Thoughts on Japan

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0900

Over the past three weeks, I’ve been talking about the motivations for Japanese speakers to use honorific language, and how those motivations have been theoretically explained by linguists interested in Pragmatics. This week, I’m going to move away from the theory and take a look at how honorifics have been considered by socio-linguists – people who are interested in language use as a social activity, and in the links between language and different social groups – groups based on age, sex, affiliation, region, class, and so forth. In any language, speakers adjust what they say, and how they say it, depending upon the situation in which they find themselves, and what image they wish to project. Do they wish to assert solidarity with their addressees? Do they wish to emphasise superiority? Level of education? Identity? And so forth. All of this can be done, and is done, through language use: the accent, use of dialect, type of vocabulary, intonation, etc. Sometimes, it’s a conscious decision, and sometimes it’s done unconsciously. British readers in their forties may remember the 1980s Nat West commercial below: It is, of course, a showcase for Adrian Edmonson’s clowning, but the fact that he endeavours to ‘Talk proper’ in order to get a bank account is evidence of the importance placed upon the right language for the right situation in British society – and the ending is evidence of how things were changing in the 1980s. There’s been a great deal of work done on English speakers’ attitudes to, and use of, language – some of which seems to identify general cross-linguistic tendencies, and some which is country-specific. In England, for example, there’s a very close relationship between accent and social class, and listeners tend to assign people to classes depending upon what they sound like, and then have stereotyped expectations of how they will behave, and what sort of people they are. So, people with who speak RP – the standard middle class accent spoken by Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady: are: intelligent, unfriendly, trustworthy and, believe it or not, tall! Whereas people with accents from the larger metropoli (London, Birmingham, etc.) are friendly, devious and short, and people with rural accents are backward, uneducated, warm, and direct. As you can see, a lot of these are nonsense – accent has nothing to do with body size, for example – but the attitudes are pervasive. One of the most famous experiments a linguist did to test this was to have someone go into a cinema and shout, ‘Fire! Everybody leave via the emergency exits!’ during a performance, in an RP accent, and then at a different showing in a regional accent, and time how long it took the audience to leave. The audience were noticeably slower to get moving with the latter than with the former – evidence that an RP accent was regarded as more trustworthy and authoritative. In Japan, of course, which lacks a class-system along English lines, accent is much less important as a social marker – even dialect use doesn’t convey as much information about background and education. As Fukuda and Asato (2004, 2000) say, however, ‘use [of] elaborate honorifics’ by people from particular groups is one of the things which serves as a badge of identity. One of the best examples of this is given by Miller (1967, 289-90) in his description of the difference between women’s and men’s Japanese speech. The following exchange he describes as (for the time) ‘fairly elegant, but otherwise quite run-of-the-mill women’s speech’: A ma, go-rippa na o-niwa degozāmasu wa nē. shibafu ga hirobiro to shite ite, kekkō degozāmasu wa nē. まあ、ご立派なお庭でござあますわねえ。芝生が広々としていて、結構でござあますわねえ。 A My, what a splendid garden you have here-the lawn is so nice and big, it's certainly wonderful, isn't it! B iie, nan desu ka, chitto mo teire ga yukitodokimasen mono degozaimasu kara, mō, nakanaka itsumo kirei ni shite oku wake ni wa mairimasen no degozāmasu yo. いいえ、何ですか、ちっとも手入れが行き届きませんものでございますから、もう、中々いつも綺麗にしておくわけには参りませんのでござあますよ。 B Oh no, not at all, we don't take care of it at all any more, so it simply doesn't always look as nice as we would like it to. A ā, sai degozaimashō nē. kore dake o-hiroin degozāmasu kara, hitotōri o-teire asobasu no ni datte taihen degozaimasho nē. demo mā, sore de mo, itsumo yoku o-teire ga yukitodoite irasshaimasu wa. itsumo hontō ni o-kirei de kekkō degozāmasu wa. ああ、さいでございましょうねえ。これだけお広いんでござあますから、一通りお手入れ遊ばすのにだって大変でございましょうねえ。でもまあ、それでも、いつもよくお手入れが行き届いていらっしゃいますわ。いつも本当にお綺麗で結構でござあますわ。 A Oh no, I don't think so at all -but since it's such a big garden, of course it must be quite a tremendous task to take care of it all by yourself; but even so, you certainly do manage to make it look nice all the time: it certainly is nice and pretty any time one sees it. B iie, chitto mo sonna koto gozāmasen wa. いいえ、ちっともそんなことござあませんわ。 B No. I'm afraid not, not at all... All of the boldfaced elements in the above exchange are honorific, in one way or another, and the conversation is less about the content – which is relatively trivial – than about the two women affirming their relationship and common background, and the elaborate honorifics are a significant part of that. Miller goes on to remark humorously that the same exchange between two men would consist of Ii niwa da nā いい庭だなあ (‘Nice garden’) and ‘a sub-linguistic grunt, as a sign of acknowledgement or of polite denial’ (1967, 290), which contains no honorifics at all. This is not to say that male speakers don’t use honorifics – they do, of course – but that they use them less for asserting solidarity with friends and acquaintances than women do. Given the pronunciation of the deferential copula degozaimasu as degozāmasu, the ladies are from the Yamanote area of Tokyo – then and now a wealthy district – and when I was last discussing this extract with some Japanese (about twenty years ago now) my informants said the language was a bit old-fashioned, but they wouldn’t be too surprised to hear it on the streets there, if the two women were quite elderly. I wonder what people would say today? Next week, I’ll continue on the social side of honorifics, and consider some of the reasons why usage changes over time. References: Fukada, Atsushi and Asato, Noriko (2004), “Universal politeness theory: application to the use of Japanese honorifics” Journal of Pragmatics, 36 (11), 1991-2002. Martin, Samuel E. (1964) “Speech levels in Japan and Korea”, 407-414 in Dell Hymes (ed.), Language in Culture and Society. New York: Harper & Row. Miller, Roy Andrew (1967) The Japanese Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Your Face or Mine? (Part Two)

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0900

Last week, I described how Brown and Levinson (1978; 1987) laid out a universal politeness theory, and how this had been criticised as being inapplicable to Japanese by a variety of linguists (Matsumoto 1988; Ide 1989), who prefer to analyse Japanese honorifics as being based upon ‘discernment’ or indication of social relationships. It might have seemed from this that the face-based account of honorific usage was discredited by this but – and this will come as no surprise to you if you think about how science works – other linguists have recently been criticising the discernment account, and relating how the theory of face could be adjusted to fit the linguistic facts of Japanese. One of the most cogent of these criticisms comes from Fukuda and Asato (2004), who argue that Brown and Levinson’s theory works perfectly well for Japanese, as long as one important fact is taken into account:

When a person of higher status is involved, distance and power are given markedly high values, which in turn, elevates…the weightiness of the FTA. Thus, any act, whether intrinsically face-threatening or not (meaning, regardless of the value of imposition), will be counted as face-threatening.

(Fukuda and Asato 2004, 1997) Thus, saying anything in the presence of a social superior can require the use of politeness strategies, and hence the use of honorifics. This does seem like a sensible adjustment to the theory, given the well-documented awareness that Japanese people display of status differences between individuals – even in contexts where a difference wouldn’t exist, or be considered to be important, most English-speaking countries. As an example of this, we only have to think of the fact that one of the most important relations Japanese can have is between senpai 先輩 (‘seniors’) and kōhai 後輩 (‘juniors’) – whether it’s at school, or in a club, or at a company. Those who enter an organisation later will accord respect to those who were there before them, who, in turn, will feel obligated to look after, or instruct, (or take advantage of) those younger than themselves. The relations can be extremely long-lasting, and require use of honorifics by the kōhai to the senpai – if you see two Japanese meet at a school reunion you can often spot who was in which position by listening to who is using honorifics and who isn’t. Fukuda and Asato (2004) also provide five arguments for the applicability of their account, and against Ide and Matsumoto’s version. First, correct honorific usage does have much to do with face-preservation, as if speakers fail to use honorifics when expected, they can sound presumptuous – threatening the addressee’s face – or, they can embarrass themselves, threatening their own (Fukuda and Asato 2004, 1997). This is obviously a concern for non-Japanese trying to speak the language, as you want to avoid causing offence, although – particularly if you don’t look Japanese – you can get away with mistakes native speakers can’t. The most important thing is to try and avoid obvious mistakes – like using honorific expressions to refer to your own actions, and humble ones to refer to a superior’s – and try and develop your honorific fluency by observing how Japanese speakers talk to each other. Although, that being said, it’s also best to avoid talking ‘down’ to your Japanese juniors (people younger than you, or who work for, or under you) too much, as it’s difficult to adopt the mannerisms of a Japanese senior without sounding offensive, unless your language skills are very high, and even then, they may not ‘fit’ with your Japanese personality. Second, the fact that it sounds odd to use honorifics about social superiors if they have done something dishonourable (Sensei ga dōkyūsei o gōkan nasatta 先生が同級生を強姦なさった ‘My teacher raped(honorific) my classmate’ – sounds bizarre in the extreme), means that obligatory indication of the social relationship is not the only criterion for honorific usage (Fukuda and Asato 2004, 1998). Third, superiors do use honorifics to juniors if they are asking them a favour. This usage cannot be to indicate the social ranking between them, as that is maintained (Fukuda and Asato 2004, 1998). Fourth, in more formal situations, too, superiors will use honorifics to juniors, which again cannot be to indicate social ranking (Fukuda and Asato 2004, 1999). These arguments, in fact, contain useful lessons for the Japanese language learner – not about what honorifics to use, but when to use them: making requests and impositions, and in any formal situation, and to anyone who’s a superior – either in the sense of having some authority over you, or simply that they are older. Finally, if saying anything in the presence of a superior is intrinsically face-threatening, then one of the most sensible options for juniors is Brown and Levinson’s (5) don’t do the FTA – in other words, keep quiet – and this accounts for the tendency of juniors in Japan not to say very much in the presence of their superiors. It is not the case, after all, that it is considered polite for them to talk as much as they want, even if they do use honorifics (Fukuda and Asato 2004, 2000). All in all, then, it seems like the face-based account of honorifics might well have something to recommend it, doesn’t it? What you need to remember, though, is that no theory can entirely account for the complexities of human interactions or behaviour: just as it’s possible to find weaknesses in the ‘face’ account, it’s also possible to find weakness in the ‘discernment’ one, and even Fukuda and Asato’s revised version is unlikely to be the final word. It’s likely that someone else will come up with a new account in a few years which will provide a different approach, and there’s nothing wrong with this, because each new version provides different insights into the language and takes a step closer to the reality. So, is that the final word on honorifics? Well, no, another interesting area, and one which Fukuda and Asato themselves acknowledge is that ‘sex, age, education, and regional origin of the speaker are related to the use of honorifics…Women, the well-educated, the aged, and urbanites like to speak a refined, elegant language and use elaborate honorifics to serve their own face wants, such as being perceived as having had a good upbringing, and being intelligent, decent or sophisticated persons’ (Fukuda and Asato.2004, 2000). This is moving more into the socio-linguistic analysis of honorifics, and is something I’ll talk about next week. References: Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen (1978) ‘Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena’, 56-311 in Goody, E. (ed.) Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen (1987) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fukada, Atsushi and Asato, Noriko (2004), “Universal politeness theory: application to the use of Japanese honorifics” Journal of Pragmatics, 36 (11), 1991-2002. Ide, Sachiko (1989) ‘Formal forms and discernment: two neglected aspects of universals of linguistic politeness’ Multilingua 8 (2/3), 223–248. Matsumoto, Yoshiko (1988) ‘Reexamination of the universality of face: politeness phenomena in Japanese’ Journal of Pragmatics 12 (4), 403–426.

