely broad realm of linguistic speculation and theory involving the nature of the ultimate relationship between language and thought. Do we think the way we do because we speak as we do, or do we speak the way we do because of the way we speak? This particular 'chicken or egg' controversy is only part of a larger and still unresolved debate about the nature of language, and about the way in which any language relates to the society that employs it; but it is also a debate in which modern Japanese literary and intellectual figures have contributed perhaps even more than their fair share. These contributions have frequently taken the form of sometimes rather startling allegations about their own language, some of which are explained and investigated in this last chapter. Since this is a book about Japanese, the discussion from time to time necessarily becomes involved in the methods and terminology of linguistics, or if one prefers the alternative term, linguistic science. This has been unavoidable, since to talk about a language, any language, is necessarily to become involved with linguistic issues; linguistics is, after all, the science of language. But I hope that these linguistic aspects of the book will not put off the reader who happens to be more interested in Japanese than in linguistics, just as I hope that the romanized citations of Japanese examples, and even of short texts, which have been kept to a necessary minimum, will not discourage the reader more at home in linguistics than in Japanese, or even the reader with no Japanese. The discussion should not be difficult for anyone to follow, even when it involves Japanese examples, since all are glossed, translated, and explained, often word for word, while the equally necessary excursions into linguistic science have purposely been kept to a level that in the 1950s would have been considered suitable for an elementary course introducing college freshmen to the subject. Today, however, when many with doctors' degrees in linguistics will never have heard of most of these ideas, there is probably something to be said for reviving them here, particularly since they are almost all elegantly simple, and not in the least difficult to understand, whether the reader is particularly interested in the field of linguistics or not. In selecting passages from the vast secondary literature on Japanese and Japanese linguistics, I have made a conscious effort to restrict my

4

Introduction

citations to works published in English. This will make it possible even for the reader who has no Japanese to verify my sources. This has seemed to me no small consideration, because frequently the nature of this literature is such that any properly cautious reader might well be sceptical about the veracity of many of the citations, were he or she not capable of personally pursuing the sources cited. Accordingly, works in Japanese and other non-English sources have been cited only when absolutely necessary. Japanese linguistic forms have been transcribed in three different ways, depending upon the period of Japanese linguistic history to which they have reference. Modern Japanese has been transcribed in the familiar Hepburn system that most English-speaking persons find, initially at least, easiest to handle among the several modern systems in use. With this system, the old (though hardly scientific) advice to pronounce 'the vowels as in Italian and the consonants as in English' is probably all the reader requires in order to approximate the forms with some degree of accuracy. The same holds true of forms transcribed in a phonemic approximation of the phonology of Middle Japanese. Old Japanese, which had a rather more complex sound system than any subsequent stage of the language, is somewhat more difficult to explain. A detailed description of the symbols used in transcribing Old Japanese, and a guide to the probable eighth-century pronunciation of the phonemes that they represent, is to be found in note 18 to Chapter 6 (p. 253 below). But when reading Old Japanese texts aloud most modern Japanese scholars, and virtually all Westerners, simply pronounce the Old Japanese forms as if they were Modern Japanese; and while this handy practice ought not be allowed to deflect our linguistic and literary analysis of Old Japanese poetics, it nevertheless can hardly be denied that there is much to recommend it for everyday, practical purposes. As in much of my recent work on Japanese, I ought here to thank many who would probably be embarrassed to find their names mentioned; and so, since I cannot name everyone who has helped, I will name no one. This admittedly cowardly course at least has the advantage of reducing the scholars and colleagues from whose guidance I continue to benefit to the same level of decent anonymity enjoyed by the many other non-academic Japanese friends who have been good enough to help me with this book in the best way possible by sitting down and talking with me hour after hour. They are also, when all is said and done, the ones who make studying Japanese - as well as worrying about its defence - finally worthwhile.

1 The Language and the Script Writing is not language, but merely a way of recording language by means of visible marks. . . . A language is the same no matter what system of writing may be used to record it, just as a person is the same no matter how you take his picture. Leonard Bloomfield, Language (1933) p. 21, §2.1

The Japanese writing system is a particularly promising topic with which to begin a discussion of the Japanese language, even though language, and not writing, is the primary structure by means of which Japanese society functions, and even though all writing systems, the example of Japanese included, are by the very nature of their inherent relationship to language always secondary phenomena. But a book about Japanese, particularly one concerned about the many ways in which the language functions vis-a-vis Japanese society today, can hardly avoid describing, along with the language, the way in which this language is written. And in the particular case of Japanese, we are in fact well advised to begin by investigating the way in which the language is written, rather than by talking about the language itself, for a number of cogent reasons. Many of the genuinely linguistic elements with which we must concern ourselves during most of our study of the Japanese language proper are in one way or another open to question - questions not only of interpretation but, as we shall see below, often also questions simply of identification. Isolating and discussing even such ostensibly simple grammatical elements as nouns and verbs, not to mention the host of rather less obvious linguistic factors with which we must eventually deal, not only requires a considerable familiarity with the techniques of linguistic science; it also, from the outset, necessarily involves us in abstractions and theoretical formulations that are not always easy to treat in concrete terms. But with the writing system, we are in the presence of a concrete, overt, indeed a tangible physical entity—something we can observe first-hand, something that is striking in its visibility, something that presents, at the very least, no subtle 5

6

Nihongo

problems of identification before we are in a position to undertake its description and analysis. No literate person outside the Japanese sociolinguistic community has ever glanced at the front page of a Japanese newspaper, looked through a Japanese book or magazine, or been dazzled by the brilliant display of the variegated electric signs of a Japanese city at night, without being deeply impressed by the almost unbelievable graphic complexity of the shapes, whorls, and curlicues of the Japanese writing system. The sheer graphic glamour inherent in the Japanese script, no matter how or where we encounter it, is simply not to be denied. It is the sort of spectacle that leaves no outsider unmoved, or at the very least, uncurious. But useful and practical and indeed obvious though this decision to begin with a consideration of the Japanese writing system may appear to us today, it is important to recall that linguists - particularly those of a generation ago, when more serious attention was generally paid to the definition of terms and the delimitation of fields of inquiry than has been true in linguistic science in recent years - once stressed what they saw as a danger inherent in any approach to language that began, not with the subject-matter proper to the field of linguistics, i.e., not with language itself, but with such entirely secondary accretions onto the phenomenon of language as writing. These earlier linguists were not solely concerned in this connection because of their conviction - a conviction that in and of itself was perfectly correct - that language, not writing, is invariably the primary structure by means of which a social entity functions, or as they usually put it, 'cooperates.' Nor did their concern arise solely from the fact again, an undeniable truth - that writing systems, no matter how intricate, how involved, or how aesthetically pleasing they maybe, are always secondary phenomena in relation to language. Their ultimate fear in this connection was rather that, if we begin any account of a language with its script, we may find the writing system so fascinating that we will never disentangle ourselves from its enthralling enticements. And surely it is true that the enormous fascination of the involved way in which Japanese society has elected to write its language - that is to say, the way in which it has decided to use a system of visible marks on paper to record that set of arbitrary vocal signs or symbols by means of which that same society carries on its internal and external cooperation and communication - frequently short-circuits even the most determined attempt to describe or discuss the language itself that lies behind this colourful and, for most Westerners, at least exotic writing system. Leonard Bloomfield long ago put the problem most neatly: 'The

The Language and the Script

7

most difficult step in the study of language is the first step. Again and again, scholarship has approached the study of language without actually entering upon it.'1 He might well have also added that one of the diversionary by-paths which early in our study of language all too frequently manages to lure us away from 'actually entering upon the study of language itself, and also that one of the most seductive side trails which continues to render that Tirst step in the study of language' so difficult, is the special fascination traditionally exerted upon Westerners by the more elaborate, non-alphabetic writing systems of East Asia, particularly by the intricate, decorative, and generally intriguing writing system employed by the Japanese to write the Japanese language. It is also true that a number of other minor though no less ominous perils are inherent in any decision to initiate a discussion of the Japanese language with a consideration of its writing system. Once we start out along orthographic lines, there is always the danger that we will be tempted later on, in our consideration of the language itself, to have facile recourse to orthographic considerations in dealing with this or that difficult point of analysis or description. We may even find ourselves saying this or that feature of the language is found in the form in which it is, or that it operates in the fashion in which it does, 'because that's the way they write it,' or 'because those words are written with different characters'. Appeals such as these to the Japanese writing system in particular are always irrelevant at the same time that they are misleading. They are irrelevant because they ignore the plain fact that people have been speaking Japanese for millennia longer than they have been writing it, as well as the fact that the extremely high literacy rate of modern Japan is an extremely recent phenomenon. For most of Japanese history, only a tiny minority of the population could either read or write. Those who would make writing primary are left with the impossible task of explaining how any cultural artifact thus limited throughout history to a tiny elite at the top of the social pyramid could possibly have played the major role that they would ascribe to it. At the same time, they must also explain by what right they are entitled to consign the vast majority of mankind, who are now and always have been illiterate, to historical oblivion. Serious observers of such matters know that we find enormously sophisticated oral literatures in totally illiterate societies, and that hence writing is not even essential for a fully developed literary tradition. Even apart from these purely practical historical considerations, however, such appeals to the writing system of Japanese, or of any other language, are misleading because they approach the matter from

8

Nihongo

an unsubstantiated theoretical basis. They approach it as if writing somehow were a primary force existing over, beyond, and above language, rather than the essentially and invariably secondary sociolinguistic superstructure that linguistic science now understands all writing to be. Another potent factor behind the fatal fascination that the Japanese script all too often exercises upon the outside observer of the Japanese sociolinguistic scene may be identified equally plainly even in the cases of languages whose customary writing systems are by no means as exotic, colourful, or visually striking as is the Japanese. This has to do with the obvious fact, already alluded to above, that even though all language is the primary phenomenon and all writing a secondary superstructure erected upon the former, writing nevertheless always has the enormous advantage of confronting us with a concrete, tangible cultural artifact. Writing is something everyone can see, touch, handle, and directly verify through the plain evidence of the senses. In all this, writing strikingly differs from language. Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols. Language is insubstantial and intangible - little more than voices in the wind, instantly fading into silence. All too frequently it would appear to possess no real existence before or after the actual moment of linguistic interchange. Language - or so it often seems - may be here today, but it is certainly gone tomorrow; and it would appear never to have existed yesterday, so long as we treat it in isolation from its concrete, tangible superstructure of script. None of us is nearly as comfortable encountering, studying, or analysing the abstract as we are with the concrete. Writing would appear, in this connection at least, to be visible, tangible, and permanent - everything that language proper is not. Little wonder then that many people - even some with interest and training in the science of linguistics - find it easy to be derailed at the very inception of their study of Japanese by the glamour of the Japanese writing system. Perhaps more than with any other modern language in common use by a major nation, an attempt to discuss the Japanese language in any way at all must always reckon with a latent but powerful predisposition on the part of most readers in the direction of the writing system. Simply to mention that we are going to describe the Japanese language is generally to arouse the immediate expectation that we will be talking in large measure, if not indeed from first to last, about what is as a matter of fact quite another subject, i.e., the Japanese writing system. This is very unfortunate. But the dangers that we will run by undertaking our discussion with a brief treatment of the script are as nothing if we compare them with the dangers of misunderstanding and

The Language and the Script

9

confusion that we will entail if we delay our treatment of the script too long. Better, then, to run the risk and to take on this particular issue at the outset of the discussion; and the best way to do that is to begin with a simple, straightforward account of just what the modern Japanese writing system is, and of how it operates in its function of committing the Japanese language to written form. The contemporary Japanese writing system - the orthography used today by the Japanese when they write or print books, newspapers, magazines, letters, official documents, and the entire vast range of written materials of which their highly literate society makes such enormous use - operates through the simultaneous employment of two structurally and functionally different sets of graphic symbols or written signs. One of these sets was borrowed intact, in both form and function, from the writing system of Chinese. The other was evolved in Japan by the Japanese, working with borrowed Chinese originals which they both modified and simplified in graphic shape, and also altered in orthographic function. Before describing these two sets of symbols, and explaining how each set is employed in writing Japanese, one significant fact about both that the reader will by now have noticed deserves comment. Both sets have been borrowed by the Japanese, in one way or another, from China. This, of course, represents an important datum for any overall evaluation of Japanese cultural history. But it is hardly surprising. With so much of the material civilization, not to mention the philosophy, and literary expression, religion, indeed of the totality of Japanese culture on all levels as deeply in debt to China as it is, there would be no reason to expect that the writing system would be an exception to this general pattern; and it is not. But by the same token it would be grossly unfair, as well as quite misleading in a general cultural-historical sense, to use this deep indebtedness of Japan to China for its writing system as a stick with which to beat the Japanese over the head. The Japanese never invented a writing system of their own. The writing system they now employ, with all its complications and its fascinating aesthetic byways, derives wholly from Chinese originals. Without Japan's long history of cultural borrowing from China there would be no Japanese orthography as we know it today. But in none of this does Japan differ a whit from most other sociolinguistic entities in the world today. Even though the Japanese have borrowed somewhat differently in the case of each of the two sets of written symbols or signs that we will be describing below, they have nevertheless borrowed their script as a whole. But then, so has everybody else. This book is being written, and will be printed and read, in a script

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Nihongo

that the English long ago borrowed from the Romans, who in turn had got it, by a complicated but nevertheless quite second-hand route, from the Greeks, who in turn had borrowed it from the Phoenicians. Writing has been invented only a very few times in the history of mankind. Each writing system in use today, or in the recent past, to write any of the major world languages must eventually be traced back through a long process of borrowing, adaptation, and reborrowing, to one of a very small number of genuinely original starts. One of these few totally independent inventions of writing took place in ancient North China, in the region where the meandering Yellow River describes a great arc upon the fertile plain that it alternately nourishes and terrorizes. Here, along with much else of lasting significance in the ancient Far East civilization, a system of writing was slowly devised, some time in the second millennium before our era. Eventually this system was to provide not only a script for the Chinese language itself, but also a system of writing that would be borrowed into most of the countries adjacent to China, including Korea, Vietnam and Japan. The other major independent invention of writing took place in the ancient Middle East roughly a millennium earlier. This other invention eventually provided the Semitic orthographic prototype out of which were evolved, through complex processes of borrowing and adaptation, scripts as diverse as the Latin and Greek alphabets, the various writing systems of India, and the Arabic script of the modern Near and Middle East. Thus, in any discussion of the history of writing, borrowing by one culture, and by one sociolinguistic entity, from another is hardly to be remarked upon. In such matters, borrowing is the norm, not the exception. In describing the two sets of graphic symbols or signs - the one directly borrowed, the other indirectly adapted and altered from Chinese originals - with which the modern Japanese writing system operates, it is important at the outset to pay fairly precise attention to questions of terminology. Much needless misunderstanding of the Japanese writing system and of how it works has been caused by nothing more involved than the careless use of such terms as 'ideographs', 'ideograms', 'ideographic (or ideogramatic) writing', and especially that most loaded of all misleading terms, 'written language'. Fortunately, the terminological issues that confront us in this part of our discussion are neither great in number nor complex in nature. Almost without exception they may be solved fairly easily if, at the outset, we decide what specific terms we are going to use, and then agree upon what those terms mean. In this, we will mostly find a ready model available in the technical

The Language and the Script

11

orthographic terminology of Japanese itself, where the words used to refer to the things that we shall here wish to discuss are, by and large, refreshingly simple and direct. Furthermore, the Japanese terminology almost entirely lacks that persistent potential for misunderstanding that traditionally plagues most Western writing and speculation on this subject. First we have to consider the set of written symbols or signs that the Japanese borrowed intact from the Chinese writing system, and which they now employ in modern Japanese orthography more or less in the same fashion, and to the same orthographic end, that these symbols are employed by the Chinese to write the Chinese language. These we shall hereafter uniformly refer to as 'Chinese characters'. Other Western writers often call them 'ideographs' or 'ideograms'. The Russians even go one misleading step further and call them iyeroglify 'hieroglyphs'. The Japanese term for this set is simple and direct; they call them Kanji, literally 'written signs, or graphs, from the Han'. In this term the element Kan (the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese 'Han') is a general historical allusion to the two early Han dynasties of China (approximately 200 BC to AD 220), during which the culture and civilization of imperial China took definitive shape - even though the Chinese script itself is far older than these Han dynasties, so that the term Kanji, 'Han graphs', is hardly to be understood in a narrowly chronological or dynastic-historical sense; in effect, it simply means 'China' or 'Chinese', which is how we shall here understand and translate it. Equally important in this termKanji is the second element ji. This means a written mark, graph, or sign, specifically when considered in terms of the role it plays when it is involved in the writing system. This ji could be rendered as 'letter' were it not for the fact that English usage pretty well restricts that particular term to alphabetic or semi-alphabetic writing systems. And this, as we shall see, makes the translation of ji as 'letter' inappropriate both for Chinese itself, and also for any borrowed writing system that, like Japanese, uses the Chinese script. The second of the two sets of written symbols or signs for which we must promptly settle upon a term is the one that the Japanese call kana. Unlike the term Kanji, the Japanese term kana will itself be of little help in settling upon a useful, unambiguous English equivalent, since this term kana is unfortunately a word of obscure etymology.2 But even though we do not really know where this word comes from, and hence are unable to base our English equivalent upon its historical origin (for an 'etymological transcription', or caique, which is what we are doing when we render Kanji as 'Chinese character'), it is a fairly

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Nihongo

simple matter to describe what the kana symbols actually are, and so we shall have no particular difficulty in arriving at a practical, descriptive translation - if not an etymological one - for this term. The kana, are, to put it most simply, symbols or letters for phonetic writing. They differ from more familiar phonetic writing such as our own letters of the alphabet in only two important respects. While five of the forty-six kana symbols in modern use write the single vowels a, /, u, e, and o (and thus function precisely like an alphabetic script), the remaining forty write instead syllabic combinations of a consonant followed by one of these vowels, thus, ka or ku, or hi, or wa, while one additional kana symbol - a fairly recent addition to the system - writes a syllabic nasal, i.e., an w-like sound that lasts as long as a combination of any of the consonants with any one of the vowels, and hence itself counts as a syllable. (This syllabic nasal is generally transcribed simply as n, as in the word son 'three'; it would be more precise, though in almost all cases redundant, to indicate its special syllabic character by some overt sign in the transcription, e.g., san or son.) In other words, the kana are a syllabic, not an alphabetic, phonetic script, since in each case the minimum unit of the language that they write is the syllable, not the individual phoneme that is the unit normally written in an alphabetic script. The second important respect in which the kana differ from the alphabets with which we are generally more familiar concerns their writing of voiced sounds such as g, d, b and the like. Instead of having individual signs for the syllables that contain these sounds, the kana write them by using their unvoiced equivalents and mark the voicing difference with an added diacritical mark; thus, the kana for the syllable ka is, with the addition of a small double tick in its upper right quadrant, used to write the syllable^; that for ta is similarly employed for da, etc. Apart from this minor complication, the kana are unambiguous and direct in their phonetic correlation with the sounds of the language that they are used to write, and hence their use differs strikingly from the way in which modern English orthography uses its alphabetic letters. As the kana are employed in modern Japanese, there are no examples - or almost no examples - of such anomalous spellings as English gh in 'ghost', but also gh in 'through' and gh in 'tough', or of the other orthographic absurdities that have bedevilled English spelling ever since the invention and proliferation of printing. The kana, then, are most simply described as a phonetic script devised and employed on syllabic principles. Writing in English, we could very well call them just that, or we might prefer some simpler explanatory translation such as 'syllabic phonetic signs'. But here we

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shall opt for the easiest and least ambiguous terminology possible, and simply borrow the Japanese term intact, referring to this second set of signs in the modern writing system with the same word that the Japanese use for them, i.e. kana. So much for the function of the kana; what of their origin? Essentially, the kana represent cursive writings or other partial graphic deformations of borrowed Chinese characters, as evolved and devised by the Japanese, with the phonetic value of each kana symbol originating either in whole or in part in the pronunciation of the Chinese word originally, and in Chinese associated with the original Chinese character underlying each of the kana symbols. This somewhat cumbersome explanation will become clearer below, when we see something of the way in which the Chinese characters themselves are used to write Chinese, and also to write Chinese words borrowed into Japanese. In the meantime, it is sufficient to understand that, for example, one of the Japanese kana symbols for the syllable ka is in its graphic origin a cursive writing of the Chinese character used when writing Chinese, to write a Chinese word once pronounced like ka but now, in modern Chinese, chid and meaning 'to add to'. In selecting the Chinese character to serve as the basis for each kana symbol, the Japanese were solely concerned with the sound, and not at all with the sense of the underlying Chinese word. The essential process involved was exactly the same as the way the Semitic prototypes of our own Latin alphabet evolved; an early graph depicting an ox that had served to write a Semitic word aleph 'ox' was simplified and deformed, eventually to serve as Greek a, by then a purely phonetic sign (even though its Greek name alpha still recalled the underlying Semitic word), that of a house, Semitic beth, to (3, gimel 'a camel' to y, etc. At any rate, now that we have at hand this unambiguous and convenient terminology - Chinese characters and kana - for referring to the two different sets of written signs that taken together constitute the modern Japanese writing system, we must next ask, and answer, the important question of function - that is, how each of these sets is employed in writing the Japanese language. In the case of the first set, the Chinese characters that the Japanese system of writing has taken over intact from Chinese writing, the answer is in two parts. That is because these characters are employed in two completely different ways when Japanese is written today. The first of these two ways is simple and straightforward and need not detain us long; but, as we shall see, the second is anything but that, and will require a little more involved description and analysis. The first of the two ways in which Chinese characters are employed in writing the Japanese language is not only essentially quite simple in

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and of itself, but it may also be adequately accounted for by a fairly simple description. In this first way, Chinese characters are used in writing Japanese precisely as they are used when Chinese is the language being written. In other words, they are used to write Chinese words - but in the case of a Japanese text, to write Chinese words that have been borrowed into the Japanese language. This method is in essence nothing but an exact replication, only now in a Japanese rather than in a Chinese linguistic context, of the method by which Chinese characters are now and for millennia have been used to write the Chinese language. But in order to understand this fully it is in turn necessary to say a few words about how Chinese characters are used to write Chinese. It is particularly important to be fairly precise at this point in the discussion, because Chinese characters have frequently been misrepresented in Western writing and speculation about 'Things Chinese' as if they were some sort of graphic representation of ideas, thoughts, or concepts. From this essential misunderstanding of the orthographic function has arisen, for example, the common and highly misleading designation of these characters as 'ideographs' or 'ideograms,' and from that designation has generally followed also a widespread misrepresentation of the nature of all writing systems that make use of these characters, particularly the writing systems of Chinese and Japanese. In writing Chinese texts of any period, from the earliest inscriptions on bone and bronze that we have from the most ancient stages of the Chinese culture, down to the front page of the most recent issue of the Beijing (Peking) People's Daily, Chinese characters have always been employed in a much less involved, but far more matter of fact fashion than the terms 'ideographs' or 'ideograms' necessarily suggest. If there ever was a truly 'ideographic' stage in the history of the Chinese script, it has left us no concrete evidence in the form of texts; the earliest examples of script that we have from China show no traces of an ideographic orthographic scheme. Instead, even in the earliest documents that have survived from the Chinese culture, we have, in effect, what we have in the most recent - a system of writing in which each individual Chinese character is an arbitrary graphic sign or mark that is associated in an equally arbitrary, one-to-one relationship, not with thoughts or ideas, but simply and plainly with an individual linguistic form in the Chinese language. The point being made here is neither new nor novel. Even though the function of the Chinese character in both the Chinese and Japanese writing systems has been widely misunderstood and misrepresented in the West, there have always been exceptions - perceptive students and

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scholars who have based their work upon an accurate understanding of the way these things actually operate. For example, Sir George Sansom (1883-1965), a British diplomat who combined a successful public career with scholarly writing and publication about Japanese language and history, put the matter completely straight on page 2 of the introduction to his An Historical Grammar of Japanese (1928), with a brief statement that deserves citation in full, if only for its commendable directness and the complete lack of ambiguity with which it treats this often and easily confused subject: The unit in Chinese writing is a symbol which, through a curious but pardonable confusion of thought, is usually styled an ideograph, but is much more accurately described as a logograph. It is a symbol which represents a word, as contrasted with symbols which, like the letters of an alphabet or syllabary, represent sounds or combinations of sounds. It would be difficult to put the matter more carefully or succinctly: in Chinese writing generally, and in the principal mechanism of Chinese writing that the Japanese borrowed intact from China in particular, the character writes the word, not ideas; and to call it an 'ideograph', implying that it is some way of writing ideas, is a 'curious but pardonable confusion of thought' from which the student of Japanese writing must unburden himself at the outset of his study. Thus, a straightforward and completely accurate account of the problem has been easily available to Western scholarship in Japanese linguistic studies ever since 1928, and it is discouraging to realize how little impact it has had on the general Western perception of the nature of the Japanese script. Despite the clarity of Sir George's statement, Western speculation and writing about this matter remains by and large as confused as ever. Perhaps this is one of those problems that each new generation must apparently rediscover, and resolve, for itself. At any rate, only one term in Sir George's enviably elegant presentation would today appear to require some comment, and perhaps also some amplification. This is his use of the term 'word' for the linguistic unit represented by each discrete unit of the Chinese script, in his otherwise completely unobjectionable definition of the Chinese script as 'a symbol which represents a word'. The problem of how best to identify and define the word as a consistently meaningful and useful linguistic entity is today generally

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admitted to be a fairly complex matter; and its solution, at the very least, varies widely from language to language. For this reason, linguists today would generally be more comfortable if Sir George's 1928 formulation were slightly altered, and the term 'morpheme' substituted for his 'word'. This makes it possible to take over the essential point of his statement intact, but at the same time removes it from any further necessity to become involved in the theoretical considerations of the definition of the 'word' in either Chinese or Japanese. This term 'morpheme' was first given wide circulation by American structural linguistics of a generation ago; sometimes linguists of that school also employed the shorter 'morph' as synonymous with 'morpheme'. Either term may well strike many readers, particularly readers who have any Greek, as unnecessarily pompous if not downright uncouth. But such questions of aesthetics aside, 'morpheme' is a useful technical term for describing Chinese characters and for correctly understanding how they are employed, not only in writing Chinese but also in much of the Japanese writing system as well. The morpheme is to be understood as the minimal meaningful unit in any language. Thus, in English, man is a morpheme (and an independent word as well); but a complex word like manly consists of two morphemes, the independent or 'free' word man plus the dependent or 'bound' suffix -ly. The bound morpheme -ly is found in this and many other complex words. It is not too difficult to assign a specific meaning to this suffix (even though that does not always imply that it is an easy matter to express that meaning, either in English or in translation); but the suffix in question does not happen to occur in English as a free, independent word in its own right. If English were written as Chinese is - and as the Chinese loanwords in Japanese are written - we would have one character, one written graph or symbol, arbitrarily assigned to the word (and to the free morpheme) man, while another, different character would similarly be assigned to the bound morpheme -ly. To write manly we would employ both these graphs, the one after the other. And whenever the morpheme man appeared in the text, either as an independent word, or in such compounds as mankind, manhood, manpower, man-of-war, etc., we would find this same character used to write it. By the same token, whenever the bound morpheme -ly appeared, as in womanly, mainly, strongly, and similar functions, it too would always be written by means of its own distinctive arbitrary character. (The tiresome question that would immediately arise with this sort of morphemic writing for English, i.e., how to write the plural men, never arises in writing Chinese or in writing Chinese loanwords in Japanese, because

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the man : men variety of plural formation through vowel alteration does not occur in Chinese.) Put most briefly, then, Chinese characters constitute a morphemic writing system. Chinese employs a single, individual, arbitrarily assigned written symbol or graph - what we are here calling a 'character' - for each morpheme in the language, nothing more and nothing less. Most importantly, the employment of these characters in writing the morphemes of the language has absolutely nothing to do with 'thoughts' or 'ideas' or 'concepts.' Nor can it be overemphasized that it is the morphemes, not the characters that write them, that are the meaningful elements of the language. Linguistic terminology of all varieties, including the words that we employ when we describe orthographies, is (as we will see in more detail below) always and essentially arbitrary. Terms like 'ideograph' and 'ideogram' are not in and of themselves either incorrect or objectionable. So long as we understand correctly how the Chinese writing system works, it really does not matter, at least in theory, what we call its symbols. Nevertheless, as we read most Western writing about these subjects it is difficult not to conclude that the terms 'ideograph' and 'ideogram' are, while not intrinsically wrong, nevertheless potentially extremely misleading, and hence also best avoided. What has frequently happened is that this terminology has initially been rather casually applied to the Chinese writing system. But once that has been done, the writing system itself has then been described solely in terms of this terminology earlier applied to it - a strange reversal of the natural order of things, and one that has, as we might suspect, led to seriously obscuring the morphemic nature of Chinese writing, especially as it is employed in the Japanese writing system. Thus, we are told that 'in a system of writing such as that used by the Japanese, the basic thought, the word in the etymological sense, is represented by the ideogram . . .'; that the Chinese language 'was and is still written by a complicated system which is not alphabetic, but has a sign for every idea'; and eventually, even that 'learning an ideogram means learning an idea at the same time.' 3 (What kinds of ideas, if any, the vast majority of Chinese illiterates, and Japanese too before modern times, may ever have had is of course passed over in silence.) None of this is true. It is not based upon an examination of the way the script operates vis-a-vis the language, nor does it provide the reader with an accurate idea of how Chinese characters are used in writing either Chinese or Japanese. It has all grown up solely as a sort of running paraphrase of the 'ideo' element in the terms 'ideograph' and 'ideogram.'

