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

Last week, I talked about how some of the difficulties native English speakers have in understanding texts written by and in Japanese arise from the fact that the rules for written discourse between the two languages are so different. I’m glad to see from the comments that what I had to say resonated with at least some of you. Just in reply to Sakai-san, though, I’m not saying that English language writers always stick to the point when Japanese ones don’t – it never ceases to amaze me how often my undergraduate students wander off track in their essays, contradict themselves, or fail to say what they mean through not thinking carefully enough about what they are writing. What I am saying is that native English speakers tend to think Japanese writers don’t stick to the point, because they don’t understand, or miss, the signposts Japanese writers use to organise their texts – and that’s a failing on the readers' part, not the writers.

To reiterate: it’s not the case that either way is better than the other – simply that they use different rulebooks to arrive at the same point. To use an analogy, imagine two people go to visit a museum exhibition on the same day. The first buys a guide, and follows it exactly, going from exhibit one, to exhibit twenty, checking at each stage that he/she is following the right route, and seeing everything in the order prescribed by the curators. The second buys the guide, reads it, but then wanders from one exhibit to another, seeing number five first, then number fourteen, then number one, and so forth, until he/she has seen everything. Both people experience the exhibition, and end up knowing the same things, but reach that knowledge by very different routes. A well-written English text bears some, and I stress some, resemblance to the first person’s experience, and a well-written Japanese one, the second.

The structure and organisation of longer texts is, of course, difficult to show without going into greater detail than I have space for here, but let me talk about a single short essay, about karaoke, of all things, which does serve to demonstrate the quasi-inductive style of writing Hinds (1990) mentions. I’m not going to give the actual Japanese, as that’s not especially relevant to the organisation, but will instead describe the contents of each paragraph, making some comments along the way.

The text is called simply Karaoke, and starts…with a paragraph on Japan’s world leading position as a manufacturer of semi-conductors. This, of course, immediately stumps the English reader: what has this got to do with karaoke? There’s no mention of it at all, and so we’re not sure where we’re going, or what the writer wants to say. The second paragraph…talks about the post-war music education system, and the manufacture of musical instruments – still no mention of karaoke. The English reader is now more confused: why are we now talking about something else? Finally, in the third paragraph, which is just a single short sentence, we are told karaoke links Japan’s musical and electronics skills. This is reassuring to the English reader – finally, a mention of what the text is supposed to be about and, OK, it links up what’s been mentioned before. We’re still not clear, however, what the overall thrust of the text is, and get confused again when paragraph four talks about Japan’s economic growth over the past forty years, leading to the destruction of traditional communities – karaoke seems to have disappeared again. Paragraph five continues the previous theme and mentions the declining birth-rate, while paragraph six stresses the need for people in modern times to find new ways of connecting with each other. Then paragraph seven refers to teenagers’ lives with few close friends living nearby – still no mention of karaoke. In paragraph eight, however, karaoke appears again, being compared to old-style village festivals. The theme is maintained in paragraph nine, where the numbers of karaoke fans are given, and doing karaoke is equated with self-actualisation. Paragraph ten, however, changes the theme again, and discusses the internationalisation of the Japanese economy, with the concomitant rise in the number of Japanese salarymen living abroad. Paragraph eleven returns to karaoke, mentioning the appearance of karaoke bars in foreign cities for resident Japanese, and that this has led to the development of karaoke for the locals, with karaoke becoming increasingly popular in other east Asian countries, and the Americas. Finally, paragraph twelve, the conclusion, bluntly states that karaoke is Japanese popular culture’s greatest gift to the world.

Laid out paragraph by paragraph like this, the text’s structure, in English terms, seems confused: there’s no introduction, it skips from one thing to another with very little obvious linkage – particularly in the initial sections – and the conclusion is a simple blunt statement which doesn’t relate closely to what has been said before. Does this sound familiar? It is, indeed, an almost classic example of a quasi-inductive text, but how do Japanese readers make sense of it?