Your Face or Mine (Part One)

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 23:08:17 +0900

Last week, I was talking about the use of honorifics in Japanese, and speculated a little about why speakers might use them. This week and next week, I’m going to continue in that vein, but from a more technical angle by considering how linguists have analysed and theorised about them, and see whether this has any practical lessons for someone who wants to learn, and speak, Japanese. There are, of course, any number of different fields within linguistics where honorifics could be studied – syntax, semantics, historical, and so on – but the area which I’m going to talk about falls under the general heading of Pragmatics. This covers quite a wide range of theoretical areas, but what I am interested in here are the reasons why certain language forms are used in particular contexts, and how these phenomena can be described theoretically. (If you want to know more about Pragmatics in general, then there are any number of good introductory textbooks, with Huang (2006) being the most recent.) In Pragmatics, then, honorifics are generally considered to fall under what is called Politeness Theory, which was first laid out by Brown and Levinson (1978; 1987) in an attempt to come up with a way to describe the theoretical basis for polite language usage cross-linguistically. Their theory – which they claimed was universally applicable – (1987, 57-76) was to posit that all human beings have both positive and negative ‘face’, with the former being essentially the desire to be liked and approved of by other people, and the latter the claim that individuals make for their personal prerogatives, such as the desire that their own actions and wishes should not be impeded. Any action which impinged upon one’s own, or another person’s face was described as a ‘face threatening act’ (FTA) and potentially required a politeness strategy to minimise its effect. Brown and Levinson posited five possible actions, depending upon how serious the speaker judges the FTA to be: (1) Use no politeness; (2) use positive politeness – stressing one’s community with the addressee, for example; (3) use negative politeness – minimising the level of the imposition, or degrading one’s own position vis á vis the addressee; (4) use other means, such as getting a third party to initiate the FTA; and (5) don’t do the FTA at all. They further posited that speakers determine how serious an individual FTA is by summing the social distance between speaker and hearer, the amount of power the hearer has over the speaker, and a culture-based ranking of impositions (asking for a reference from a superior is more serious in Japan, for example, where the writer is expected to put his or her personal status behind the junior, than it is in the UK, where the reference is a more objective evaluation of the person’s qualities). They represented this with the following equation:

W(eightiness of the FTA)= D(istance between Speaker-Hearer)+P(ower of Hearer over Speaker)+R(ank of Imposition)

Having laid out the basis of their theory, Brown and Levinson then proceeded to apply it to politeness phenomena in a variety of the world’s languages in an attempt to demonstrate its universality. Use of honorifics – in any language, not just Japanese – is categorised as a negative politeness strategy, as it is seen as giving deference by lowering the speaker’s position, and exalting the hearer. Obviously, in the above I’ve simplified things quite a bit, but that’s the basis of universal politeness theory and its application to honorifics. Simple, isn’t it? If your answer is ‘No!’, and you feel that describing honorifics as simple markers of deference used when initiating requests doesn’t quite fit with your understanding of them, you would not be alone. In fact, Brown and Levinson almost immediately came under attack from linguists who questioned the universality of ‘face’, and claimed that the theory was based upon an overly-Eurocentric concept of social relations between individuals, or even of the notion of the individual. One of the first to do this was Matsumoto (1988), who denies the applicability of the idea that individuals want to be unimpeded in their actions to a Japanese context. Instead, ‘acknowledgement and maintenance of the relative position of others, rather than preservation of an individual’s proper territory, governs all social interaction’ (1988, 405). The sources she cites in support of this, such as Nakane (1970) and Doi (1973) would probably now be considered as part of the nihonjinron (even Matsumoto acknowledges that Doi may be over-stating the point (1988: 407)), which weakens her overall argument, but there is no doubt that honorifics are used in Japanese in situations which do not involve a face-threatening act, such as Kyō wa doyōbi degozaimasu 今日は土曜日でございます (‘Today is Saturday’), where the copula verb degozaimasu (‘be (deferential)’) indicates a high level of politeness and formality, but the statement itself cannot possibly impinge on anyone’s prerogatives. Furthermore, in some contexts imposing upon a person is actually considered the polite thing to do. For example, a wife may say to her husband’s boss, Shujin o dōzo yoroshiku onegaishimasu 主人をどうぞよろしくお願いします (‘Please take care of my husband’). This is a request to the boss, and hence an imposition upon him, but is considered polite in Japan because it’s an acknowledgement that the superior has the power to perform the action requested (Matsumoto 1988, 410). Given these, and other, issues, Matsumoto (1988, 411) claims that Japanese honorifics are essentially ‘relation-acknowledging devices’, a description which comes closer to my own reference to them as markers of social deixis. She also rejects Brown and Levinson’s theory entirely, and prefers to see politeness as motivated by culturally-determined concepts of deference, which ‘in Japanese culture focuses on the ranking difference between the conversational participants…Conventional Japanese Deference would say ‘Leave it to someone higher’’(Matsumoto 1988, 424). Further criticisms, and an alternative theory, were proposed by Ide (1989), who argues that honorifics are governed by ‘discernment’ of the social position of the addressee, and this is based upon the speaker’s understanding of the social conventions governing interaction in Japanese culture. Again, this is broadly similar to Matsumoto’s description of honorifics as ‘relation-acknowledging devices’. So, is the face-based account of Japanese politeness discredited? Not entirely, and I’ll tell you why, next week. References: Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen (1978) ‘Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena’, 56-311 in Goody, E. (ed.) Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen (1987) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doi, Takeo (1973) The anatomy of dependence. Tokyo: Kodansha. Huang, Yan (2006) Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ide, Sachiko (1989) ‘Formal forms and discernment: two neglected aspects of universals of linguistic politeness’ Multilingua 8 (2/3), 223–248. Matsumoto, Yoshiko (1988) ‘Reexamination of the universality of face: politeness phenomena in Japanese’ Journal of Pragmatics 12 (4), 403–426. Nakane, Chie (1970) Japanese society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Honour and Humility - Japanese Style

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:25:29 +0900

In my column about why the Japanese language can be difficult to learn, I mentioned that one of the challenging features is social deixis – the fact that you cannot say anything in Japanese without conveying what your impression is of the social relationship between you and your addressee, or between you and the person you are talking about. This week, and over the next couple of columns, too, I’m going to talk about this in a little more depth, by taking a look at the subject of honorifics. For those of you who don’t know any Japanese, briefly, honorifics are linguistic means of expressing respect to the person you are talking to, or the person you are talking about. There are various forms: prefixes attached to nouns, a variety of verb inflections, and a number of substitute nouns and verbs for use in particular contexts. So, for example, one uses the verb meshiagaru (召し上がる), ‘eat (honourably)’, if a social superior is doing it, but itadaku (頂く), ‘eat (humbly)’, if you are doing it in a social superior’s presence, and so on. Put like that it sounds quite simple, if bizarre to English speakers, and strictly speaking, it is – one can learn the most common forms, expressions and grammatical rules quite quickly – and like everything in Japanese they are logical and don’t have exceptions, but the challenge comes in learning when and how to apply them, and relating that to yourself – your age, sex, job and so forth – in other words, the socio-pragmatic rules and conventions. What combination of honorifics are appropriate when meeting one’s prospective parents-in-law for the first time? When speaking to one’s teacher? When meeting a business client? When talking to one’s boss at work? Should you use different expressions if you meet him outside the office? The possibilities are as varied as there are different social situations and encounters, and unless you are extremely familiar with Japanese social relationships, it’s difficult to sound natural, or to pick up on the signals that honorific usage sends. For example, I recently received an email from a Japanese publisher, requesting corrections to the proofs of a book chapter I’ve written, and letting me know what the necessary schedule was for me to get the corrections back. Nothing surprising about that, but how did she conclude her mail? Well, the final sentence was: ‘kongo tomo go-shidō go-bentatsu no hodo, nanitozo yoroshiku o-negai-mōshiagemasu’ (今後ともご指導ご鞭撻の程、何卒宜しくお願い申し上げます), which translates literally as, ‘In every way we humbly and sincerely request your future honoured guidance and the honour of your lashes of encouragement’, although if you look the expression up in Kenkyūsha’s Japanese-English Dictionary, you’ll find the much less flowery, ‘Thank you in advance for your continued support’ given as a translation! In any case, this was about the politest expression I’ve ever received from a Japanese, so I showed it to one of my Japanese colleagues, who laughed, and said, ‘I haven’t seen anything like that for years. She wants you to know how important you are, and she must work for quite a traditional company.’ As a native Japanese speaker, my colleague was able to pick up on the message that was being sent, in a way that I couldn’t, but I was still flattered to be addressed in that way, and have reciprocated by being especially careful in my own responses which, in turn, has generated a warm response back. Knowing that they are missing out, many foreign learners of Japanese tend to throw up their hands at the thought of honorifics, and try to avoid them wherever possible – and the Japanese, being polite – let them get away with it. It’s a mistake to do so, however, as it means you’re cutting yourself off from a major part of Japanese socio-linguistic interaction, and depriving yourself of a useful tool for easing relationships, making a good impression and even disambiguating your speech – of which more later. As a Japanese teacher, I sometimes think that part of the problem learners have with honorifics is that they tend to be introduced some way into a course, after students have had a chance to internalise a fair number of conjugations, inflections and other pieces of grammatical information, which means that they tend to regard them as an special add-on to ‘normal’ Japanese, rather than as an integral part of it and simply an extension of the ‘polite’ and ‘plain’ styles of speech that everyone learns almost from the beginning. Perhaps if honorifics were taught earlier, students would find them easier to deal with (I seem to recall that the famous linguist Eleanor Jorden was in favour of this approach), but then again, maybe it would just put them off even more. In any case, with teaching as it is, students’ reactions to honorifics generally fall into one of three types – not unlike the reactions they have to learning kanji characters: grudging acceptance, wholehearted enjoyment or, virulent dislike, with the first being the most common. Leaving the first two aside, people who dislike honorifics tend to believe that by using them they are somehow demeaning themselves, and that they are simply a manifestation of the inequalities in Japanese society, and so it’s a democratic duty to actively refuse to use them. Or, that it’s part of the Japanese conspiracy to make speaking their language needlessly complex, and difficult for foreigners to learn. Obviously, the latter belief is simply paranoia brought on by dealing with a language which conceptualises the world in a very different way from what they are used to, but what about the former? Are honorifics a linguistic reflection of an unequal society? Is doing away with them a ‘good’ thing? Will they eventually disappear? Well, the answer is far from easy to arrive at, partly because first we’d need to define what an unequal society was, and who it was unequal for. To avoid getting bogged down in that, I think I would prefer to say that in the Japanese case, honorific usage reflects a society where it’s important to show that you are considerate of other people – and of demonstrating that consideration verbally. I’ve talked previously about the Japanese love of rituals to mark important, and not so important, events, and using honorifics is a verbal confirmation to the person you are speaking to that you know how to relate to them and are taking things seriously. As a foreign learner, unless you live in Japan long-term and relate to people largely in Japanese, it is true that you probably won’t use honorifics in an entirely natural way, but that is no reason not to try, because honorifics are not primarily about conveying information – propositional content, in technical terms – because you can do that using neutral verbs and expressions. Instead, they function as a demonstration of commitment and concern, and will convey the sense that you are trying hard to communicate properly, and are thus more trustworthy and reliable. Next week, I’m going to get a bit more technical, and discuss the different ways linguists have analysed honorific usage, and what these theories can tell us.