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This same Chinese principle of morphemic writing has been taken over intact into the Japanese writing system. There it is employed today for writing the thousands of Chinese words that have over the centuries been borrowed into the Japanese language. Once these Chinese words enter Japanese they are then written with the same Chinese characters and according to the same morphemic principle that would be employed to write them if the text in question were Chinese instead of Japanese. While it is correct to stress, as we have done above, that this method of using Chinese characters to write Chinese words that have been borrowed, i.e., taken over into Japanese, is direct and straightforward, this is not to imply that it is simple to learn or easy to remember. It is only the principle of this sort of morphemic writing - the principle of a single written symbol for each separate morpheme of the language that is simple. The details of the system itself are enormously complicated. This follows because, in Chinese or in any other language, the total number of morphemes is extremely large. This in turn means that the number of individual arbitrary written symbols necessary for a morphemic system of writing is correspondingly enormous - with all that this implies for the difficulties inherent in learning, remembering, and employing such a system. A large unabridged Chinese dictionary, which lists most of the characters that have been used to write the morphemes in Chinese texts over the long history of Chinese language and literature, includes a total of 48,902 different characters. But it is certainly possible to read and to write modern Chinese with a far smaller number. Exact data are lacking, but most authorities appear to agree that a working familiarity with between 3,000 and 4,000 Chinese characters - implying, of course, also a familiarity with the same number of Chinese morphemes - would be sufficient to make one's way through the pages of a modern book, magazine, or newspaper from the People's Republic. For the number of Chinese characters used to write the Chinese words borrowed into modern Japanese we do have a fairly precise statistic close at hand. Most modern Japanese newspapers and weekly magazines now limit themselves to a total of approximately 1,850 Chinese characters, all of which are employed in this function in the orthography. One must still qualify this total with 'approximately' because the list in question is continually being altered in minor details by the Japanese Ministry of Education, which selects and sets it; it must also be noted that scientific, technical, and other specialized books and publications, particularly those of a scholarly character, frequently make use of many other Chinese characters not found on this limited list.

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No one would wish to make light of the burden that Chinese characters, whether used to write Chinese or Japanese, impose upon the memory, or to under-estimate the large amount of time that must be spent in school by children memorizing how to write and how to read them. At the same time it must be kept in mind that this burden is considerably less for the native speaker of Chinese or Japanese, who after all already knows all the morphemes of his or her language, and so need only learn the written signs that are arbitrarily associated with these morphemes. Most of the exaggerated statements frequently heard concerning the difficulty involved in learning Chinese characters reflect instead a very special and unnatural situation - that of the adult Western student of one of these languages who too often must attempt to learn the writing system without first knowing the language. The Chinese words that are today part of the Japanese language, and for which the Japanese writing system employs Chinese characters in this simple and direct - if multifarious - fashion, have found their way into Japanese by several different routes; here we need concern ourselves only with two major ones. First there is the phenomenon that linguists call borrowing. Every language has almost surely borrowed words from other languages at one time or another in its history; nevertheless, the phenomenon is more widespread, and more striking, in some languages than in others. Enormous nymbers of French and Latin words have been borrowed into English, most of them now so much at home in their adoptive linguistic medium that we hardly ever think of them as anything but English. In the same way, the Japanese have, over their long history of cultural, religious, and literary contact with Chinese civilization, borrowed enormous numbers of Chinese words. These are the words that typically are written with Chinese characters when they appear in a Japanese text - using the same Chinese characters with which the Chinese words from which the borrowing process began would be written if instead they appeared in a Chinese text. Here again, and as throughout any discussion of either Chinese or Japanese writing, it cannot be stressed too strongly or too frequently that 'ideas' or 'thoughts' or 'concepts' have nothing at all to do with any of this. In both Chinese and Japanese texts, when Chinese characters are used to write Chinese words, it is all simply a matter of specific morphemes being written by means of specific graphic signs or symbols that the sociolinguistic entity concerned has arbitrarily agreed to associate with one another. Meaning - not to mention 'ideas', 'thoughts', or 'concepts' - is a factor of the morphemes of the language, not of the symbols by which these morphemes are written, and it does

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not in actual fact play any role as such in functioning of the orthography, no more in Japan than in China. All linguistic borrowing is a type of imitation. Speakers of one language imitate words from another language as closely as they can. But since each language differs from every other language in its phonological system, as well as in its phonetic inventory and in many other details of its structure, this imitation is hardly ever exact. We usually alter foreign words to make them conform more'or less to English sounds, whenever we 'borrow', i.e., imitate them. If while speaking English we actually employ a borrowed French word with a precise reproduction of the pronunciation that the word would have in French, we are for that moment at least, not speaking English but French; we are also generally running the risk of not being understood. This is what the Japanese have done countless times with countless Chinese words. The sound systems, and the sound inventories, of Japanese and Chinese are today very different; they have also apparently been very different throughout the histories of both languages. In the process of borrowing, the Japanese have always substantially altered the pronunciation of Chinese words - so greatly, in most cases, that only a specialist in Chinese historical phonology can today identify the original Chinese morphemes that lie behind most of their modern Japanese borrowed equivalents. Another reason why the modern Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese words they have borrowed usually diverges so greatly from their etymological equivalents in any of the modern Chinese languages is because many of these borrowings of Chinese words into Japanese were made at earlier historical periods. As a result, many of these words reflect several different earlier stages in Chinese pronunciation, which itself has altered a good deal between the time of such borrowings and the modern period. Again, a parallel from English may be instructive. The French place-name 'Paris' has been borrowed by English at two different times in linguistic history, once at a period when this word in its French pronunciation still had the final -s indicated by the usual orthography, and again when this -s had later disappeared, this last borrowing resulting in the English pronunciation generally represented by the spelling Taree'. Etymologically both English 'Paris' and 'Paree' go back to the same original. But the two words have different phonetic shapes in English because they were borrowed from two different historical stages of French pronunciation. Also, although both refer to the same city, they do not 'mean the same thing' in English, since there are English sociolinguistic contexts in which one would always use 'Paris' but never 'Paree', and vice-versa. In the same

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way, Japanese has often borrowed a given Chinese morpheme not once but twice, or even more frequently. The resulting borrowed forms in Japanese generally have minor - but important - semantic differences, even though etymologically they all go back to the same original Chinese etymon. And, in writing a Japanese text, all will be written with the same Chinese character - this last, an orthographic feature for which it is difficult to find a useful outside parallel. Modern Japanese also has large numbers of words that are etymologically of Chinese origin, and that are also written with Chinese characters when they appear in a Japanese text, but which are not actually borrowed from Chinese into Japanese. Instead, these words have been coined in Japan from Chinese elements, i.e., by making up new compounds of old Chinese morphemes. The process by which these Chinese-based neologisms have been made up in Japan from Chinese lexical materials is almost exactly parallel to the way in which English has provided itself with most of its modern scientific, technical, and medical vocabulary by coining neologisms on the basis of Latin and Greek. Just as the Greek morphemes meaning 'eye' and 'a watcher' have been combined to form the English neologism ophthalmoscope, so also have countless new words been coined in Japan by combining Chinese morphemes, particularly since the late nineteenth century and especially in science, technology, and medicine, where the inherited vocabulary of the language, whether native Japanese or borrowed Chinese, was naturally inadequate to the requirements of industrialization and modernization. That such Japanese coinages should also now be written by employing the Chinese characters that would be used to write their constituent morphemes in a Chinese text - even though these 'Madein-Japan' neologisms represent a layer of the Chinese-based Japanese vocabulary that of course has never existed in China itself- is hardly to be wondered at. Nor is it surprising that many of these neologisms coined in Japan frequently strike the Chinese reader as strange, uncouth, and at times even downright misleading. An Athenian of the age of Pericles would surely have been puzzled by the sense, and offended by the style, of such words as ophthalmoscope and otorhinolaryngology. Similar slippage often happens even between French and English, with their thousands of borrowed words. French speakers must not only learn to recognize the (for them) strange English pronunciations of brassiere and lingerie, they must also learn that English brassiere does not at all mean what French brassiere does, any more than English lingerie translates its French original. All this is quite reminiscent of many of the Chinese words in modern Japanese.

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The second way in which the borrowed Chinese characters are employed in the Japanese writing system is a bit more involved than this first variety, and at the outset it may be a little more difficult for the outside observer of the orthography to grasp. We have just explained how, for example, when the Chinese word shan 'mountain' or more precisely, some historically earlier Chinese pronunciation of that word - was borrowed into Japanese as san, this borrowed word san would then be written with the same Chinese character used to write the original Chinese morpheme, i.e., Chinese shan 'mountain', in a Chinese text. When a borrowed word represented a semantic area in which the inherited native Japanese vocabulary was poor or lacking and such semantic areas were legion - the process stopped there. But frequently, the original inherited Japanese vocabulary stock already possessed either a quite exact, or else at least a satisfactorily approximate, semantic equivalent for this or that borrowed Chinese word. Chinese shan 'mountain', for example, could be quite adequately equated in its semantic dimension with, i.e., translated by, the inherited Japanese word yama. Japanese yama meant, and means, 'mountain'. It is part of the original word stock that Japanese inherited in the course of its own line of genetic decent from the Altaic linguistic unity4 - a line of historical origin that, it should be stressed, has absolutely nothing to do with Chinese, which is genetically a member of a quite different and entirely separate linguistic family. Translation from one language to another is always, and to a significant extent, a matter of approximation. Translation must always leave something to be desired. But for all that, it often serves well enough for practical purposes, as did, and does, the translation of Chinese shan by Japanese yama. If these two words in these two different languages are not precisely equivalent with one another in every semantic detail - and in any translation situation, they never are - this is mainly because of the greatly different natural geographies of the two countries. Chinese mountains are bound to be different from Japanese ones - and shan is by that token bound to mean something different from yama - because of inherent geological differences between the Asian land mass and its adjacent archipelago. But give or take these discrepancies, Chinese shan more or less adequately translates Japanese yama, and vice versa. And so it was only natural, as the Japanese writing system developed, for it also to incorporate this variety of Chinese-Japanese semantic equation, along with hundreds of other similar translationequivalents. The end result was that not only could a given Chinese character be used to write the borrowed Chinese word shan - now appearing in Japanese in slightly altered phonetic guise as san - but it

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also became possible, if a writer wished to do so, for this same Chinese character to be used to write the Japanese word yama as well. This orthographic innovation, which in effect now brought into the Japanese writing system all the problems of approximation involved in any exercise in translation from one language to another, opened an enormous new area for the employment of Chinese characters in writing Japanese texts. The single Chinese character that went with Chinese shan - and that hence also was naturally available to write san, the Japanese borrowing of this Chinese word - was now further available to write the Japanese word yama that translated Chinese shan. Unfortunately, this development also opened an almost equally enormous area of ambiguity, ambiguity that to a greater or lesser extent continues to characterize portions of the Japanese writing system down to the present time. This ambiguity has resulted because this particular use of Chinese characters, for writing Japanese words of the same, or nearly the same, meaning as those Chinese words originally going with the characters when properly employed to write Chinese, is essentially based on the technique of translation; and all translation is always a matter of approximation, rich in opportunities for ambiguity. No matter how close two languages may be to each other, translating from one to the other is never an automatic, cut and dried, one-to-one operation. Translation always encounters elements that must be approximated. It inevitably leaves semantic loose ends somewhere. This is true even when the languages involved are historically related to each other. But it is all the more striking, and all the more critical, when the languages involved are - as in the case of Chinese and Japanese - totally without a genetic link to one another. In such instances, the semantic approximations and the loose ends of left-over meanings to which any attempt at translation promptly gives rise easily assume major proportions. Furthermore, translation is always an open-ended process. In any given instance, almost any number of translations is possible. There is never just one correct way to say something in translation. Instead, we are almost always confronted with a considerable range of possible equivalents. Each of them is perhaps superior to the others in one way or another, but none of them is ever perfect. Translation is not an operation that admits of final solutions. The Japanese writing system involves virtually no ambiguity when Chinese characters are used to write Chinese words that have been borrowed into, or coined within, Japanese. But in this other variety of writing, where the use of Chinese characters in writing Japanese is ultimately based on translation, there is always the quite real

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possibility that when a text, once having been written, must now be read, a considerable degree of ambiguity will be inherent in its orthography - ambiguity arising out of the inevitably ambiguous nature of all inter-lingual translation. A particularly striking example of this inherently ambiguous feature of the modern Japanese writing system involves the usual orthography for male given names. Many male given names are composed linguistically of native Japanese morphemes. Such elements as hajime 'first', takashi 'exalted', yoshi 'good', hiro 'broad', kazu 'numerous', and o 'male' are either used alone or enter into composition to form such names as Hajime, Takashi, Yoshihiro, Kazuo, and the like. But there are also a considerable number of male given names that either consist entirely of, or partially incorporate, morphemes borrowed from Chinese. Thus, one encounters such borrowed Chinese elements as so 'complete', ichi 'one, first', kichi 'lucky', ryu 'exalted', ryo 'good', and ko 'broad', either in isolation or in composition in such names as Ryuichi, Sokichi, Ryoichi, Kokichi, and the like. A further complication that must be kept in mind is that each given name in Japan, men's and women's alike, is in theory at least supposed to be a unique coinage made up for the occasion by the parents, rather than being selected (as is customary in the West) from a ready-made repertory of already available male and female given names. The orthographic ambiguity with which we are here concerned arises because in the Japanese writing system it is customary to write a male given name entirely and exclusively in Chinese characters, whether the name is coined from native Japanese elements or from borrowed Chinese morphemes, or even - as is frequently the case - if it incorporates both these possible sources. A name consisting entirely of borrowed Chinese morphemes, like Ryoichi or Sokichi, presents no particular problem when written in Chinese characters. The problems arise when a name incorporates one or more native Japanese morphemes - which in a name will also always be written in Chinese characters. The characters that might be used to write a name like Ryuichi, a word that consists of two borrowed Chinese morphemes, could just as well be used to write the name Takakazu, which consists of two native Japanese morphemes - since Japanese taka 'high' is a possible translation of Chinese ryu, and Japanese kazu is a possible translation of ichi. Similarly, the two very different male given names Gen and Hajime may very well be written with the same Chinese character, as also Ryoji and Yoshitsugu, Joji and Tsunetsugi, etc., etc. - the list could be extended virtually without limit. The problem in orthographic ambiguity encountered here becomes all the more complex when we realize that there are almost literally hundreds of

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Chinese morphemes, and hundreds of Chinese characters going with them, that more or less adequately translate such Japanese morphemes as hajime, takashi, yoshi, and most of the other inherited morphemes most frequently favoured for male given names. The sociolinguistic scenario involved in all this is rather complicated. Parents first decide upon a name for a new-born boy. Next they decide how his name shall be written, selecting Chinese characters that either translate its constituent morphemes (if the name consists of native Japanese morphemes), or that go with its borrowed Chinese morphemes. In the former category especially, the opportunities for indulging personal whim and caprice are legion. Actually, the final orthographic choice is frequently made on the basis of advice from a fortune-teller who for a fee will inform the parents which characters are 'lucky' or 'unlucky' in their particular case; these instructions are in turn based upon a vast body of arcane lore, mostly of Chinese origin, that has nothing to do either with language or with writing. The boy thus named eventually grows up, gets a job in a company, and has his name printed in Chinese characters on his business card. But more often than not, a person receiving such a card cannot possibly do more than hazard a guess about what the given name printed on it actually is. Particularly if the boy's parents have indulged themselves in an even moderately bizarre choice of characters, their son will spend the rest of his adult life patiently explaining to everyone who receives his business card what his given name is supposed to be. Furthermore, when his given name appears written in Chinese characters in a newspaper, a book, or a telephone directory, no one who does not already know what his name is will be able to read it either. The only way anyone could possibly find out what the words are that go with all the male given names written in Chinese characters in the Tokyo telephone book would be to sit down, call up each person listed, and ask whoever answers what his name is. We have thus far spoken almost entirely of male given names because this is the area of the modern Japanese lexicon where this particular problem of orthographic ambiguity is the most striking. In the usual orthography for female given names, ambiguity is far less a problem. Many of these are written in kana; and even when Chinese characters are used, the orthographic conventions for this sub-set of names leave rather less room for doubt about how they are to be pronounced than in the case of men's names. Family names lie approximately half-way on the scale of ambiguity between the two extremes represented by male and female given names. One has at least a reasonable expectation of being able to pronounce a Japanese family name written in Chinese characters the first time one sees it, with

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somewhat better odds at being correct than in the case of a male given name, but with somewhat worse odds than in the case of a female given name. There is no question but that the ambiguity thus generated when Japanese personal names are written in Chinese characters - which they are, almost always - is often as frustrating to the Japanese as it is to Westerners trying to cope with the language; it is also rather unexpected that a sociolinguistic unity would long tolerate this sort of problem, particularly in the case of anything as specific and individual as personal names. But before we dismiss this entire phenomenon out of hand as merely another inscrutable paradox of an irrational foreign orthography, it is instructive to note that, for all the inconvenience it entails, it actually fits in quite well with the sociolinguistic structuring of the language itself. If it did not, it probably would have been remedied long ago. At issue here is the often overlooked fact that male given names are almost totally taboo in Japanese sociolinguistic usage. Far more than most foreign observers of the Japanese social and business scene generally realize, men's given names are largely ineffable, virtually sacred linguistic elements. They are only pronounced under specially delimited sociolinguistic conditions, typically by parent addressing child; otherwise, they are hardly ever heard or uttered aloud. Americans are of course notorious for the rapidity with which they attempt to switch to afirst-namebasis in social and business situations. The English always take rather longer. The Germans have a regularly formalized sociolinguistic ritual in which, sometimes after days, sometimes after years - or sometimes never - males mutually agree to address one another by their given names. In Japanese society, this simply never happens. Male friends may grow up together, they may go to school together, and they may thereafter associate with one another for all their lives; but they still do not generally ever address one another by their given names. Indeed, in many cases they may not even know what one another's given names are. They will generally know the Chinese characters that go with those names, but they will not by this fact necessarily know what the names themselves actually are. Under these circumstances, what could better serve this special sociolinguistic configuration of Japanese society than a writing system that, thanks to this particular employment of Chinese characters, makes it possible to write one of these virtually taboo male given names without actually ever knowing what the taboo linguistic form really is, i.e., how it is pronounced? Understanding this, we begin to see how something that at first

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glance might appear to be an almost fatal flaw in the Japanese writing system is, in actual fact, one of its most sophisticated resources. This feature of the orthography makes it possible, for example, to write, address, and mail a letter to a male correspondent, including his full name correctly written in Chinese characters, without ever once breaking the male given name taboo, and without ever once pronouncing the ineffable name of one's male correspondent. This is possible because, even with the Chinese characters with which the name is written in front of one, the actual morphemes that the writing was intended to represent by the boy's parents are not specifically identified or marked in any way. Thanks to the writing system, these special linguistic elements remain covert and safely taboo, known only to the parents in question and to their son. Writing systems are able to function only because the people who must use them already know all or most of the words being written. (This is one of the reasons why adult learners of foreign languages often have unexpected difficulty with new and unfamiliar writing systems, difficulty that in turn they frequently - and mistakenly - tend to attribute to native speakers of the language as well.) In the Japanese personal names we have the unusual case of what are in effect words that native speakers of the language concerned themselves do not always know - indeed, in the case of the virtually taboo male given names, words that no one except for the person named is really even supposed to know. The writing system neatly parallels this sociolinguistic structural feature of the language. Once we understand that, we also understand how what might at first appear to be only a tedious and irrational ambiguity of the orthography is actually one of the most subtle and effective of all its resources. The Japanese phonetic symbols known as kana - the second major set of written signs that the Japanese writing system employs - have already been described above and need not detain us much longer at this point. We have already described what the kana are - syllabic phonetic writing - and it is also a fairly simple matter to describe how these kana symbols are used in writing Japanese. In effect, they are used to write everything in the language that is left over when Chinese characters have been used to write words either borrowed from or coined on the basis of Chinese, or to write native Japanese words for which semantic equivalents are readily available in Chinese and which may therefore be written by means of Chinese characters employed as logographs on the principle of inter-lingual translation. The rest of a text - whatever remains after the resources of the two ways of using Chinese characters, either for writing Chinese words or for writing Japanese words, have been exhausted - is written in kana.

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Today the modern Japanese writing system uses two different sets of kana, each containing 46 symbols. The first set, called hiragana, is notable for its freely flowing calligraphic line, especially suitable for delicate, graceful penmanship. The second, known as katakana, is square, angular, and in general more abrupt and abbreviated, even though many of the signs in both sets originally derive from cursive graphic reductions and deformations of the same Chinese characters. The terms hiragana and katakana both incorporate the word kana (the variation in its initial between k and g in the two compounds is irregular), but the modifying elements hira and kata are etymologically somewhat obscure. The latter probably originally meant 'square' or 'angular', but the former largely defies historical explanation, as does the word kana itself. Since the kana symbols are used to write all those morphemes in a Japanese text that are left over and beyond the Japanese words, or borrowed or coined Chinese words, that are written with Chinese characters, this means that they are mainly used for Japanese grammatical elements such as case suffixes and verb and adjective inflections. They are also used to write recent borrowings into Japanese of words from modern European languages, particularly from English; thus, the Japanese word rajio, which means 'radio' and is of course borrowed from English radio, would normally be written in kana. The kana may also be used to write any other words, either native Japanese forms or Chinese borrowings, when it is felt that using Chinese characters would involve the modern reader with unduly difficult or unfamiliar written forms, particularly in the case of words properly written with Chinese characters not appearing on the Ministry of Education's approved list of 1,850. Indeed, there is no particularly cogent linguistic reason why entire Japanese texts could not be written entirely in kana, but they rarely are, apart from certain exceptions encountered in modern telecommunications, where texts are frequently transmitted entirely in kana. Either of the two modern sets of kana symbols, the hiragana or the katakana, could in principle also be used alone, to the total exclusion of the other. But today the usual orthographic convention is to use hiragana, in conjunction of course with Chinese characters, to write almost all texts, and to reserve katakana mainly for recent foreign borrowings. This has the advantage of making newly borrowed foreign words, which any page in a Japanese newspaper or weekly magazine generally turns up in surprising numbers, stand out from the rest of the text, rather in the same way that we use italic type to identify foreign words or phrases in the midst of English text.