Well, the answer lies in the priority placed by Japanese speakers on different linguistic features – what they consider to be the most important elements in a text. I don’t have the space here to go into this in detail, but briefly, for Japanese, psychologically the most important element is topic. This is a discourse element, and is the thing which the speaker/writer wants the listener/hearer to pay most attention to at any given moment. It thus relates to the speaker’s attitude, rather than relations of who did what to whom. When explicitly mentioned, topic is marked with the particle wa は, but it can be derived from other elements, such as a text’s title, or even the body of cultural assumptions that all Japanese share. (A mention of tsuki 月 ‘moon’, for example, can introduce the topic of ‘autumn’, because that is the season most closely associated with the moon in Japanese culture.) Topic holds readers’ attention so strongly that it does not have to be stated explicitly if it can be understood from the context, and frequently, it isn’t. It will also remain the focus of attention until another topic is mentioned, but will stay in the background, and can be brought back, either by being referred to again explicitly, or by the context. By contrast, the most important element for English speakers is grammatical subject, which always has to be explicitly stated in English.

This is where the problem lies: English speakers think that if something is not concretely and explicitly stated, it isn’t playing a role in the makeup of the text, but that’s not the case for Japanese.

When reading a text, Japanese readers will assign a preliminary, unstated, topic from its title, and from the mini-biography of the writer which is almost always given at its beginning, and then make assumptions about how the text should be read by adhering to what they assume the author's veiwpoint to be (in the case of Karaoke it states the writer is an ‘economic commentator’ (keizai hyōronka 経済評論家), so before they even start reading the main text they ‘know’ the text will be about karaoke, and will be looking at it from an economic perspective. Thus, they are not surprised when it starts by talking about semi-conductor manufacturing – karaoke involves electronics, after all, and the writer must be going to link up the content of this initial paragraph at some point. As each new paragraph introduces a new theme, it’s viewed psychologically through the lens of the implicit topic, and assessed for what bearing it might have upon it (as before, this crucial point was explained to me by Ishikawa Luli - I've even borrowed some of her words, as she can put it far more succinctly than I can).

Moreover, as you probably know, the most important part of a Japanese sentence is usually its end – where the verb is – and this carries over to text structure. The most significant part – the author’s main point, or points, usually comes at the text’s end, in the final paragraph. Hence in Karaoke the statement about karaoke being Japanese popular culture’s main gift to the world. This is the central point the author wants to put across, and placing it at the end of the text means that it’s in the position where, psychologically, Japanese readers will pay most attention to it.

What this means is that if you are a native English speaker, you have to retrain yourself to read Japanese texts: first, always pay close attention to the title and information about the author, and recognise that this may take the place of an introduction. Second, be alert for changes in topic – look for was, but keep in mind that there will always be a topic, even if it isn’t stated explicitly. Third, look at the ends of paragraphs, and the final paragraph of the text in order to find the writer’s main message. One technique is to simply highlight anything marked with a wa – this will show you how the focus shifts; the final sentence in each paragraph – these will contain the key ideas and author’s opinions; and the final paragraph in the text – this will contain a statement of the main message, as previously said: if you do that, you are likely to have all the main points the writer wishes to make.

It’s not an easy thing to do – it takes practice – but it is possible to learn to make sense of Japanese writing, and in doing so, you will come to realise that far from wandering randomly about, Japanese texts tend to be tend to be tightly structured around an underlying pattern of topic shifts, and they only seem vague to us, because topic is not relevant as an organisational principle in English. Simply put, by judging Japanese texts by the standards of our own language, we tend to ignore their most salient feature.

Next week: a few words on Japanese rhetorical styles.

References:

Hinds, John (1990), "Inductive, deductive, quasi-inductive: Expository writing in Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Thai", 89-109 in Connor, Ulla and Ann M. Johns (Eds.) Coherence in Writing: Research and Pedagogical Perspectives Alexandria, VA, Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc.

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