Bloodsuckers of the World, Unite? Part 3

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0900

Last week, I outlined the differences in plot and resolution between Koishite Akuma and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, as a way of demonstrating how closely the former fitted with Japanese tastes. This week, I want to consider some of the reasons why this was necessary, and see what lessons we can draw from it. As a first step, I think it’s yet more evidence, if it be needed, of the omnivorous internationalisation of popular culture. The vampire theme is perceived as being currently popular, and so the Japanese media ‘cash in’ with a version tailored to their own audience. That being said, however, it’s also evidence of how much plot-lines have to be adapted to be acceptable to that audience, or the sponsors, producing a version which closely follows the stylised conventions of the dorama form. There is no doubt that dorama are highly formulaic: no matter what the programme is, one can predict, within certain limits, exactly how it is going to develop. I’m not saying the British or American dramas are not formulaic – just think of 24, now in its eighth season and still following the same arc as in all its previous ones – but it’s more obvious in dorama, as if all the TV writers were following the same ‘Bible’: first, the two main characters and the supporting group ensemble is introduced; second, a variety of external circumstances both push the protagonists together and pull them apart, while simultaneously affecting the dynamics of their relationships with the group. Events build to a climax, which is resolved by a cathartic, emotional confrontation, which leads to the final denouement, whether it be happy, or sad. There are other dorama plot staples, but I think the above is a reasonably summary which any fan could identify. Again, I can only speculate as to why there should be such a high level of repetition: the imposed conservatism of an entertainment agenda frequently dictated by commercial sponsors and major talent agencies; a limited pool of successful TV writers who come from similar backgrounds; or, maybe, simple, unintellectual tastes on the part of the audience – any and all of these could play a role. Whatever the reason, the end result is that there are certain, set, scenes which occur regularly in dorama, and so must be included. For example, the cathartic final confrontation: here, the individual and the group face each other, confess their mistakes, and draw closer together through an outpouring of emotion. This reaffirmation of social bonds, presented in a highly sentimentalised fashion, provides the audience with a major emotional ‘hit’ from their viewing, and is so much a staple of the form that it has to take place, and does so again, and again, in programme after programme. Again, I can only speculate as to why this is so popular – possibly because such open displays of emotion are extremely unusual in public in Japanese society, and showing them in fictional form reassures people that their friends, families and work colleagues do, indeed, care, even if they don’t show it that often. It also provides reassurance that no matter what the crisis, the supportive network of intra-group ties can overcome it, allowing viewers to feel hopeful that their own networks will support them in their real lives. Returning to Koishite Akuma and its differences from Twilight, a further adaptation and one of the most striking, I think, is in the identity of the heroine: from someone of the same apparent age as the vampire to an older woman. In order to understand why this is necessary and, indeed, imperative in Koishite Akuma, we need to consider the stereotyped images of and attitudes to women prevalent in Japan. Over the last twenty years – or even longer –Japanese opinion has agonised over ‘acceptable’ ideas of womanhood, women’s roles in society, and ideas of ‘appropriate’ teenaged, and older behaviour. In this it’s no different from many modernising, or post-modernising states, and many academic authors have written about it. Notwithstanding the undoubted eroticisation and fetishisation of the image of the high-school girl in some areas of Japanese popular culture, and the complicated realities of teenage sexuality and experience, television dorama tends to present teenaged female characters as two distinct character types: first, there is the ‘good’ girl – studious, quiet, possibly interested in a boyfriend, but entirely innocent and able to do no more than hold hands, if she’s particularly daring. Second, there’s the ‘bad’ girl – noisy, interested only in clothes, make-up, having a good time, and probably sexually active and promiscuous. Example of both this character type are present in Koishite Akuma: there's the serious Kaori (Sakuraba Nanami 桜庭ななみ) and the lively Tomomi (Okamoto Rei 岡本玲). But neither would do as a heroine: the ‘bad’ girl because she’s a bad girl, and the ‘good’ girl because it’s inconceivable that she could ever let go enough to engage in the semi-sexual activity that being bitten by a vampire involves. Hamstrung by these conventions, the writers of Koishite Akuma had no choice, therefore, but to make the female lead an older woman, which provides greater leeway in acceptable behaviour. Makoto is presented as being ‘good’: she lives alone, socialises little – because she’s so committed to her work and the children in her care – and, despite going out with the vice-principal, has not even kissed him or held his hand. Nevertheless, because she’s in her twenties, it would not be problematic, or unusual for her to do so, and so the writers can build up the tension with suggestions that she may surrender herself to Luka, in a way that would be impossible with a girl of his own, apparent, age. Of course, her actually doing so would be a step too far, and so inevitably viewers know that the relationship must remain unconsummated, and that the dénouement will involve an element of tragedy, as indeed it does – Romeo and Juliet again, but with a semi-sad ending. This plays sentimentally on the heartstrings of the Japanese viewer, allowing them to be moved by the characters’ plight, while also reassuring them that the correct social norms have been upheld. Thus, the bloodsuckers of the world may be united in their popularity, but also remain very much a part of their own cultural milieu.

Bloodsuckers of the World, Unite? Part Two

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0900

Last week I mentioned that the recent boom in vampire-related fiction and drama reached Japan last summer with the broadcast of a prime-time drama series, Koishite Akuma, although it was far more rooted in the conventions of Japanese dorama than in any of the recent western productions. To illustrate this, let’s take a look at the plots of Koishite Akuma and its closest equivalent, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. In Twilight, lonely teenager Bella Swann moves to north-west of the US, and at her new school in a small town encounters Edward Cullen. She is struck by his attractiveness, and also by his aloofness – unlike most of her other new school-mates, he seems to want to have nothing to do with her. One thing leads to another, and Bella learns that Edward is, in fact, a vampire, but one who finds himself almost unbearably drawn to her, wanting to devour her and drink her blood. Despite this obstacle, the two fall passionately in love, and must overcome various dangers – disapproval from other vampires and werewolves – in order to remain together, which, in the end, of course, they do. In other words, the story is essentially Romeo and Juliet but with a happy ending. In Koishite Akuma aloof teenage-seeming vampire Kuromiya Luka is brought to Yokohama to find his first victim, and is lodged while there with a small family consisting of a father, played by dorama stalwart Itō Shirō 伊藤四郎, his adult, widowed daughter, and her young son, all of whom have been mesmerised into believing that Luka is a distant relative. Enrolled at the local high-school, his mentor expects that Luka will swiftly bite one of his classmates, cement his immortality, and return to the vampires’ ‘beautiful, quiet, world’. Instead, Luka finds himself fascinated by his teacher, the beautiful and vivacious Natsukawa Makoto (played by Katō Rosa 加藤ロサ). Thus already difference between the two stories emerge: in Meyer’s work, despite the fact that Edward has been around since the 1900s, he appears to be a teenager, and so there are no obstacles – in human society at least – in him pursuing a relationship with Bella. In Koishite Akuma, Luka appears to be 16, while Makoto is 25, and their pupil-teacher relationship means that any romance between them will inevitably be scandalous, and bring them as individuals into conflict with the expectations of the group and society at large. Eventually, in a somewhat unlikely plot twist, Luka finds that Makoto was, in fact, his high-school sweetheart before he died and became a vampire, and that she is his ‘fated woman’ (unmei no onna 運命の女) - the only one for whom his fangs will grow (much light relief is obtained by the fact that they tend to emerge involuntarily, and Luka has to frantically conceal their presence). If he does not bite her, he will die at the next full moon. Makoto, too, discovers his identity, and her unresolved feelings for him cause her to first become engaged to her current boyfriend, the school’s handsome vice-principal, and then to break it off. Scandal ensues and, in an attempt to force Luka to action, his vampire mentor, Katō, reveals Luka’s vampiric nature to both the people of his host family’s neighbourhood, and his schoolmates; he is forced to flee his family’s house when a mob attempts to storm it, although his adopted family remain firmly on his side. There follows a confrontation between Luka, Makoto and his class at the school, where he admits to his vampiric identity and original motivation for coming there, and apologises, and she confesses her love for him as her high school sweetheart. The class accept him and wish him well, and Luka and Makoto depart to watch the sunrise on his final day. He remains steadfast to the end in his refusal to bite her, and with a chaste kiss dissolves to dust. Over the closing credits, Makoto is shown having been accepted back into the bosom of her class, and it is suggested Luka and she continue to remain together in some ‘higher’ world. You may have been able to work out from the above that Koishite Akuma formulaically follows the conventions of the standard deru kui plotline – of relations between an individual and a group – which I discussed in my earlier column on Japanese dorama. There are two groups of which Luka unwillingly finds himself a member: his class at school, and the family with whom he is forced to lodge. As the series progresses, he is drawn further and further into relations with both – through taking part in drama club activities; being an object of longing for most of the girls in class; through the warm, uncritical affection of his adoptive family, who also take Makoto to their hearts, and so forth. He thus gradually becomes aware of the ties of obligation that link him to the humans around him. At the same time, through the difficulties they have in adopting him, the groups change too, with the class learning some tolerance for an outsider, and the family drawn closer together by the presence of an elder brother/surrogate son in their midst. Next week, I’ll consider what lessons may be drawn from the differences between the two programmes, and what they have to tell us about the media in Japan.