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This then is what the modern Japanese writing system consists of, and how it functions today. Moreover, with a few minor matters of detail altered, the same description could also serve for the Japanese writing system throughout most of the history of the language. The rigid separation of the kana into two entirely separate sets of hiragana and katakana is the only really modern feature of the system described; effectively, this division was notfinallycarried out until well into the present century. Apart from this minor detail what we have described is not only the way the modern Japanese writing system is and works today, it is the way it has always been and worked. In other words, it is, and always was, elaborate, involved and complex. It has always imposed a considerable burden on the memory; and sometimes it is rather more ambiguous than we generally expect a writing system to be. But for all that, it is, and always was, simply just another way of writing another human language. But a reader familiar with most descriptions of the Japanese writing system as viewed by Europeans and Americans, particularly with accounts that try to associate the writing system either with the 'nature of the language' or with the 'psychology of the Japanese people', will by this time most likely have noticed that something appears to be missing here. What, the reader will by this time most likely be asking, ever happened to the 'ideographic nature' of the Japanese language? Why have you not even mentioned that immensely interesting and infinitely inscrutable facet of the language and the people who speak it, that marvellous mystery that follows from the very fact that the Japanese use Chinese characters - which, after all, are really 'ideographs' or 'ideograms', are they not? - when they write their language? What you have described appears to leave no room for ideas or for concepts, or for their cunning and exotic graphic representation. In plain fact, it all sounds disappointingly quite like any other way of writing any other language, except of course for being somewhat more complicated because of all those Chinese characters that it involves. Why, in a word, have you been so mean as to pass in silence over the ideographic marvels and mysteries of Japanese, which 'everyone knows' is an 'ideographic language'? That questions such as these should arise is natural enough. Popular writing by Westerners about the Japanese writing system generally tries to make a case for 'ideographic' writing, and for Japanese itself as somehow being an 'ideographic language'. What an 'ideographic language' might in actual fact be is seldom explained, much less defined; presumably it would be a language that has somehow been transmogrified out of the usual run of human language by reason of its association with the - in this case, borrowed! - Chinese script. Be that

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as it may, what might appear to be missing from the description above is not missing by accident. It is missing because there is nothing in the Japanese writing system, or in the Japanese language - or for that matter in either the Chinese writing system or the Chinese language that in any way corresponds to the often encountered claims, mostly in writing by foreigners, about 'ideographic script' and 'ideographic language'. Neither of these nebulously named entities actually exists; both are purely imaginary, and both rest solely upon an over-literal understanding of the 'ideo' in the unfortunate term 'ideograph', arrived at through the same process of fecund paraphrase already noted, and refuted, above. In the case of both China and Japan, the traditional writing systems are complex, involved, and time-consuming to learn and use. In many ways they are also decorative and attractive; in many ways they are also a great nuisance. But this is the only essential difference between these writing systems and writing as it is used anywhere else in the world today. If anything, the modern Japanese writing system is rather more complex, somewhat more time-consuming, and in general even a greater nuisance than the original Chinese writing system from which it was borrowed and adapted. This is mostly to be explained by the fact that Japanese and Chinese are historically two quite different languages of totally different genetic origin and entirely different structures. Borrowing a script originally devised to write the one and using it to write the other raised a raft of complex problems that could in turn only be solved by evolving a large repertory of equally complex graphic conventions. But that is really all there is to it; and ideas or thoughts or concepts as entities somehow relating directly to the script, or somehow functioning directly vis-a-vis the language and its speakers in a way unknown to other languages, particularly to European languages with their alphabetic writing systems, simply do not enter into the question - except in the romantic and unsubstantiated speculations of uninformed and unreliable foreign writers on 'Things Japanese'. Significantly, one will search in vain for such misleading statements in most modern accounts of Japanese writing written by Japanese. Only one important exception to this generalization is to be found in Japan today, but on closer scrutiny this turns out to be a classic case of the 'exception that proves the rule'. This exception is provided by a few maverick authors who, however, always prove on closer inspection to have got those 'exotic ideas' about how their language is written during longer or shorter periods spent studying in America or Europe. These writers are hence as easily distinguished by the history of their background and training as by the content of what they write; in both

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they stand clearly apart from the mainstream of Japanese writing and scholarship on these topics, which remains significantly silent on this whole issue of 'ideographs', 'ideograms', and 'ideographic language'. Professor Suzuki Takao of Waseda University is, for example, representative of a very small minority group among Japanese academics who regularly and stridently argue for the existence of a special 'ideographic' quality within the Japanese language, and who assign special importance to the so-called 'ideographic nature' of the language - but who talk, of course, entirely about the writing system and hardly at all about the language while they discuss all these things. Professor Suzuki himself tells us how he came to hold these surprisingly unorthodox views: When I first came to the United States of America [in 1950] as a visiting graduate student from Japan in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, with the hope that I might continue with the study of linguistic meaning, the first thing I learned, to my great consternation, was that modern linguistics here had nothing to do with semantics.5 One wonders if Suzuki's disappointment would have been equally momentous if he had, for example, mistakenly enrolled in the Chemistry Department in order to study watercolour painting, or in the Art Department in order to study music and harmony. But at any rate, the impenetrable if undeniably poignant confusion of halfmisunderstood terms and concepts attested in the above paragraph seems to have pervaded his entire brief brush with formal training in linguistic science. Thereafter, the role of writing vis-a-vis the Japanese language not only became the theme of much of Suzuki's work, but has assumed the proportions of a crusade in his writing. Suzuki now frequently purports to prove, in a number of best-selling Japanese books, that Japanese is in this respect not only unique among the world's languages, but also, and by the same token, a language that is plainly superior to all other human languages. Curiously enough, Suzuki does not advance either allegation neither that of being unique, much less that of being superior - on behalf of Chinese, the language from which Japanese borrowed this same writing system to which he now would assign such enormous potency. At any rate, Suzuki has himself published representative samples of his own work in English (including the essay from which the self-revelatory paragraph above is extracted), while other aspects of his large Japanese-language oeuvre have already been more than adequately explored and refuted in easily available Western-language

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publications, so we need not let him and his Western-influenced ideographic theories about his language detain us longer.6 The other apparently significant exception is provided by a few members of the Japanese aesthetic establishment who specialize in introducing Westerners into the arcane mysteries of the traditional Japanese arts such as the tea ceremony and flower arrangement - and in the process of providing such introduction, generally also manage to take a couple of misleading side-swipes at the Japanese writing system. Thus, Sen Soshitsu XV, the present hereditary head {iemoto) of one of the most powerful and prestigious schools of the traditional tea ceremony cult, is quoted in an English-language daily paper published in Japan as follows: We cannot say that it is totally impossible to have time for reflection and relaxation because of the fact that one has a very tight schedule. The word in Japanese for 'busy' is isogashii, which consists of two parts in the written character: 'heart' at the left, 'lose' at the right. Therefore, the word 'busy' actually means to 'lose one's heart'. We must always be mindful of not losing our heart, even if we are very busy.7 Excellent advice, to be sure. But it hardly follows from the quasilinguistic - and totally Chinese orthographic - argument that iemoto Sen here advances. This variety of misleading argumentation from the Chinese script - concerning the theoretical and methodological lapses of which we shall see more below - apparently comes especially easily to the iemoto, the hereditary leaders in the traditional Japanese arts. Nor is it particularly difficult to identify a few of the principal reasons why this should be so. Though the iemoto have been trained almost from infancy in their own specialities - flower arrangement, tea ceremony, and the like - they almost never have had any higher education, much less formal training in language and linguistics. They know the Japanese language, to be sure. But in the absence of formal training in that field, this no more makes them qualified experts on the subject than the fact that they also, presumably, have complete and functioning circulatory systems makes them specialists in disorders of the vascular system. To this simple lack of education and training must be added the powerful stimulus of their frequent contacts with Westerners who, they soon learn, have an apparently insatiable appetite for this sort of thing. Moreover, the traditional arts have always been taught in Japan simply by requiring the student to mimic the physical movements and actions of the master - always without any serious attempt at verbal

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instruction, or at explaining in a coherent fashion why this or that is to be done in the way that it is. The Westerner, unlike the more docile Japanese disciple, generally will not settle for hours of simple rote mimicry in lieu of instruction. Having paid good money, he or she wants to be told something, anything, that will help in understanding what the whole mysterious business is about. Lacking any experience in providing such verbal explanations for his Japanese disciples, the iemoto is at first quite at a loss about how to assuage the demands of his foreign students - until he at last stumbles upon the gambit of talking about the writing system. In the end, the iemoto's genial ignorance of the subject he mostly ends up talking about blends together with the eager reception that such unfounded statements always receive from equally uninformed foreigners, finally to produce a heady, irresistible synergism of impressive misinformation. It is thus not particularly difficult to explain the perennial popularity of the ideographic myth concerning Japanese writing on several different levels. But, at the same time, this quite unnecessary misunderstanding concerning the way in which Japanese - and for that matter, Chinese - is written is not only so widespread but also so persistent that we can hardly avoid asking what larger factors might possibly be responsible for the surprising frequency with which we encounter it. Any phenomenon this common is likely to have, somewhere behind it, elements of causation rather more significant than the unfortunate accidents of background and training, or the simplistic desire to tell foreigners what they obviously like to hear, to which we have assigned the speculations of a Suzuki or a Sen. Leonard Bloomfield probably pointed in the direction of the larger answer to this question when he wrote of the way in which 'popular belief, the world over, exaggerates the effect of language'. As Bloomfield explained this, we are too often unwilling to settle for a definition, much less for an overall view, of language that would make this phenomenon into the essentially simple and direct stimulusand-response mechanism of social intercourse that it really is. Too much of the superstitious survives in the educational, not to mention the folklorist, background of all of us to make this view of language, correct though it surely is, an easy one to accept. And so, since it is essentially uncomfortable with language as a stimulus-andresponse mechanism, 'popular belief deems speech alone insufficient, and supposes that there is also some transference of a non-physical entity, an idea or thought\ over and above the actual speech act itself. All this, Bloomfield further pointed out, is in turn connected with 'the metaphysical doctrine which sets out to connect the graphic symbols

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directly with "thoughts" or "ideas" - as though these symbols were correlated with objects and situations and not with speech-sounds.'8 Bloomfield was so close on-target in this particular passage that it actually comes as something of a surprise to read further in the same chapter of his 1933 book and learn that he was not thinking, in this connection at least, of Chinese and Japanese writing at all. His tellingly accurate strictures on 'popular belief had to do only with teaching, learning and correctly evaluating our familiar, European-style alphabetic writing system. But there certainly is no question that what Bloomfield said in this passage relates equally well to the common misrepresentation of Chinese and Japanese writing as somehow being ideographic in nature - whether we find this misrepresentation in writing by foreigners, or in books and articles by Japanese who, like Suzuki and Sen, have learned how to write what foreigners apparently like to read. In other words, at least one segment of the explanation we are seeking for the perennial popularity of misrepresentation about socalled ideographic writing and ideographic languages is to be found, simply and plainly, in the generally untutored folk-belief that most European culture tends to hold toward all writing, and toward all language. This belief superstitiously deems 'speech alone insufficient', and hence postulates 'some . . . non-physical entity . . . over and above the actual speech act itself. The avidity with which Westerners have allowed themselves to be taken in by the ideographic myth is in large measure at least to be explained by this same 'generally untutored folk-belief that Bloomfield wrote about. In the specific case of Chinese characters, particularly in connection with their use in the Japanese writing system, there is probably another important folkloristic by-path of explanation that is also worth exploring. Memorizing several thousand Chinese characters is a considerable burden for any student. It is a considerable burden for the young native-speaker of either Chinese or Japanese, but it is even more onerous in the case of the adult foreign student of these languages, who generally must learn the language at the same time that he or she is trying to learn the script. Moreover, this task is if anything even more demanding in the case of Japanese than it is for Chinese, since, as we have seen, Chinese characters are used both for Chinese words and for Japanese words in writing Japanese texts. For the student of Chinese it is sufficient to learn and to remember how to write the single character that is used to write the word shan 'mountain'. But for the student of Japanese, it is necessary to remember rather more. The student of Japanese must always keep in mind that this same character in writing Japanese is not

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only used to write the Chinese loanword san but also to write the native Japanese word yama that means 'mountain' and that by and large translates Chinese shan into Japanese. Chinese characters when they are used in writing Japanese remain logographic in principle, but because in Japanese they are used as logographs not only for Chinese loanwords and for Chinese neologisms but also for inherited Japanese words, the burden that they place upon the memory is exponentially increased in the case of Japanese text. Teachers instructing adult foreigners in Japanese frequently attempt to ease this considerable burden of rote memory work by recourse to what may be termed the historical epigraphy, or graphic etymology, of Chinese characters. The student is often told how a given character was originally formed - what its graphic elements consist of, which parts of a character in its present-day written form may still be identified as variants of original picture-writing, or which elements appear to have or once to have had a vestigial phonetic function. All this is innocent enough. It is merely designed to make the student's task of remembering how to write and read the characters a little easier than it would be if one were simply forced to rely on sheer rote memory, learning each individual character as a totally unique graphic constellation. Sometimes this graphic analysis of Chinese characters presented to the foreign student is historically correct. It is possible to determine with a fair degree of historical accuracy the principles according to which some - but by no means all - Chinese characters were originally devised in the first millennia BC. But in most cases, where the historical facts of the formation of the characters are either not known, or else are too complex to serve as a useful mnemonic device, the foreign student is told what is only a graphic folk-etymology: a clever explanation that serves its purpose - to jog the student's memory without being historically accurate. Thus, a text-book of Japanese prepared for American students, and published by an American university press, includes such patently absurd etymologies as one that would derive a Chinese character used to write a word for the lapel or collar of a garment from an 'ancient pictograph' showing a sketch-outline of a modern Japanese schoolboy's Eton-style blazer jacket - which article, if we were to take this folk-etymology literally, must be supposed to have existed in China in the second millennium BC!9 Much of the persistent misrepresentation of the Japanese script and language as somehow being ideographic in nature probably has its origin in these irresponsible graphic explanations, originally manufactured solely as emergency mnemonic devices for overburdened foreign language students. Particularly powerful perpetrators of this

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facet of the ideographic myth are 'explanations' of the characters that, like the one just quoted, appear in books published by university presses and other academic agencies, sources that the inexperienced and uninstructed student of the language and of the script might well be forgiven for taking as authoritative and reliable. Unfortunately, too many of them are neither. The example cited is on the face of it so absurd that it probably causes the student of average intelligence more mirth than mischief. But others are less obviously false, though equally inaccurate, and are particularly insidious because they often end in misleading even the intelligent and informed foreign observer about the nature of both Chinese and Japanese writing. A representative example of this last variety of folk-etymology is frequently provided for the Chinese character used to write the Chinese word ming 'bright'. In Japanese this same Chinese character is used to write the morphemes mei and myo; both mean 'bright' and both are borrowings, at different historical periods, of earlier Chinese pronunciations of this same word ming. Additionally, this same character is used as a logograph to write the native Japanese word akira, also meaning 'bright', along with several other Japanese words of similar or related semantic import, all of which more or less satisfactorily translate Chinese ming. The foreign student of both Chinese and Japanese is almost always told that this character is a particularly apt ideographic representation of the idea or concept of'brightness' because its written form consists of a juxtaposition of two other characters, on the left one that is also used for a word meaning 'moon', and on the right one that is also used to write a word meaning 'sun'. What better way, the student is told, could there be for 'expressing the idea' of 'brightness' than thus to bring together the ideographs for 'sun' and 'moon'? This explanation serves its immediate purpose. It provides a handy way for the student to remember how to write the Chinese character ming - the same character that is used to write mei, myo, akira, and several other words in Japanese - but it happens not to be historically true. We now know from technical studies in Chinese epigraphy that this Chinese character only happens to look, inks present-day written form, as if it consisted of an ideographic juxtaposition of the characters for 'sun' and 'moon'. In reality its graphic history is quite different, and far more complicated than this frequently encountered folketymology even suggests. The character in question did not originally consist of 'sun' and 'moon' in graphic juxtaposition, and it is not an 'ideograph' that 'expresses an idea', no more so in its historical origin than in its modern orthographic employment.10 The native Chinese or Japanese student of the writing system is only

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rarely exposed to these epigraphic pseudo-explanations. This is because he or she generally has the entire long period of elementary and secondary education available for the task of learning the characters, and hence need not resort to such dangerous short-cuts as aids to the necessary rote memory work. But for the foreign student, who in addition to not knowing the language in question is also generally an adult, time is of the essence. He or she is frequently given an enormous dose of this extremely dangerous medicine. Frequently also, the foreign student ends up remembering these stories and fables about the composition of the Chinese characters, fanciful and historically inaccurate though they generally are, long after the characters themselves have been forgotten. But because these stories themselves are often so memorable, they eventually form the basis of much of what has been written about Chinese and Japanese script and language in Europe and the West - leading in turn to the persistence of the general ideographic delusion. What was originally never intended to be more than a mnemonic device for harried students has instead become the foundation for a full-blown, and highly misleading, myth about both language and script. Sometimes, to be sure, recent advances in the science of Chinese historical epigraphy mean that we now have a fairly secure basis for making historical statements about how this or that Chinese character was originally devised (in the case of a simple graph), or composed (as in the case of the more common composite graphs). But even in China and Japan, this knowledge remains almost exclusively the property of specialists. It has absolutely nothing to do with the way in which the script is actually used in writing either Chinese or Japanese today. In particular, it does not make it necessary to postulate - to borrow Bloomfield's trenchant language again - 'some transference of a nonphysical entity, an idea or thought'. On those fortunate occasions when we do know fairly accurately why a given Chinese character is written in the way in which it is, what we then have at our disposal is specific information about its graphic etymology, i.e., about its history as a sign. But such graphic etymology neither can nor does play any part in the choice or selection of a given character in writing a text, either in Chinese or Japanese, any more than we entertain considerations of Germanic or Indo-European etymology when we select the words we employ in an English-language text - much less in deciding how we are going to spell those words. Specialists know the etymologies - which are often surprising to the amateur - of large numbers of English words. But this knowledge does not even remotely play a role in determining what words we use, or how we spell them. What words we use is a matter of the linguistic

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structure and lexical resources of our language; how we spell them is a matter of orthographic convention. Both are arbitrary structural sets; neither is open to determined choice or selection on any basis, much less on the basis of etymological or other specialized historical information. The specialist may realize that English quick, vitamin, biology, and zoology all in one way or another incorporate different developments of a single original morpheme that may be reconstructed as IndoEuropean *gwei- 'to live'; that English tame and diamond etymologically go back to a common origin, as do also door and foreign and sweet and hedonism; and that the English verb leave actually has no etymological connection with the English noun leave.11 But important and fascinating as such recondite etymological information is, surely no one would seriously suggest that any of it plays a part in deciding what we say or write in English about the things to which these words refer, or in determining how we will spell any of these words. Specialized knowledge concerning the actual, historically accurate epigraphical history of Chinese characters is about as rare among the general reading and writing public in China and Japan as specialized knowledge of English etymology of the type sketched above is among speakers and writers of English in England and America. Such specialized knowledge provides insights into how the Chinese script evolved millennia ago in ancient China. But it is without any significance for understanding the way that script is used today in its homeland, or in Japan. Japanese society has traditionally suffered from what can in all charity only be described as a persistently bad conscience about its relations with China, particularly when it comes to the question of the many facets of its own civilization that it has borrowed, more or less directly, from that country. On this list of borrowings, of course, the script occupies a position of capital importance. As we have seen, the simple fact of having borrowed a script from another country, and from another culture, is surely nothing to feel guilty about. If it were, then virtually every literate culture in the world today would be equally guilty. But this has not prevented the Japanese from feeling especially vulnerable on this point throughout most of their history. The events of recent decades have done much to add to this already considerable burden of guilt that the Japanese have long felt toward China. Even though the Japanese educational establishment has done everything possible to keep the sordid details from public notice, the Japanese have in recent years become increasingly well informed about the Japanese Army's arrogant invasion of China in the 1930s, and in particular about the shameless, wanton, and often surprisingly

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inhuman behaviour of many Japanese in China, military and civilians alike, in the period between the Japanese invasion of the mainland and the termination of the so-called Pacific War in August 1945. The more the Japanese learn about what they did in China in the recent past, the greater their sense of guilt - quite over and above their already considerable burden of historical guilt arising from the sense of cultural inferiority that, as a nation, they have always entertained toward everything Chinese. Society generally responds to stimuli of this variety, particularly stimuli provided by persistent feelings of communal guilt arising from a communal sense of inferiority, in varied but always significantly structured ways. Two of the ways in which modern Japanese society has responded to its sense of guilt concerning its borrowing of the script from China - a sense of guilt that, unlike that involved in the war-crimes and civilian atrocities of the war-years in China, is as unnecessary as it is culturally irrelevant - are particularly revealing, more for what they tell us of the workings of the Japanese social and cultural conscience than for their actual content. One of these responses began to make itself heard in the latter half of the seventeenth century, a period that saw the first stirrings of what later became known as 'The National Learning' (Kokugaku). This was a literary-historical movement that began by attempting to wean the interest of Japanese scholars and intellectuals away from Chinese literature, seeking to focus it upon Japanese texts instead. This it did in the hope that, in the process, scholars would come to look with renewed favour upon the native ideas, views, and aesthetic canons embodied in those texts, where it was believed, without much foundation, such Japanese ideas, views and canons could still be detected in their pristine, pre-Chinese forms. By the time it reached its zenith, however, the Kokugaku movement had pretty generally shifted its emphasis towards disparaging and denigrating all Chinese culture, meanwhile extolling Japanese literature and other native cultural expressions as unique and superior. For the adherents of this movement, of course, Japan's enormous cultural debt to China, particularly as demonstrated by its obviously borrowed script, was a major embarrassment, one that they met head on by an early version of the 'big lie' technique. They simply fabricated the myth that long before the Japanese borrowed the Chinese script, they had actually invented a totally independent script of their own. This they called the jinji or 'script of [the age of] the gods'. Eventually the Kokugaku adherents even provided the public with selected samples of what this pious orthographic fraud was supposed to have looked like in remote antiquity.

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Their thesis was that this early, divinely-inspired Japanese invention had unfairly and unwisely been neglected by subsequent generations in favour of the borrowed Chinese script, in what they were in turn eventually to cite as yet another example of Chinese cunning and perfidy. Of course, none of this was even remotely true. The myth was sheer fabrication, and the examples of the supposedly indigenous script that it offered in evidence are now easily seen to be nothing more than clumsy mis writings of- of all things! - the Korean syllabic-phonetic script in use on the peninsula from the mid fifteenth century on.12 But this did not prevent the myth of the existence of this 'script of the age of the gods' from being taught in all high seriousness during Japan's fascist-nationalist period, or from finding its way into Western scholarly handbooks on the history of writing, where it is still lamentably alive and well.13 No one in modern Japan takes this 'script of the age of the gods' seriously. The education authorities have at last stopped teaching about it in Japanese schools. But this has not prevented Japanese intellectual circles from continuing to respond in characteristic ways to this same problem of their guilty national conscience. Today this process of reaction to the stimulus of guilt largely operates by means of what may be termed 'internalization'. This is a well-attested variety of face-saving rationalization by means of which a social unit comes to terms with an unwelcome or hostile outside force by a simple, if major, act of will. By internalization a society determines to treat any outside elements that appear to threaten it, or that in some way or other disturb its conscience, as if they were not outside but internal - not borrowed or otherwise originating from a foreign source but really ours after all, and hence no threat to our cultural integrity and social peace of mind. Even to attempt, much less successfully to carry off, this sort of internalization in the case of anything as obviously borrowed as the Chinese script in Japanese orthography requires, to say the least, a major act of suspension of disbelief. Alongside this the White Queen's injunction to Alice, urging her to practice believing six impossible things before breakfast, pales by comparison. But what man feels he must do, man always can do, be it ever so difficult. Many Japanese intellectuals today seriously argue that their borrowed Chinese script is not really borrowed, or really Chinese, at all, but something that 'we Japanese' somehow made up 'ourselves'. We have already discussed an incipient example of this in the earlier citation from flower-arrangement iemoto Sen, seeking to teach a didactic significance for the Japanese word isogashi-i 'be busy' on the basis of a folk-etymology for one of the Chinese characters that may be used to write this word as a translation-based logograph. If there is

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anything at all to what Sen says, it can only be valid if we assume that China is the same country and has the same language as Japan, or else that the Japanese made up the Chinese characters - both demonstrably false propositions. This genial confusion between Chinese script and Japanese language remains a harmless curiosity so long as it is limited to practitioners of the traditional arts. But what shall we say of it when, as frequently, it turns up in the work of Japanese scholars who are putative authorities, not in arranging flowers or drinking ceremonial tea, but in Japanese language and linguistics? For a particularly striking example of this latter variety of the phenomenon of internalization we may cite the following passage by Professor Ono Susumu, incumbent of a chair of Japanese language and linguistics at a major and prestigious Japanese university, a scholar widely regarded in Japan as an authority on all questions of the Japanese language. Professor Ono's remarks, which make up the introductory paragraphs of an essay entitled T h e Linguistic World of Japanese', begin with a question: Things either are or are not. The fact of being, or not being, is as different as heaven is from earth or as light is from dark. This being so, what in fact was the source from which the word am ['to be, to exist'] was formed? Or, to put it another way, how did the ancient Japanese go about understanding the meaning of aruT It is his answer to this question that is astonishing: 'In considering this we should first look at the two ideographs [sic!] that are read as aru' - in other words, we should study Chinese historical epigraphy for a clue to ihe^working of the minds of the 'ancient Japanese'. Ono then proceeds to speculate about the graphic histories of the two modern Chinese characters, tsdimdydu, that today are frequently employed in Japan as translation-based logographic writings for the Japanese word ar-u. The first of these characters he believes to show that by aru the Japanese had 'the concept of damming a stream with earth' in mind, while the other seems to him 'to have been that of something that happened suddenly, or appeared unexpectedly.'14 It would be possible, but unnecessarily unkind, to cite Ono at far greater length on this subject. He has much more to say, all of it equally incorrect and misleading. Here our concern is mainly with his surprising success in internalizing the Chinese writing system. For him, it is entirely Japanese, and apparently never had anything to do with China at all. How do we learn 'how the ancient Japanese [went] about understanding the meaning of aru\ which is an inherited, native Japanese word? According to Ono, we inspect the epigraphic history of the various Chinese characters developed by the Chinese millennia ago, in order to write several different Chinese words, which several

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different Chinese words all happen to be capable of rough translation by this Japanese verb aru. Unlike Sen, Ono is no flower arranger. He is a university professor. He of course had a university education himself. It is impossible that he does not know just how absurd all this is, on one carefully compartmentalized mental level. Yet so completely has he internalized the Chinese script, and so successfully - on yet another rigidly compartmentalized level of his thinking - has he concealed from himself the very fact of its Chinese origins, that we find him writing exactly as if China never existed, and as if the Japanese had themselves invented this, their totally borrowed writing system. What is perhaps even more striking, we also find the esteemed Asahi Newspapers going to the trouble of translating all this into English, and publishing it for all the world to read, in partial fulfilment of their self-assumed task of 'telling the world the truth about Japan'. Those of us who are unable to follow Ono in the labyrinthine legerdemain of his watertight mental compartmentalization are left to ask, how in the world can something that happened millennia ago in a far-distant country - in this instance, in China of the second millennia BC, which is where and when the characters to which Ono refers were devised - tell us anything about the thought-process of the people he calls the 'ancient Japanese' - the Japanese who borrowed these characters in the sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian era? Even this query passes over, in silence somewhat more dignified than it deserves, Ono's astonishing imputation that the Japanese first studied Chinese historical epigraphy before 'making up' the words of their own language, including words like the verb ar-u 'to be, to exist'. Specialists in Chinese epigraphy will also, for that matter, seriously disagree with most of the specific details of Ono's graphic analysis of the Chinese characters that figure in his discussion. And while this too is a serious defect in his argument, it hardly matters, a fortiori, alongside the other problems raised by his complete internalization of the Chinese script, and by his go-it-alone decision to treat the Chinese script as if it were an indigenous Japanese cultural invention - which he, along with everyone else in the world, obviously knows that it is not. Of course, it is perfectly pointless to go to the Chinese script to study the etymology, much less the 'basic conceptualization' or 'original meaning', of any Japanese word. In this particular case, for example, we know that both the form and meaning of the Old Japanese verb -. Early forms of Mongolian have e, and o. A few short text examples will be sufficient to demonstrate that even more is lost when, as customary among Western translators of Old Japanese poetry, the elaborately vocalized eighth-century originals are reduced to the simple modern Tokyo five-vowel scheme, together with the many reductions in consonantism. When we find translators citing in romanization, as the basis for their renderings, spurious recastings of Old Japanese such as the following, it becomes easier to understand why their translations depart almost entirely from the sense, not to mention the music, of the originals. For example, in a single Man'yoshu poem, number 923, we may contrast (on the left) two representative passages from the recast text that two modern translators print, with the corresponding passages as they appear in the actual Old Japanese original (on the right): . . . Harube wa Hana sakiori . . . . . . Momoshiki no Omiyabito wa Tsune ni kayowan.20

Farube Fa Fana sakiwowori . . . momosiki no oFomiyaFito Fa tune ni kayoFamu.21

Surely it would be difficult even to imagine two texts - or two underlying languages - more different from one another than these. The spuriously recast text that the translators employ incorporates phonetic features totally unknown to Old Japanese, particularly long vowels and the syllabic nasal -w, while at the same time it reduces the rich vocalization of the original to the pallid five vowels of modern Tokyo speech. Equally disastrously, it obscures the intricate patterns of head-rime and assonance that were of immense importance to the Old Japanese poet. Even the reader without Japanese will surely be struck by the patterns of labial repetition (F..b..F..F..w..w.. m. .m.., etc.) that distinguish at the same time that they decorate what are after all only fragments from a much longer poem, one in which these same devices are employed on an even more involved

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scale. In the second line cited above, all this labial assonance has disappeared from the spurious modern text, either because it is there disguised under consonantal change (modern hana for Old Japanese Fana\ or in the development of the much later long vowels (sakiori for earlier sakiwowovi). When we thus understand the nature and implications of the sheer linguistic violence that the translators have done their originals, the wide divergence of their English versions from the simple sense of the texts becomes somewhat less astonishing, though not a whit less reprehensible. The first fragment cited above means, quite simply and literally, 'in the spring, / blossoms bloom luxuriantly'. The same translators whose spuriously romanized text is cited above render this, 'In the springtime / Bright flowers blossom on the mountain walls.'22 The second means, 'the courtiers of the great hundredfold palace shall pay court forever.' Their rendering: 'The courtiers will come / In reverent corps to these imperial halls / Erected on foundations multiwalled.'23 There is hardly any need to dwell on the large number of unauthorized interpolations and unnecessary additions that these translations embody; suffice it to say that the violence their text does to the language of the original is matched only by the violence their translation does to its sense. Fragments, again representative of the whole, from another Man'yoshu poem, number 135, illustrate still other patterns of assonance and sound-arrangement in the original that the translators first destroy in their romanization, then overlook in their translation: . . . Ikuri ni zo Fukamiru ouru Aviso ni zo Tamamo wa ouvu. . . 24

. . . ikuri ni so Fukaniiru oFuru aviso ni so tamamo Fa oFuvu . . . 25

Here not only has the translators' text obscured the labial assonance in which the verb oFuv-u 'to grow thick, large (of vegetation)' so notably participates but, as for example in the third line cited above, it misses completely the delicate contrast of the d in avisd with the 6 in the emphatic quasi-copula so, their text having only the modern forms aviso and zo for the two. Old Japanese aviso was originally a contraction, by vowel haplology, of ava'iso 'large rock (isd) that becomes visible or exposed (ara)' at the line between water and land with shifts in tide and waves. The literal sense of the fragment cited is, 'on the reef / the deep rriivu grows: / on the exposed rocks / the gemweed grows. . . .' Old Japanese rriivu was the name of a specific variety of seaweed, 'a green, fleshy water plant with forked

