Thoughts on Japan

Idolatrous Cannibals in Golden Palaces (Part Three)

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0900

It’s not just for serious study of Japan that I think Japanese language is essential. What about if you simply want to find out what the Japanese find entertaining and enjoy it? For example, one of the things the Japanese astronaut Yamazaki Naoko did during her recent visit to the International Space Station was compose haiku, such as:

ruri-iro no/chikyū mo hana mo/uchū no ko
瑠璃色の　地球も花も　宇宙の子

Lapis lazuli-hued
The world and blossoms, too,
Are children of space.

And the Japanese Space Agency ran a competition for ordinary Japanese to submit their own contributions, which Yamazaki judged (the results are here, if you can read Japanese). I’m not aware of any of the other astronauts or space agencies doing something similar, and without access to Japanese language, you miss out on the pleasure. This also serves as a useful illustration of cultural difference.

On a more pop-culture note, there’s the recent satirical monster flick Girara no gyakushū: toyako samitto kiki ippatsu ギララの逆襲・洞爺湖サミット危機一発 (‘The Revenge of Girara: Explosive Crisis at the Toyako Summit’, 2008), where the usual man-in-a-rubber-suit monster from space, provoked by a Chinese space-shot, arrives on Earth and starts laying waste to Hokkaido while the leaders of the G8 are holding their summit there. The world leaders band together to fight it, each reacting according to his or her national stereotype (the US president bosses the Japanese around, takes charge, but is ultimately ineffectual; the Russian President orders the monster assassinated with polonium 210; the German chancellor attempts to have it gassed; the British attempt to brainwash it – not quite sure where that one comes from; and the president of France is too busy seducing his interpreter to care). Eventually, former Japanese prime minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō arrives to take charge, with a suggestion to nuke the beast. The horrified world leaders reject this out of hand, whereupon he reveals himself to be North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in disguise, who has infiltrated the summit, accompanied by his attractive female bodyguards, to make his mark in the world. Even though the world leaders all speak in their own languages, Japanese skills are a must to really make sense of everything. (In case you’re wondering, Girara is eventually defeated by a local Shinto deity, who vaguely resembles popular Japanese comedian Beat Takeshi!)

Speaking more seriously, the sheer volume of Japan and Japanese-related blogs and internet sites is testament to the level of interest in Japan and Japanese culture which already exists. Quite apart from specialists like myself, people of all ages are busily learning Japanese, writing about Japan, and using it in their daily lives. One only has to think of the phenomenal success enjoyed by 15 year-old schoolgirl Rebecca Flint, who started by posting videos of herself dancing and singing along to Japanese songs in a variety of costumes on You Tube,

was taken up by a Japanese site, was invited to Japan to perform and now has advertising and recording contracts under the stage name of Beckii Cruel ベッキー・クルエル (her latest You Tube videos seem more professionally done, too).

Now, Ms Flint’s success is obviously aided by the fact that she is telegenic, and that some Japanese have a fondness for a quality described as moe 萌え ‘budding’, which is used to describe cute young girls on the cusp of womanhood – supposedly in a pure, protective, non-sexualised way – and I’m not saying that anyone can parlay an interest in Japanese pop culture into a career, but it does show that success can arise from the most unlikely of sources, and, to use the language that seems to be used all to frequently about education these days, that real, measureable, economic benefits can arise from linguistic knowledge.

The quantity of amateur, ‘fan-subs’ of Japanese anime (and dorama) on the web suggests that there are audiences for Japanese popular culture products for which their makers do not attempt to cater, and that there may be careers to be made in subtitling, as opposed to the usual translator’s path of dealing with technical texts, and having people do it who know the language better may help to avoid howlers such as this!

Finally, to return to my starting point, and the question of why languages should have a place in the higher education curriculum, the answer is obvious: if it’s Japanese we’re talking about, people worldwide are plainly already interested in Japan and things Japanese, and are struggling with knowledge of the language, culture and society. The task of the academy is to help them take their interest in things Japanese, whether it be manga, anime, literature, history, management or economics, and do the best they possibly can with it – and teaching them the language and improving their existing skills will help them individually, produce better understanding between nations, and ultimately be of material benefit. So, how can language not have a place?