Bloodsuckers of the World, Unite! Part One

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 00:14:11 +0900

I thought I’d give the classical literature a rest this week and spend my next few columns talking about vampires – for reasons which will become clear shortly. The figure of the blood, or life, draining monster is a familiar one from tales of the supernatural the world over, with the nosferatu in Europe, the al-ghūl in Arabia, and the jiāngshī 殭屍 in China. Each of these has its own characteristics, and each has been adopted to a greater or lesser extent by a variety of media for fictional representation, which has often produced a mythology about the creatures which has more reality in popular imagination than the old folk-wisdom now does. Without doubt, the most well-known of these is, of course, the vampire, which has enjoyed waves of popularity ever since Bram Stoker adapted tales of the nosferatu for Dracula in 1897. As I’m sure you know, there have been a series of cinematic tales about the Count, or his family (or even his dog – does Zoltan, Hound of Dracula sound familiar to anyone?), starting with Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, continuing in the 1930s with Universal Studios’ Dracula films, Hammer Horror’s versions with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and culminating in Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which converted Stoker’s cold-hearted monster into a passionate, and thwarted, lover. Simultaneously there have been any number of other films about vampires, ranging from straight horror to farcical comedy. The vampire has also been influential on the small screen, too, with Joss Whedon’s Buffy: The Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) being the most famous example, and the first to use battling the supernatural as a metaphor for the journey from child to adult. More recently, Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries have been adapted for television as True Blood, which is aimed at a much more adult audience, and uses the plot theme of vampires going ‘public’ to explore concepts of racism and discrimination – as well as the steamy eroticism and barely concealed violence often stereotypically associated with the Deep South of the US. At the same time, there’s been a boom in vampire-related fiction, aimed at a whole gamut of age-ranges and readerships: there are literary descendants of Buffy such as Vampire Academy with teen angst converted to vampire angst, innumerable ‘paranormal romance’ titles, such as J. R. Ward’s tales of the Black Dagger Brotherhood about the difficulties of relationships with a vampire lover, and crossover works such as Laurell K. Hamilton’s long running Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series which began as relatively straight horror in a modern, twentieth century setting, and has morphed into romance and erotica, and back, as it has continued. Currently, of course, the single most popular vampire-related tale worldwide is Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, which has legions of, mainly teenaged female, fans, pining over the relationship between its protagonists: ordinary high-school girl Bella Swann and Edward Cullen, her vampire true love – Japan is definitely no exception to this, with the translations of Meyer’s books selling well, and the first film and second films in the series generating large audiences. As you may have guessed from the above, I’m something of a fan of fantasy and horror in all its incarnations, and am always on the lookout for a new series to try out, whether it be on television, or in book form, so I was pleased to find out when I was in Japan last summer that one of the most popular new television dramas was a vampire tale, and I settled in to watch it with interest, wondering what the Japanese take on the story would be. The show was called Koishite Akuma Vampaia Bōi 恋して悪魔ヴァンパイアボーイ, and featured one of the latest teen heartthrobs, fifteen year old Nakayama Yuma 中山優馬 as the eponymous protagonist. The title is a play-on-words, as it’s both ‘He Loves and is a Devil – the Vampire Boy’ or ‘Love me, Devil – Vampire Boy’ – either way, you can get a good sense of the plot from the title, and it soon became apparent that this was, indeed, a school-set vampire love story, and can only have been inspired by Twilight’s success, I think. That being said, however, the programme closely followed the standard conventions for Japanese popular television drama, which made it a very different animal from Meyer’s works, and it was illuminating to watch for that reason – seeing how the plot arc was developed across the ten episodes of the story (Japanese dramas are almost always short and self-contained) provided me with a number of insights into what the Japanese expect and find entertaining in a television programme, which in turn can provide a degree of insight into the national character – if one can talk of such a thing. Now that I’ve whetted your appetite, next week, I’ll take a look at plots of both Twilight and Koishite Akuma and see how they differ in approach and resolution.

Amber or Green Tea - Part Two

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:47:14 +0900

This week, I’m continuing my discussion of Genji translations with a consideration of the more recent versions of the work. Forty-four years after Arthur Waley’s version, the second complete English Genji translation, by Edward Seidensticker, appeared. In his preface, Seidensticker criticises Waley’s version, saying Waley’s ‘translation is very free…his excisions seem merely arbitrary…Waley embroiders marvelously’ (Seidensticker, 1981, xiv), making it clear that his motivation in retranslating the work was, at least in part, to correct perceived errors in the earlier version and, indeed, the points of difference between the two translations formed a major parts of the reviews of Seidensticker’s translation with, for example, Marian Ury claiming, ‘it is clear that the cuts and alterations that Waley made in his translation are such that it is no longer possible to take it as a faithful representation of the original. Waley's book is an intriguing hybrid; but we have not really had a Genji in English until now’ (1977, 201), and Helen McCullough going even further to say, ‘few who have access to Seidensticker's translation will feel inclined to re-read his predecessor’ (1977, 93). So, what is this wonderful new translation like? Well, here’s Seidensticker’s version of the beginning of the tale: The Paulownia Court In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank whom the emperor loved more than any of the others. The grand ladies with high ambitions thought her a presumptuous upstart, and lesser ladies were still more resentful. (Seidensticker, 1981, 3) In fact, this is even more like a cup of amber tea than either of the previous versions, in some ways. The chapter title is translated, the sentence structure is simplified, and some of the imagery is cut, producing an English version which is easily comprehensible, but somewhat terse. This observation is not original – Edwin Cranston in his review of the Seidensticker translation for the Journal of Japanese Studies noted as much, saying that it was ‘drier, brisker, more quotidian’ (Cranston, 1978, 24), than Waley’s, while Roy Andrew Miller makes the comment that, ‘in place of the smoothly articulated, arching structures of the text, we are given…a paragraph of short, effective sentences…it offers nothing unfamiliar or strange; it does not confront the visitor with anything in the least unexpected or novel’ (Miller, 1986, 113) – both of these comments suggest that ease of reading for the target audience was paramount in Seidensticker’s translation strategy, although it is certainly true that his Genji is identifiably set in Heian Japan. Moving on the fourth translation, Helen McCullough’s 1994 version is incomplete and consists only of ten selected chapters from the work. It was published in a book composed of the Genji excerpts and selections from Heike Monogatari 平家物語 (‘The Tale of the Heike’), another classical Japanese tale. Her intentions in making the translation were to provide a resource for ‘students in survey courses and others who may lack the time to read The Tale of Genji and The Tale of the Heike in their entirety’ (McCullough, 1994, ix), and as such it is not usually mentioned in considerations of English Genji translations, but for completeness’ sake, here is her take: Kiritsubo During the reign of a certain sovereign, it happened that one rather insignificant lady enjoyed far greater Imperial favor than any of the other consorts and concubines. She was regarded with contempt and jealousy by proud ladies of superior status—personages who had always taken their own success very much for granted—and her equals and inferiors among the concubines felt even more disgruntled. (McCullough, 1994, 25) The most recent translation, by Royall Tyler, unfortunately, has failed to become much of a talking point: I have been able to locate only a single review appearing in an academic journal, framed in less than entirely glowing terms: [I]t will not give rise to the rapturous transports or sensory revelations that readers of Woolf's…generation experienced through Waley's version; nor…is there much reason to look for the epochal revisions of scholarly protocols and the global shifts in interpretation that reviewers thought would follow from the publication of Seidensticker's. (Kamens, 2003, 339) It is a sad fact that in academia today the publication of a new translation of a work often fails to excite much interest. Kamen’s review cannot be called negative, but it displays a denigratory attitude to translation as an academic activity, dismissing it as a ‘faulty but necessary medium’ (Kamens, 2003, 334). Thus, while simultaneously praising Tyler’s work, Kamen’s attitude can be summed up as implying that translations are only important or relevant insofar as they stimulate readers to read, or do research on, the original texts. As he himself says, ‘I hope it will invite at least some readers to look beyond translation to imagine what else may be done’ (Kamens, 2003, 339). This isn’t the place to go into what I think of that in detail – suffice it to say that more than one colleague has said to me that the work that gives them most satisfaction, and of which they are most proud, is their translations, but that in order to comply with institutional priorities, and for the sake of their careers, they are obliged to write research article after research article. Leaving that aside, though, what about the translation itself? Here’s Tyler’s version: KIRITSUBO The Paulownia Pavilion Kiri means “paulownia tree” and tsubo “a small garden between palace buildings.” Kiristsubo is therefore the name for the palace pavilion that has a paulownia in its garden. The Emperor installs Genji’s mother there, so that readers have always called her Kiritsubo no Kōi (the Kiritsubo Intimate), although the text does not. In a certain reign (whose can it have been?) someone of no very great rank, among all His Majesty’s Consorts and Intimates, enjoyed exceptional favor. Those others who had always assumed that pride of place was properly theirs despised her as a dreadful woman, while the lesser Intimates were unhappier still. (Tyler, 2001, 1-3) Immediately, one can see that this is a very different animal, indeed, from the previous versions. The rhythm is closer to that of the first two translations, and there is also a significant amount of editorial apparatus, leaving the reader in no doubt about the significance of the title. This is replicated throughout the text – ‘there are few pages…that do not have at least one if not several notes’ (Kamens, 2003, 336) – and there is a wealth of additional material contained in appendices and afterwords. The overall result, then, is that readers are constantly aware that they are reading a translation and being informed about Heian Japan. In addition, Tyler goes further in attempting to replicate in English, as closely as is possible, the experience of reading the original Heian Japanese. To this end he refers to characters with titles, rather than names, and blends, to some extent at least, narration and quotation which, again, leaves one in no doubt that one is reading a work written in a very different way from something written in the English tradition. It certainly is a cup of green tea. To conclude, then: the reception of each of the major translations of Genji has been different, and reflects the period in which it appeared: Suematsu’s was a curiosity; Waley’s a romantic work of English literature; Seidensticker’s a correction of Waley’s errors and a major step forward in Japanese Studies; and, finally, Tyler’s which appears to have had only a limited literary and academic impact. Which, then, should you read, if you want to get better-acquainted with Genji? Are you the amber-coloured tea type, in search of a fantastical and romantic reading experience? Choose Waley, then. Do you want to get a quick, yet faithful sense of the work’s content? Choose Seidensticker. Or, are you the green-tea type, wanting to get the closest possible equivalent in English to reading a classical Japanese work, while at the same time learning about its setting? Then, Tyler has to be your choice. Each has its strengths, and each its weaknesses, and perhaps the most important question to ask, is ‘Will I enjoy reading this text?’ and if the answer is, ‘Yes’, then that’s the translation for you. References Cranston, Edwin (1978), "Review: The Seidensticker Genji" Journal of Japanese Studies 4 (1), 1-25. Kamens, Edward (2003), ""A Beautiful, Quiet World"? The Tale of Genji and Its English Translations" Journal of Japanese Studies 29 (2), 325-339. Mccullough, Helen (1977), "Review: The Seidensticker Genji" Monumenta Nipponica 32 (1), 93-110. Mccullough, Helen (1994), Genji and Heike Selections from the Tale of Genji and the Tale of the Heike Stanford, Stanford University Press. Miller, Roy Andrew (1986), Nihongo: In Defense of Japanese London, Athlone Press. Seidensticker, Edward G. (1981), The Tale of Genji Harmondsworth, Penguin. Tyler, Royall (2001), The Tale of Genji Harmondsworth, Viking. Ury, Marian (1977), "Review: The Complete Genji" Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 37 (1), 183-201.