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branches',26 prized by the poets because the word was a homophone with the verb miru 'to see, to meet'. The translators' 'Yes, there where the seaweed grows, / Clinging to rocks fathoms beneath the waves, / And where on the stony strand / The seaweed grows like polished gems'27 is as far from the sense of the original as their text is from its delicately arranged sound-patterns. Particularly in view of such evidence, one is at a loss to understand what the same translators had in mind when they wrote that sometimes the Old Japanese poets set up 'perturbations to direct the natural onward-pressing flow of Japanese into meaningful channels and to assure that the vocalic softness of the language would not become monotonously sweet.'28 If there is a danger of the 'monotonously sweet' in any of this, it is entirely in their spurious modern-vowel texts, hardly in the language of the originals with its eleven separate and distinctively contrasting vowels. These, then, are some of the major challenges that the Old Japanese language per se throws down to the translation of its literary monuments - challenges that remain by and large unanswered because translators have by and large ignored the very existence of the language itself. But even these problems pale by comparison with those of the second major category that we must consider, namely, the special literary devices and rhetorical techniques of Old Japanese literature. Unlike the distinctive features of the language itself, these particular questions have frequently been the subject of study and discussion by Western translators of early Japanese texts. But out of such work has, to date at least, evolved very little of immediate relevance to the pressing problems of translation that these devices present. The net result has been that, like the Old Japanese language itself, the special literary devices of Old Japanese texts are generally ignored, when not actually misrepresented, in the bulk of available translations. A particularly important category of distinctive Old Japanese rhetorical technique is one that Japanese scholars call makura kotoba, a term that is usually, but quite misleadingly, translated by Western scholars as 'pillow words'. This translation is inaccurate as well as unfortunate. The word makura here has little to do with 'pillow', except insofar as the term embodies a metaphor in which the makura kotoba is viewed as 'supporting' ('pillowing') the subsequent word to which it is an attribute, as a makura 'pillow' supports the head; the same sense survives in modern Japanese makuragi 'a railroad tie (American); a sleeper (British)'. (We have also seen this same sense in the literary term uta makura, briefly described above in this same chapter.) The makura kotoba of Old Japanese literary texts represent, in

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effect, a large repertory of formalized or stylized qualifiers for specific nouns. They have often been compared, not without justification, to Homeric 'wine-red sea' or 'ox-eyed Athene'. But the makura kotoba differ from these classical analogues chiefly by being both a wider and a freer category, one to which the poets continued to add throughout the Old Japanese period, and also by being far less simple semantically than the Greek parallels would suggest. In fact, in the case of a great many of the Old Japanese makura kotoba, the semantic link between the formalized qualifier and the specific noun to which it is aligned is now partially obscure, and probably always was. From this it follows that most of the makura kotoba in Old Japanese texts are used as much for the aesthetic effect of their phonological shape as for their meaning. In other words, it was often in large measure - and sometimes, almost entirely - as a consequence of the way these expressions sounded in Old Japanese that they served their purpose of qualifying the specific nouns to which they were attached. This naturally presents would-be translators of texts employing these makura kotoba with formidable difficulties, difficulties that only become even more enormous when the translators persist in ignoring the phonological facts of the language involved. A representative example of the makura kotoba problem is provided by one of the fragments ofMan 'yoshu poem 923 exhibited earlier in the present chapter:. . .momosiki no / oFomiyaFitd Fa / tune ni kayoFamu 'the courtiers of the great hundredfold palace shall pay court forever'. Old Japanese momosiki is a makura kotoba, a stylized formulaic epithet frequently aligned with oFomiya 'great palace'. The sense of the first morpheme in momosiki is clear enough: it is momo, the Old Japanese word for 'hundred'. But no one today has any convincing explanation for what the siki element means - or even more importantly, for what it meant during the time of the Old Japanese poets. The most reliable reference works for Old Japanese list a number of speculations (always carefully identifying them as just that): perhaps, they tell us, siki meant 'made of timbers (ki)\ or perhaps it mant 'a ki "citadel" of stone', etc, etc.29 The etymological problem as such cannot be solved. But in a sense, even to attempt to solve it is only to deflect the consideration of this (or of any other Old Japanese makura kotoba) away from the dimension proper to the literary and aesthetic rationale of the texts. What is important for the translator of these texts to understand is that the second element in this expression is now obscure, and also probably was obscure to most of the Old Japanese poets, who as a consequence employed the entire makura kotoba only partly for its sense, and mainly for its sound. Qualifying oFomiya 'palace' with momosiki had both a semantic and a

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phonetic function: the momo 'hundred' morpheme communicated the sense of complex, elaborate, myriad, while the siki element left in interesting and engaging semantic obscurity the precise identity of whatever aspect of the oForriiya it was that was thus qualified. Confronted with the enormous challenge of this makura kotoba device, the translators have opted for various solutions; a selection of representative renderings for momosiki will show the direction that most of them have taken. Frequently this and similar terms are simply omitted.30 This may hardly be said to be a solution at all, because it tells the reader of the translation nothing about the original at this point. When, on the other hand, translators have attempted to fashion a semantic rendering for momosiki, they may be observed engaging in a wide variety of speculative paraphrase, almost all of which is unfortunate in the extreme, not merely because it is speculation and paraphrase and not proper translation, but also, and especially, because it more often than not builds into the translation features and concepts totally foreign to Old Japanese culture and civilization. Thus, in published translations of this same poem, we find such renderings of momosiki as 'created on foundations multi-walled',31 and 'hundred-acre'. 32 In other translations it has been rendered 'fortressstrong',33 'walls once thick with wood and stone',34 'mighty',35 and 'great'.36 The principal problem with all these translations is that the more they attempt to tell us, the further they stray from the mark. We know from archaeological evidence that the oFomiya 'palace' in the Old Japanese period frequently covered a fairly extensive site, so that 'hundred-acre' is not overtly misleading, except that it suggests that siki means 'acre', which it clearly does not. But this same concrete evidence from archaeology also makes it clear that palace sites in the Old Japanese period were never 'created on foundations multiwalled', or protected by 'walls once thick with wood and stone'. The massive protective walls that traditionally distinguished Chinese urban architecture were never popular in early Japan; apparent exceptions are always late examples, largely the result of European concepts of fortification introduced by Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If Kyoto had been a Chinese metropolis, it would have been surrounded by a massive defensive wall; but none was ever built around the ancient city until Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1568-95) hastily threw up such a structure in 1587, largely inspired by European ideas of civil defence.37 The ancient palace sites of the pre-Kyoto periods, which are at issue in these poems, knew nothing of such structures, so that all the 'multi-walled foundations' and 'walls thick with wood and stone' not only result from unsubstantiated speculation on the part of the translators, they also

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directly contradict what we do know about the realia of the Old Japanese period. And of course, they do not by any stretch translate momosiki. A makura kotoba of this variety, where one of the morphemes is semantically obscure, is of course in a sense impossible to translate at all. But that hardly justifies replacing it with a misleading and inaccurate picture of the culture out of which the texts in which it appears grew, much less conjuring up Old Japanese 'foundations multi-walled' and 'walls thick with wood and stone' where we know that no such structures ever existed. The final vowel in the obscure -site element of momosiki was probably pronounced something like [u] or [61], i.e. as a front or fronted labial vowel with a high-vowel off-glide. Assonance between the nuclear labial elements in this vowel and the two labials in its following head-term oFomiya 'palace' was without question an important factor in the poetic employment of this particular makura kotoba. While no genuinely accurate or completely adequate translation of momosiki is possible, at least what is understood of its sense (momo 'hundred; myriad') and what is known of its sound (siki) might plausibly be imitated by such translations as 'hundredfold' or 'multifold'. Both are suitable because they leave the final element semantically quite as obscure as it is in the original, while also reproducing a high-vowel—labial vowel sequence (Old Japanese -/-.. -i-, English 'hundredfold', multifold') that directs us smoothly towards the subsequent labials of oFomiya 'palace'. Even after the Old Japanese period, the makura kotoba technique continued to be important in all Japanese literature, poetry and prose alike. As a result it continues to present problems for translators of texts of virtually all periods. One such figure even finds its place in the incipit of the book that has been called 'Japan's first modern novel', the Ukigumo (1887-89) of Hasegawa Tatsunosuke (1864-1909), anauthor better known under his sardonic pen name 'Futabatei Shimei', literally 'Drop Dead!'. In that passage, the makura kotoba is, interestingly enough, chihayaburu, qualifying kaminazuki 'the godless month', i.e. the tenth lunar month.38 But chihayaburu is simply the modern Japanese reflex of Old Japanese tiFayaburu, a makura kotoba that in the early texts is usually aligned with nouns referring to deities (Old Japanese kami)> hence Hasegawa's employment of the term with kaminazuki. The difficulty is that, even in the earlier texts, tiFayaburu is already almost totally obscure semantically. The internal morpheme -Faya- is perhaps to be related to Faya-s-i 'rapid', but otherwise the form is etymologically inexplicable. From its earliest documented examples the word appears to have been used almost entirely for its

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sound, rather than for its sense - which is precisely how Hasegawa was still using it in the late nineteenth century. Growing tangentially out of the makura kotoba technique is the second of the characteristic rhetorical devices of the Old Japanese poet, where a specific linguistic form, e.g. Old Japanese matu> is consciously employed in a way that capitalizes on the fortuitous existence of homophones within the language, in this case, the verb mat-u 'to wait' and the noun matu 'pine tree'. Japanese scholars call this variety of literary punning kakekotoba, a somewhat impressionistic term that foreign students of the art generally render 'pivot words'. The technique is particularly effective when, as for example with the verb and noun just cited, the two forms involved in this figure belong to different portions of the grammar. Even when they do not, e.g. in the case of a pun between the two verbs kur-u 'to coil' and k-u 'to come' (whose adnominal form ku-r-u is homophonous with kur-u 'to coil'), the device means that a portion of the text must be read and understood on at least two simultaneous but different levels of lexical meaning. And of course, when the two words belong to different portions of the grammar, the existence of the resulting two simultaneous syntactic structures also further complicates the employment of this device. The kakekotoba technique may be seen developing during the Old Japanese period; subsequently it becomes of enormous importance during most of the middle period of Japanese literature. Translators rarely make the considerable effort that would be required to render these puns. They can be explained easily enough, but incorporating them into anything resembling a true translation is, of course, another matter. To ignore them is to play false with the original; but so also is to explain them, since the charm of the device in the original is that it is not explained or elaborated by the poet: all that is left to the wit and imagination of the reader. The punning kakekotoba device in its turn was subsequently elaborated into the third of these major special devices of Old Japanese poetry with which a translator must constantly be concerned. This is the technique that Japanese scholars designate with the Chinese loanword jo 'preface', and by which they identify substantial portions of entire poems that the poet intended to be understood as standing in some special or extraordinary metaphorical relationship to what follows. Sometimes a jo will establish the circumstances or setting of the poem, or sketch the background of the action that transpires. But whatever its overt lexical content, and despite its generally deceptively simple superficial semantic function, what is always important about a 'preface' is that it employs sound equally as often as sense - and

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frequently with the further complication of kakekotoba puns - in order to link up metaphorically with the main statement of the poem itself. Fortunately, this70 technique is somewhat easier to illustrate than it is to explain, as the following example, Man'yoshu poem 201, first given in text and literal, line by line translation in the order of the original, will make clear: 1 Faniyasu no 2 ike no tuturrii no 3 komori-nu no 4 yukuFe wo sira ni 5 toneri Fa matdFu.

1 At Haniyasu 2 the dikes along the moat 3 by the stagnant marsh 4 Not knowing where to go 5 the royal servants are stunned.

This is the second of two envoys (hanka) that majestically conclude a long and impressive threnody by Hitomaro (fl. c. 680-700), memorializing the temporary interment of a royal prince prior to his final burial in the moat-surrounded artificial hill or tumulus, favoured by the Japanese ruling class until it was gradually displaced by the Buddhist practice of cremation. In this poem, the first three lines of the text are the so-called jo or 'preface'. Syntactically they are a single structure, a long string of nouns beginning with the place name Haniyasu, and concluding with the compound noun komori-nu 'stagnant marsh'. All are connected in sequence with multiple examples of the general referrant particle no> while a final use of this same no at the end of line three further serves to connect the jo to line four, and to the rest of the poem. Line four itself is, in effect, a pivoting kakekotoba, linked syntactically to the/0 of lines one to three, but also associated semantically with the final line five, which is the statement proper of the poem. Finally, it must not be overlooked that the place name Haniyasu carries phonetic-semantic overtones both of the burial tumuli, with their protective rows of unglazed ceramic mortuary figures (haniwa), and of the peace hoped for after the grave (yasu-). Thus, the entire unbroken expanse of this seamless three-line 'preface' functions as a massively effective metaphor. The stunned servants of the dead prince whose body now awaits its final interment in the tumulus stand about not knowing where they shall go. In the metaphor of the jo they are stagnant and immovable in their quandary, immovable as the weed-choked marsh-water which has already become stagnant alongside the hurriedly thrown up dikes for the moat that circles the newly erected tumulus. Despite the fact that, in this way, the characteristic function of the/0

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is that of direct and expressive metaphor, the translators have almost always rendered them simply as simile, thus destroying the impact and force of the originals. Indeed, of the three major distinctive devices of Old Japanese poetry, that of the70 or 'preface' metaphor may well be the one that actually presents the translator with the greatest difficulties; at any rate, it is surely the one about which existing translations have the least to teach us. Thus, for the poem just cited, we find 'like the hidden puddles that run / on the banks of Haniyasu Pond . . .';39 'Like the water of the hidden pool / On the banks of Haniyasu Lake . . .';40 and 'Just as the waters / Pent-up by walls in Haniyasu Pool . . .';41 Even on the simple civil-engineering level, all these versions have misunderstood the language of the original; one can only, for example, wonder exactly what the first translator had in mind by 'hidden puddles that run', while actually, as we have seen, the original has neither 'hidden puddles', nor 'hidden pools', nor 'pent-up walls'. All have also missed the original's allusion to the burial tumulus and its surrounding moat, which is, after all, what the poem is mainly about. But equally unfortunate is the decision of all three to opt for simile ('. . . like, just as . . .') when the impact of the original, with its^b, is not that of simile but of metaphor. It is hardly accidental that the easy way out of simile is also the choice of the bulk of the modern Japanese translators of such poems into Japanese. Indeed, here the three translators cited are not really translating the Old Japanese original, but instead its running paraphrases into modern Japanese which universally have . . . no yd na . . . But even this, of course, neither explains nor excuses the 'running puddles' and 'pent-up walls'. Each early poem employing the technique of the jo as a metaphoric 'preface' probably requires a different treatment if it is to be translated with even a modicum of faithfulness to the original. In the case of the poem cited, an attempt at translation must also somehow take account of the function of the pivot lineyukuFe wo sira ni 'not knowing where to go'. This line executes or implements the entire metaphor by directly linking together, within its own semantic content, not only the stagnant waters of the moat but also the stunned courtiers. Under such difficult circumstances, one necessarily tends more toward paraphrase than translation proper; even so, it is not necessary to depart significantly from the original if one works along the following lines: Stagnant the marsh by The dikes along the moat At Haniyasu,

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What, then, can the common reader do by way of defence against the inaccuracies, interpolations, and misleading paraphrases which as we have seen even in the tiny sample explored in the present chapter, generally characterize the bulk of published translations from Japanese literature of all periods? In an absolute sense, of course, the answer must unfortunately be that little or nothing is possible in selfdefence on this score, short of learning the language and checking translations against their originals at every step - and once the language is learned, the reader will naturally wish to spend as little time as possible with translations and go instead directly to the originals. But even short of this radical solution, there are a number of ways in which the reader of translations from Japanese literary texts may at least detect certain warnings - identify, as it were, early danger signals that make themselves visible in most translations, indicating at least that something is most likely wrong, even if they do not generally give much guidance concerning the precise nature of the problem. For example, when the reader encounters a passage in a translation that is, on the face of it, absurd, grotesque, or startling, he or she should recognize this as one of the prime danger signs of careless or inaccurate translation. When this happens, it is almost always the translator who is at fault, not the original. We have seen examples earlier in the present chapter in the 'foundations multi-walled' and 'walls thick with wood and stone' that translators have attempted to incorporate into Old Japanese texts - absurd, because no such structures were known to the culture behind the texts; the 'hidden puddles that run / o n the banks. . .'of a pond - a sheer physical as well as hydrological impossibility; and the translator's interpolated pseudo-simile comparing the movement of human limbs to 'smooth, rotary motion like that of paddle blades'. One hardly needs a knowledge of Japanese to sense the grotesque absurdity of each such passage; and when one does have the language, and can verify the passages at issue, each turns out to be little more than a careless misunderstanding of the original. Similarly, when a translator of another of Basho's travel diaries asks us to believe that the text makes reference to a 'grand facade . . . stretching out for two and half miles'42 we know at once that something is wrong. No building in the world, not even St Peter's in Rome, has ever had a facade that long. A glance at the text shows that the translation has almost nothing to do with the original, which instead makes a quite matter of fact reference to the location of the remains of a gate one ri

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(the traditional Sino-Japanese mile') from the author's point of reference.43 When we are told that a fourteenth-century political pamphlet describes a retired emperor as having 'pursued the holy life, wandering from mountain to mountain', we know at once that something is wrong, and indeed it is: the text describes him visiting 'temple after temple'.44 The translator has simply not recognized one of the most common words in the language for 'Buddhist temple'. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that whenever a Japanese text in translation, no matter what its period, appears to say something that flies in the face of reason and commonsense, or that strikingly contradicts everything else that we know about Japanese society, culture, and civilization, it is the translator who is wrong and not the text. It is difficult to imagine anything that a pious Buddhist would more greatly abhor than being asked to place copies of sacred texts in containers made from the skins of dead animals. The mind boggles at the evil karma that would attach to anyone involved in such an outrageous act, striking as it does at the heart of half a dozen different Buddhist prohibitions and commandments. Certainly Kamo Chomei (1153-1216), author oftheHojoki (1212), would have shuddered at the very thought. Yet we are asked to believe that he wrote, 'Above the sliding door that faces north I have built a little shelf on which I keep three or four black leather baskets that contain books of poetry and music and extracts from the sacred writings.'45 We know that this cannot be so without even consulting the text; and when we do consult the original, we find our suspicions more than justified. The text refers to simple containers or cases made of unfinished tree bark, such as find parallel employment even today in chashitsu and other formally decorated rooms. Kamo Chomei was a pious Buddhist, and his text makes sense in terms of the author, his times, his beliefs, and his culture; he did not desecrate his scriptures by keeping them in the skins of dead animals. Anachronism is also a generally reliable guide to translators' blunders. One does not properly expect to find twentieth-century terms reflecting distinctively twentieth-century concepts and realia in early texts. When one does, something is wrong with the translation. Fourteenth-century Japanese texts do not speak the language of modern American social science jargon; nor do they mention such nebulous entities as 'primary index' or 'lessening] the plausibility of the variant tradition', pace the efforts of certain modern translators.46 Late Old Japanese and Heian texts frequently refer to a number of diseases characterized by intermittent chills and fevers; their terms include yeyami 'pestilence', okori 'seizure', and waraFayami 'child's disease'. Medical historians now believe, in view of the symptomology

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of these illnesses as they are mentioned in the texts, that all three frequently had reference to certain varieties of malaria. But such an identification is proper to the history of medicine, not to literary translation; and to use 'malaria' as an automatic equivalent for any of these three terms in Heian texts is to introduce a jarring and misleading anachronism - particularly when the word in question is found in a passage where the modern Japanese commentators have specific reason to point out that, in this case at least, the disease now known as malaria is clearly not at issue.47 When the redoubtable Lady Nijo in her Towazugatari (c. 1307) describes a visit to a group of prostitutes whom she found now living exemplary lives as Buddhist votaries, the translator claims that she 'admired their pluck'.48 Reading this, one wonders what the Heian word for 'pluck' might have been, and turning to the text, finds nothing at all there that might correspond to this thoroughly anachronistic quality. Nor does the text in question itself ever refer to the reformed women as 'former prostitutes', pace what the translator writes.49 For Lady Nijo they remainyujo 'women of pleasure', as much after they take up the Buddhist devotional life as before. Her interest in the episode hinges upon the fact that these women are prostitutes. Nothing that they have done has changed that, in her view. And particularly because they are prostitutes, the spectacle of them piously following the daily nun-like observances of the Buddhist cloister especially strikes her fancy. The concept that it was possible for anyone to 'reform', and thus to become a 'former prostitute', is quite absent from the text; to write such things under the guise of translating an original in which no such expressions appear is a total anachronism. Yet another variety of anachronism is at the root of the frequent, and almost always misleading, pronoun-personification in which many translators of Japanese texts over-indulge; as we have already seen, this is a particular problem the further back in time our texts go. A long and justly celebrated piece by Hitomaro, Man'yoshu poem 220, describes the poet's emotional response to the discovery of the abandoned body of a dead man 'lying among the stones on the island of Samine'; and when, midway into the text, the poet appears to address the dead man directly, he does so with Old Japanese kirrii 'milord; prince'. Hitomaro's reactions to this shocking sight are profound and moving. But they are also predicated upon the supposition that what he has stumbled upon is the body of a man of noble rank. He surely would not have paused for a moment if his eyes had told him that the corpse at his feet was that of just another dead peasant or commoner. Old Japanese kirrii 'milord' eventually changed, in both form and meaning, to become modern Japanese kimi, a noun used today for familiar,

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informal second-person address. Even in the modern language, kind is not, for reasons already explored in Chapter 2, a pronoun properly socalled; but to translate it 'you' in a late seventh-century text of this variety, as all the translators do,50 is to mislead the reader into a quite false, and entirely anachronistic, view of early Japanese life as reflected in Old Japanese literature. An otherwise mostly unobjectionable translation of a sequence of four short Old Japanese poems, Man 'yoshu poems 3979-82, interpolates 16 English pronouns (four T , five 'my', one 'me', two 'she', and four 'her'). 51 But 15 of these correspond to nothing at all in the text, while the sixteenth, in the original, is not a noun used for second-person pronominal reference but a word meaning 'loved one' or 'wife'. This anachronistic interpolation of pronominal reference, particularly of specific first- and second-person pronouns, into the translations of Japanese texts of all periods has probably done more than any other single kind of mistranslation to obscure the outside world's view of Japan. The reader of translations may also frequently detect careless or uninformed mistranslations when the English version seems to be notably quaint, coy, or otherwise distinguished by orientalisme. These elements are, to be sure, not totally alien to Japanese culture; but for all that, they appear in the texts not nearly as frequently as many translators would have the English-language reader believe. A well-known passage in Kamo Chomei's Hojoki describes the start of a terrible fire that devastated Kyoto in 1175. The flames, we are told, began 'in a temporary structure where court dancers had put up for the night'. As usual, the author's concern is entirely for the life of the elite, the nobles (like himself) closely associated with the court. Vulgate texts in circulation a century ago, and now understood to be corrupt in their reading of this passage, support - but only barely - a translation of this passage as saying that 'the fire originated in a little hut where a sick man lodged'. Not only do modern textual studies tell us this is a false reading, but so also does our knowledge of Heian culture. The author and his society cared not a fig for what happened in 'little huts where sick men lodged'. Had the great fire of 1175 actually been believed to have begun under such circumstances, no one in Kyoto would have remembered them, much less thought it suitable to record them in a literary text. In Chicago they remember the fire that started with Mrs O'Leary's cow; in Kyoto, had the great fire of 1175 actually begun under such plebeian circumstances, they would only have remembered the fire itself, and how much they had lost in it - but neither the cow, nor Mrs O'Leary, nor any 'little hut where a sick man lodged'. Nevertheless, the most available, and frequently reprinted, modern translation of the text opts for the incorrect vulgate reading; the

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translator has simply been unwilling to jettison the orientalisme of this touching but quite erroneous image, despite all evidence to the contrary.52 Sometimes, too, as if to move in the opposite direction from this spurious orientalisme, translators attempt to wrench their texts into the twentieth-century by introducing jarring modernisms that quite obviously can have no connection with the sense of the originals. Basho is made to say, of a view of Mt Fuji on an overcast day, that it was Tun'.53 An Old Japanese poet remarks, 'Life is the zip of a bird across the eyes'54 - if we are to believe a recent translator of xhtMan'yoshu, who departs in the most extraordinary manner possible from the sense, as well as from the sensibility, of almost every poem he has rendered from the anthology.55 In all these cases, and in many parallel instances, the reader of translations at least has some clue to the fact that something is wrong. Perceptive editing on the part of the publishers could also just as easily spot these passages, and undertake to have them remedied before they are printed; but for reasons already explained, that seldom happens. Less amenable to early detection are the cases of whole texts, including their titles, being misunderstood, and as a result misrepresented, by translators. An entire modern volume that brings together under one set of covers a somewhat disjointed set of unconnected essays on the history of Japanese political ideology (seiji shiso-shi) has been misunderstood, mistranslated, and published as if its subject were intellectual history. More than one reader of this translation must surely have noticed that the book never once mentions a single issue in intellectual history, and wondered why (another example, perhaps, of T h e Mysterious East'?) - never realizing that the original author and his text never once purported to do anything of the sort.56 How surprisingly far this particular variety of wholesale misrepresentation may on occasion go, is documented by Ivan Morris's well-known translation of the text generally known as Makura no Soshi.57 Just as in the case of the volume on political ideology made to masquerade as a study of intellectual history, the translator's problems here too began with the book's title; but they by no means stopped there. In translating Makura no Soshi as Pillow Book, and in ingenuously assuming that this title really had anything to do with 'pillows' in any sense of that English word, Morris was perpetuating an early misunderstanding of this text first broached in 1928 by Arthur Waley.58 In Waley's day there was ample justification for such misunderstanding, particularly in view of the state of Japanese scholarship on Heian literature then available to the great British pioneer student of

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these texts. But by the 1960s, when Morris undertook his own work, there was easily available a virtual library of studies by Japanese scholars concerning this particular book and the involved questions of its textual evolution, and - most important of all - treating in sometimes almost unbelievably prolix philological detail the great issues not only of what the text we have today says, but also of what it means. By the 1960s, Japanese scholarship had long ceased to believe that Makura no Soshi, as we have its texts today, represents a single literary composition by a single individual working at any specific time in history. Instead, the consensus is that the existing four main text families, each quite different in many details from one another, are the result of a highly involved process of transmission - and also that what has been transmitted reverts to at least two Urtexte that are now lost and have been lost ever since the eleventh century. The consensus of Japanese scholarship is also that at least three separate and distinct works, each originally written at different times and under different circumstances - and also probably (but not necessarily) by different authors - antedate even the first of these two now-lost Urtexte. The first was a classified, partially annotated series of uta makura and similar lists, compilations of place-names and other terms and words especially prized for their allusive poetic values. The second was a series of essay-like jottings and reminiscences, some finished, some mere first-drafts, describing various aspects of elite life in the Heian capital. The third was a fragmentary poetic diary - or sketches for such a diary - again centring on episodes of courtly life. Several portions of the third and a few of the second of these three originally different and independent works may be identified with a female, even though they contain virtually no first-person overt personification. This woman is conventionally (but rather late in the transmission-tradition) identified as 'Sei Shonagon', even though this is not really a name at all, but only a secondhand, obviously coined, pseudonym. Nothing in the texts themselves justifies assigning the authorship of the first of these three original textual strands - the uta makura and similar lists - to any individual of either sex. Each of the three original textual sources for this book embody large numbers of value judgements, telling the reader that a certain poetic conceit, a certain manner of dress, a certain way of writing a poem or folding a piece of paper is or is not suitable for a member of the upper classes: it puts one in mind, more than once, of Nancy Mitford's 'U' and 'Non-U' categories. Sometimes these judgements are explicitly verbalized in the text, sometimes - particularly in the lists - they are only implicit. In either case, they are to be understood as the 'U' or 'Non-U'