Idolatrous Cannibals in Golden Palaces (Part Two)

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0900

Carrying on from last week, in order to get information, or data for research, the best sources in my view are going to be straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, and in the language of the nation’s people, particularly when it’s as geographically and culturally distant from our own as Japan is.

‘Ah,’ says the sceptic, ‘But I’m only interested in statistics – you don’t need language for that! Or I can just work through an interpreter, or read books written in English. Why do I need to learn the language?’

Well, say you are interested in statistics, and are looking for some Japanese data, it’s not very helpful to know that 飯田市 has 225 外国人登録者 who are 就学者 divided into 167 公立学校 and 14 外国人学校, with other numbers in two other categories. You will understand the numbers, of course, but they won’t mean anything unless you can read the accompanying text to know what they refer to. (In case you’re curious, the figures above say that Iida City has 225 registered (school age) foreigners, of whom 167 are attending ordinary Japanese public schools and 14 schools for foreigners.) Admittedly, if you are in possession of a very large research grant, you can hire a Japanese research assistant to deal with the figures for you, but most people aren’t – if you want to get the data, you have to read it for yourself in Japanese.

The same is true of working through an interpreter – it’s just not an option in many circumstances. Even in the world of business, where interpreters are a way of life in interaction between international companies, who’s going to get further when all other things are equal: the person the Japanese can talk to and contact directly if there’s a problem or issue, or the one they have to wait and arrange translation and interpretation for? The one who shows they understand the Japanese expectations of a business relationship, with all the emphasis placed on long-term commitments and reliability that implies, or the one who makes no allowances for the fact that they are not dealing with people from their own country? I know which I would choose, if the situation were reversed.

Finally, what about just reading about Japan in English? Well, there’s no denying you can get a great deal of information this way, but – and this is a big but – you are then at the mercy of the accuracy and reliability of the writers you are reading. I have already described how one of the problems with English language scholarship on Japan in the 1970s and early 80s was an uncritical acceptance of many nihonjinron ideas and theories, resulting in work which gave a distorted picture of what Japanese society and language was really like, particularly when influential nihonjinron texts like Doi’s Amae no kōzō 甘えの構造 (‘The Anatomy of Dependence’) were translated into English and treated as genuine depictions of Japanese reality. Even today, long past nihonjiron’s heyday, nihonjinron writers still pop up and are allowed to make statements having little basis in fact in otherwise trustworthy venues. For example, Tsunoda Tadanobu, who I have mentioned before, was recently in The Japan Times saying:

Japanese communication is more of an exchange of feelings than of information. Our conversation is more like animal sounds, like two birds singing to each other. Ours is not as logical a language as others. (27/6/2006)

There are so many things wrong with this statement, it’s difficult to know where to begin, but suffice it to say, in my experience, when I’m speaking Japanese, or listening to Japanese people speak the language to each other, I’m not particularly aware of squawking out sounds, or of a lack of ability to hold complex, well-argued discussions – although the nature and structure of that argument might be different.

To take more literary example of why Japanese language is important, let’s think of Kawabata Yasunari 川端康成: he was awarded the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind’. I have no doubt of Kawabata’s worth as a prize winner, but the fact is that the committee had to read his work in translation, and simply because of the very Japanese-ness of his writing, the English versions are often a very different animal from the original. For example, Edward Seidensticker begins his 1957 translation of Kawabata’s masterwork, Yukiguni 雪国 (1935-37) with the following sentence:

The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.

This, in fact, bears remarkably little resemblance to the Japanese original. In fact, none of the elements I’ve boldfaced in the English, above, appear in the Japanese. This is partly for grammatical reasons – Japanese doesn’t have articles, for example, so there is no equivalent for the – but much more important are Seidensticker’s decisions as a translator: what to include, what to omit, and what to insert. The original text starts:

kokkyō no nagai toneru wo nukeru to yukiguni deatta
国境の長いトネルを抜けると雪国であった。

The Japanese sentence consists of two clauses (Seidensticker’s English has just one), neither of which has a subject (Seidensticker inserts the train); the original gives the location of the tunnel – the border between provinces (kokkyō 国境) – (Seidensticker omits this); with the particle to と after the verb in the first clause in the original, there’s a sense of immediacy (‘as soon as’), and change from one thing to another – (again Seidensticker omits this); and finally, the second clause in the original, yukiguni deatta 雪国であった is a copula structure (‘was [the] snow country’), focussing on the result of the change suggested before (Seidensticker makes this a location the train enters). As you can see, there’s quite a difference between the two.

