Thoughts on Japan

Kingaku kara no omoi - 金額からの思い

Thoughts on Japan from the National Institute of Japanese Studies. University of Sheffield

Thomas McAuley

University of Sheffield

Following on from last week’s column, this week, I’m going to talk about the second two factors making Japanese a challenge to learn: social deixis and discourse structure.

‘Deixis’ for those of you who are unfamiliar with the word, refers to linguistic features which have to do with positioning, meaning they can only be interpreted correctly in the context in which they are used. For example, in English, if someone says, ‘Here is the book, and there is the magazine,’ unless you know when and where the statement was made, you cannot know exactly what ‘here’ and ‘there’ mean. Japanese has similar deictic expressions, of course, but it also has an extremely large number of elements whose purpose is to indicate the social relationship between speaker and addressee. In fact, these are so characteristic of the language that it’s fair to say that it’s impossible to say anything in Japanese without indicating what you think of your relationship with the person you are speaking, or writing, to.

You may know this already, but just as an example, modern Japanese has five different copula verbs (‘to be’) in common use, each of which conveys different social information. You have: the plain copula da だ, used when speaking to social inferiors, or to people the speaker knows well in informal circumstances; the polite copula desu です, used when speaking to adult strangers, or under polite circumstances; the deferential copula degozaimasu でございます, used when speaking to social superiors, or in formal circumstances; the honorific copula deirasshaimasu でいらっしゃいます, used when speaking about social superiors, in their presence; and finally, the impersonal copula dearu である, which conveys no social information but is only used in writing, or in formal speeches to large audiences when the speaker wants to strike an objective tone. (There are other copulas which are have fallen out of current use, or you will only come across in highly restricted circumstances: dearaseraremasu であらせられます, for example, which is only used if the subject is a Shintō deity, or kami 神.)

So, it’s impossible for a Japanese person to say, ‘This is Tanaka,’ and no more in Japanese: kore wa tanaka da これは田中だ, says, approximately, ‘This is my junior, Tanaka,’ or ‘This is Tanaka who I know very well, and the situation in which we are speaking is a casual one.’ Kore wa tanaka-san desu これは田中さんです , says, ‘This is Tanaka, and I don’t know you well, so we are speaking under polite, formal circumstances.’ Kochira wa tanaka-sama deirasshaimasu こちらは田中様でいらっしゃいます, says, ‘This is Mr Tanaka, who is superior to me, and to whom I wish to show respect.’ It’s perfectly possible to give an indication of what you think of the relationship between you and your addressee in English, too, of course – just think of the different circumstances under which someone might say, ‘Fancy a brew?’ and ‘Might you possibly care for a cup of tea?’ (That’s if you’re British, that is, but I’m sure you can think of an equivalent pair of expressions in your own version of English.) In Japanese, however, the social aspect of what you are saying is always present, and encoded in the syntactic and lexical choices you make, so you have to remain constantly aware of who you are speaking to, and your relationship with them, in a way that you don’t have to do in English.

There are also significant linguistic differences between the way men and women express themselves in similar social situations – you may have had the experience of your Japanese students saying to you, ‘Please teach me to talk English like a man/woman,’ and this is the reason why. Japanese is by no means unique in this, of course, there are identifiable gender-based differences in many languages, including English, but the differences in Japanese are much more extensive than English speakers are likely to be used in their own language, and operate at the syntactic level.

What all this means is that it is quite difficult to learn to speak, and write, Japanese authentically, unless you understand both how Japanese society is structured, and where your place is in it, and this it is difficult to do unless you live in Japan, and make an effort to relate to Japanese people in a Japanese way. In short, you have to develop a ‘Japanese persona’, which you use when speaking the language, which is usually quite different from your ‘English’ one, and this is something that people often find very hard to do.

As evidence for this, one of my students did a dissertation a couple of years ago on the attitudes native English speakers who had developed good Japanese skills had to the language. One of the questions he asked his informants was which was more important in Japanese communication: conveying information, or using the social aspects of the language correctly. Interestingly, those who rated their abilities as ‘good’ plumped for ‘conveying information’, but those who rated their abilities as ‘native or near native’ uniformly said ‘the social aspects,’ as this allowed them to function much more effectively in Japanese society.

Finally, we come to the fourth difficulty with Japanese – discourse structure – by which I mean the way in which texts, using the word in the broadest sense, are put together and the roles the various parts play. I’m not going to say too much about this now, because there’s enough material in the topic for a column or two, but suffice it to say that Japanese texts are frequently structured in a very different way from English ones, and until you get used to this, as a native English speaker, you may not even recognise what a given text is, or what role it is supposed to perform. So, even if you understand the grammar and vocabulary perfectly, you may not understand why a text has the structure it does, and what the equivalent structure would be in English: is this an argument in favour of something? Is this an introduction? Is this a conclusion? What is the writer, or speaker, trying to say? You just can’t tell.

It is at this point that some people give up in disgust, or accuse the Japanese of being duplicitous, or never saying what they ‘really’ mean, or meaning what they say. I’m not stating that the Japanese never lie or intentionally mislead, but a considerable number of the miscommunications and misunderstandings between Japanese and English speakers arise because both are using their own discourse structures – even if speaking the others’ language – and these are simply not compatible.

In conclusion, then, is Japanese a ‘hard’ language? Well, the answer is both ‘Yes’ and ‘No’: phonologically and syntactically, it certainly isn’t, and challenges like learning the writing system and vocabulary can be overcome simply by improving one’s memory skills and having a high boredom threshold, but communication and comprehension require flexibility and considerable effort at redrawing your mental ‘maps’, and this is something that some people find they can’t do, or don’t feel comfortable doing. In the end, though, what it comes down to, just like the Japanese learning English, is motivation.

That’s it for the language for a while – next week, I’m going to talk about a subject dear to my heart: jidai geki 時代劇, or samurai 侍 dramas!

• Japanese Language (12)
• Japanese Literature (3)
• Japanese Popular Culture (6)
• Japanese Social Relations (7)
• Japanese Society (3)
• Musings (7)
• Traditional Japanese Culture (2)

• Idolatrous Cannibals in Golden Palaces (Part Three)
• Idolatrous Cannibals in Golden Palaces (Part Two)
• Idolatrous Cannibals in Golden Palaces (Part One)
• You will talk proper!
• How Does Your Garden Grow?
• Your Face or Mine? (Part Two)
• Your Face or Mine (Part One)
• Honour and Humility - Japanese Style
• Bloodsuckers of the World, Unite? Part 3
• Bloodsuckers of the World, Unite? Part Two

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• Your Face or Mine? (Part Two)
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• Your Face or Mine (Part One)
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• Bloodsuckers of the World, Unite? Part 3
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• Honour and Humility - Japanese Style
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• Bloodsuckers of the World, Unite! Part One
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• Amber or Green Tea - Part One
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• Does the Shining Prince yet shine?
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• Nonsense About Nihonjin
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