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judgements of the Heian elite establishment as a whole, not as the personal, individualistic, witty observations of a single individual named 'Sei Shonagon'. The virtually encyclopaedic view of upperclass Heian taste that the text thus preserves is the main reason why it is a valuable document;59 not because, as one reviewer totally misled by the Morris translation expressed it, the book allows us to 'know, incredibly, exactly "what [Sei Shonagon] is like".' 60 These three different original sources were subsequently edited and copied together in such a way as to form the first now-lost Urtext sometime around AD 1001. This first Urtext was subsequently not so much lost as purposely dismembered, probably in an attempt to unravel the three original sources that had gone into its compilation. At any rate, a second, now lost Urtext resulted from this dismemberment process. But that too in its turn was later lost by being dismembered in different ways at different times, leading to a large number of subsequent, and quite different, textual traditions, eventually sorted out into the surviving four major 'families', each claiming to be 'Sei Shonagon's Makura no Soshi\ but each rather different from the other. No other Japanese literary text has had such a complex textual history. Beside it, the problem of the synoptic Gospels, and of their ultimate connection with the now-lost source 'Q' that underlies their common textuality, is simplicity itself - if only because, in the case of Makura no Soshi> we must begin not with one but with three different 'Q' sources. The broad outlines of the scenario of textual transmission for the book as sketched here are generally accepted by Japanese scholarship. Beyond this general outline there is, naturally enough, still room for considerable difference of opinion on points of detail.61 But for all that, no one in Japan in the past several generations has ever seriously held that Makura no Soshi as it exists today represents the views, observations, or comments of a single individual woman writing at a single point in history. Yet that is precisely the image of this book and 'its author' that the Morris translation perpetuates. For him the entire text is the work of 'Sei Shonagon'. She emerges as a wryly sophisticated court lady - a person who, certain language problems aside, would certainly have been quite as much at home in Bloomsbury as in Heian Japan. An appealing picture, indeed, but totally without a shred of support anywhere in the text Morris purports to be translating. How far Morris misrepresented this entire book becomes especially striking when we study, even briefly, portions of the many uta makura lists of names and other words with special poetic-allusive properties that survive in our present texts. Needless to add, it is from these uta

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makura or 'poem support' lists that the text eventually took its later name; soshi means 'miscellany', and so the whole was well named, a 'Miscellany of Lists'. Morris gamely undertook to translate all these lists, apparently without ever realizing what they were. He renders them as if he believed that they contained the highly idiosyncratic personal observations of his putative authoress, and he freely interpolates hundreds of first-person references into his translation, along with much else that is not even remotely in the original, in order to bring this feat off. Thus, in one of these surviving uta makura lists, we find a catalogue of the names of herbs and shrubs, where some of the entries are annotated with brief explanations about precisely why this or that plant-name is particularly important in poetic composition. In this particular list we read, omodaka Fa na no wokasiki nari, literally, 'the water-plantain (omodaka) is notable because of its name'. 62 This is what the text says, and all it says. The later Japanese commentators on this passage have conjectured that what this probably means is that the name of this plant called omodaka was regarded by the compiler (or compilers) of this particular list as particularly notable (wokasi-, 'notable, interesting, charming, out of the ordinary') because the word itself had been analysed by folk-etymology as if it consisted of omo 'face' and taka 'high', and thus may have suggested something like 'high face', i.e. proud or haughty, a somewhat incongruous sense in view of the plant's physical configuration and lowly habitat. But all this is later scholastic conjecture; the text says only, 'the waterplantain is notable because of its name'. In the Morris translation, this passage is rendered as follows: 'I like the water-plantain, and when I hear its name, I am amused to think that it must have a swollen head'.63 At issue here is not only the unauthorized and inaccurate personification that manages to put all this into the witty mouth of'Sei Shonagon'. Even more misleading is the conflation of the Heian text with later scholastic speculation, and the way in which this has in turn been pieced out with additional materials ('. . . when I hear its name, I am amused to think . . .') invented out of the whole cloth. What Morris has written may well pass for a charmingly idiosyncratic statement by a highly opinionated lady; but in plain fact, hardly a word of his translation corresponds to anything in the text. Similarly, in his translation of a list of mountain names, Morris writes the following: '. . . Asakura (I like the idea that the lovers probably met again in another place)'.64 The text reads . . . asakurayama, yoso ni miru zo wokasiki,65 i.e. it

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glosses the place name Mt Asakura with yoso ni miru 'to see from afar', to which gloss it adds the all-purpose Heian elite aesthetic encomium wokasi- 'this is notable (or, interesting, important, charming)'. This yoso ni miru 'to see from afar' is a fragment from a poem in which Mt Asakura figures, a poem that might be paraphrased, 'Seeing from afar / one whom one once knew / as Mt Asakura / far beyond the clouds'. What this uta makura list is doing is telling us that the notable (or interesting, or charming) fact about Mt Asakura is that this name was once employed in the poem cited in the gloss, a poem whose sentiments and conceits the reader is, in effect, urged to keep in mind when making future allusion to Mt Asakura. Morris instead asks us to believe that 'Sei Shonagon' wrote this portion of the text (for which there is no historical or textual evidence), and also that what she wrote means 'I like the idea that the lovers probably met again in another place' (for which there is no lexical or linguistic evidence: the original has no T , no 'like', no 'idea', no 'lovers', and no 'probably met'). Similarly interpolated, and similarly misleading, are the hundreds of 'I enjoy . . .', 'I like the idea . . .', 'I feel very sorry . . .', etc., etc., that appear on every page, sometimes in every line, of this very long translation. Indeed, few books in the entire history of literary translation can have been as badly deflected from their original sense and purport as has, in this fashion, theMakura no Soshi in the Morris version. Given the enormous dimensions of these problems of translation from the Japanese, it is only to be expected that attempts should have been made to evolve a theory that would explain why the situation is as bad as it is. A Japanese critic, for example, has - apparently in all seriousness - suggested that the highly visible gap between most Japanese originals and their available English translations is to be accounted for by a special quality inherent in the Japanese language itself. For him, the Japanese language has kotodama 'the spirit of the language'. This is supposed to be a mystical entity that not only interferes with, but actually defies the adequate translation of Japanese texts. The Germans have long read Shakespeare in translations that are said to rival the originals. Thomas Mann became a world literary figure chiefly through the English translations of Helen Lowe Porter. But since there are no translations from Japanese into European languages that have been similarly received, it must follow, according to this argument, that Japanese with its kotodama is inherently and innately different from any other human language.66 Few outside the rather specialized confines of modern Japanese intellectual circles will probably wish to follow this argument to its logical denouement; for most of us, the answer is rather more simple,

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and far more direct. Most available translations of Japanese literary texts, no matter what the period of their originals, fall far short of the mark that might reasonably be expected for any translation, not because of any special mystical entity inherent in the Japanese language, but plainly and simply because these translations are generally done carelessly, and in haste, and more often than not by translators insufficiently familiar not only with the Japanese language itself but also with Japanese life and culture. And that, in the final analysis, is really all that is at issue here. The translations are mostly unsatisfactory simply because they are badly done. With questions of kotodama 'the spirit of the language' ruled out of order, we may finally turn our attention to the one remaining issue that a careful study of translation from Japanese necessarily raises: why are most of these translations done so badly, and in such a careless and ultimately misleading fashion? Many of the answers to this cardinal question may be identified in the special historical circumstances out of which the translations, and the translators, of the past four decades have arisen. Certainly, nothing can really ever excuse this state of affairs; but even a necessarily abbreviated survey of the circumstances surrounding the production of these translations will at least do something to explain why they are generally so unsatisfactory. In the main, these circumstances have to do with the background of Japanese language and literary studies as conducted in the American university establishment over the past four decades. American universities are responsible for most of the translations of Japanese literary texts that we have today.67 Almost all the translators are professors employed in American universities. These men and women still almost invariably treat all texts as if they were reading captured military intelligence documents, thus directly reflecting their own training - since most of the older generation of such scholars learned their Japanese in military language schools during World War II - or now, in a second generation, the training of their teachers. For the military translator, the style and language of the original of course do not matter, only the 'facts', what it purports to say. Hence the attention of these translators still focuses entirely upon what they often mistakenly, of course - suppose to be the factual content of the originals. Don't bother about how the original says something, all that matters is what it says: all the sergeant needs to know is the number of enemy troops, and where they are. And of course it will never do to forget that the sergeant is only minimally literate: don't try simile, metaphor, allusion, or anything but the plain and simple with him, he won't understand. One would think that four post-war decades had

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been sufficient for American scholarship to outgrow this GHQ approach to Japanese literary texts: unfortunately, it has not. Over and above this, the enormous pressure that universities throughout the world - and here the Americans surely have no monopoly - exert upon their faculty to publish as much as possible early in their academic careers must also be blamed for many of these translations. The truly adequate translation of a single poem from the Man'yoshu is a task that might well occupy a mature scholar for months. To think that anyone, particularly a young inexperienced beginner, can prepare translations of thousands of these poems and publish them overnight is madness; yet that is precisely what is being done every day, while the publishers of these ill-advised volumes boast that they 'convey . . . the flavour of the original poems . . . faithful to the original and idiomatic',68 or that reading these sorry mistranslations 'is something like looking at one's favourite Rembrandt newly cleaned and framed.'69 The best that can be said of such enormously inflated claims is that they show that the publishers of these books know as little about the originals as the translators do. But as always, of course, it is the innocent reader of the translations who ultimately suffers the most. What of the future of translation from the Japanese? The prospects are hardly encouraging, in view of the circumstances that continue to dominate the American university scene, and in consideration of what has actually taken place in this field during the past four decades. Today it is fashionable to look down on such old translations as A. L. Sadler's 1928 version of the Hojoki. It is true of course that his translation does abound in strange misunderstandings of the text in many places, and also that it is shot through with musty Englishings. But whatever his other failings may have been, Sadler was not lazy. Faced with a linguistic difficulty, he did not opt for the easiest way out and simply omit it from his translation. Confronted by a makura kotoba in a line near the incipit of his text, tamasikino / miyako no utini/mune wo narabi . . ., Sadler at least made an effort in the direction of translating everything he found in his text, not just those fragments of it that could be rendered easily and without effort: 'In the stately ways of our shining Capital the dwellings of high and low raise their roofs in rivalry. . . .'70 Sadler's 'the stately ways of our shining Capital' raises its own problems when we confront it with the original makura kotoba of the text, lamasiki, literally 'gem-strewn', going with miyako 'capital'; but the important point is that Sadler at least made an effort at responsible interpretation of his text, and at a complete translation based upon that interpretation. Translators decades later, knowing far more about the language

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than Sadler did, and benefiting from immensely more assistance from books and teachers than he ever had available, have not displayed a fraction of his energy and resourcefulness; for this passage they now write, '. . . the houses, great and small, which vie roof against proud roof in the capital,'71 and so simply leave the tamasikino of the original out of their texts as if they had not even seen it - or as if Kamo Chomei had not written it, which is even more serious. An Englishman or an American writing the Hojoki would not have burdened us with such tiresome things as this makura kotoba. To solve the problem simply by leaving all these things out of our translations is to try and make Kamo Chomei into an Englishman: Sadler can never be accused of that, at least. By the same token, the 'Lady Sei Shonagon' of the Morris translation has become a rather formidable English lady, the sort who is permitted to say and do quite outrageous things from time to time because she wears that special aura that the British call 'county'. Well and good; but she is also no longer Japanese; and reading about her in the Morris translation will not teach us anything that is true about Japan today or yesterday, since we shall be reading about something that, in plain fact, never existed. The prospects for improvement in all this remain dismal. Above everything else that is to be criticized in their work, the principal translators from Japanese over the past four decades have displayed a startling lack of lexical and linguistic courage. They are unwilling, if not downright ashamed, ever to have any text, or anyone in any text, say anything that might not have been said or written by a modern American university professor of modest literacy, and concomitantly modest literary gifts. Different ways of saying novel things, surprising figures, astonishing metaphors, unexpected expressions and tropes all these they rigorously excise from their texts. Such things might startle the reader, or put him off. Without such excisions, the texts would no longer sound as if Englishmen and Americans were talking, they might even possibly begin to sound rather like the originals; and that of course will not do. One hopes, of course, for a higher level of simple linguistic competence in translators of the future. Japanese today is too widely studied and too well known in many parts of the world to excuse any longer the lexical and grammatical errors that still disfigure the main run of these translations. But even granted this very minimal desideratum, something else, on another, rather higher level, will also be necessary before translation from the Japanese will improve. A new generation of genuinely 'post-war' translators must not only be well trained in the language, they must also be encouraged to experiment with exposing readers to the actual nature of Japanese

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literary texts of all periods, even when this involves writing, and publishing, things that do not necessarily read as if they were originally written in English. The form and expression of Japanese texts must not always be sacrificed to their simplistic content. Translators must be willing to confront the English-language reader with translations that do not necessarily conform to preconceived notions of what a text must sound like and say. In other words, translators must one day learn to translate Japanese warts and all - no easy task, as we have seen, but by the same token, one that becomes no less difficult for being evaded through the easy courses of deletion, conflation, and paraphrase. In the meantime, the most that can be said today about the best of the available translations from Japanese literary texts is that, like the curate's egg, parts of them are excellent indeed. But just as it would be highly misleading - as well as highly indigestible - to base one's view of Western cuisine entirely on the melancholy experience of the curate in the story, so too the reader of translations from Japanese must necessarily resist the temptation to swallow any single item, or passage, or ostensible fact, that is found in translations - unless or until the reader can verify it in the original. And once the reader can do that, then the less time spent with all these translations the better.

7

The Chicken or the Egg

It would not have been possible for 'grammarians' to bluff a large part of our speech-community, and they would not have undertaken to do so, if the public had not been ready for the deception. Leonard Bloomfield, Language p. 497, §28.1

It is time to speak of something that till now has played only an intermittent and somewhat enigmatic part in these discussions: the why, as distinct from the what, and particularly from the how, of linguistic science as it involves the study and analysis of the Japanese language. Much has already had to be said in these pages pro or con the different ways in which it is possible to talk about Japanese. The gulfs separating structural descriptivism from the transformational-generative approach, and both these in their turn from the square-peg, round-hole approach of traditional Japanese scholarship about Japanese, have necessarily occupied much of our attention. Only now are we at last able to ask the essential question that otherwise ought properly to have come first. No matter which school of linguistics we follow, no matter how we approach the subject, why should we bother with any of this in the first place? What possible point can there be to all this talk about Japanese? What utility can be claimed for linguistic discourse involving Japanese, particularly when, as now seems to be the case, hardly anyone in the world is able to agree on how the subject should be approached? Given the enormous grey areas that engulf the what and how of linguistics and Japanese, how can anything be said about the why} As frequently before, we have again only to remind ourselves of our basic definition of language for virtually everything to become plain. Answers to this question of why appear to be obscure only so long as we insist upon divorcing our study of Japanese from the realia concerning the role of language in human society that our definition of language embraces. So long as we remember that all language, Japanese included, is neither marks on pieces of paper, nor unreal sets of nebulous relationships postulated by a linguist simply in order to connect observed data with imaginary deep structures visible only to 221

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that same linguist, nor an inferior secondary projection of an ideal state - much less an inadequate, watered-down version of English - but rather a set of arbitrary vocal signs by means of which a social group cooperates, then we shall experience little difficulty in understanding why talking about language - and this last is as good a definition of linguistic science as any - is not merely an intellectual exercise, but in fact a valid humanistic activity of considerable practicality. This is because, as soon as we remember our working definition of language, we realize that the ultimate utility of linguistic science is implicit within its statement; language being the medium by means of which society functions, it immediately follows that to talk about language is to talk about human society and mankind, and to study the way these entities function - all in the most central, valid, and utilitarian manner possible. ' Sociolinguistics' is a technical term that has come to be increasingly in vogue over the past decade, partly because during this same period linguists of all persuasions have more and more begun to rediscover the social nature and function of language. The vogue at present enjoyed by this term is also in large measure to be explained by the general disillusionment with transformational-generative grammar that has set in over the past decade; this too has lent powerful impetus to what has been in a sense the rediscovery of the function of language within society. In many ways, the term 'sociolinguistics' reminds one of'ecology'. Both are really only new words for familiar things that have been around for a long time; and neither was much mentioned until it appeared that neglect might soon lead to destruction. Concern for ecology was not frequently and overtly verbalized until there was a real danger that our abuse of the world around us might soon land us in serious trouble. Similarly, sociolinguistics was not much discussed until it became painfully clear that the transformational-generative school had managed to paint linguistic science into an increasingly narrow corner, from where the essential social nature of language itself had become all but invisible. One heard little or nothing of sociolinguistics, for example, during the heyday of American structural descriptivism. Until that particular variety of linguistic science burned itself out in the late 1950s, all serious description and analysis of language was routinely conducted against a background of concern for the social function of the entire linguistic system being investigated. Minute attention was paid to every detail of the society in which a given language operated. Most structural linguists had themselves either done work in social anthropology, or else had been trained by other linguists whose own

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backgrounds had contained healthy doses of that important discipline. As a result, they were prepared from the inception of their work to be as sensitive to linguistic evidence for the details of a kinship system, or for sexually-differentiated levels of linguistic usage, or for any of the other virtually unlimited varieties of data that document language in its characteristically close relationship to social culture, as they were to be attentive to details of phonology, morphology, and syntax. All linguistic science in the West until the late 1950s was sociolinguistics. If in those days one hardly ever heard the word, this was only because there was little need to employ a specific term to identify something that was already obvious to everyone concerned with the field.1 All this changed sharply, and much for the worse, with the advent of the transformational-generative school. Not content with divorcing linguistic science from reality by conjuring up 'kernels' and 'deep structures' existing only in the analyst's imagination, the practitioners of this new departure now increasingly isolated language itself from the social context in which it always functions, and within which it must always exist if it is to be language. After all, if the kernels and deep structures that Chomsky's epigones now claimed not only to be able to see, but even to be able to employ in order to 'explain' linguistic behaviour had no necessary existence either in fact or in history, why should language itself any more necessarily have a direct relationship with society? As Chomsky's followers went about their work with Japanese, they accordingly found it not only convenient, but generally necessary to divorce even those made-up fragments of quasi-Japanese that they dismissed as 'surface structure' from the sociolinguistic realities of Japanese. The entire transformational-generative technique had, after all, evolved almost solely from the study of English and English alone.2 But English had nothing that even roughly paralleled the Japanese levels-of-speech phenomenon. This meant that this new technique of analysis, growing entirely out of English, could not be applied to this or to any other salient sociolinguistic vector of the Japanese language. Unwilling to change the technique, Chomsky's followers in Japan were forced to pretend that they could instead change the language. In a short time they were conducting their analysis entirely on the basis of artificially made-up non-sentences involving totally un-Japanese subjects such as'John-wa . . .' or'Mary-^a. . .'3 not to mention even more patently absurd (because superficially somewhat more 'Japanese-looking') examples in which Japanese given-names appear ungrammatically as topic or subject without the sociolinguistically required context of accompanying titles (san, -kun, -chan, -sensei, etc.). 'Taro-wa . . .' and lHanako-ga . . .'4 are quite asungrammatical

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and as un-Japanese as 'John-zua . . .' and 'Mary-ga . . .'; both types of locutions are ad hoc and unnatural expressions, made up solely in order to provide the linguist with something close enough to English so that transformational-generative grammars will be able to cope. It would be misleading to assume, however, that Chomsky's version of linguistics, particularly in its early, formative stages, lacked sharply defined utilitarian goals. Just as Buddhism grew out of Hinduism, and Christianity out of Judaism, so also did transformational-generative linguistics stir itself up out of the smouldering ashes of the Gotterdammerung that engulfed the structuralists in the late 1950s. Chomsky's followers have never been distinguished for zeal expended in searching the older scriptures out of which their science grew; nor is it in all honesty difficult to blame them for this neglect, since their own sectarian tracts quickly became so voluminous that it soon was unreasonable to expect them to spare either time or effort to read the remains of the structuralist canon. But this was not always so. Many of the early figures in this area were far more at home in the structuralist literature than their followers have realized. One passage in Bloomfield's Language in particular cannot but have caught the fancy of the early Chomsky school, as indeed it must always still rivet the attention of any careful reader of his work. It happened to be the last few words in the last sentence on the last page of the book perhaps this in itself explains why it stuck so firmly in the memories of the early transformational-generativists: The methods and results of linguistics, in spite of their modest scope, resemble those of natural science, the domain in which science has been the most successful. It is only a prospect, but not hopelessly remote, that the study of language may help us toward the understanding and control of human events.5 To hold out hope for understanding human events, as Bloomfield did here, was one thing; but his ominous prediction that 'the study of language may help us toward the . . . control of human events' was quite another. Now, as then, this was a promise full of dark and foreboding prospects; and particularly as the structuralists began to self-destruct, it was also a promise that seems to have lingered on longer in the American academic memory than almost anything else Bloomfield ever wrote. To understand all this, the reader must recall how many in American academic circles in the mid to late 1950s remained intoxicated by the sweet smell of success which at that time in history still emanated from the Faustian deal that J. Robert Oppenheimer

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(1904-67) and the other atomic scientists had successfully entered into during World War II. One of Oppenheimer's critics described their lapse from grace as a direct result of the technical arrogance that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds - a charge that might equally well have been levelled against the structuralists in their last, hubris-ridden days, while at the same time it goes far to explain the fascination that Bloomfield's dark promise for the 'control of human events' exercised upon early transformationalgenerative linguistics. The poignant truth was, however, that unlike Oppenheimer and his physicists in Los Alamos, the linguists actually had nothing even remotely of value to barter away. But this did not keep them, in the early days of their movement, from concluding a number of profitable negotiations. The prospect of being able to exercise control over human events always fascinates the military mind. When, in the mid and late 1950s, American linguists began to hold out this chimera to representatives of the US military establishment, material rewards were quickly forthcoming. The first printing of Chomsky's Syntactic Structures in 1957, like all its subsequent reprints, carried the frank acknowledgement that '[t]his work was supported in part by the US Army (Signal Corps), the Air Force (Office of Scientific Research, Air Research and Development Command), and the Navy (Office of Naval Research)'. Even as late as Current Issues in Linguistic Theory in 1964 the founders of this new linguistic feast remained unchanged: '. . . the US Signal Corps, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Office of Naval Research . . .'. After Current Issues, one suddenly hears little of these armed fists behind the transformation and generation of deep structures. Apparently, you can fool part of the military establishment part of the time, but not all of it all of the time. The utter inability of this new variety of linguistic science to deliver its part of the bargain - its abject failure to provide the American military with any effective means for the 'control of human events' - could effectively be concealed no longer, and as a result, funding failed. Few of these Faustian fantasies from the early days of the transformational-generative school appear to have survived the massive transplantation of this brand of linguistics into Japan. And even if they had, thanks to its post-war constitution, Japan had no military establishment from whom support might be lured with the false promise of human control through linguistic analysis. Despite the enormous amounts of time and energy devoted to post-Chomskyite studies in Japan, the question of utility seems virtually never to have been asked there. Apparently, as in so many other aspects of Japanese

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life and culture, the reply, 'this is the way they do it in foreign countries' is sufficient to quell any doubts that may arise about the reason for all this - if indeed such doubts ever do arise, which itself is anything but certain. However, it would be a mistake to conclude on this basis that the overall question of the utility of linguistic discourse is ignored in modern Japan, or that linguistic issues are there always discussed in the neutral vacuum of a purely academic pursuit carried out entirely for its own sake. Far from it. And we would be negligent in the extreme were we to leave our subject without investigating at least one of the representative ways in which contemporary Japanese intellectual circles frequently attempt to make utilitarian employment of linguistic science as it applies to the Japanese language - i.e., how they answer our question oiwhy. Whatever other difficulties it may prove to have, our evidence can hardly be faulted on the grounds of its academic credentials. It is intimately connected with one of the most prestigious movements to evolve within the Japanese academy in the post-war period, the study and analysis of so-called 'group orientedness' in Japanese society, particularly as this concept has been elaborated in the pages of the prize-winning academic best-seller of 1979, Bunmei to shite no ieshakai (The z>-Society as a Civilization) by Murakami Yasusuke, Kumon Shumpei, and Sato Seizaburo.6 The specific document we shall be considering below is the work of the second of this trio of authors, Kumon Shumpei, Professor of International Relations at the University of Tokyo, and an influential Japanese political scientist. It is fortunate also that Kumon's essay was written and published in English, thus freeing us from any concern that we may not have correctly understood his original text. The single most difficult passage in Kumon's essay is probably its title, 'Some Principles Governing the Thought and Behaviour of Japanese (Contextualists)'.7 Fortunately, this collocation and its lexical puzzles prove to have almost no connection with the body of his text. What Kumon actually has to say is almost entirely concerned with the analysis and interpretation of linguistic data. Moreover, as we read his essay, it becomes clear that for Kumon there simply is no question of chicken or egg in the case of the Japanese language vis-a-vis Japanese society. Kumon never even overtly broaches the question of whether a language determines the configuration and operation of the society that utilizes it, or whether instead the configuration and operation of the society and customary modus operandi of a given society may be responsible for determining the structure, nature, and method of functioning of its language. For him, language is the womb, the matrix,

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the enormous Ur-tgg out of which Japanese society in all its concrete manifestations arises; language predetermines society and culture. The way people say what they say determines what they think and feel; and what they think and feel determines what they do. How he goes about this may be understood from the following representative passage - Kumon's analytic exploitation of what appear to him to be the sociolinguistic implications of the Japanese verb wakatta '(someone) understand(s)' (a perfective from wakar-u): For [Japanese] to understand something is to divide it into parts. When they want to say that something is understood they say that it is wakatta (divided) . . . The original Japanese word iyamato kotoba) meaning reason is kotowari, which literally means 'division of things'. In contrast to this, it seems that the cognitive process of Westerners tends to proceed from individual elements to a larger whole. . . . In view of the fact that the recognition process of the Japanese begins with a vaguely grasped (perhaps by the right half of the brain) whole, we may say that they are holists.8 Kumon's analysis of what he finds sociolinguistically significant about the way the Japanese say 'to understand' may itself be analysed in terms of a bifurcated axis-system, a model that his approach shares with most contemporary Japanese scholarship in this field. One dimension of this system may be identified as an achronic axis, the other as an aspatial one. These two, taken together, provide the only framework within which it is possible to comprehend the overwhelming aggregate of this important variety of modern Japanese social-science literature. The achronic axis of this system is probably the more significant of the two; it will, unfortunately, also be less easy for the non-specialist in linguistics to grasp. At the outset, it is important to note that while we have dubbed this axis achronic, we do not call it anachronistic. It does not inverse, reverse, or otherwise upset simple chronological considerations - which would be anachronistic - so much as it puts itself above history. In its mapping function, this axis treats all considerations of time and the historical sequence of human events naturally imposed by chronology as completely irrelevant. It isolates itself and its findings from the mundane limitations imposed by clock time, by history, and by the cause-and-effect sequentiality of human life. Here, then, there can be no question either of chicken or of egg; this liberating achronic axis rules the one to be as irrelevant as the other. Several different achronic dimensions are involved not only in