If I were asked to translate the sentence, my version would probably be:

As soon as they emerged from the long, border tunnel, they were in snow country.

But even this involves a conscious change to the text – the introduction of the subject they – which foreshadows the involvement of the protagonists for the English reader, something which is left ambiguous in the original. My version is closer to the Japanese, but it’s still not the same, and the only way to get the full sense is to read it in the original, and for that you need the language.

Or, let’s think about military history: in the introduction to his Japanese Army Operations in the South Pacific Area: New Britain and Papua Campaigns, 1942-43 (2007, Australian War Memorial), which is a translation of an excerpt of the official Japanese military history of the war (Senshi Sōsho 戦史叢書), historian and translator Steve Bullard discusses some of the issues which make the text difficult to translate, for example the use of ideologically loaded euphemisms such as gyokusai 玉砕, ‘shattered jewels’, used when soldiers fought to the death rather than surrender, or the fact that equivalents to ‘withdraw’ or ‘defeat’ simply weren’t part of the Imperial Japanese Army’s vocabulary, and so the most you will get mentioned in despatches and orders from the time is tenshin 転進, ‘alternate advance’ and any move to a defensive position is always framed as a preparation for a future offensive. Interpreting the true state of affairs behind documents such as these, then, requires not only linguistic skills, but also a knowledge of the culture and rhetoric of the Imperial Army, and this can only be gained once you have Japanese language under your belt.

Next week: what if you’re just interested in fun, Japanese things?

Idolatrous Cannibals in Golden Palaces (Part One)

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:04:45 +0900

A couple of months ago, I was speaking at a conference entitled New directions: how languages promote research and internationalisation in higher education organised by the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, in conjunction with the Centre for Russian, Central and East European Studies – which is a Language Based Area Studies Centre focussing on Russia, and central and eastern Europe, just as the White Rose East Asia Centre does on East Asia. The event was an opportunity to bring together people working in languages in higher education in the UK and discuss the best way to promote the languages agenda in the face of increased pressure on resources and ignorance about the importance of language learning as a part of degree programmes. You can find the full programme for the day here.

My own talk was about why learning the Japanese language was vital for engagement with, and study of, Japan and in the next few columns I’m going to go over some of the same ground, starting with the same quotation which gives them their title:

In the oceans to the east of Cathay lies a large island. The natives have white skins, and their behaviour is most elegant, following strict rules of decorum. They worship, however, idols with the heads of beasts, such as oxen, swine, hounds and sheep, and on occasion eat the flesh of enemies they have captured in battle. They think, moreover, that human flesh is the most delicious of all meats. Of even greater note, however, is the fact that their palaces are all plated with gold. The roofs are tiled with gold, and the floors have gold two fingers thick spread upon them.

This is my own translation of a Japanese account of the first ever description a European gave of Japan – by Marco Polo (c. 1254-1324), in fact. Polo famously visited China, then under the control of the Mongols, and worked for Kublai Khan, and it is most likely from them that he got the information on which he based his description. The Mongols were hardly the most objective describers of Japan, attempting to invade the country twice, in 1274 and again in 1281, while Polo was in China, only to be defeated by a combination of military readiness on the part of the Kamakura Shogunate, and a freak storm which sank much of the invasion fleet – the famous ‘divine wind’ kamikaze 神風 which was to become such a symbol of the defence of Japan in desperate straits that the term was used to refer to the Tokubetsu Kōgeki Tai 特別攻撃隊 (‘Special Attack Group’) suicide pilot squadron during the Pacific War.

Given this, it’s not surprising that the image that Polo conveys bears little connection to reality – only the reference to Japanese decorum seems to have any resonance – having as he did no opportunity to visit Japan or speak to a Japanese person. Even today, however, despite the benefits we enjoy of fast, relatively cheap intercontinental travel, and the instant communication of text, image, sound and video worldwide, it strikes me that non-Japan specialists are confronted with a range of conflicting and often contradictory images of Japan, and so it is unsurprising that they often have difficulties in determining the complex reality of the nation and its people.

