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

This week I thought I’d introduce you to the wonderful world of Japanese letters – something you may not be familiar with unless your Japanese language skills are already at quite a high level. Obviously, if you’re not intending to develop your knowledge of written Japanese much this isn’t a skill you are ever going to need to apply, but knowing about how the Japanese communicate with each other in writing can be illuminating about other aspects of their social behaviour, and can help you to understand them better, so it’s useful to know about, even if it’s something you’ll never have to do yourself.

I suppose the first thing I should say is that writing letters in Japanese is a complicated business, and I’m only going to have time to scratch the surface here. If this whets your appetite, then I recommend Writing Letters in Japanese which is a reasonable guide to the basic patterns and expressions, with examples of various different types of letters, with somewhat clumsy English translations, to give you an idea of how things are expressed.

With that said, let me try and explain what it is that I love about Japanese letter writing: I think it’s the fact that it’s still something of an art – in a way that letter-writing in English no longer is. While the modern age and information technology are bringing changes, there’s an etiquette and a structure to writing a Japanese letter that I find deeply satisfying, although I admit that some people find the exercise stultifying.

What you need to remember is that it’s not so long – probably about 25 years – since all, and I mean all, letters were handwritten: postcards, family messages, love letters, business ones – everything. This is obviously partly a simply practical response to the fact that Japanese typewriters were hugely cumbersome pieces of equipment, requiring extensive specialised training to use, and even then being relatively slow to operate. So, they were only used under special circumstances, as it was much easier to write something by hand. It was only with the word processing revolution that it became easier, and faster, to have a machine ‘write’ for you, but even so, that was still regarded as cold and impersonal, so it was much slower to be widely adopted than it was in the UK and US, for example.

Another reason for this was, as I said in my column on jiko shōkai, that the Japanese in general place great emphasis on maintaining relationships, and not writing a letter by hand was thought of as showing a lack of concern – you couldn’t be bothered to take the time to do it yourself. There are a number of ways in which you can demonstrate that you do care when writing a letter: for example, it’s vital to make no mistakes at all – if you do, you have to do the whole page again (many people write letters in pencil and then trace them), and it’s also imperative to send more than one page – even if you have to include a blank sheet with the letter. It’s a sign that you wish you could write more, and are not deliberately cutting the communication short.

It’s also the case that Japanese letters, as communicative acts from one person to another, contain a number of features intended to demonstrate that the writer is appropriately committed to the relationship. Thus, they always begin with both wishes for the addressee’s continuing good health, followed by a reassurance of the writer’s health, usually with an assertion that this due to the good offices of the addressee. Prior to this, however, you need to have two other elements: a formulaic opening salutation, always paired with a particular formulaic close – the equivalent of ‘Dear Sir’ and ‘Yours faithfully’ in English – and a remark about the season. There are any number of these – you can get lists of the appropriate ones for each month, or a word processor will generate one automatically – although a skilled letter-writer will adapt a standardised remark to their own context. This gives the impression that you have devoted more personal attention to the letter and is bound to create a better reaction in your recipient.

To give just a couple of examples, for this month, March, you could begin ‘fuyu no nagori no mada sariyaranu toki sōrō’ 冬の名残のまだ去りやらぬ時候 (‘At this time when the lingering traces of winter have yet to depart’), whereas in May you would start ‘wakaba no azayaka na kisetsu’ 若葉の鮮やかな季節 (‘In the season of fresh green leaves’), and in August ‘zansho kibishiki ori kara’ 残暑厳しき折から (‘As this is a time of severe and lingering heat’). The expressions relate more to the traditional, poetic, lunar year than they do to the calendrical, solar one – dating is, perhaps, something I can talk about in detail in another column – which is why they can sometimes seem a little out of step with the actual weather, such as referring to the summer heat being almost over in August, and it can seem particularly incongruous when writing a letter to Japan from the UK - mentioning the ‘fragrant breezes’ of June, when the rain is still lashing down – but it still provides an elegant beginning to the letter, and helps to establish a civilised tone.