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Kumon's presentation of his data on the modern Japanese verb wakar-u 'to understand', but also in the conclusions that he draws on the basis of his data. There is, on the face of it, nothing either necessarily unlikely or necessarily impossible in Kumon's proposition. This proposition we read to the effect that because the Japanese say wakatta when they want to say they 'understand something', and because this word wakatta really means 'divided' or 'divided into parts', it follows that the Japanese 'recognition process begins with a vaguely grasped (perhaps by the right half of the brain) whole. . .'.In the abstract, none of this is entirely impossible, or even intrinsically improbable. The unanswered - because unasked - question is instead, when did all this happen, if indeed it ever did happen? Only after we grapple with that issue can we face the problem posed by Kumon's tantalizingly tentative mention of 'the right half of the brain'. What is at issue here is a metaphor, a figure of speech: 'understanding' expressed as 'dividing into parts' - or is it 'understanding' taking place as 'dividing into parts' because that is how it is expressed? In either instance, what is involved is an etymological metaphor. Etymology is a linguistic issue. It is a division of linguistics, but it is also a division of history. Most simply, but also quite accurately, etymology is nothing more nor less than the history of words. And because etymology is history, to invoke it as Kumon does is actually to violate all neutrality on this overall question of the linguistic chicken or the sociolinguistic egg. Etymology is by its nature a sequence of historical events. Historical events take place in time. Therefore, the question becomes, when did this one take place? Not to ask that question is like discussing the consequences of Napoleon's death without specifying when it took place. The consequences must necessarily have been considerably different, depending on what the date really was. If we do not face up to these historical imperatives that necessarily impose themselves upon any sociolinguistic analysis of 'understanding' expressed as wakatta, we are placing ourselves in the position of the historian who would attempt to discuss the consequences of the death of Napoleon without even being able to tell us in which century that event took place - as if all we were sure of were that he was dead (if indeed it is him in that coffin in Les Invalides), but really had no idea when it all happened. We cannot deny that today, in modern Japanese, wakatta generally is adequately translated by English 'understand'. We also know that this specialized use of this particular verb becomes common in Edo times. But we also are told by our Japanese colleagues who specialize in such matters that this linguistic usage, this metaphor, this particularly specialized expression, cannot be traced back earlier than the end of

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Muromachi, i.e., c. 1570. And significantly, the earliest citations available for this specialization of the verb wakar-u are found in the Japanese-Portuguese bilingual glosses of the Jesuit Vocabulario of 1603.9 If this complex cluster of linguistic and semantic data ever really had a seminal role in determining Japanese behaviour, it all must have happened in such a comparatively recent historical span as to leave the linguist sceptical in the extreme about its cause-and-effect relationship to the longstanding mainstream of Japanese life, culture, and grouporientation. We are, of course, always at liberty to conclude, along with Henry Ford, that 'history is bunk', and to assume that what took place in the past, along with the details of precisely when and where it transpired, is of no consequence to our understanding of the present. But the linguist has great difficulty in indulging this particular Fordian liberty, particularly when confronted with an etymological question, because all etymological considerations are essentially historical issues. Not so, however, for Kumon - or for the other authors responsible for the bulk of the contemporary Japanese sociolinguistic literature. It is particularly in this area that the dominant characteristic of its achronic axis makes it possible for our Japanese colleagues to manipulate their data liberated from considerations of simplistic clock-time, as well as from all other mundane manifestations of human chronology. For them, as in Kumon's formulation cited above, when any of this happened in history is of no consequence. What concerns them is only the way things are now; and the way things are now is significant apart from, over, above, and outside of history. In a word, their approach is totally achronic. But the heavy reliance that our Japanese colleagues place upon this achronic axis does not mean that they are oblivious to all chronological considerations. Far from it. Kumon's formulation demonstrates this when it introduces the idea of 'the original Japanese word (yamato kotoba) meaning reason [which] is kotowari\ 'Original' presupposes chronological priority. It positions us in a time sequence that thereafter remains in a state of tension with the ahistorical approach of Kumon's essentially achronic axis - a tension that is consistently, and characteristically, maintained unresolved in the bulk of the literature under consideration. But, as if in answer to our own uneasy queries, Kumon's immediate introduction of a stridently achronic issue into the same sentence just quoted vividly documents this extraordinarily fructifying tension that obtains throughout every dimension of this entire complex. First, 'the original Japanese word' is cited in evidence. Thus, something is

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alleged to be, or to have been, earlier than something else, with the clear implication that by reason of that fact, something else followed later as a necessary, cause-and-effect, essentially historical consequence of that earlier something. But we are not to be permitted to stay in these familiar surroundings for more than a moment. Immediately thereafter we are told what this, the 'original Japanese word', means - not then, not in the past, not in that unspecified time in history when it was 'original', but now, here and at the present. Etymology, the history of words, is thus ruled out of court, along with all other chronological considerations of real time. If the word in question ever were, or really is, original, the linguistic issue would surely be, what did it mean then, not what it 'means' now. Nor can the problem here be dismissed as superficial or trivial, or as hinging solely upon the author's use of words. This is impossible, because of the sweeping conclusions that he at once erects solely upon this achronic foundation ('In contrast to this, it seems that the cognitive process of Westerners tends to proceed from individual elements to a larger whole . . .', etc). The Western linguist, necessarily bound to a much more narrowly delimited and hence also a much more sterile conceptual framework, can only envy Japanese colleagues their free and easy access to widereaching conclusions as a result of the untrammelled recourse they enjoy to linguistic data, liberated from the narrowing limitations of historical time and the considerations that this concept normally imposes upon analysis and theoretical formulations. The Western historian of language, never this fortunate, can only envy the Japanese historian of the social sciences. The energetic elan that is an understandably inseparable concomitant of this genial achronic liberation is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in Kumon's analysis of his Japanese linguistic data for yet another 'original Japanese word . . . meaning reason'. As pointed out above, the essential orientation of his approach to all linguistic data is characteristically achronic. But in this instance, and somewhat differently from the situation obtaining with the verb wakar-u, his achronic stance is particularly significant for our purposes because this time around something (even if not everything) is known about the history of the word (more precisely, the words) that Kumon cites in evidence. And what is known only throws the achronic axis of his analytic structuring into even sharper relief. For Kumon, 'the original Japanese word . . . meaning reason is kotowariy which literally means "division of things".' 'Literally means . . .' can only be understood as an etymological statement, i.e., a historical allegation. Even though - and again, in contrast to the word

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wakar-u - we do know a good deal about the history of the modern Japanese word kotowari (which is a later changed form of Old Japanese kotowari), we do not, as it happens, know enough about its history to be able to make a hard-and-fast etymological statement of this sort. To continue the parallel suggested above, the historical situation of this word is rather as if we were pretty sure that Napoleon had died, but were not at all sure when or where. What Kumon cites as the etymology of kotowari - his historical statement of its 'literal meaning' - is not actually an etymology at all. It is only a hermeneutic allegation concerning the interpretative signification of this word first advanced by the scholar-monk Keichu (1640-1701), in his great pioneering encyclopaedia of neo-national normative exegesis, the Waji Shoran-sho of 1693.10 Keichu knew no more about the etymology of this word than Kumon does. Equally importantly - and unlike us - Keichu probably would not have cared very much what the etymology, the history, of this word was even if he had known it, since Keichu was not an etymologist. He was an exegete and above all else, a hermeneute. Etymology is a branch of historical linguistics, but exegesis and hermeneutics are branches of theology. But for all that, it is actually Keichu's seventeenth-century postulation concerning the word kotowari that now appears in the contemporary sociolinguistic literature, recycled into Kumon's pseudo-etymological claim to the effect that this word 'literally means "division of things".' This hermeneutic statement is important and interesting for a study of the neo-national school of Japanese literary exegesis in the late seventeenth century; but it is not etymology, nor does it constitute the history of the word. Most important of all, because none of this is history but merely hermeneutic speculation, it cannot possibly tell us anything of significance about the origin and development of the society that has so long employed this word - quite apart from the still unresolved sociolinguistic chicken-or-egg question itself. Actually, Kumon has been kind to focus our attention upon this word kotowari, because, as has been said, a good deal is known about its history, i.e., about its etymology. The evidence of the texts makes it clear that the Old Japanese noun kotowari was first of all employed as a caique, or loan-translation, for the Chinese philosophical-ethical term ft. In the traditional system of Chinese thought, this word meant 'the natural, reasonable course of the cosmos', and hence the 'principles' or 'laws' or 'reason' that were assumed to underlie both cosmic events and their mirror-image replicas on earth. (This was also the sense of Chinese ft that was capitalized upon in modern times when the

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Japanese coined the term butsurigaku, a neologism that combined loans into Japanese from Chinese wit 'thing(s)' and this same #, to translate 'physics', this word then being understood pretty much along the lines of the older English expression 'natural philosophy'.) Chinese ft was one of the earliest philosophical concepts to be introduced to Japanese elite culture from the Asiatic continent; it was also one of the most difficult Chinese concepts to translate into Old Japanese, or even to explain - translation and explanation being, after all, really just two sides of the same coin. But a fairly satisfactory loantranslation, or caique, was worked out for this difficult term early in the transplantation of Chinese philosophical systems to Japan. The insular linguistic solution for this problem in continental conceptualization appears to have been the neologism, Old Japanese *koto ari, 'things are'. When two vowels came together in Old Japanese the language usually took one of two possible steps to avoid a vowel-plusvowel sequence: it either contracted the two into some other secondary vowel (so that sequences of a-plus-i regularly became e, etc.), or it deleted one of the two, generally the narrower vowel of the pair. But to have enforced either of these two morphophonemic solutions in the case of the Chinese ft - Old Japanese *kbto art caique would have destroyed the expression's carefully coined explanatory powers. Contraction or deletion of the vowel sequence b a would have obscured the sense of this coinage, and thus also have obscured the way in which it explained what Chinese ft meant - and what Chinese ft meant was what everyone wanted to know. To avoid this difficulty Old Japanese here opted for a third, rather rare morphophonemic solution, the analogic insertion of a hiatusfilling labial semi-vowel -w-> so that koto ari became kbtbwari. It is this kbtbwari that we find attested in several Old Japanese text-passages where it unmistakably glosses, i.e., explains, caiques, and translates, Chinese ft.n (This same analogic insertion of a hiatus-filling labial semi-vowel is sometimes still employed by the modern language, whence the frequent pronunciation of etymologically original ba at 'occasion' as bawai.) Once the word kbtbwari had been evolved in this fashion sometime early in the Old Japanese period as a hermeneutic caique for Chinese ft 'natural principle, laws; reason', it became feasible to give further semantic employment within Japanese to this same neologism in order to render, and thus to explain, still other newly-imported Chinese terms and concepts for which Old Japanese also lacked its own readymade expressions. The most important of these were the Chinese terms tuan and p 'an. These words were key terms in the Chinese civil administrative system and in Chinese law, both of which were being

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studiously replicated by Japanese society in the Old Japanese period. In Chinese, these terms were originally metaphors for the process of handing down a judicial verdict or administrative judgement. They were figures of speech that expressed the process of 'judging' or 'deciding' as a kind of 'stopping, cutting off, severing' (the sense of man in its non-legal contexts), or as 'dividing up, cutting into' (the sense of p'an apart from its juridical employment). There was nothing especially 'oriental' about these juridical metaphors, even though their semantic impact may have been somewhat enhanced by the notorious Chinese penchant for punishments in criminal judications that involved mutilation (cutting off, severing) of parts of the human body. But we find the same metaphoric relationship relating 'legal decisions' and 'judgements', as well as unspecialized verbs meaning 'to decide', to 'separate', 'cut', and 'split' in the Indo-European languages. For 'judge', Greek Kpivco and Latin decernere are both etymologically associated with Old English sceran 'cut off, shear', while Latin decidere, along with all the Romance cognates of this form, including modern English decide (borrowed into English from French), is a compound embracing caedere 'to cut'.12 Confronted with similar situations, widely different sociolinguistic entities serving vastly disparate cultures in enormously separated parts of the world have time and time again come up with strikingly similar semantic solutions. Here at the very least we have yet another important type of evidence that consistently argues against the facile equation of language and society along a one-way, chicken-or-egg relationship. At any rate, the early Chinese (and Korean) mentors whose business it was to introduce the elite of the Old Japanese period into the semantic and terminological intricacies of continental administrative and juridical practices had their work cut out for them when it became necessary to explain to their Japanese pupils the connotations, as well as the denotations, of all-important Chinese expressions for handing down juridicial decisions such as man and p'an> involving metaphors of 'cutting off, 'dividing up', and 'cutting into'. In the ideal Chinese system these man and p'an decisions were always supposed to be handed down and carried out in such a manner as to enforce /*, the natural principle, laws and reason of the cosmos. (Again, this supposition represented no particular monopoly on the part of the Chinese; compare Old High German rihten, modern German richten 'to judge', both verbs from reht, recht 'law', a word etymologically cognate with Old English riht 'law', in turn the source of the modern English noun right,) At this critical juncture, a happy convenience presented itself in the

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Old Japanese neologism kotowari previously coined as a hermeneutic gloss for Chinese Tu This word, once it had got its intrusive -w-, sounded as if it somehow involved the verb war-u 'split up, divide', even though this was not etymologically, i.e., not historically, true, as we have seen above. Nevertheless, its association with war-u 'split up, divide' seemed to be true in the Old Japanese period, just as it seemed to be hermeneutically true centuries later; and this being the case, what then could have been simpler than to capitalize upon this phonological and semantic coincidence - and such double coincidence was all that really was at issue here - and on its basis to explain both tuan and p 'an as also somehow equivalent to this same Old Japanese kotowari. In other words, Old Japanese kotowari, which began as "'"koto ari, a neologistic syntactic structure incorporating a noun and a verb, had entered the language as a neologistic noun, after coinage and calquing. This new noun now served as the morphological base for a secondarily derived denominal verb kotowar-u, and it was to this new secondary verb that, again by the process that in linguistic history is termed calquing, all the senses of Chinese tuan and p 'an were subsequently attached. From this point on, we find these two Chinese verbs regularly glossed with the properly inflected forms of Old Japanese kotowar-u, in a wide variety of texts. 'Judgements' and 'decisions' in all cultures inevitably involve refusal, denial, excuse, and apology. Thus it is hardly surprising to find that 'refuse', 'deny', 'excuse', and 'apologize' also all enter the semantic arsenal with which this term fortifies itself during the course of its subsequent long centuries of history within the Japanese language. What is nevertheless surprising is how late some of these secondary, ancillary semantic adumbrations are attested. Many modern Japanese speakers, like Kumon, believe that the 'basic meaning' or 'literal sense' of the verb kotowar-u is 'to refuse' or 'to decline'. But this is a purely impressionistic reaction on their part to the fact that this sense is particularly common in the modern spoken language. Actually, this sense is not only attested surprisingly late; it also appears documented for the first time in a surprisingly 'unJapanese' source: the Waei gorin shusei, a Japanese-English bilingual lexical tool compiled in 1867 by the American-Scots missionary James Curtis Hepburn (1815-1911).13 One begins to suspect that kotowar-u 'refuse, decline' is hardly the place within the Japanese sociolinguistic universe to locate evidence for anything extremely old or extremely 'Japanese', or even anything particularly original. These, then, are the principal dimensions of the achronic axis along which the major thrust of Kumon's sociolinguistic argumentation is oriented. This achronic axis relegates both clock-time and history to

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insignificance. Sociolinguistic elements that find their place along this vector exist, and within the frame of reference of contemporary Japanese sociolinguistic theory and formulation they may be laid under contribution, entirely apart from time. But above we spoke of a bifurcated axis-system, where the achronic vector is paralleled by another that we termed aspatial. What, then, of that second dimension? The aspatial vector is one that does for space, for physical geography, for actual, real location in this present, physical, palpable world, precisely what the achronic axis does for time: it wipes them all out, or at the very least, it relegates them all to total triviality. Where there is no time, there need be no space. If all historical considerations of etymology are irrelevant to a system, as we have seen that they are to Kumon, then it should occasion no particular surprise to learn that physical geography is also totally trivial, even if this means abolishing major geographical entities down to and including the identity of whole countries, peoples, and nations. Illustrations that demonstrate how Japanese sociolinguistic data may be oriented along this axis of the aspatial are particularly striking when they obliterate not just the geographical, national, and spatial differences that separate China from Japan but when, as frequently, they render quite imperceptible the distinction between India and Japan. Indeed, such examples provide the most impressive evidence for Kumon's aspatial axis, if only because India is geographically even further away from Japan than China is. But in part they are also impressive because of the way in which they draw Indie civilization in all its manifestations into the Japanese sociolinguistic system. The following is typical: . . . Japanese tend to see the dualistic components of the world as being complementary, not conflicting. Quite often the boundary between the two poles is fuzzy. . . . I think this is closely related to Buddhism's concept of 'emptiness', according to which forms or distinctions such as 'good' and 'bad' are not only complementary but also interchangeable. . . . That is why, 'emptiness is form, and form is emptiness', as one sutra puts it.14 As so frequently, the achronic here really cannot be disentangled from the aspatial; but on this occasion the aspatial element surely stands out in more than ordinarily bold relief. Space is totally obliterated before our eyes. Geography, physical as well as human, is set entirely at nought. Millennia-old distinctions in national identity are as gossamer before the impact of this aspatial vector. Now there is no Japan, no China, and above all, no India: only a uniform,

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unarticulated, unsegmented continuum of sociolinguistic conceptualization, totally and by the very fact of its own existence free from any of the otherwise rigidly fixed coordinates that might under different circumstances relegate it to ordinary, mundane, surface of the globe geography. Alongside the demonstrated ability of this variety of argumentation to obliterate space, its power to destroy time seems almost trivial by comparison. Trivial also becomes what would otherwise be the startling inversion of roles implicit in Kumon's assertion that the 'fuzzy' way people in Japan today think is the reason why an ancient text from Buddhist India says what it does - or rather, did. After all, when there is no time, no space, no Japan, and no India, nothing else can be expected to matter very much either - and indeed, in this variety of argumentation, nothing does. In historical fact, the text that Kumon refers to as 'one sutra' is not a single text, but the totality of one of the oldest, most frequently encountered central concepts in Mahayana Buddhism. This doctrine is the one that teaches that all rupa 'form(s)' are entirely and by and in themselves sunya 'empty'. As E. Lamotte, himself a tireless student of these ideas, has wearily admitted, this 'topic [is] untiringly repeated' throughout all Mahayana literature, but particularly in that vast branch of those texts known as the Prajnaparamita.15 It is no 'one sutra', no single text; it is a major doctrinal prop to a major world religion - originally an Indie religion, a way of thought and a set of beliefs about life that reached Japan only after the most involved and time-consuming transmission imaginable - from India to Central Asia, next to China, from there to Korea, and then and only then, to the Japanese archipelago. Religous beliefs and doctrines, at least for the Western student of such matters, have a locus in both history and in geography - their coordinates in time and space, just as language does. The Indie texts which teach the doctrine that rupa is the same as sunya> and vice versa, are, as always in India, difficult to date. But we know that by the first part of the fourth century of our era, a celebrated Chinese Buddhist preacher and teacher, Chih Tun (314-366), employed this doctrine with great effect in his presentation of the Buddhist concept of emptiness in its relation to the phenomenal world, while preaching to what Lamotte calls la haute societe of south-eastern China. Once 'rupa = sunya found its way into Chinese Mahayana Buddhism, and once this equation had been successfully and strikingly translated into the Chinese language, it was then available to the Koreans, who in their turn were able to transmit it to Japan. And there eventually it was to become the familiar phrase, in the somewhat uncouth church-Chinese pronunciation of Japanese Buddhism, shiki

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zoku ze ku . . . (form is emptiness), the phrase to which Kumon makes reference. No matter how we try to embroider this narrative, it will inevitably seem bald and unpromising compared to the view that our Japanese colleagues entertain of the same data, unfettered as they are by our stubborn Western insistence upon linear clock-time and simplistic, two-dimensional space. For Kumon there is nothing in any of this about an idea starting somewhere in history, and somewhere in India, and eventually making its way to Japan via China and Korea. As he so effectively demonstrates, once time and space are obliterated, seminal sociolinguistic formulations can be generated almost without limit. For him, the whole scenario literally begins in Japan, and actually within the Japanese brain, where the distinctive right-hand, left-hand structuring of that marvellous organ first of all determines a characteristic Japanese cognitive process. Then, in its turn, it is this same Japanese cognitive process that explains 'why "emptiness is form, and form is emptiness", as one sutra puts it.' In other words, Kumon would have us believe that it is the contemporary Japanese brain and its physiologically-determined cognition patterns that explain why, several centuries before our era, an anonymous Mahayana thinker somewhere on the subcontinent suddenly came to the realization that riipa was the same as sunya, and vice versa. Kumon's contextualist-principles paper is so rich in examples that, like the one just explored, simultaneously annihilate time, space, and human history, that once one begins to cite them there is almost no place to stop. Kumon tells us that modern Japanese ningen 'mankind' is 'a Japanese word which has the most intriguing connotations', one whose 'multiple meanings' make it 'a key concept in the contextualist philosophy'16 that sets the Japanese apart from among the rest of the human race. For the linguist, ningen is not historically a Japanese word at all. It is a loan into Japanese from the church-Chinese of Mahayana Buddhism. In China it is first attested in nonBuddhist texts from the end of the Han Dynasty, but soon thereafter it is taken over as a quasi-neologism by the Chinese Buddhist establishment in order to serve as their canonical translation for Buddhist Sanskrit manusya, which means 'man, mankind, the world, this world (of man and men, as distinct from other worlds of, e.g., gods, demigods, and demons)'. Kumon locates Chinese Buddhist ww,'nothingness', at the'core. . . of the Japanese mind' - but then hesitates to wonder if what one finds there is not instead Sung-dynasty Neo-Confucian Buddhist ki 'pneuma'. 17 If these words really had anything to do with 'Japanese

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contextualism', then that exotic commodity must not only be a very recent development historically, it also must never have had much to do with Japan and the Japanese since every one of its 'most intriguing . . . key concepts' was coined in China, either in Buddhist or in NeoConfucian intellectual circles. Nothing would be gained by multiplying such examples from Kumon's paper. His entire argument reposes upon the exploitation of linguistic data, and not a single shred of his linguistic evidence holds up under scrutiny. In a word, there is nothing to Kumon's contextualist analysis of Japanese life and thought, because there is nothing to his evidence. The same must also be said - but in even stronger terms, if possible about Kumon's genial endorsement of Dr Tsunoda Tadanobu's fantastic theories concerning allegedly unique physiological structure and distinctive linguistic functions of the Japanese brain. Kumon blandly argues that '[i]n view of the fact [sic!] that the recognition process of the Japanese begins with a vaguely grasped (perhaps by the right half of the brain) whole, we may say that they are holists.'18 The refutation of Dr Tsunoda's theories - which for Kumon are already 'facts' - is so simple a matter that it runs the risk of becoming a work of supererogation. Enough has already been published on this subject in the West, both in terms of general linguistic theory,19 and in the findings of competent medical researchers who have exploded the myth of Dr Tsunoda's 'discoveries',20 to allow us here to pass over this particularly melancholy aspect of Kumon's contextualist-holist thesis in that discreet silence it so richly deserves. Even though, for the reasons just explained, Kumon is able to tell us nothing of value about the origin or functions of his so-called 'contextualism' in Japanese life, there is still something for the outside observer of the Japanese linguistic scene to learn from his essay - there is always something to learn in everything - even though it is hardly the message that Kumon and his colleagues in the study of 'group orientedness' appear to urge. What cannot but strike us with renewed impact as we read Kumon is, once again, the enormous internalizing powers of popular Japanese sociolinguistic culture. In Chapter 1 we marvelled at Professor Ono's ability to internalize the Chinese writing system, as he argues in all seriousness, that the epigraphic composition of Chinese characters provides a clue to aboriginal Japanese thought patterns. Now we see Ono's internalization, discussed in_Chapter 1, for what it was - only a warm-up for the real thing. Ono merely internalized the Chinese script. Kumon internalizes the entire history, culture, and geography of all East Asia, all the way from India, across China and through Korea, ultimately localizing everything and

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anything from the entire human experience of man throughout Asia squarely in the right-hand side of the Japanese brain. Fosco Maraini was only repeating at second hand a commonly encountered criticism of the Japanese language when he wrote that '. . . it fails . . . as an instrument of abstract thought'.21 Needless to say, nothing factual substantiates this allegation.22 Still, Maraini was perhaps not directing our attention into an entirely unproductive channel. The Japanese language does not fail as 'an instrument of abstract thought'. But too many Japanese scholars and literary critics do fail the language by abstracting it virtually out of existence, as a consequence of the enormously far-reaching internalization that they implement whenever linguistic issues are raised. The problem is not a new one. As early as 1897 the early Japanese grammarian Otsuki Fumihiko (1847-1929) ominously entitled his compendious attempt at a grammar of the Japanese language Kb Nihon Bunten, with ko 'unabridged', Nihon 'Japan', and Bunten 'grammar'. This set the style for a whole series of similarly titled volumes, and in the process did more than merely popularize a fashion in book-titles. These books were grammars of the Japanese language, Nihongo. But instead, their titles identified them as grammars of Japan, Nihon.23 From that point on, the country and its language became more and more inseparably identified each with the other; today they are still far from being untangled. Sometimes this language-motivated internalization reaches a truly incredible extent. Kato Shuichi, who is not only a literary critic but a medical doctor as well, argues that an appendectomy performed by a Japanese doctor in a Japanese hospital is intrinsically different from an appendectomy performed anywhere else in the world by a nonJapanese doctor. For Kato, such an operation is a manifestation of 'quintessential Japanese culture' because the surgeon was educated by 'Japanese doctors in the Japanese language in Japanese universities'.24 One wonders whether an offending appendix removed under these circumstances of'quintessential Japanese culture' proves to be - as we are asked to believe of the Japanese brain - an organ of unique physiological structure, one functioning differently from its putative counterpart in a run-of-the-mill, non-Japanese, ordinary human being. So much, then, for the why of linguistics and Japanese, as this question is currently explored in the bulk of the contemporary Japanese sociolinguistic literature. The answers that this literature suggests are always ambiguous. But the unfortunate problem that remains is the significant extent to which the simplistic linguistic analysis upon which these popular practitioners erect their theses

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chronically falls short of their grasp. We cannot but be awed by the achronic and aspatial legerdemain of a Kumon; but by the same token we cannot salvage anything of indubitable scientific value from his one-way, egg-to-chicken farrago. When Bloomfield wrote of'grammarians' who 'bluff. . .the public' he had in mind proscriptive dictators of linguistic usage, busy labelling this or that variant form as 'incorrect' or 'bad' or 'not even English'. One wonders what form Bloomfield's warning would have taken had he known of the Kumons and Tsunodas of contemporary Japan. The 'grammarians' bluff that Bloomfield berated in 1933 pales by comparison with their work - and their work is, unfortunately, fully representative of the vast majority of the popular sociolinguistic literature generated by the Japanese academy in recent years. That such things enjoy an extraordinary vogue among Japanese readers is hardly to be wondered at; nor is it really any of our business. But the way in which they have also managed to pull the wool over the eyes of many Western scholars of Japan (as witness the prestigious foreign place of publication of Kumon's contextualist chimera) is, to say the least, another matter. Linguistic science today is still far from achieving anything resembling a consensus about the chicken-and-egg aspects of the relationship of language to society; many arguments have been advanced, many remain to be explored.25 But we do certainly understand enough about this question as a whole to see why the attempts of Kumon and many other Japanese scholars to make of the Japanese language the one and only egg - the aboriginal mother matrix out of which Japanese life, thought, and conduct springs, and the sole factor (plus or minus the role of the allegedly uniquely constructed Japanese brain) determining the course of Japanese culture - is simplistic to the point of absurdity. Science knows that language does not work that way: language is not the mother-lode of society, it is the medium by which society cooperates. Sir George Sansom (1883-1965) was hardly far from the mark when he wrote, concerning the role of the levels-of-speech phenomenon visa-vis Japanese social life, 'Honorific words and phrases grow out of social habits, and in their turn influence social conceptions.'26 And this is no more a Japanese monopoly than it is a Japanese speciality; nothing having to do with language and sociolinguistics ever is. It is one thing to point out, for example, that German das Kind 'the child' is grammatically neuter, and that since 'all Germans have the experience of being referred to by means of the neuter pronoun es' as a consequence of this arbitrary segmentation, Freud's dasEs may have a 'special feeling [for] the German reader - reminding] him of a time

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when his entire existence was dominated by the It.'27 But it would be quite another thing - and exactly in line with Kumon's method - to extrapolate a cause-and-effect scenario for all German history and culture over the past thousand years solely on the basis of the arbitrary grammatical gender of das Kind. Such a thesis would certainly stand head and shoulders above Kumon's work in one respect at least: it would employ accurate linguistic data - i.e., das Kind actually is a neuter in German grammar - in happy distinction to the welter of errors and half-truths that disfigure Kumon's presentation. But at best, it simply will not do to explain everything that ever happened in German life and society on the basis of das Kind; and yet, in Japan this is precisely what is done every day. The complex of interlocking sociolinguistic relationships that Sir George had in mind has been observed in many cultures. One of the most serious charges that must be laid at the feet of writers like Kumon is that, because of their strident insistence that the Japanese language is the egg and Japanese life and society the chicken to which it gives birth, it only becomes harder and harder for us all to study what is really happening in the Japanese sociolinguistic entity.