To give some examples of common images of Japan, there’s ‘Japan: the ultra-modern urban environment’, familiar from films such as Lost in Translation (2003) or Black Rain (1989), or pictures of the shinkansen 新幹線 bullet train, or the latest robot. Equally, there’s ‘Japan: the bizarre’, where buildings such as love hotels shaped like The Titanic are commonplace, or the people spend their time watching game shows like Za Gaman ザ・ガマン ‘Endurance’. Then there’s ‘Popular Culture Japan’ represented first by monsters such as the mighty Godzilla – incidentally one of the few fictional characters to be granted a statue in Tokyo. You can find a picture of it here (although the caption wrongly positions the statue in Hibiya Park), and also here where my colleague, Graham Healey, faces off against the King of the Monsters. Later incarnations of ‘Popular Culture Japan’, of course, are represented by anime and manga characters, such as the ultra-cute, sailor-suited heroine, Sailor Moon, or even the Akihabara Majokko Princess character played by Kirsten Dunst in a recent video for artist Murakami Takashi’s contribution to the recent Tate Modern exhibition ‘Pop Life’.

Then, finally, there’s ‘Traditional, natural Japan’ represented by images of places like Lake Ashi (Ashinoko 芦ノ湖) in Hakone, with its pine-forested shores, shrine gate (torii 鳥居) and proximity to Mount Fuji. Seeing the photograph in the link you could be forgiven for thinking that Hakone was some kind of natural wonderland, whereas, without discounting the undoubted beauty of the area, anyone with any knowledge of the place knows that a pirate galleon cruises the bay providing sightseeing trips for tourists, and one of the major attractions is the Hakone Garasu no Mori Bijutsukan 箱根ガラスの森美術館, the ‘Hakone Glass Forest Venetian Glass Museum’, which displays all of Maria Callas’ costume stage jewellery, among other things. There’s even a popular culture connection, as Hakone is famously the site of the fictional Tokyo-3 in the classic anime series Shinseiki Ebangerion 新世紀エヴァンゲリオン ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’, and an Evangelion-themed convenience store opened there recently had to close when too many fans of the series congregated to visit it.

Faced with all of these conflicting images of Japan, is it any wonder that there’s confusion and uncertainty about the nation, its people and culture? And, if we want to find out the truth, or truths, about the place, how can we do it unless we can access information about it? The answer is, obviously, that we can’t.

Next week: can we get information on Japan without knowing Japanese?

You will talk proper!