After these opening remarks, you can then move on with what you actually want to write about. The language used in letters is formal and contains a number of archaic features (verb stems instead of te-forms, for example, so yuki 行き (‘go and…’), and not itte 行って, as it would be in conversation, or some other forms of writing), all of which help to maintain the polite tone. You also use a higher level of honorific language than you would in person, because you don’t have the option of using body language and tone of voice to be polite, but on the whole, modern epistolary Japanese is not that different from the language as it would be written in other formal contexts. A mere fifty, or sixty, years ago, however, the situation was quite different.

Letters used to be written in a special linguistic style called sōrōbun 候文, a term which translates loosely into English as ‘epistolary style’. I don’t have time to go into this in detail now – again maybe I can write another column about it, if there’s interest enough – but suffice it to say that it was substantially different, in almost every respect, from the modern spoken and written language. Just as an example, what do you make of this:

saru sangatsu muika zuke o motte gokōfuainarisōrō ‘bukanan’ in uisukii no gosōbazuke ichi dāsu ni tsuki yonjūni shiringu kae ni yori rokujū hako dake tōten kanjō nite gokaimotomekudasaretaku onegaimōshiagesōrō

然る三月六日付を以つて御交付相成候「ブカナン」印ウヰスキーの御相場付一打に就き四十二志替へに拠り六十箱丈當店勘定にて御買求下度願申上候。

This is a single sentence from a standard business letter, written in the late 1940s, but I suspect it’s a closed book to most of you, even if you do know quite a lot of Japanese. It’s representative of sōrōbun, though, in its use of the tenseless auxiliary verb sōrō 候 – we saw it earlier in one of the seasonal remarks, which is about the only context it’s still used today – alternatives for suru する (‘do’) – in this case ainarisōrō 相成候 – and using kanji alone, without any hiragana – 御買求下度願申上候 . Oh, if you want to know what it means, it’s:

We request you to purchase for our account 60 cases of “Buchanan” Brand Whisky at 42/- per dozen, as per your quotation of March 6th.

Luckily, no one has to learn to produce sōrōbun these days, although historians learn how to read it, but diplomats used to be taught how to speak it – imagine instead of being able to say dekimasen 出来ません (‘I can’t’), having to say itashikanesōrō 兼至候 – for use in formal meetings with their Japanese counterparts.

Getting back to modern letters, once you’ve finished the main body, it’s time to close. Here, again, the most important thing is to wish your addressee good health, and pass on your respects to their family, in a personal letter, or to apologise for taking up their time in a business one.

That’s the basic structure of a formal Japanese letter – a civilised form of communication, I’ll hope you agree. These days, of course, the taboo against writing by machine is disappearing, and younger people, of course, use printers and word processors, but there has also been a much greater investment in fonts and software which can mimic handwriting – I’m sure you know this from just wandering into any computer shop – than has been in the English-speaking countries, all as a way of mitigating the perceived coldness and unfriendliness of writing to someone by machine.

So, what do you do if you want to write to a Japanese person, and your language skills aren’t yet at the advanced level? Well, the most important thing is to show willing – for a beginner using the ‘correct’ forms is much less important than appearing to show concern for the person to whom you are writing. Just remember to make a simple remark about the weather (ima otenki ga atsuidesu ne 今お天気が暑いですね ‘It’s hot now, isn’t it?’), ask about your addressee’s health (ogenki desu ka お元気ですか ‘How are you?’), and pay your respects to their family (gokazoku ni yoroshiku o tsutaekudasai ご家族によろしくを伝えください ‘Please give my regards to your family’) and you are bound to make a positive impression.

Next week: why read the classics?

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さすがトム先生ですね。

Matt White | March 26, 2009 11:46 AM

"...it’s also imperative to send more than one page – even if you have to include a blank sheet with the letter. It’s a sign that you wish you could write more, and are not deliberately cutting the communication short."

As a child in the US in the late 50s-early 60s, I was also taught to do so when writing letters. I wonder how widespread this custom was.

Mary | March 27, 2009 4:59 PM

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