Amber or Green Tea - Part One

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:27:34 +0900

The title of this column may seem a bit obscure, particularly as I said last time I was going to talk about the English translations of Genji Monogatari, but bear with me, all will become clear shortly. As I mentioned in my last column, there are five English translations of Genji, three complete, and two partial. Here are the translators’ names and the dates of publication: • Suematsu Kenchō (1882) • Arthur Waley (1925) • Edward Seidensticker (1976) • Helen McCullough (1994) • Royall Tyler (2001) As you can see, the translations are widely separated in time and appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, in the early and latter parts of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, meaning that the translators’ purposes in translating, their readers, and the translations’ reception were bound to be different. This also means that each of them is a very different work, and will give you a very different idea of Genji depending upon which one you read now. I’m going to deal with the first two translations this week, and will discuss the others later. Suematsu’s translation is incomplete, covering only the first seventeen ‘chapters’ of the original. It starts as follows: The Chamber of Kiri[i] In the reign of a certain Emperor, whose name is unknown to us, there was, among the Niogo and Kôyi[ii] of the Imperial Court, one who, though she was not of high birth, enjoyed the full tide of Royal favour. Hence her superiors, each one of whom had always been thinking—“I shall be the one,” gazed upon her disdainfully with malignant eyes, and her equals and inferiors were more indignant still. [i] The beautiful tree, called Kiri, has been named Paulownia Imperialia, by botanists. [ii] Official titles held by Court ladies. (Suematsu Kenchō, 1974, 19) One could take issue with the translation of the title, the uninformative footnotes, and, now, the somewhat old-fashioned phrasing (‘gazed upon her disdainfully with malignant eyes’), but overall there if much to commend here: it is a faithful reflection of the original’s content, and goes some way to replicating its rhythm and style. In his introduction Suematsu explicitly states his purpose in translating: [It] is not so much to amuse my readers as to present them with a study of human nature, and to give them information on the history of the social and political condition of my native country nearly a thousand years ago. They will then be able to compare it with the condition of mediaeval and modern Europe. (Suematsu Kenchō, 1974, 17)　 Suematsu was a diplomat despatched to Britain by the Meiji government, and his translation was a way to emphasise that Japan, far from being a barbaric, peripheral nation, had equalled, and even exceeded, the cultural developments of the western powers. This was in keeping with the Japanese government’s major foreign policy aim of securing a revision to the ‘unequal treaties’ signed by the Tokugawa shogunate. It was a translation for a political purpose, in other words. The contemporary critical reception of the translation, however, was patronising, to say the least: The story, if story it may be called, when there is not a vestige or anything like a plot, is exceedingly tedious…The best things in the book are the scraps of verse, which are sometimes really pretty. (The Spectator 1882) Despite this seemingly negative reception, however, the translation was reprinted in 1898, at which time the following review appeared: …the text carries with it innumerable verses, which are to us utterly meaningless…we now understand the wonderful art of Japan, but perhaps it will be never given to us to appreciate her fiction. (The New York Times 1898) At this time the very existence of Japanese literature was an object of curiosity, and, it was never considered that it could be in any way equal to the literary achievements of Europe, or, not to put too fine a point on it, English. This should come as no surprise: Britain, in particular, was still in the grip of the self-confident Victorian assumption of its own superiority, and any work of world literature, not just those from Japan, was likely to be regarded in the same way. So, you could say that Suematsu’s translation was, and to some extent still is, a curiosity and not worth a great deal of attention. The first complete translation of Genji, by Arthur Waley, and published in six volumes between 1925-32, however, was a different matter. It was widely read, and highly praised by the British literary establishment. On the cover of the edition which I own, in an excerpted quotation from the New York Times, it is described as being ‘as robust as “Tom Jones,” as discerning as “Don Quixote,” as untrammeled as “The Arabian Nights”’, clearly placing it in the company of other, more familiar, major works of English, European and world literature. Waley begins his Genji like this: Kiritsubo[i] At the Court of an Emperor (he lived it matters not when) there was among the many gentlewomen of the Wardrobe and Chamber one, who though she was not of very high rank was favoured far beyond all the rest; so that the great ladies of the Palace, each of whom had secretly hoped that she herself would be chosen, looked with scorn and hatred upon the upstart who had dispelled their dreams. Still less were her former companions, the minor ladies of the Wardrobe, content to see her raised so far above them. [i] This chapter should be read with indulgence. In it Murasaki, still under the influence of her somewhat childish predecessors, writes in a manner which is a blend of the Court chronicle with the conventional fairy-tale. (Waley, 1935, 7) Setting aside the footnote – I think the last thing one would do nowadays when translating a literary work is insult one’s author on the very first page - you can see immediately, I hope, that this is a more literary version than the previous one. A reader is caught at once by the initial, long, sentence and swept away by its rhythm. This is easily done as Waley has decided, for example, to translate the terms nyōgo (女御) and kōi (更衣), which Suematsu simply transcribed, even if the translations themselves are somewhat opaque. He has, though, left the chapter title untranslated, and unexplained. How much you enjoy it, I suppose, depends on whether you like this relatively flowery style (an American student of mine once remarked that this could only ever have been written by an Englishman), but I have to confess to finding it enchanting, and I am not the only one: for example, writing in Vogue in 1925, Virginia Woolf made these effusive comments: While the Aelfrics and the Aelfreds croaked and coughed in England, this court lady...was sitting down in her silk dress and trousers with pictures before her and the sound of poetry in her ears, with flowers in her garden and nightingales in the trees, with all day to talk in and all night to dance in-she was sitting down about the year 1000 to tell the story of the life and adventures of Prince Genji. (Woolf, 1966, 265) With positive reviews such as this to drive it, Waley’s translation was read by many people and evaluated highly. Again, this is, perhaps, unsurprising, given when it appeared: in the early 1920s the First World War remained an unhealed wound upon the psyche of the British people, many of whom could perceive little hope for a better life in the immediate future. It seems unsurprising, therefore, that they should seize on Genji as offering an escape into a romantic and more civilised world, and that it should exercise a strong influence on the British literary establishment, with Aldous Huxley relating in later years that the Tale of Genji was ‘the essence of all tragedy, refined to a couple of tablespoonfuls of amber coloured tea in a porcelain cup no bigger than a magnolia flower’ (Huxley 1939: 156). This brings us to the title of the column and the crux of the matter: it’s a fact that Japanese tea is, of course, green, and amber tea can’t help but seem foreign, or rather, un-Japanese (the Japanese word for Indian tea is kōcha 紅茶which literally translates as ‘scarlet tea’, as you probably know already). Although Huxley may not have meant it this way, Waley’s translation departs in both letter and spirit from the Japanese original in order to make the resultant English text more palatable to the English reader. The technical term for this in Translation Studies is domestication, and there’s no doubt that Waley’s Genji is thoroughly domesticated, with European furniture and other accoutrements inserted, changes in characterisation and motivation, and substantial deletions, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable, or influential. Next week, I’ll talk about the more recent translations – those which are more akin to green tea. References Mccullough, Helen (1994), Genji and Heike Selections from the Tale of Genji and the Tale of the Heike Stanford, Stanford University Press. Seidensticker, Edward G. (1981), The Tale of Genji Harmondsworth, Penguin. Suematsu Kenchō (1974), Genji Monogatari Tokyo, Tuttle. Tyler, Royall (2001), The Tale of Genji Harmondsworth, Viking. Waley, Arthur (1935), The Tale of Genji Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company. Woolf, Virginia (1966), "The Tale of Genji", 264-268, in Virginia Woolf (Ed.) Collected Essays London, Hogarth Press.

Does the Shining Prince yet shine?