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:38:49 +0900

In my last column, I talked a little about the social aspect of Japanese honorific speech, and how speakers from certain social groups use it as a linguistic means of projecting an image of themselves to other people. In this they are no different from English speakers, who either consciously or unconsciously adopt different accents: the case of British violinist Nigel Kennedy, who famously adopted a ‘Mockney’ accent in order to appeal to a constituency who wouldn’t normally like classical music, springs to mind. I’ve also outlined how the normal rules (respect from inferiors to superiors) can be suspended in situations where the superior is seeking a favour, or of heightened levels of formality, and how this counts against the argument that honorific usage is solely based upon the obligatory indication of social status. Finally, I’ve mentioned that it’s been suggested that one reason why older speakers often seem to feel that younger ones can’t use honorifics properly is because the latter’s perception of how social relationships should be determined is different from that of their elders, which results in different honorific usage. This week, I’m going to draw all of these themes together and look briefly at the historical development of the honorific system – from both a grammatical and social perspective – with a view to seeing how the language has ended up with the system it now has. This will be a little linguistics-heavy to start with, but bear with me, as I hope it will be interesting. I’ll start by looking at previous versions of honorifics. The earliest type of Japanese for which we have a significant amount of information about the honorific system is the language spoken during the Heian period (794-1185). Linguists refer to this as either Late Old Japanese, or Early Middle Japanese, but less technically it’s just ‘Classical Japanese’ – the language in which most of the pre-modern works of literature were composed. In Japanese schools it’s called kogo 古語 ‘old language’, and every Japanese learns the rudiments of it as part of their education. The language was that variety of Japanese spoken and written by the court aristocracy in Heian-kyō 平安京 (Kyoto 京都) during the Heian period (794-1185). Roughly speaking, it’s grammatically more different from modern Japanese than Chaucer’s is from modern English, but not as different as Beowulf’s Anglo-Saxon is from the modern language. It was, of course, restricted to a tiny proportion of the population – approximately one tenth of one percent, that being the rough numbers of the court aristocracy – and reflects their society and concerns. The nobility lived in a world where rank and status was all important, and determined partly by family back ground, but also by one’s official rank in the imperial government. This isn’t the place to go into that in detail, but briefly there was an officially sanctioned system of ranks, promotion in which brought a man increased status and income – benefits which would also reflect upon his family. The system was clear and well-understood, with the Emperor at the apex, followed by the Empress and Crown Prince, then other members of the imperial family, higher nobility, mid-ranking nobility and so on downwards. The top five non-imperial ranks were the most important, and people below that level were looked down upon by their betters and thought of as not fit to associate with. People outside the rank structure were barely thought of as being the same species. Given this preoccupation with rank and status, then, it’s not surprising that EMJ should have a well-developed system of honorifics. Formally, of course, it’s very different from the modern system, with the verbs and inflections which indicate respect or deference being entirely different from those in the modern language, and it being possible to combine respectful and deferential forms in the one expression in ways which it is no longer possible to do, but more interesting is the evidence which suggests that the level of honorifics used to address and refer to another person was determined almost entirely by their court rank. So, if one was addressing a Major Councillor (dainagon 大納言) say, one would use one level of honorifics, but if one was talking to a Minister (otodo 大臣) a higher level was required. Talking to or about the Emperor mandated the highest possible level, with a range of terms and forms used only for actions by or in relation to him. What this means is that the Heian honorific system is much closer to the ‘discernment’ model of honorific usage. Japanese linguists call this zettai 絶対 (‘absolute’) in that honorific speech was determined by the addressee or referent’s position on an absolute, and externally determined, scale of social status. This is contrasted with the modern system, which is characterised as sōtai 相対 (‘relative’), meaning that the speaker’s perception of the relationship is more important. (In fact, even the ‘absolute’ Heian system was not absolute – if it were Emperors would never use honorifics at all – because seniors did use honorifics to juniors, particularly if a debt or obligation was involved.) Nevertheless, it’s fair to say that the system was more absolute than the modern one, and speakers were aware, and critical, of people who used the wrong level of honorifics about people of lower status – Sei Shōnagon complains about it in her Pillow Book. It’s also accurate to say that, leaving aside the formal changes which have been extreme, the major development in Japanese honorifics over the past thousand years has been a progressive increase in the relativisation of the system – particularly once we enter the modern period and a person’s social position became less a product of absolute external criteria. To a certain extent, that is what makes honorific usage more difficult – for both Japanese and foreign speakers – nowadays: it’s no longer enough to simply know what someone is, and use the right honorifics for that position, you have to form your own judgement about the relationship and speak accordingly. How, though, do Japanese speakers decide which forms to use? Well, in business contexts companies often train new employees in the correct forms to use to clients and customers, but people in everyday life have to rely upon their own instincts, and they are often unsure about them, particularly if they are going to have to speak in a situation, or to someone, outside of their usual patterns of interaction. As an extreme example of this, one of my colleagues related to me an anecdote about what happened when the current Emperor paid a visit to Oxford when he was Crown Prince back in the 1960s. The university wasn’t quite sure what to do about the visit, and so invited a large number of Japanese to a reception to meet His Highness – people who would never have met a member of the imperial family in Japan under normal circumstances. My colleague described his astonishment when most of these people, when introduced to the Prince, chose to speak to him in English rather than Japanese, and when he asked one of them about it afterwards was told, ‘Well, I wasn’t sure what honorifics to use to someone like him, so it was just easier to speak in English.’ I have to say that I, myself, probably wouldn’t be sure of the correct etiquette for addressing the Prince of Wales should I ever get to meet him, but I don’t think that I would choose to speak in French to avoid the issue! Nevertheless, it demonstrates the lack of security people may have about their honorifics, and the lengths they may go to in order to avoid embarrassing themselves with mistakes. It’s this concern over doing things right which accounts for the large number of ‘How to’ books on honorifics available from any Japanese bookshop (putting the search term ‘correct honorific usage’ (keigo no tadashii tsukaikata 敬語の正しい使い方) in to Amazon Japan’s search engine immediately produced a list of fifty titles). What criteria, though, do the authors of books like these use to provide their readers with information? Well, one valuable source is, in fact, the Japanese government! Believe it or not, there’s a long tradition of these bodies making prescriptive pronouncements on matters of linguistic usage in Japan, and receiving support from government organs to do so. The most obvious area where the government interferes is, of course, the writing system, by determining which kanji should be learnt during compulsory education and used in public life, but honorifics haven’t escaped attention either. This is some time ago, but in 1957 the Ministry of Education issued a document entitled Kore kara no keigo これからの敬語, ‘Honorifics from now on’ which contained a series of detailed ‘recommendations’ about how the Japanese people should speak to each other in the future. The document is not particularly lengthy, but it does make interesting reading, as evidence of a belief that it is possible to change linguistic behaviour by fiat (Miller 1967, 284). I don’t have space here to go into all the ‘advice’ the document provides – you can read a summary in Miller (1967, 285-287) if you are interested – but briefly there is instruction about which pronouns should, or shouldn’t be used (watashi 私and anata あなた only, with boku 僕 allowed only for men prior to entering adult society); which suffixes (-san, -sama) should be used after people’s names; appropriate contexts for the honorific prefixes o- and go-; and a prohibition of extended honorific verb forms (where, for example, the ordinary honorific form of the verb yomu 読む ‘read’, o-yomi ni naru お読みになる ‘read(honorific)’, is made even more respectful by the addition of a further honorific inflection: o-yomi ni nareru お読みになれる). Anyone who knows anything about the Japanese language will know that none of these prescriptions has been effective – a wide variety of other pronouns and suffixes is still used, as are extended honorific verb forms – which just serves to demonstrate the persistence of honorific speech as a part of the language and its intrinsic connection to Japanese social relations and organisation and the uselessness of governmental bodies attempting to control how people speak. There is, however, one set recommendations in Kore kara no keigo which have been effective: the advice provided on what type of honorific vocabulary should be used in referring to the Emperor – not when speaking to him face-to-face, of course, but in writing. The concern then, only a few years after Japan’s defeat, was to eliminate honorific usage which overly exalted the throne, as had been the case during and before the war. Essentially, the recommendations were that ‘ordinary’ levels of honorifics should henceforth be applied to the emperor, and specialised honorific vocabulary should be avoided. These have largely been followed, and so the imperial body is now simply o-karada お体 ‘body(honorific)’ and not gyokutai 玉体 ‘jewelled form’, and his face is simply o-kao お顔 ‘face(honorific)’ and not ryūgan 竜顔 ‘dragon’s visage’, although I remember the headline in the Asahi newspaper when Emperor Shōwa died in 1989 as being Tennō heika go-hōgyo 天皇陛下御崩御 ‘His Majesty the Emperor - Dead’, using an honorific word for ‘dead’ which can only be applied to the imperial person, although the television newscasters used the more common o-nakunari ni narimashita お亡くなりになりました ‘passed away(honorific)’. The fact, however, that Kore kara no keigo enjoyed even this level of success, and was largely welcomed by the Japanese as a helpful contribution also demonstrates the difference in attitude to official ‘advice’ on language between the Japanese and the British, say: can you imagine the public reaction if the British prime minister held a press conference and announced that the government was abolishing the use of ‘Mr’, ‘Mrs’ and ‘Ms’ before people’s names when addressing each other? I have absolutely no doubt that the response would be a resounding ‘Get lost!’ and it would be seen as a ridiculous infringement on personal relations. In conclusion, then, despite the generational changes in usage, there’s no evidence to suggest that honorifics will disappear from Japanese any time soon, and they will continue to both delight and frustrate foreign learners of the language for many years to come. All that you can do is do your best to learn them, use them, understand and accept them – look upon them not as a barrier to communication, but an additional resource, a way of both smoothing relations and shielding yourself in talking to and with the Japanese. And if you get frustrated, just think of all those self-help books for the Japanese themselves, and realise that there are a great many native speakers in the same boat! References: Miller, Roy Andrew (1967), The Japanese Language, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

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.