Postscript Why should the Japanese language require defence? And if indeed it does, why should that be the business of anyone but the Japanese? We began this book by suggesting, in the Introduction, that these were questions which the title of this book might naturally occasion. By this time, the reader will have had ample opportunity to see, not only why defence is necessary, but also why, in one sense at least, such defence is everbody's business. Just over a decade ago, reviewing the first wave of what has since become a flood of publications treating Japanese in terms of transformational-generative linguistics, I identified what still appears to me to be the principal culprit in the following admittedly somewhat melodramatic terms: 'Languages apparently have their destinies too, as well as nations; it is not for peoples alone that Clio has been keeping those ominously turgid batches of fate warm on the back of her stove. . . . now it turns out that what the linguistic Norns really had in mind in this connection all the time must have been Japanese.'1 Little far too little - has changed over the past ten years, in spite of the fact that the same decade has seen the propositions and pretensions of the transformational-generative school routed from the academic arena with ever accelerating vigour. Two years before my review, Hans Aarsleff had already begun the counter-offensive with a trenchant demonstration of how 'Chomsky's version of history is the product of serious deficiencies in knowledge and research, and is an obstacle to the creation of a true and significant history of linguistics.'2 The same decade drew to a close with Maurice Gross's equally incisive debunking of the entire notion of transformational-generative grammars, even in the case of English, much less for any other language.3 Subsequently, Noam Chomsky himself, we are told,4 has 'in private conversation . . . conceded' the wellfounded charge of his misuse of linguistic history for the purposes of personal polemic. We must always reckon with a certain time-lag between Japan and the rest of the world, in everything but the natural sciences and technology. Nevertheless, it is discouraging to realize that the eclipse of Chomskyite linguistics in the West appears hardly to have been noticed, either in linguistic scholarship in Japan, or in most Western linguistic circles concerned with Japanese. The flood of transformational-generative treatments of Japanese continues without respite. Something must be done before the outside world's perception of the 242

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243

Japanese language is distorted beyond all recognition, and possibly also beyond all repair. Western scholarship must admit its responsibility for having first set Japanese linguistics onto this dark path. But it is still not too late for Western scholarship to take the initiative in leading the study of Japanese out of the post-Chomsky Nacht und Nebel that now almost universally engulf it. A further reason for defending Japanese grows out of the decent concern that all humanistic scholarship must share for the future of linguistic science itself. Ian Robinson's The New Grammarians' Funeral (1975) has been well described as 'a magnificent example of a contemporary David taking on Goliath.'5 But his book also provides a sober warning against the excesses of counter-reaction into which the transformational-generative extremists frequently tempt their contenders. Robinson begins by scoring the non-scientific bias of Chomsky's epigones; but he ends by questioning the very existence of linguistics as a scientific discipline. A botched surgical operation is always unfortunate, and sometimes a tragedy as well, but it should hardly make us question the existence of medical science; all it proves is the existence of incompetent surgeons, something no one ever really doubted. Of course, bungling surgeons harm not only their hapless patients but medicine as well. One of the lessons of Robinson's book is that linguistic science itself is today so generally misunderstood that it is in serious danger of being deleted from the modern humanistic quadrivium. So much of the responsibility for this crisis in linguistics must be laid directly at the feet of the Chomskyite school, and so much of their work has involved the misrepresentation of Japanese linguistic data, that the slow work of rebuilding public confidence in linguistics must almost necessarily begin with the Japanese language. The past several decades have also seen the publication of an evergrowing list of English translations from Japanese literature of all periods, many of them admirable examples of bilingual tact as applied to the translator's craft. For much of what the West today knows - or believes it understands - about Japan it has these translations to thank. But unfortunately the translators have not always been as admirable as their translations. Many of their commentaries on Japanese as a language only serve to perpetuate century-old misconceptions, when they do not actually give rise to new misunderstandings. And all too frequently, as we have seen, translations of Japanese literature of all periods not only bewilder the common reader with their linguistic naivete, they also pass off on to the largely defenceless public Englishings that bear only a remote relation to the Japanese originals. Someone must begin the work of defending the language against its translators.

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Finally, there is the common responsibility that must be felt by anyone studying and teaching the Japanese language anywhere in the world - but particularly in the West - to mount some some sort of defence against the deluge of books and articles, many - but by no means all - by Japanese amateurs of Japanese linguistics, that in and of themselves constitute one of the most ominous obstacles in the way of better mutual understanding between Japan and the rest of the outside world. My recent book Japan's Modern Myth: The Language and Beyond (1982)6 dealt mainly with the non-linguistic aspects of this problem. In the book at hand I instead direct attention to how many of these modern mythologizers of Japanese also blatantly distort the very grammar and structure of the language itself, as one of the many sorry consequences of their pseudo-linguistic paltering. Little in the work of these redoubtable authorities can be blamed on Noam Chomsky, of whom most of them have never even heard. Instead we mostly have to reckon here with what might be dubbed the 'common-sense' school of Japanese linguistics - a term that can only remind us how a century ago medical common-sense prescribed pouring boiling oil into open wounds, and setting leeches to suck away 'bad blood'. Works of this persuasion, frequently published abroad in inferior and misleading English versions,7 have begun to be almost as ubiquitous in the West as they have long been in Japan. Nor are foreign practitioners unfamiliar figures in the ranks of these 'common-sense' amateurs. A Pulitzer Prize administrator tells his American readers that the Japanese 'themselves sometimes refer to Japanese as "the Devil's language",' in which particularly preposterous and offensive allegation he is immediately seconded by none less than E. O. Reischauer, a distinguished Harvard University professor, and former US ambassador to Tokyo, who finds the author and his book 'very perceptive, well-informed, interesting'.8 Given these august auspices, it is hardly surprising that this wicked canard almost immediately makes its way to the pages of Time? for all the world to read. Not only does the language deserve defence against this sort of denigration; in a world where an author who knows so little of the Japanese language that he cannot correctly identify and gloss the usual Japanese term for 'linguistics' is able to write, and to get a university press to publish, an entire volume on linguistic theory as illustrated by Japanese,10 readers also deserve warning as well. It would be unfair as well as inaccurate to leave the reader with the impression that the idea of defending Japanese has never been suggested, or the task undertaken, by Japanese scholars. The doyen of Japanese scholars of the Japanese language, Kindaichi Haruhiko, built one of his most famous books around this same theme, his Nihongo of

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1957, which decades later remains in print and still sells vigorously in Japanese bookstores. But as the Western reader may easily see from the English translation of Kindaichi's book that appeared in 1978 (identifying the book as 'a classic defence of the Japanese language by one of Japan's leading linguists'),11 Kindaichi is suggesting another variety of defence against another variety of danger. For him the language, with its many alleged flaws and weaknesses, is its own worst enemy, followed in close second place by the Japanese themselves, who (mistakenly, in his view) tend to feel that because they speak a second-rate language they themselves must also be second-rate. His concept of 'defending Japanese' is to debunk, as gently as possibly, his own suggestions that the language is inferior, while at the same time urging the Japanese to re-arm themselves by renewing their self-confidence and self-esteem, particularly as these qualities relate to their language. In a word, Kindaichi's defence seems to us no defence at all, because the 'problems of the language' as he describes them are mere strawmen, set only up to be shot down. Indeed, the Kindaichi variety of defence must, in all candour, be admitted to embody one of the most strikingly persistent and perennial avenues for actually disparaging the language encountered anywhere in the literature, West or East, and hence itself something against which the Western reader at least deserves to be warned, particularly because its author is a distinguished Japanese authority on the Japanese language.12 When urged to 'call a spade a spade', Gwendolyn in The Importance of Being Earnest retorted with some pride that she at least had never seen a spade. Those of us involved in Japanese language and linguistics are not nearly so fortunate as Gwendolyn: we see spades every day. Some readers of this book will undoubtedly be distressed by the tone of severity that they will detect in many of its references to authorities with whom I disagree. Others instead will be understandably upset by the note of levity that I fear I am never completely successful in surpressing, particularly when it becomes necessary to recount the more egregious transformational-generative excesses. All the severity and most of the levity are intentional, not inadvertent. Wm. Pfaff has argued convincingly that the renewed air of'grave respect' extended to Marxism-Leninism by the US government these past few years has unwittingly done more to consolidate and reassure Soviet leadership than anything they might ever have accomplished on their own.13 The same seems to me true of the grave respect that most Western scholarship apparently feels compelled to accord to anything and everything that our Japanese colleagues write or print about the Japanese language. Severity where severity is due, leavened with levity

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as the occasion allows, seems to me to be the best possible course still open to the few of us in this field who, despite all discouragement, persist in calling a spade a spade. The Japanese language in our time stridently calls out for defence. It is mercilessly assailed from every quarter; its enemies are as numerous within as they are without. The recent self-destruction of the transformational-generative school has been a fortunate accident, but we can hardly count on many more such happy hazards in the years ahead. The prospects for what may lie ahead for the language of Lady Murasaki, Chikamatsu, Kawabata and Tanizaki appear to be particularly dismal in the areas surveyed in the last chapter. One cannot but be discouraged about the future when one sees how easily not only the general Japanese reading public but even many Western scholars are still successfully bluffed by irresponsible sociolinguistic assumptions about the chicken and the egg. Desperate problems call for desperate measures. Anyone who does not think that the Japanese language today is desperately beleagured has only to turn, once more, to the pages of the issue of Time for 1 August 1983 entirely given over to reporting on Japan. There the reader will find how far the situation has already deteriorated. A Japanese anthropologist is quoted, in all seriousness and with evident approval, as denying that Japanese is even a language, as that term is generally understood: 'English is intended strictly for communication. Japanese is primarily interested in feeling out the other person's mood.'14 Unless someone somewhere is prepared to refute this kind of attack, the study of Japanese - and for that matter the language itself might as well be consigned to oblivion. Hence the urgency, as well as the need, for defence of the sort suggested by our title, and also for the kind of defence undertaken in the present book. Fortunately, Japanese scholarship, like Japanese science and technology, is seldom slow in emulating foreign models, once they have been set forth with sufficient clarity and lucidity. Those of us who are concerned, either by profession or by conviction, or by both, with these questions, look forward to the day - may it be soon! - when we may count on the support of our Japanese colleagues in this defence.

Notes Chapter I

The Language and the Script

1 Language (1933), p. 21, § 2.1. 2 The etymology for the word kana in my book The Japanese Language (1967), p. 98, is merely the traditional Japanese folk-etymology for the term, and should be ignored. 3 Fosco Maraini, Ore Giapponesi, translated by Eric Mosbacher as Meeting With Japan (1959), pp. 247, 251, 254. 4 For the Altaic etymology of yama, see my book Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages (1971), pp. 85-6; for general considerations of Japanese as an Altaic language, see my book Origins of the Japanese Language (1981), passim. 5 'Writing is not Language, or is it?', Journal of Pragmatics, 1:4 (1977), p. 407. 6 For additional analysis of Suzuki's theory of the superiority of the Japanese writing system, see my monograph The Japanese Language in Contemporary Japan: Some Sociolinguistic Observations (1977), p. 57 ff., and my book Japan's Modern Myth, the Language and Beyond (1982), pp. 187 ff. 7 'Chanoyu, A Quest for Peacefulness, The Cultural Heritage of Japan (4)', Mainichi Daily News, 5 July 1983, 9. 8 Language (1933), p. 508, § 28.6; p. 500, § 28.2. 9 Toyoaki Uehara and Gisaburo N. Kiyose, Fundamentals of Japanese (1974), pp. 86-92, see my review in Journal of the American Oriental Society, 99 (1979), 122a-123a. Whole books entirely devoted to these baseless graphic etymologies for Chinese characters are in circulation, e.g., Len Walsh, Read Japanese Today (1966); Andrew Dykstra, TheKanjiABC (1977); id., Kanji 1-2-3 (1983). 10 P.A. Boodberg, Troleptical Remarks on the Evolution of Archaic Chinese', Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2 (1937), 344-5; id., '"Ideography"or Iconolatry', T'oungPao, 35 (I940),270ff.; Language, 40 (1964), 104. 11 Russel G. Schuh, Language, 58 (1982), 726. 12 Ito Tazaburo, 'J m dai moji', in Kawade Takao (ed.), Nihon rekishi daijiten (1958), Vol. 10, pp. 31 Id-12a. The principal perpetrator of the fraud was the kokugaku proponent Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843). 13 David Diringer, The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind (1948), pp. 169, 444. 14 Japan Quarterly, 25:4 (1978), 429. 15 N. Poppe, Introduction to Mongolian Comparative Studies (1955), pp. 74, 266; K.H. Menges, The Turkic Languages and Peoples: An Introduction to Turkic Studies (1968), pp. 145,147-9; N. Poppe, 'Ancient Mongolian', p. 471 in Walter Heissig (ed.), Tractata Altaica (1976). 16 F. Maraini, Meeting With Japan, pp. 255, 253, 255, 257. 17 L'Empire des Signes (1970), translated by Richard Howard as Empire of Signs (1982) 18 Op. cit., p. 99.

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248 Chapter 2

Notes

2 Square Pegs, Round Holes

Square Pegs, Round Holes

1 Meeting With Japan, p. 247. 2 For a full presentation of the description, see Bernard Bloch on Japanese, edited with an introduction and analytic index by Roy Andrew Miller (1970), passim, with a short epitome in my book The Japanese Language (1967), pp. 316-55. 3 Cf. Bernard Bloch on Japanese, p. 58, n. 42. Particularly notable for failing to recognize this principle is Bernard St.-Jacques, Structural Analysis of Modern Japanese (1971), on which see my review in Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 17 (1971), 27-62. 4 L. Bloomfield, Language (1933), p. 139, § 9.1. 5 S.W. Bushell, 'Obituary Notices: Rev. Joseph Edkins, D.D.', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1906, p. 271. 6 Transactions of the Asiatic Society Of Japan, 1 (1874; reprinted 1882), 87-100. 7 On Mori Arinori, see The Japanese Language in Contemporary Japan (1977), p. 42, and Japan's Modern Myth (1982), pp. 108-9, 111-12, and 204; see also Chapter 3 below with n. 2. 8 'Virgin Birth', pp. 85-112 in his Genesis as Myth, and Other Essay$(1969). 9 'Correspondence: Virgin Birth', Man, 3 (1968), 126-29. 10 'Fathers Were Not Genitors,, Man, 10 (1975), 34-40; Marina Warner, Alone of all Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), p. 369. 11 The Japanese Language, pp. 218,309-12; see also my article 'The Far East', pp. 1249-51 in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, Vol. 13, Historiography of Linguistics (1975). 12 'The Far East', p. 1256 ff. 13 For the historical circumstances under which Bloch's work on Japanese was undertaken and carried out, together with a bibliographic summary of publications later resulting from work by his students at Yale, see the 'Introduction', p. ix ff., to Bernard Bloch on Japanese. 14 Ibid., pp. xxxvii-xl. 15 Kazuko Inoue, A Study of Japanese Syntax (1969), p. 97; see my review in Language, 48 (1972), 214-30, especially p. 219 on this and the following two points. 16 Inoue, op. cit., p. 81. 17 Ibid., p. 77. 18 On the grammar of dake (actually somewhat more involved than the brief presentation in the text), see Bernard Bloch on Japanese, pp. 53, 56. 19 John J. Chew, Jr., A Transformational Grammar of Modern Colloquial Japanese (1973), p. 87; see my review in Journal of the American Oriental Society, 99 (1979), 505a-506a. 20 The Japanese Language, p. 268 ff.; more details in my chapter 'Levels of speech (keigo) and the Japanese Linguistic Response to Modernization', pp. 601-67 in Donald H. Shivley (ed.), Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture (1971). The impotence of transformational-generative grammar to deal with this phenomenon is strikingly demonstrated by Gary Dean Prideaux, The Syntax of Japanese Honorifics (1970), see my review in American Anthropologist, 73 (1971), 1379-82.

Notes

3 Native Guides and Foreign Tourists

249

21 S.I. Harada, 'Honorifics,' p. 513 in Masayoshi Shibatani (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 5, Japanese Generative Grammar (1976). 22 Susumu Kuno, The Structure of the Japanese Language (1973), pp. 3, 12; see my review in Journal of the American Oriental Society, 97 (1977), 232b-234b. Chapter 3 Native Guides and Foreign Tourists 1 Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 1 (1874), 93. 2 LP. Hall, Mori Arinori (1973), pp. 189-195; see also the citations for Chapter 2, n. 7 above. 3 'Shingoron', cited and translated in The Japanese Language in Contemporary Japan (1977), p. 49. 4 'Kokugo undo', Kaizo, April 1946, cited and translated in ibid., p. 43. 5 I.e. kanazukai, the rules (mostly of historical origin) for a small number of somewhat arbitrary kana spellings, especially for the long vowels. The passage here exhibits the genial confusion between language and writing that distinguishes most popular Japanese writing in this field. 6 An indigenous grammatical term for a set of discontinuous correlations in syntax between certain particles and certain sentence-final inflected forms; today it survives only in the literary language. Cf. The Japanese Language, pp. 325, 352-54; Bruno Lewin, Abriss der japanischen Grammatik, aufder Grundlage der klassischen Schriftsprache (1959), p. 218, § 220. 7 Bunsho tokuhon (1934; 36th printing of 1979), p. 69. 8 Susumu Nagara,Japanese Pidgin English in Hawaii: A Bilingual Description (1972); see my review in Journal of Asian Studies, 33 (1974), 125-7. 9 The Japanese Language, pp. 262-4; Arthur M.Z. Norman, 'Bamboo English, The Japanese Influence upon American Speech in Japan', American Speech, 30 (1955), 44-8; id., 'Linguistic Aspects of the Mores of the U.S. Occupation and Security Forces in Japan', American Speech, 29 (1954), 301-2, with corrections to both papers in The Japanese Language, p. 373. 10 The Japanese Language, pp. 264-6; Exercises in the Yokohama Dialect. . . Revised and Corrected at the Special Request of the Author by the Bishop of Homoco (1879) (with details of the reprintings in The Japanese Language, p. 373); F.J. Daniels, 'The Vocabulary of the Japanese Ports Lingo', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 12 (1948), 804-23. 11 See my chapter 'Levels of speech (keigo) and the Japanese Linguistic Response to Modernization', pp. 601-67 in Donald H. Shiveley (ed.), Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture (1971). 12. Japanese Literature: An Introduction for Western Readers (1955), p. 7. 13 'Japanese Language', Funk and Wagnails New Encyclopedia, Vol. 14 (1975), p. 158. 14 Another confusion of language and writing: kanabun is literally 'kana - i.e. phonetic syllabary - texts', but what the author meant is 'literature written in the Japanese language (and not in Chinese)'. The form kanabun itself is also somewhat solecistic; the preferred form is kanafumi.

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Notes

4 The Semantic

Fallacy

15 The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (1964; paperback 1969), pp. 289-90. 16 Ibid., pp. 290-92. 17 Ibid., pp. 291-92. 18 Yamagishi Tokuhei (ed.), Nihon koten bungaku taikei, Vol. 18 (1963), pp. 211-12. 19 Le Genji Monogatari: Introduction et Traduction du Livre 1 (1959). 20 Edward G. Seidensticker, The Tale of Genji (1978), p. 977. 21 Language (1933), p. 3, § 1.1. Chapter 4 The Semantic Fallacy 1 Bunsho tokuhon, p. 44. 2 The World of the Shining Prince, p. 291. 3 'Japanese Language', Funk and Wagnalls New Encyclopedia, Vol. 14 (1975), p. 158. 4 'The Far East', in Current Trends in Linguistics (see Chapter 2, n. 11), pp. 1258 ff. 5 R.H. Brower and E. Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (1961), p. 3; cf. T h e Far East', p. 1259, n. 75. 6 Here and below, Indo-European forms and etymologies are cited from C D . Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal IndoEuropean Languages (1949), s. v. v. 7 Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1949), p. 363a, s. v. 'green'. 8 Buck, op. cit., p. 1053b. 9 On the meanings and etymology of Old Japanese iro, see Sh. Murayama, 'Etymologie des altjapanischen Wortes iro "Farbe, Gesichtsfarbe, Gesicht"', Ural-Altaische Jahrbiicher, 34 (1962), 107-12, and my review in Language, 57 (1981), 472. 10 John Street and R.A. Miller, Altaic Elements in OldJapanese (1975), Part 1, pp.121-2. 11 The etymology remains unclear; Old Japanese murasaki shows that the final morpheme could not have been M 'tree, wood'. 12 Ferdinand D. Lessing et al., Mongolian-English Dictionary (1960), p. 706b, s. v. silt. 13 See my paper 'The Relevance of Historical Linguistics for Japanese Studies', Journal of Japanese Studies, 2 (1976), 378. 14 See my paper 'Old Japanese sir'6 "fortress, citadel"', pp. 397-415 in Walter Heissig (ed.), Tractata Altaica (1976). 15 N.N. Poppe, Vergleichende Grammatik der Altaischen Sprachen, Teil 1, Vergleichenden Lautlehre (1960), pp. 76,106; John Street, On the Lexicon of Proto-Altaic: A Partial Index to Reconstructions (1974), p. 9. 16 Lessing, op. cit., p. 96b, s. v. bel. 17 Bruno Lewin, Abriss der japanischen Grammatik, auf der Grundlage der klassischen Schriftsprache (1959), § 66, pp. 52 ff. 18 The World of the Shining Prince, pp. 105-6.

Notes

5 Time, Tense and Aspect

251

Chapter 5 Time, Tense and Aspect 1 Mark Twain, 'The Awful German Language', from A Tramp Abroad (1880), in The Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales of Mark Twain. . ., Charles Neider (ed.) (1961), pp. 439-55, deserves to be reread in this connection, particularly in comparison with Edkins's essay on Japanese cited above. 2 As in Chapter 2, this account is both abbreviated and condensed from the full treatment in Bernard Bloch on Japanese, cf. The Japanese Language, pp. 316-55. 3 At Matthew 12:45 and Luke 11:26 and hence probably to be referred ultimately to 'Q'. 4 See Marleigh Grayer Ryan, Japan's First Modern Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei (1967). 5 Accomplishes of Silence, The Modern Japanese Novel (1974), p. 24. 6 Ibid., p. 63. 7 Kusamakura, Ch. 3, ed. Iwanami Bunko (1942), p. 29. 8 Translated by Alan Turney, The Three-Cornered World (1965), p. 40. 9 Kusamakura, Chapter 10, p. 120. 10 The Three-Cornered World, pp. 136-7. On this general problem, see further the extensive treatment of time, tense and aspect in my paper 'Do the Japanese Know How to Tell Time?', Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, 10 (1975), 1-18. 11 On the problems associated with the compilation of the Man 'yoshu, see my paper 'The Lost Poetic Sequence of the Priest Manzei', Monumenta Nipponica, 36 (1981), 133-72. 12 See my paper, 'Time, Space, and Texts', Journal of Japanese Studies, 1 (1981), 202-14. 13 Nagafuji Yasushi, Kodai Nihon bungaku tojikan ishiki (1979), pp. 82-93. 14 N.N. Poppe, Vergleichende Grammatik der Altaischen Sprachen (I960), pp. 81, 100; John Street, On the Lexicon of Proto-Altaic (1974), p. 24. The objections to this etymology raised by N.A. Syromjatnikov, Drevnejaponskij Jazyk (1972), p. 70 are without foundation. 15 'O God Our Help in Ages Past', § 5; a metrical paraphrase of Ps. 90 from Psalms of David (1719) by Isaac Watts (1674-1748). 16 J.F. Fleet, 'The Kaliyuga Era of B.C. 3102', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1911, p. 490. 17 On 'exoactive' and 'endoactive' verbs, see Bruno Lewin, Abriss der japanischen Grammatik, § 134, pp. 118 ff. 18 See my monograph,' The Footprints of the Buddha': A n Eighth-Century Old Japanese Poetic Sequence (1975). 19 'The Footprints of the Buddha', Poem 10, loc. cit., pp. 117 ff. (but the translation and commentary as there now require minor corrections). 20 Gukansho, Chapter 3, Okami Masao and Akamatsu Toshihide (eds.), Nihon koten bungaku taikei, Vol. 86 (1966), p. 129; Chapter 7, pp. 325-6. 21 Louis de la Vallee Poussin, L'Abhidharmakosa de Vasubandhu, traduit et annote (1923-1925; 1931), translating the Chinese version of Hsiiantsang with which Jien was familiar (Taiskb Vol. 29, No. 1558). 22 It is not, e.g., true of the translation and commentary in Delmer M. Brown

252

Notes

5 Time, Tense and Aspect

and Ichiro Ishida, The Future and the Past, A Translation and Study of the Gukansho, An Interpretative History ofJapan Written in 1219 (1979), who appear unaware of the existence of de la Vallee Poussin's version, or at least certainly did not study it sufficiently. 23 As noted by Joyce Ackroyd, Lessons from History: The Tokushi Yoronty AraiHakuseki (1982), pp. xxiv and p. 348, n. 29. 24 E Benveniste, 'Mutations of Linguistic Categories', p. 90 in W.P. Lehmann and Y. Malkiel (eds.). Directions for Historical Linguistics: A Symposium (1968). Benveniste thus explains, e.g., Nazaraeus vocari habebat secundum prophetiam for the Vulgate's . . . quod dictum est per Prophetas : qubniam Nazaraeus vocabitur, a particularly apt example when we recall that St Jerome believed this to be one of two passages where Matthew 'non sequatur Septuaginta translatorum auctoritatem, sed hebraicam' (Cat. script, eccl, Tom. 4, 2s, col. 102). 25 Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages, p. 19; Bruno Lewin, Abriss der japanischen Grammatik (1959), § 170, pp. 160 ff.; J. Benzing, 'Die tungusischen Sprachen, Versuch einer vergleichenden Grammatik', Abhandlungen der geistes- undsozialwissenschaftlichenKlasse, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz, 11 (1955), p. 1069, § 130n. 26 Perceptively noted and accurately described by Fosco Maraini, Meeting With Japan, p. 248: 'mairimasho means "perhaps I shall go", whether today or tomorrow or the next day, though it is generally used in the translation of our future* (emphasis added). 27 Citing the colloquial Japanese version of the N T copyright 1974 by the Japan Bible Society, the American Bible Society, and the British and Foreign Bible Society, and an old literary Japanese version (Warera no shu naru sukuinushi Iesu Kirisuto no Shin'yaku Seisho, Kaiyaku) published sometime before 1945 for the United Bible Society of New York, London and Tokyo. The several competing colloquial versions of the Bible now available all differ from one another on this score, some rendering more futures with tentatives than others; the caique appears to be especially frequent in the colloquial versions now mostly used in RC churches in Japan, e.g., the N T published by the Tokyo Franciscans (1979), nihil obstat Callistus Sweeney, OFM, imprimatur Petrus S[eiichi] Shirayanaghi, Archiepiscopus Tokiensis. 28 Mainichi Shinbun, 5 July 1983, 13th Kyoto ed., p. 7. 29 Asahi Shinbun, 5 July 1983, 13th Kyoto ed., p. 7. 30 Nihon bungakushi josetsu, Vol. 1 (1975), Vol. 2 (1980), translated by David Chibbett, A History of Japanese Literature, The First Thousand Years (1979). 31 Translated by Chibbett, p. 248. 32 Sankashu, Poem 77, Kazamaki Keijiro and Kojima Yoshio (eds.), Nihon koten bungaku taikei, Vol 29, (1961), p. 32. 33 For more details on the question of dates involved with Kato's misunderstanding of this poem, see my review-article 'Plus Qa Change . . .\ Journal of Asian Studies, 39 (1980), 771-82.