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:17:33 +0900

In my first column, I mentioned in passing the Genji Monogatari 源氏物語 (The ‘Tale of Genji’), and referred to it as Japan’s greatest literary masterpiece, promising to return to this vitally important topic at a later date. Well, that time has now come, but you may ask why a literary work written a thousand years ago should be important enough to devote time to today, if you are not a pre-modern Japan specialist. You may wonder if I don’t have an ulterior motive for writing about it, and I have to confess, I do: many years ago I came across a series of translations for academic where, ‘This is a vitally important topic,’ was given as the academic equivalent of, ‘This is the topic of my dissertation,’ and, yes, I have to admit that more years ago than I like to think of, now, I wrote a thesis entitled ‘The Tale of Genji: “A Loose Sequence of Vague Phrases”?’ where I took issue with claims by some scholars that the language of Genji is intrinsically vague and difficult to understand. So, after spending three years living, breathing and thinking Genji, I can’t claim to be entirely objective about it, however, even so I don’t think it is something you can easily ignore if you are interested in Japan and Japanese culture. To give you an idea of the work’s significance to the Japanese, I was once told that there has been more criticism and commentary written about Genji in Japanese than there has been about all of the works of Shakespeare in English – and anything which has proved so influential has to be deserving of at least some consideration. In the space I have here, I can do no more than make a pinprick on Genji’s surface, but I’m going to try and give you an idea of what sort of work it is, what made it so influential, and why it’s still worth a read now. So, what is the Genji Monogatari? Well, it’s a lengthy literary work in fifty-four ‘chapters’, covering the life, career and loves of the son of an Emperor, the Genji of the title, called hikaru genji 光源氏 – ‘the shining Genji’, because of his extraordinary talent and beauty, and those of some of his descendants. There are affairs, triumphs, exiles, disasters, spirit possession and death, all played out against the background of the world of exquisite taste and etiquette that was life for the higher nobility. Unlike in any of the works written at the same time, however, the characters in Genji have believable and convincing inner lives, so it’s considered to be ‘psychological’ and, therefore, ‘modern’ in the literary sense, despite being written so long ago. That alone would be enough to guarantee it a place in the annals of world literature, as it’s literally the first work of its kind in history. Imagine how unique and novel it must have seemed, then, to the aristocrats of the imperial court, who literally had come across nothing like it. It will come as no surprise to you to learn that it proved to be extremely popular – in particular with the women, who had little else to do beside wait for the slim chance that the emperor might pay them some attention. Quite apart from its uniqueness, its popularity was also due to fact that the hero of the work was, in many ways, the perfect Heian man, who, despite his many flaws, was loyal to the many women with whom he had relations and almost never abandoned them to penury after his affections cooled. This, however, would not be enough to make the work endure – that was at least partly due to the progress of Japan’s history. The Genji was written during the zenith of Japan’s aristocratic age – when court culture was at its height. This meant that in the years and decades after its composition, the aristocracy’s power and wealth waned as the court gradually lost control of the provinces to a rising warrior class – the samurai. As a consequence, the nobility tried desperately to retain control in the one area where it still had some authority – culture and the arts – and the Genji became a crucial part of this. Quite apart from its literary merits, it came to be seen as a blueprint for a more civilised and cultured age – an unimpeachable historical record of earlier customs and events – and thus it was preserved and studied. In addition, the aesthetics of Genji were regarded as being crucial to an understanding of waka poetry: Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114-1204), one of Japan’s most influential poets and critics even went so far as to remark that no one could be a poet who had not read it. Thus it was pored over and studied by poets and critics, becoming a practically endless source of allusions and material for poetic composition. The Genji-inspired poetry in turn inspired plays – first Noh and then Kabuki, and even Bunraku puppetry – artworks, fabric designs for kimono, pastiches, satires, and a wealth of critical works. One might almost say that it’s easier to list the bits of Japanese culture which haven’t been influenced by Genji in some way, rather than those that have, because its influence and effect is so pervasive. That isn’t to say that there weren’t periods when it was less read, or popular, and by the end of the Tokugawa period in the mid-nineteenth century, when the language in which it was written was so remote from Japanese as it was then that only scholars could read it, the Genji as a text, as opposed to an influence, was perhaps on its way into obscurity, but once again, history intervened. With the opening of the country and the formation of the new Meiji state, the government urgently need ways to prove to the western powers that Japan was a ‘civilised’ country, and the Genji was a useful means. Thus, it began to be reread and studied with the new critical tools provided by European and American scholarship, and from there it was a short step to producing translations into modern Japanese, so that contemporary readers could experience it in their own language, and some of Japan’s greatest modern writers and poets have turned their hand to the task. For example, Yosano Akiko 與謝野晶子 (1878-1942), perhaps Japan’s most famous and passionate modern tanka poetess, and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886-1965), author of the masterful Sasameyuki 細雪 (translated into English as ‘The Makioka Sisters’), each produced their own version. Tanizaki, in fact, translated it no few than three times, as he attempted to get closer to the essence of the work. The new interest in Genji, spurred by its modern Japanese translations and inclusion as an essential text in the school curriculum, has generated a whole range of new adaptations and variations of it: films, re-writings, television dramas, manga and anime; it’s even been performed, many times, by the all-woman Takarazuka Gekijō 宝塚劇場! Many of these modern versions have provided new interpretations, or new twists, on the work’s plot, re-imagining it for new ages and generations – one of the Genji films was even the first to have an actor portray an emperor on screen, although he was only shown from the back. The development of Japanese interest was paralleled by that in other nations, once scholars became aware of Genji’s existence. It’s now been translated into French, German, Russian, Czech, and English – three times completely, and twice partially – and is at least mentioned in almost every Japanese Studies course. Last year, 2008, was declared by the Japanese government to be the official millennium of its writing, and it was celebrated with exhibitions and conferences world-wide. You’d be hard pushed to find a Japanese who didn’t know the work’s title, and the majority would have a rough idea of the plot – like most British people would probably know that Romeo and Juliet was about a love affair that comes to a bad end. With all this going for it, how could Genji not be worth a read? If your only available language is English though, the question becomes which translation should you pick – and that’s what I’ll talk about in my next column.

What can we learn from dorama?

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:02:05 +0900

Last week I was talking about the wonderful subject of Japanese television dramas in terms of the general types of plots and characters which tend to appear, and what broader lessons about Japanese society we can draw from watching them, quite apart from the linguistic and entertainment benefits that can be obtained. This week, I said I’d take a look at the types of academic studies which scholars have done recently. I’m not going to pretend that this is anything like a comprehensive study or review of the literature – I don’t have time, or space, for that – but I can identify some of the broader areas which have attracted attention and flag up some of the more interesting studies for you to look at if you want to go into the subject in more depth. Television drama can, of course, be a research topic for any number of academic disciplines, some of which can pay less attention to the dramatic aspects of the medium than others. For example, Senko Maynard, who I’ve mentioned before when talking about Japanese rhetorical structures, has recently been analysing the language used in a particular dorama in order to determine how language use between individuals changes as their relationships mature and alter, and discovering that ‘linguistic strategy such as stylistic shift expresses changing emotions between the characters, and, in particular, that stylistic shift indexes changing degrees of intimacy.’ (Maynard 2001: 1). This is straight linguistics research, which just happens to be using a drama as a resource – she could equally have gone out and recorded examples of speech and analysed those, although as the dorama in question, Majo no Jōken 魔女の条件 (TBS, 1999), concerned the progression of an illicit affair, it might have been difficult to obtain real-life examples easily. It’s also possible to draw more firmly grounded academic conclusions about the current state of Japanese society from looking at what appears, or doesn’t appear, on television. Two recent studies, Valentine (1997) and Stibbe (2004) have analysed TV programmes in order to determine what they can tell us about the representation of minorities in Japan. Valentine’s work on marginalised sexualities shows that ‘lesbians and gay men can be freely stereotyped’ (Valentine 1997: 59), with lesbians in particular being portrayed, when they are represented at all, in almost wholly negative terms. For example, in the drama Kōkō Kyōshi 高校教師 (TBS, 1993), a lesbian character, even though not explicitly acknowledged as such, ‘is associated with…non-reciprocated, enforced relationships involving abuse of power’ (Valentine 1997: 60), while gay men generally, when not portrayed comically as okama オカマ, are ‘stereotypically defective in love, decency, honesty or courage: they are lonesome and/or loathsome’ (Valentine 1997: 69). Stibbe (2004), on the other hand, investigated representations of the disabled on Japanese television, discovering that from the beginning of the 1990s, there was ‘a massive boom in the portrayal of fictional disabled characters, played by non-disabled actors’ (Stibbe 2004: 23), with the characters being both positive, attractive and involved in romantic relationships (Stibbe 2004: 23). These dramas worked, however, to reinforce accepted social norms in that they either almost invariably concluded with the death of one of the protagonists, suggesting that the barrier between able-bodied and disabled people is ‘a taken-for-granted fact of Japanese society, without so much as a hint that it might be overcome’ (Stibbe 2004: 26), or else suggested that disabled people could be cured, or needed the protection of someone able-bodied (Stibbe 2004: 27), thus marginalising them and denying them an identity of their own. The final major area of research on Japanese television is the consideration of its relationship with East Asia – either in terms of how it may contribute to the formation of a common East Asian popular culture and identity (Chua 2004), or how it spreads beyond the shores of Japan to Hong Kong and China (Nakano 2004) (other scholars have also considered the penetration of Japanese popular culture into Korea). In the former, it is not simply Japanese television which becomes the object of study, but other countries’ products of popular culture, too – I’m sure you are all familiar with the vogue for all things Korean recently in Japan, the so-called Kanryū būmu 韓流ブーム - and how they cross cultural boundaries and are received in environments other than that in which they were created. There might be a tendency to view the international spread of the artefacts of Japanese popular culture – television programmes, films, comics, music, and so forth – as the result of cultural and economic imperialism. That is, Japanese corporations aggressively pushing their products into other East Asian markets, and overwhelming the domestic products. According to Nakano (2004), however, this is not the case: the spread of Japanese entertainment into Hong Kong and China was consumer driven, with young people watching pirated copies of Japanese dramas, and demanding more themselves. This is important because ‘this shift in perspective might help us break with the concepts of Japanization as well as Americanization that put the economic power at the absolute center of globalization’ (Nakano 2004: 249), and allow us to develop a more people-centred view of East Asian relations. So, in answer to the question posed in the title of this column – I’d have to say, we can learn a great deal from dorama, both about Japan, and the part of the world in which it is. References: Chua, Beng Huat (2004) ‘Conceptualizing an East Asian popular culture’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5 (2): 200 – 221. Maynard, Senko K. (2001) ‘Falling in love with style: Expressive functions of stylistic shifts in a Japanese television drama series’ Functions of Language 8 (1): 1-39. Nakano, Yoshiko (2002) ‘Who initiates a global flow? Japanese popular culture in Asia’ Visual Communication 1: 230-254. Stibbe, Arran (2004) ‘Disability, gender and power in Japanese television drama’ Japan Forum 16 (1): 21-36. Valentine, James (1997) ‘Skirting and Suiting Stereotypes: Representations of Marginalized Sexualities in Japan’ Theory Culture Society 14: 57-85.