Notes

5 Time, Tense and Aspect

253

Chapter 6 Translation and Translators 1 N. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), p. 30, and pp. 201-3, n. 17. 2 This point is effectively made by Katharina May, Journal of Japanese Studies, 8:2 (1982), 398, in a review that may also be consulted with profit for its sound critical evaluation of several translations from modern texts not mentioned in the present chapter. 3 Onnamen was first published in the May and June, 1958 numbers of the literary monthly Gunzo, then as a single volume in October of that year. It is cited here from the text in the author's collected works, Enchi Fumiko zenshu (1977), vol. 6, pp. 124-219. The translation cited here is that by J.W. Carpenter, Masks (1983). 4 John Updike, 'As Others See Us', New Yorker, 2 January 1984, 87-8. 5 Onnamen, p. 209a; Masks, p. 126. 6 Onnamen, p. 164b; Masks, p. 62. 7 Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary (4th edn) (1974), p. 1113b. 8 Onnamen, p. 186b; Masks, p. 95. 9 Nobuyuki Yuasa, trs., Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (1966; 6th reprint of 1977). 10 The text cited is that in Sugiura Masakazu et al., eds.,Bashobunshu,Nihon koten bungaku taikei, Vol. 46 (1959), pp. 36-8, corresponding to pp. 51-4 in the Yuasa translation (he renders the title, T h e Records of a WeatherExposed Skeleton'). Also consulted with profit was Toyama Susumu, Basko bunshu, Shincho Nihon koten zensei, Vol. 17 (1978). 11 These translations are adapted from those in A.C. Graham, Chuang-tzu (1981), p. 47 ('the realm of Nothingwhatever'). B. Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (1968), p. 35, had rendered the same expression 'Not-Even-Anything Village', which is hardly English, nor does it accurately render the Chinese. 12 R.L. Braybrooke, Diary and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, FRS (1894), Vol. 1, pp. 13, 88. 13 The poem, in Chapter 1 of the Genji, is given here in an adaptation of the prose paraphrase in E. Seidensticker, The Tale of Genji (1978), p. 9. 14 Wm. R. LaFleur, Mirror for the Moon: A Selection of Poems by Saigyo (1118-1190) (1978), p. xiii. 15 The association in question is primarily with Saigyo's poem Sankashu 2130, also appearing as Shin Kokinshu 987, incipit toshi takete . . ., translated in LaFleur, p. 87. 16 Sankashu 2108, incipit fukaku irete . . ., translated LaFleur, p. 86. 17 Sankashu 820 and 821, Shin Kokinshu 978 and 979, incipit yo no naka wo . . ., and the wo iduru . . ., both translated LaFleur, p. 37. 18 In the pronunciation of the eleven Old Japanese vowels, we now understand that the three neutralizations Old Japanese i, e, and o, as well as Old Japanese a and u, sounded much as the similarly romanized vowels do in modern Japanese; but Old Japanese / was pronounced like the vowel in English 'if, b as in English 'off, and b generally the centralized or mid vowel of English 'up'. Old Japanese e and e were pronounced with glides, e roughly like the onset of English 'yes', e like the onset of English 'eight'. On

254

Notes

6 Translation and

Translators

the pronunciation of Old Japanese 'i, see the body of the chapter infra. 19 The sense is, T w o maids carried the basket / and were angry at how heavy it was.' 20 Lines 9-10 and 17-19 in the vulgate text of Man 'yoshu poem 923 as printed in R.H. Brower and E. Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (1961), pp. 126-7. 21 Id., transcribed from Takagi Ichinosuke et al., eds., Man'ybshu 2, Nihon koten bungaku taikei (1959), Vol. 5, p. 139. 22 Translated in Brower and Miner, p. 126. 23 Translated in Brower and Miner, p. 127. 24 Lines 5-8 in the vulgate text of Man'ybshu poem 135 as printed in Brower and Miner, p. 115. 25 Id., transcribed from Takagi Ichinosuke et al., eds., Man'ybshu I, Nihon koten bungaku taikei (1957), Vol. 4, p. 83. 26 Edwin A. Cranston, 'Water-Plant Imagery in the Man'ybshu', Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 31 (1971), p. 138; this paper is particularly valuable for its precise identifications of plants mentioned in the Old Japanese texts. 27 Translated in Brower and Miner, p. 115. 28 Translated in Brower and Miner, p. 139. 29 E.g., Jidaibetsu kokugo daijiten, Jbdaihen (1967), p. 749b; Ono Susumu et al., Iwanami kogo jiten (1974), p. 1291c. 30 As in the Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai translation of Man 'yoshu poem 923 (. . . One Thousand Poems, 1940; reprinted 1969), p. 192. 31 Translated in Brower and Miner, p. 127. 32 Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson, eds. and translators, From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry (1981), p. 60. 33 Translated in Brower and Miner, p. 13. 34 Ian Hideo Levy, The Ten Thousand Leaves, A Translation of the Man'yoshu, Japan's Premier Anthology of Classical Poetry, Volume One (1981), p. 54. 35 Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai, . . . One Thousand Poems, p. 27. 36 InKojikiyotm 102, translated in D.L. Philippi,Kojiki (1968), p. 366,and similarly in his This Wine of Peace, This Wine of Laughter: A Complete Anthology ofJapan's Earliest Songs (1968), p. 84. The startling pairing of 'complete' and 'anthology' in this book's title gives a more than adequate hint of the level of its translations. 37 Murai Yasuhiko, Kokyb nendaiki (1973), pp. 342-9. 38 Text in Iwanami bunko 2668-9 (33rd revised reprint, 1972), p. 7; Marleigh G. Ryan, Japan's First Modern Novel: Ukigumo of FutabateiShimei(1967), p. 197, does not translate the makura kotoba. 39 I.H. Levy, The Ten Thousand Leaves . . ., p. 130. 40 Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai, . . . One Thousand Poems, p. 41. 41 Brower and Miner, pp. 138, 207, with the vulgate text bis. 42 Earl Miner, Japanese Poetic Diaries (1969), p. 176. 43 See the citations and discussion in Monumenta Nipponica, 25 (1970), 462-3. 44 H. Paul Varley, trs., A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns: Jinno Shotoki of Kitabatake Chikafusa (1980), p. 192.

Notes 6 Translation and

Translators

255

45 Donald Keene, A nthology ofJapanese Literature from the Earliest Era to the Mid-nineteenth Century (1955), p. 207. 46 H.P. Varley, A Chronicle . . ., pp. 100, 115; see my review, Journal of Japanese Studies, 7 (1981), 481-96, especially p. 492. 47 E. Seidensticker, The Tale of Genji, p. 84. Yamagishi Tokuhei, in Nihon koten bungaku taikei (1958), p. 177, n. 1, and p. 431, n. 176, explains why, in this passage in Chapter 5 of the original, the illness mentioned is not malaria - the same edition which the new Seidensticker translation (p. ix) is 'based chiefly on'. As so frequently, some of the early translations seem more careful than the latest ones: Kencho Suematsu, GenjiMonogatari by Murasaki Shikibu (1900; reprinted 1974), p. 102, renders the same passage 'periodical attacks of ague'. 48 Karen Brazell, The Confessions of Lady Nijb (1973), p. xx. This is, incidentally, another translation from Heian Japanese in which people persist in coming down with translator's pseudo-'malaria', e.g., p. 239. 49 K. Brazell, Confessions . . ., p. 228; for the text, Tomikura Tokujiro, ed., Towazugatari (1966), p. 175, also with a modern Japanese translation in the same volume, p. 362. 50 Man'ybshu poem 220, where the text, as in Takagi Ichinosuke et al., eds., Man'yoshu 1, Nihon koten bungaku taikei (1957), Vol. 4, p. 124, reads aradbkb ni koroFusu kinii. All the English translations render this kinii incorrectly as 'you', thus Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai, p. 46; Brower and Miner, pp. 28, 29; Sato and Watson, p. 34; Levy, p. 143; and Cranston, p. 166, even though decades ago A. Lorenzen, Die Gedichte Hitomaro's aus dem Manybshu (1927) translated these lines quite correctly ('Da sehe ich den Mann . . . Ach - der Herr, der dort geschlafen hat. . .'). Brower and Miner expand upon their incorrect translation by a commentary that professes to find evidence for Hitomaro's 'broad humanity' (p. 28) and also - most astonishingly of all! - for 'the direct personalism which is characteristic of that age' (p. 97) in this non-existent pronoun. On the second person in Old Japanese, na, nare, see Yamada Yoshio, Nara-cho bunpo-shi (4th edn, 1968), pp. 25, 57-64, and in particular his p. 95, where he points out that Old Japanese kimi, unlike the modern word of similar shape, is always to be understood as an honorific or flattering designation, not as a second-person pronoun. 51 . . . One Thousand Poems, p. 144. 52 D. Keene, Anthology, p. 198; the passage is reprinted without change in An Account of my Hut (1976), p. v. 53 N. Yuasa, Basho . . ., p. 51; the poem has omoroshiki, related to omoshiro-i, which does frequently mean 'fun' in modern Japanese, but never in Basho's language. Yuasa either does not realize that many words have changed in sense between Basho's day and our own, or else has decided to astonish his readers by concealing this information. 54 Levy, The Ten Thousand Leaves . . ., p. 344, translating a line of Chinese prose in an essay introducing Man'yoshu poem 794; the text is actually a Chinese recension of Sanskrit akase sakuneh padam, item 28 in the old canonical list of the 35 orthodox tropes for describing 'how the Bodhisattva ought to view all living beings', in this instance, as 'the tracks left by a flight of birds'. The author of the text being translated drew it, in

256

55 56

57 58 59 60

61

62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71

Notes

7 The Chicken or the Egg

turn, from KumarajTva's Chinese translation of the Vimalaklrti nirdesa sutra. See my article, 'Mozart Scored for Mouth Organ', Yale Review, 71:3 (1982), 453-8. Murayama Masao, Nihon seiji shisb-shi kenkyu (1952; 20th printing 1975), and its putative translation by Mikiso Hane as Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (1974). The extraordinary problem of this translation is discussed in my article, 'Translation from the Japanese', Yale Review, 65:1 (1975), 146-51. Ivan Morris, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon (1967), 2 vols. Arthur Waley, The Pillow-Book of Sei Shonagon (1928). This point is elaborated in my review, Nation, 206:612, 6 May 1968. Charles Elliott, 'Delightful Insights from Old Japan', Life, 64:10,6 March 1968. The totally ahistorical fantasy with which this review of the Morris translation begins ('almost exactly one thousand years ago, in a matfloored room in a low wooden palace in the center of the city of Heian - now Kyoto - a lady knelt at a low table behind a brocaded screen to finish her book. . .') preserves an excellent example of the misunderstanding among the general public to which careless and uninformed translations such as this invariably give enduring currency. This brief summary of the textual history ofMakura no Sbshi is drawn (but simplified) from the essay that begins the text-edition by Ikeda Kikan and Kishigami Shinji, Nihon koten bungaku taikei (1958), p. 13, § 3. Morris lists this volume as the first entry in his 'Bibliography. Works in Japanese' (Vol. 2, p. 268), but gives no evidence of ever having read this portion of it. Ed. Ikeda and Kishigami, p. 104, § 66. Translated by Morris, Vol. 1, p. 60, as his § 62. Translated by Morris, Vol. 1, p. 14, as his § 13. Ed. Ikeda and Kishigami, p. 56, § 13. Details are discussed and sources cited \n Japan's Modern Myth, p. 137 ff. Ivan Morris is only an apparent exception, one that actually proves the rule, having spent the years of World War II in the USA, learned Japanese at the US Navy Language School, and served in the US Navy as a 'language officer'. Blurb on the back cover of Sato and Watson, From the Country of Eight Islands. Blurb on the back cover of Levy, The Ten Thousand Leaves. A.L. Sadler, The Ten Foot Square Hut and Tales of the Heike (1928, reprinted 1972), p. 2. Donald Keene, Anthology, p. 197.

Chapter 7 The Chicken or the Egg 1 A disparate view is that of Mary R. Haas, 'Author's Postscript', pp. 370-72 in A.S. Dil (ed.), Language, Culture, and History: Essays by Mary Rosamund Haas (1978), who would see the rise of Bloomfieldian structuralism as the force that 'precluded the consideration of those broader facts of linguistics which loomed so large in [Edward] Sapir's work'. Despite the

Notes 7 The Chicken or the Egg

257

importance that naturally attaches to the reminiscences of one of the few living survivors from the earliest days of American linguistics, a close reading of Language (1933) scarcely bears out this charge, nor does Haas's tacit disregard of the Chomskyite decades enhance the credibility of her thesis. 2 K.V. Teeter, Language, 46 (1970), 527, n. 7; H.G. Lunt, Language, 46 (1970), 720, n. 12. 3 E.g., Lewis S. Josephs, 'Phenomena of Tense and Aspect in Japanese Relative Clauses', Language, 48 (1972), 109; for this school, not only people but even typhoons must be given different, ungrammatical names, as in S. Kuno, The Structure of the Japanese Language (1973), p. 157, cf. Journalof the American Oriental Society, 97 (1977), 234b. 4 E.g., Masayoshi Shibatani (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 5, Japanese Generative Grammar (1976), which has examples on almost every page. 5 Language (1933), p. 509, § 28.7. 6 Cf. the review by Hayami Akira, Journal of Japanese Studies, 7 (1981), 415-20. 7 Journal of Japanese Studies, 8 (1982), 5-28. 8 Kumon, loc. cit., pp. 8-9. 9 Nihon kokugo daijiten, Vol. 20 (1976), pp. 619a-b, meaning (2). For the original Vocabulario entry, see the Iwanami facsimile, Doi Tadao (ed.) (1960), p. 532b; on the Vocabulario and its facsimile editions, see my review in Romance Philology, 36 (1982), 74-80. 10 Nihon kokugo daijiten, Vol. 8 (1974), p. 302d, etymology (1). 11 For text-citations of OJ kotowari as a caique for Chin. Vi, see Omodaka Hisataka et al (eds.,), Jidaibetsu kokugo daijiten, Jodaihen (1967), p. 3Q2d. 12 C D . Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal IndoEuropean Languages (1949), pp. 1428-9. 13 Nihon kokugo daijiten, Vol. 8 (1974), p. 304a, meaning (6). 14 Kumon, loc. cit., pp. 9-10. 15 E. Lamotte, L 'enseignement de Vimalakirti (1962), translated by Sara Boin as The Teaching of Vimalakirti (1976), pp. lxix-lxx, and p. 196, n. 22. 16 Kumon, loc. cit., pp. 11-12. 17 Ibid., p. 16. 18 Ibid., p. 18. 19 E.g., Japan's Modern Myth (1982), pp. 64-83. 20 E.g., William A. Cooper, Jr., and Honor O'Malley, 'Effects of Dichotically Presented Simultaneous Synchronous and Delayed Auditory Feedback on Key Tapping Performance', Cortex, 11 (1975), 206-16. 21 Meeting With Japan, p. 249. 22 Japan's Modern Myth, p. 117 and passim. 23. 'The Far East', p. 1252 in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, Vol. 13, Historiography of Linguistics (1975). 24 Kato Shuichi, 'Nihon shakai e no kagi', Kokusai Kbryu, 21 (1979), 41 (emphasis added). 25 See my summary of the literature on this question in 'Levels of speech (keigo) and the Japanese Linguistic Response to Modernization', pp. 601-67 in Donald H. Shively (ed.), Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture (1971).

258

Notes

Postscript

26 Cited The Japanese Language (1967), p. 270. 27 Bruno Bettelheim, Treud and Man's Soul', The New Yorker, 1 March 1982, 83. Postscript 1 Language, 48 (1972), 214-15. 2 T h e History of Linguistics and Professor Chomsky', Language, 46 (1970), p. 570. 3 'On the Failure of Generative Grammar', Language, 55 (1979), 859-85. 4 Konrad Koerner, T h e Neogrammarian Doctrine: Breakthrough or Extension of the Schleicherian Paradigm, A Problem in Linguistic Historiography', in Folia Linguistica Historica, 2:2 (1981), 159, n. 6. 5 In New Society, cited on the back cover of the first (1978) paperback edition. 6 See the review by Louis Allen, Monumenta Nipponica, 38 (1983), 333-8. 7 E.g., Ono Susumu, Nihongo no kigen (1957), translated as The Origin of the Japanese Language (1970) (see my review in Monumenta Nipponica, 26 (1971), 455-69); Suzuki Takao, Kotoba to bunka (1973), translated as Japanese and the Japanese: Words in Culture (1978) (see my review in Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, 13:2 (1978), 163-88). 8 Robert C. Christopher, The Japanese Mind: The Goliath Explained (1983), p. 39. Reischauer's encomium leads a long list of similarly laudatory comments on the book's back jacket. 9 Time, 1 August 1983, 75. 10 J.V. Neustupny, Post-structural Approaches to Language: Language Theory in a Japanese Context (1978), p. 7; see my review in Language, 56 (1980), 440-42. 11 Haruhiko Kindaichi, The Japanese Language, translated and annotated by Umeyo Hirano (1978). 12 See my review of the Hirano version in Language Problems and Language Planning, 6 (1982), 81-5, for a discussion of some of the questions raised by the translation itself; Kindaichi's original is commented upon in Japan's Modern Myth, pp. 55-63, and passim. 13 The New Yorker, 25 July 1983, 35, 14 Time, 1 August 1983, 75.

Index Chuvash, 166 class meaning, 54 coinages, see neologisms colour-names, 129-39 compounding, 53 copula, 54-6, 68, 79, 85 Creole, 95, 175 Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 225

Aarsleff, Hans, 242 Abhidharma-kosa, 172 adjectives, 51-4, 58, 63, 68, 72, 74, 83, 136, 150 Aeneid3 104 allomorph, 54 Altaic, 22, 60, 141-2, 149, 166, 167, 173 ambiguity, 23-7, 29, 69 aspect, 52, 84, 144-76, 178 assonance, 199-201, 204

deferential connotations, 174 deferential prefix, 83, 85 deep structures, 77-87, 158, 221, 223, 225 drift, 159, 162

Barthes, Roland, 44-5 bases, 48, 50, 52-8, 136 Basho, see Matsuo Munefusa Basque, 121 Benveniste, E., 173 Bloch, Bernard, vii, 49, 75 Bloomfield, Leonard, 5, 6, 33-4, 37,46,71,96, 115-17, 144, 177-8, 221, 224-5, 240 body-parts, 139-42, 144 borrowings, 19-24, 28, 35-6, 52, 54-5, 66, 70, 84, 94, 131, 136-7, 184, 205, 237 bound forms, 58, 68, 71 Breton, 131 Buddhism, 165-72, 224, 235 Bunmei to shite no ie-shakai, 226 Bunsho Tokuhon, 92, 117

Edkins, Joseph, 59-63, 86, 89, 90, 92 Empire of Signs, 45 Enchi Fumiko, 180-83, 195 endings, 49, 50, 53, 58 endoactive, 169 epigraphy, 35-8, 41-2, 60 Evenki, 141 exoactive, 169 Floris and Blauncheflur, 198-9 folk-etymology, 35-6, 40, 44 Ford, Henry, 229 form-classes, see word-classes free forms, 58, 68 Fujitani Nariakira, 66-70 Funaki Kazuo, 45 Futabatei Shimei, see Hasegawa Tatsunosuke futures, 123-5

calligraphy, 43-5 caiques, 11, 68, 70, 84, 170, 179, 188, 231, 234 Carpenter, Juliet Winters, 180-83 case suffixes, 28 Celtic, 131, 134 Chih Tun, 236 Chikamatsu, 246 Chinese characters, 9, 11, 13-29, 32, 34-7, 41, 43-5, 69 Chinese writing system, 9, 14-29, 31, 33, 34, 38, 40, 42-3, 238 Chomsky, Noam, 62-3, 76-8, 81-2,85,87, 114, 158, 178, 223-5, 242-4

gender, 146-7, 240-41 Genji Monogatari, 96, 99-114, 118, 122, 138, 143, 189, 195, 197 geographical terms, 141-2 German, 136, 140-41, 146-8, 233 Gilbert, W. S., 159 grammar, 46-87, 92, 97-8, 103-5, 110, 117 259

260 graphic etymology, see epigraphy Gross, Maurice, 141 Gukansho, 171-2 Haguenauer, Charles, 112 Harvey, William, 64 Hasegawa Tatsunosuke, 154, 204-5 Hawaii, 95 head-rime, 199 Hepburn, James Curtis, 234 hiragana, 28-9 Hiraoka Kimitake, 160-61 Historical Grammar of Japanese, An, 15 History of Japanese Literature, 175 Hitomaro, 206, 210 Hbjbki, 209, 211-12, 218-19 honorifics, see levels of speech Husserl, Edmund, 73 Hymns Ancient and Modern, 168 ideograms, 10, 14, 17, 29, 31, 44 ideographs, 10, 14, 15, 17, 29, 30-37, 41 immediate constituents, 84-5 imperfectives, see aspect Importance of Being Earnest, The, 245 Indo-European, 38, 46-8, 50, 52, 55,59,70,99, 118, 121, 131, 133-5, 146, 148, 152, 233 inflections, 28, 49, 52-3, 57-8 internalization, 40, 42, 238-9 Irish, 131, 134 ji, see Chinese characters Jien, 171-2, 175 jinji, 39 jo, 205-7 kakari musubi, 92 kakekotoba, 205-6 kalpa, 169, 170, 172 Kamo Chomei, 209, 211-12, 219 kana, 11-13, 25, 27-9, 66, 92 kanabun, 99 Kanji, see Chinese characters katakana, 28-9

Index Kato Shuichi, 175-6, 239 Kawabata Yasunari, 160, 246 Keene, Donald, 99-100 Keichu, 231 keigo, see levels of speech Ki Tsurayuki, 127 Kindaichi Haruhiko, 244-5 Kb Nihon Bunten, 239 Kojiki, 162 Kokinshu, 127 Kokugaku, 39 kotodama, 216-17 Korea, 10, 40, 43, 74, 136, 140, 233, 236-8 Kumon Shumpei, 226-38, 240-41 Kusamakura, 155-7, 159 Lamotte, E., 236 langue, 73 Leach, Edmund, 64 levels of speech, 82-3, 110, 223-4, 240 loan translations, see caiques logographs, 15, 27, 35-6, 40, 41, 138 makura kotoba, 191, 201-5, 218-19 Makura no Soshi, 212-16 Manchu, 60 Mann, Thomas, 216 Man'yoshu, 162-3, 169-70, 195, 199, 200, 202, 206, 210-12, 218 Maraini, Fosco, 46, 48, 239 Matsuo Munefusa, 184-95, 208, 212 meaning, 19-20, 56-7, 81, 82, 104, 122-30, 147, 151-2 metaphor, 179, 207 Middle English, 198-9 Middle Japanese, 4, 136, 142, 173, 179 mimesis, 110, 157, 181 Ministry of Education, 18, 28, 72 Mishima Yukio, see Hiraoka Kimitake Mitford, Nancy, 213 Miyoshi Masao, 153-9, 172, 175 modifiers, 52-5, 68, 83-4 Monberg, Toben, 64

Index Mongolian, 43, 60, 141-2, 166 Monguor, 166 Mori Arinori, 62, 90, 91, 93, 95, 97-8 morpheme, 16-22, 24-5, 27, 28, 36, 38, 81 Morris, Ivan, 99-111, 114-15, 117-120, 122-3, 128, 130, 138, 143, 212-16, 219 Murakami Yasusuke, 226 Murasaki Shikibu, 99-101, 113, 118, 122-3, 138,246 nagauta, 163 names, 24-7 Natsume Kinnosuke, 155-7 negatives, 53, 174 neologisms, 21, 27, 35, 70 71, 84, 169, 170, 232-4, 237 New Grammarians9 Funeral, The, 243 NHK, 49 Nihongi, 162 Nijo, Lady, 210 nouns, 51, 53-8, 63, 68, 81, 84-5, 134, 136, 140, 146-7, 174, 202, 205 Nozarashi Kiko, 184-94 numbers, 55 Old English, 136, 196, 233 Old Japanese, 4, 43, 134-7, 142, 161-6, 169-71, 173, 179, 190, 195-208,210-12,231-4; phonology of, 197-201, 204 Ono Susumu, 41-2, 238 Onnamen, 180-83 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 224-5 Otsuki Fumihiko, 239 Panini, 67 parts of speech, see word-classes perfectives, see aspect perfects, see aspect Persian, 86 Pfaff, Wm., 245 pidgin, 95 Porter, Helen Lowe, 216 post-positions, 58, 61

261 Prajnaparamita, 236 prenouns, 55 presumptives, see tentatives pronouns, 56, 70, 83-6, 142, 186-7, 190-93, 210-11, 215-16, 253-4 Reischauer, E. O., 244 relative clauses, 83-5 rhetorical techniques, see jo; kakekotoba; makura kotoba Robinson, Ian, 243 Romance languages, 121, 173, 233 roots, 151 Russian, 148 Sadler, A. L., 218 Saigyo, 175-6, 192-4 Sansom, Sir George, 15-16,140-41 Sato Seizaburo, 226 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 72-3 Schneider, David M., 64 segmentation, 128-45, 149, 163-70, 172-3, 175 Sei Shonagon, 213-16, 219 Seidensticker, Edward G., 112-13 semantics, 117-43, 149-51, 157 Sen Soshitsu XV, 32-4, 40-42 Shiga Naoya, 91-3, 95, 159 simile, 179, 207 sociolinguistics, 222-3 Soseki, see Natsume Kinnosuke stems, 151 structural-descriptivism, 74-6, 84, 122, 221-5 structural grammar, 49, 52, 57, 59,75 structuralism, 47-8, 50-51, 63, 74-5, 80-82, 143 suppletion, 54 Suzuki Takao, 31, 33-4, 56-7, 75 Syntactic Structures, 11, 225 syntax, 76, 81, 83-5, 91, 103-4, 110-11, 117, 155 Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, 92, 95, 97-8, 117, 159, 161,246 tense, 52, 144-76 tentatives, 151-3, 173-5

262 time, see tense Tokieda Motoki, 73 Towazugatari, 210 transformational-generative grammar, 76, 78-80, 83, 85-7, 178, 221-5, 242-3, 245-6 translation, 22-5, 27, 35-6, 40-42, 50-51, 57, 59, 70-71, 75, 79-80, 101-16, 118, 122-30, 134, 151, 160-61, 174-5, 177-220, 232, 243 Tsunoda Tadanobu, 238-9 Tungusic, 43, 129, 141, 173 Turkic, 43, 149, 166 Ukigumo, 154-5, 204 Updike, John, 180-83 uta makura, 191-2, 201, 213-16 verbs, 50-54, 57, 61, 63, 68, 92, 109, 149-76, 203

Index Vietnam, 10, 43 Viglielmo, Valdo Humbert, 99-100, 118-20, 122, 123, 128-31, 130-31, 134 Vocabulario, 229 Waei gorin shusei, 234 Waji Shoran-sho, 231 Waley, Arthur, 112-13,212 Welsh, 131 Wen Hstian, 162 Whitney, William Dwight, 90-91 Wilde, Oscar, 65 word, 15-16 word-classes, 49-50, 52-6, 58, 68, 84-5 writing system, 5-45, 66 Yanagita Kunio, 91, 93, 95, 117 Yasuda Kiyomon, 127 Yuasa Nobuyuki, 184-94 Yukawa Hideki, 160