Dorama - What A Drama!

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 02:49:38 +0900

Whenever I visit Japan these days, most of the time I’m working in various ways all day, so that when evening comes I usually find that all I want to do is go back to my hotel room and relax – rather than go out exploring bars, as I might have done twenty, or even ten, years ago. Once there, I could read, but usually I prefer to switch on the television and dip into the world of Japanese TV broadcasts. This is a good exercise, both linguistically, because one gets to hear naturally spoken Japanese language, and culturally, because you get to observe what interests and entertains the Japanese people – to see the kinds of things which much of the population enjoy, what moves them and, in the dramas, how the Japanese see themselves, or more accurately, like to imagine themselves to be. Obviously, I’m not claiming that Japanese TV is necessarily a truthful reflection of Japan as it is – all dramas have to reflect the exigencies of their genre first and reality second – but there are enough common themes and character types running through many different programmes that it is clear they must supply something with which the Japanese can identify. The same is true for any nation’s television, of course – you’d pick up a pretty distorted view of what the UK is like if all you did was watch popular dramas, and soap operas (probably that the more bucolic, or picturesque, the location, the more likely there were to be murderers lurking about, and people living in close-knit communities in the inner cities always have disastrous times at Christmas), but you could get an impression of the iron grip the class system still holds on British (or English) social relations, attitudes and past-times, and what a long way there still is to go before Britain sees anything like the kind of uniformity in outlook there is in Japan, for example. Turning back to Japan, as far as I can tell, there are essentially two basic plots used for the majority of dramatic productions: first, and perhaps most common, is the story of what one might call the deru kui 出る杭 – from the much quoted proverb deru kui wa utareru 出る杭は打たれる ‘the protruding stake will be hammered down’, meaning that anyone who doesn’t conform will be made to. In the deru kui dramas, however, the non-conformist, while causing frustrations to his/her group (and there’s always a group), almost always, ends up teaching the group a lesson about something, while possibly becoming a bit more conformist. Classic examples of this type of drama would be: Asahi TV’s Satorare サトラレ (‘Transparent’) (2002) featuring Odagiri Jō as a genius who telepathically projects his thoughts to anyone in a 12 metre radius around him, which naturally causes endless opportunities for comedy, embarrassment and pathos, as everyone is forbidden by law from reacting to them, or telling him that he’s doing it; Fuji TV’s long-running Naasu no Oshigoto ナースのお仕事 (‘A Nurse’s Job’) (1996-2002), starring Mizuki Arisa 観月ありさ as an accident-prone and headstrong nurse, who nevertheless cared passionately for her patients; Asahi TV’s Fugō Keiji 富豪刑事 (‘Millionaire Cop’) (2005-2006), starring Fukuda Kyōko 深田恭子 as the daughter of a fantastically wealthy whose father essentially buys her a place in the police force, and who then uses her wealth to help solve crimes; and last year’s Shibatora – dōgan keiji Shibata Taketora シバトラ～童顔刑事・柴田竹虎 (‘Shibatora: Baby-Faced Cop Shibata Taketora’), starring current heartthrob Koike Teppei 小池徹平as a police officer who is so youthful looking that he can pass for a schoolboy – something, along with his psychic ability to see when Death is reaching out for someone, which gives him a special insight into delinquency and youth crime. The second basic plot is ‘the group overcoming its conflicts to win through in the end’ – something which is certainly not a purely Japanese plot. An obvious example of this would be Fuji TV’s 2003 series Water Boys about a high school synchronised swimming team. You also, of course, get combinations of the two plots – most often in police, or crime, dramas. The detective in a Japanese murder mystery is often something of a loner – an offbeat detective, a lawyer, or a prosecutor – but who, nevertheless, is firmly part of a group – of police, or other legal professionals – with whom he, or she, has disagreements, but which are resolved in order to catch the killer, or killers. Just check out the huge list of characters such as Mōjin Tantei Matsunaga Reitarō 盲人探偵・松永礼太郎 (‘Blind PI Matsunaga Reitarō’), Onna Kenji Kasumi Yūko 女検事・霞夕子 (‘Lady Prosecutor Kasumi Yūko’) and Bengoshi Asahi Takenosuke 弁護士・朝日岳之助 (‘Lawyer Asahi Takenosuke’) on the Japanese wikipedia page for the extremely long-running Nihon TV show, Kayō Sasupensu Gekijō 火曜サスペンス劇場 (‘Tuesday Suspense Theatre’) (1981-2005) to see what I mean. Another example would be the Odoru Daisōsasen 踊る大捜査線 (‘Bayside Shakedown’) franchise, which from its beginnings as a TV show in 1997, has spawned a large number of specials and spin-offs, including four films. The initial series and films starred Oda Yūji 織田裕二as a salaryman who gives up his office job to become a police officer, and gets assigned to the Tokyo Bayside Police Station, where he has to fight against the inertia of his superiors to get the job done (the original series was remarkable for suggesting that the many police officers treated the job just like working at a company, and weren’t passionate crime fighters). A more recent example would be Hotaru no Hikari ホタルノヒカリ (‘It’s Only Little Light in my Life’ – this is the ‘official’ English title, but a more natural one might be simply ‘Hotaru’s Light’), starring Ayase Haruka 綾瀬はるか as a young woman working for an interior design company – where her department has to compete for contracts and work together to complete jobs (the group working together), but who is secretly a himono onna 干物女, a ‘dried fish woman’ (this isn’t a standard expression, but rather something invented by the writer), who prefers slobbing around at home rather than keeping herself presentable and going out on dates (the non-conformist element). Within both of these plot-types, you also get a number of clearly defined characters: the essentially incompetent superior who’s more interested in golf than the job, but who may, nevertheless, come through in a crisis; the colleague who’s only got the job through family connections; the slimy colleague who’s jealous of the protagonist and wants to get rid of him, or her; the loyal sidekick – often female if the protagonist is male, and vice versa – who clearly has a yen for the protagonist, but will never get anywhere because the protagonist is too wrapped up in the job; the wise old colleague who provides the voice of experience; the young female colleague who provides comic relief; the loyal friend, and so on. It shouldn’t take you too long to identify which archetype any character in a given drama belongs to, if you watch it for a while. So, what does all this tell us about Japan and the Japanese? Well, primarily I think it’s a very good demonstration of the importance of group relations: individuals are only seen in the context of how they fit into, or influence, their group, and, on the whole, it’s the success or failure of the group that’s important. In addition, the overwhelming focus on the world of work, or school, hints both at the importance these places play in people’s lives, and perhaps, self-image. You do get workplace-set dramas in the UK, of course: medical, police – I can even recall a couple set in hotels – but it’s frequently the characters’ relations with each other which are more important than what they do. I can’t imagine a character making an extended speech about how hard they intend, or want, to work to make their, say, department store, the best in the country, but this happens regularly on Japanese TV. Of course, you could say that this is just the Japanese business elite manipulating the masses, but I’m not quite that cynical yet. Next week, I’ll take a slightly more academic look at Japanese TV, and discuss how other scholars have analysed it recently.

Journeys Outside of the Bubble

Fri, 22 May 2009 19:30:05 +0900

Here’s a question for you: what’s the stereotypical image of a Japanese tourist abroad? Thinking about it, you might say that the question is misphrased, because there’s no such thing as a Japanese tourist, only Japanese tourists – they only ever occur in groups. That’s obviously an overstatement, and yet it’s probably true to say that many, or perhaps most, Japanese leisure travellers outside of their own country do so as part of package, group, tours. If you live in a tourist area of Japan, you’ll be familiar with the sight of tour groups, each with their own guide, being bussed from place to place according to a carefully planned schedule of sightseeing and shopping, and the sight of groups of tourists being gathered together at airports, often all wearing name badges, or with similar hats, is one I’m familiar with from my own travels.

The Japanese tour group, too, travelling together, speaking only Japanese and being rushed from place to place, snapping photographs, but never stopping long, is almost a metaphor for Japan’s preferred way of dealing with kaigai 海外 (‘abroad’): looking at it through a Japanese lens, or visiting it in a Japanese bubble. (The British, of course, aren’t any better – thousands of Britons visit popular tourist spots in Europe every year, and spend their time eating British food, visiting British pubs and clubs, and staying in hotels surrounded by other Brits – the only way they know they’re not at home is because the weather’s better. This type of attitude was satirised by the Comic Strip team, in the episode ‘Funseekers’ (1988), at the end of which the gormless protagonists emerge from a church where they have just assisted a young Spanish woman to give birth to her illegitimate child, gaze around in amazement, and say, ‘I’ve just realised – we’re in Spain!’ – but I digress.)

Package tours are such a part of Japanese travel now that it’s difficult to believe that they are a relatively recent development, only really taking off after the 1960s with Japan’s rise to economic superpower status. Incidentally, do you know the origin of the modern package tour? It’s, in fact, a British invention: on 5 July 1841 a cabinet maker by the name of Thomas Cook reached an agreement with the Midland Counties Railway company to send 570 people from Leicester to a temperance rally in Loughborough eleven miles away. He was so successful in this and arranging other trips, after some initial problems, that he abandoned cabinet making altogether, and became the first travel agent, eventually arranging to send people all over the world.

Anyway, I seem to be digressing again.

Foreign travel by Japanese didn’t start in the 1960s, of course, it’s just that earlier travellers tended to be solo ones, and leisure wasn’t the reason they left Japan. In Meiji and the early twentieth century, Japanese travelled for education – to learn about the world outside, which was a strange place after the two hundred and fifty odd years of isolation of the Tokugawa period. Some of Japan’s most famous modern writers went overseas, either voluntarily, or because the government despatched them, to improve their knowledge and return with it to Japan, and had intense experiences while there. For example, Natsume Kinnosuke (1867-1916), better known by his pen-name Sōseki 漱石, the famous author of works such as Botchan 坊ちゃん (‘The Young Master’) (1906) and Kokoro こころ (1914), and, by all accounts something of an eccentric (his first remark to his wife on their marriage was apparently, ‘I am a scholar and therefore must study. I have no time to fuss over you. Please understand this.’), spent two very unhappy years in England from 1900, eventually behaving so oddly that reports were sent back to Tokyo that he had gone mad, resulting in his urgent recall home. Years later, when asked about his impressions of his stay there, he was to say, ‘To tell the truth, I have no liking for England. But I must be honest, whether I like the country or not. I do not think there is a place in the world so free or so orderly.’ Arishima Takeo 有島健郎 (1878-1923), another famous writer, spent over three years abroad, from 1901-04, travelling through the US and on to Europe, where he fell in love with a Swiss innkeeper’s daughter. He left after they had spent only a week together, but they corresponded until his death, and she remained faithful to his memory, visiting his grave in Japan and buying copies of his books, which she kept until her death at the age of 84 in 1970, although she was unable to read a word of them (Llewellen 1993).

Other travellers went for religious reasons: the most famous Meiji example was Kawaguchi Ekai河口慧海, a Buddhist monk who made several journeys to Nepal and Tibet and was the first known modern Japanese visitor to both countries, while the most famous Japanese Christian traveller was undoubtedly Kibe Petro 岐部ペトロ (1587-1639). Kibe was born to Christian convert parents in Kyushu, and seems to have wanted to be nothing other than a priest, enrolling in a Jesuit school at the age of 13, and being deported by the Bakufu to Macao in 1614 at the age of 23. He then set off on a odyssey in search of ordainment, eventually walking the entire length of the Silk Road, some 2000 miles, becoming the first Japanese to enter the Holy Land, and the first to visit Rome, where his wish was eventually granted. He returned to Japan in 1630, after the sakoku 鎖国 (‘seclusion’) policy had been instituted, landing in secret at Nagasaki and travelling as far north as Sendai before he was finally betrayed to the shogunate and arrested. By all accounts, great efforts were made to make him apostatise, including interrogation by Christovao Ferreira, a Portuguese Jesuit who had abandoned his faith after torture (if you’ve read Endō Shūsaku’s 遠藤周作 (1923-96) award winning novel Chinmoku 沈黙 ('Silence') (1966), you’ll be familiar with his name, as he’s the man the protagonists enter Japan to seek). Kibe remained, however, true to his beliefs, and eventually died under torture in July 1639. His name appears near the top of the list of Japanese Christian martyrs recognised by the Catholic church, and he was beatified in November last year.

Japanese Buddhists, of course, travelled abroad in search of enlightenment and instruction centuries before Christianity ever came to Japan. Probably the most famous of these, even though he spent relatively little time away, was a man by the name of Saeki no Mao 佐伯眞魚 (774-?835), although he’s far better known now by his Buddhist name of Kūkai 空海, or his posthumous title of Kōbō Daishi 弘法大師. Mao came from an aristocratic background, as many monks did at the time, and was prodigiously clever, publishing his first work Sangō Shiiki三教指帰, a comparison of the merits of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, in 794 at the age of just 24. Ten years later, he travelled to China and within two years had been initiated as a master of Shingon 真言 esoteric Buddhism, a faith he was to bring back to Japan, which proved to be fertile ground for its teachings. In addition to his religious duties, Kūkai worked as an advisor to the imperial throne and is known to have guided the building works to improve Mannō Ike 満濃池, Japan’s largest agricultural irrigation reservoir, which is still to be found in Kagawa Prefecture in Shikoku. Kōbō Daishi remains the single most revered Japanese Buddhist figure, legendarily responsible for inventing both the kana 仮名 syllabary and the Iroha poem traditionally used to teach it, and the faithful believe that he did not die in 835, but merely entered permanent meditation on Mount Kōya 高野, where his body remains to this day.

Finally, we should also remember that in pre-modern times, travel within Japan could be just as daunting as long sea voyages abroad, and so I’ll end this week with a poem composed by an anonymous retainer of Ōtomo no Tabito 大伴旅人, while journeying with him from Kyushu back to the capital in Nara:

大海の奧かも知らず行く我をいつ來まさむと問ひし子らはも
opoumi nö
oku ka mo sirazu
yuku ware wo
itu kimasamu tö
topisi kora pa mo

On the vastness of the sea
Not knowing what's to come
Or whither bound am I;
"When will you be home?"
My children asked...

MYS XVII: 3897

There won’t be a column next week, as I’ll be on holiday, so look for the next one on, or around, June 5th.

References:
Llewellen, John (1993), Modern Japanese Novelists: A Biographical Dictionary Tokyo, Kodansha International.

How Japanese Writers Make the Point

Fri, 15 May 2009 08:06:01 +0900

Over the last couple of weeks, I have talked about how the difficulty native English speakers often have in working out what a Japanese text is attempting to say is frequently a combination of a lack of familiarity with the Japanese quasi-inductive style of discourse, and with the idea of relying upon something which is not explicitly present in the text in order to understand it, given that the network holding Japanese texts together tends to be one of explicit and implicit topics. There is one further difficulty, however, which is what I am going to talk about this week. Beyond linguistic structure, and general ideas about the appropriate format for a discourse, texts are also organised according to rhetorical principles – broadly speaking, what parts a texts should have, and what type of things you should say in order to make your point. Most English texts, for example, have a three part organisation: introduction, main body, and conclusion, although there are others. Japanese, too, has a three-part rhetorical structure: joron 序論, honron 本論, ketsuron 結論, and the Japanese terms translate literally as ‘introduction’, ‘main argument’ and, unsurprisingly, ‘conclusion’, which, on the surface, is identical to the English one. Problems can arise, however, because the Japanese concept of what an ‘introduction’ or a ‘conclusion’ should be is different from the English one. A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned how an effective way for a Japanese writer to begin a text is with an ungrammatical statement, and that a question is good way to conclude, because the former captures the reader’s attention, and the latter demonstrates respect, indicating that the writer is allowing the reader to make up his or her own mind about the topic of the text. These demonstrations of deference can go to extreme lengths: an equally effective Japanese conclusion might be ‘shikashi kono kangae jitai ga kontei kara ayamatteiru kamoshirenai’ しかし、この考え自体が根底から誤っているかもしれない ‘I may, however, be fundamentally mistaken in my views’, a statement which might be calculated to annoy readers, if used to conclude an English text. So, if you are reading something written by a Japanese, and they suddenly seem to backtrack, or become tentative in their statements, always bear in mind that it might not necessarily be an indication that they are uncertain of the correctness of their argument, but instead, it might be simply that they are following an effective, Japanese, rhetorical strategy. There are other types of Japanese text organisation besides the three-part one. If you recall, I also mentioned that one thing that may have puzzled you is why a Japanese writer might suddenly start talking about something completely unrelated to the main topic of their text. This has its origin in an extremely common writing style which is held up as a good model for Japanese writers to follow when producing short, expository texts: ki shō ten ketsu 起承転結. This is a four-part organisation for a piece of writing: an introduction of a topic (ki 起), a development of the topic (shō 承), a sudden switch away from the topic (ten 転), and a conclusion (ketsu 結). Despite now being regarded as a typically Japanese style, in fact, it’s derived from the pattern of a four-line classical Chinese poem, a shih 詩, which had its heyday in the seventh century. Kanshi 漢詩 (‘Chinese poems’), as the shih were called in Japan, were very popular among the aristocracy of Japan’s classical age, and at some point in mediaeval times, the pattern began to be used to write essays, and still is. (If you want to know more about ki shō ten ketsu, just ask a kokugo teacher, or one of your students.) Maynard (1998: 33) uses the following short text to exemplify this pattern: Ki: Ōsaka Motomachi Itoya no musume 大阪本町糸屋の娘。 ‘The daughters of Itoya in Ōsaka Motomachi:’ Here, we have topic introduced: the daughters of Ito, the thread seller, in one small district of Osaka. Shō: Ane wa jūroku, imōto wa jūgo 姉は十六、妹は十五。 ‘The elder is sixteen, the younger: fifteen.’ Next, the topic is developed further, with information about the two girls’ ages. Thus far, there is nothing to confuse an English reader. Ten: Taikoku daimyō wa yumiya de korosu 大国大名は弓矢で殺す。 ‘The Great Lords of the mighty domains slay with bows and arrows.’ It is at this point that the English reader would start getting confused: why is the writer suddenly talking about something unrelated to the topic of the text? The fact, however, is that this diversion is not random, but has been carefully chosen. The ki and shō talk about the daughters of a single merchant in a single part of a single city – the lord of his own, tiny, domain. The ten sets up a semantic contrast with what has gone before by referring to feudal lords, in command of many thousands of warriors, instead of a single shop. It also makes a reference to killing, which is taken up in the ketsu: Ketsu: Itoya no musume wa me de korosu 糸屋の娘は目で殺す。 ‘The daughters of Itoya slay with their eyes.’ Here, the writer combines elements from all the previous sections of the text to make their final point – about the devastating attractiveness of the two girls. This type of carefully constructed, contrasting structure, is typical of ki shō ten ketsu-patterned texts, and the diversion from the main topic is key to their impact and effectiveness. The text above has only a single line per section, but the same principles apply to longer ones, where each section can last over several paragraphs, or more. So, the next time you are reading something written by a Japanese, and it seems to go off on a tangent, look for semantic contrasts with what has been mentioned before – if you find it, the likelihood is that the writer, far from wandering randomly off the topic, is doing it deliberately, and you can look for the various elements to be tied together in the subsequent, concluding, section. I should emphasis at this point that I couldn't have produced any of the above explanation without the input of my colleague, Ishikawa Luli, who has the rare skill of distilling quite complicated linguistic theoretical explanations down into easily comprehensible layman's terms. (If you want to read more texts structured like this, try reading the Asahi Shinbun’s Tensei Jingo 天声人語 column, and if you want to read more about all aspects of Japanese text organisation, Maynard (1998) is by far the best source.) References: Maynard, Senko K. (1998), Principles of Japanese Discourse: A Handbook Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Japanese Writers Do Stick to the Point!

Fri, 08 May 2009 20:05:02 +0900

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.