Translating Obama into Japanese

SOME LINGUISTS claim that Japanese rivals English and German in its amenability for incorporating outside influences. Indeed, the Japanese might well surpass native speakers of the other two languages in their ability to borrow words and chop and channel them for their own purposes.

And now comes word that the first faint signs are beginning to appear of Japanese young people importing another word into the language—this one based on the name of the President of the United States.

A contributor to a mailing list for Japanese-English translation that I read reports that the verb obamu is gaining currency on the Kyoto University campus. He writes, “It means something along the lines of, ‘to ignore anything which appears to make you likely to fail or (be) wrong, and blindly surge ahead (preferably chanting, “yes we can, yes we can”)’.” He adds that he heard a friend jokingly try to cheer someone up by saying, “obandoke, omae.” (オバんどけ、お前.)

If I had to translate that on the fly, it would come out something like, “Lighten up and think positive, guy!”

A quick look at the Japanese-language turf on the Internet turns up few examples, but one in particular is meaningful. I found it as an entry dated 22 September in a collection of slang and modern usage put together by the Japanese Teachers’ Network in Kitakyushu. Here’s what they write:

obamu: (v.) To ignore inexpedient and inconvenient facts or realities, think “Yes we can, Yes we can,” and proceed with optimism using those facts as an inspiration (literally, as fuel). It is used to elicit success in a personal endeavor. One explanation holds that it is the opposite of kobamu. (拒む, which means to refuse, reject, or oppose).

They give the following example:

ほら、何落ち込んでいるんだよ。オバめよ、オバめ。

Or, “Hey, why are you so down in the dumps? Cheer up, cheer up!”

That people cite its use in cities as far apart as Kyoto and Kitakyushu suggests some fire might be under those wisps of smoke.

One more Japanese-language citation is from a Twitter tweet, which defines it simply as believing you can accomplish something.

Those familiar with the language will understand immediately that such a coinage would sound very natural, and that it is typical of Japanese creativity and their sense of humor.

I asked my wife, the television-watcher in the family, if she had heard anything about it, but it was news to her.

It remains to be seen whether this word is capable of hitoriaruki (literally, walking alone, or becoming independently viable), and whether the tweety Pollyanna definition or the more pointed Kitakyushu definition become the standard.

But considering the nature of the Internet and the Japanese love of wordplay and new coinages, it shouldn’t be long before we find out.

Amae, amas, amat…

“JOURNALISM LARGELY CONSISTS of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive,” observed G.K. Chesterton, and that corresponds all too well to the reports earlier this week of the death of Dr. Doi Takeo. A psychoanalyst, Dr. Doi developed and presented first to Japan and then to the world his theories on the role of amae in the Japanese psyche and cultural behavior. As the obituaries noted, people consider him to have been the first Japanese trained in psychiatry to influence Western psychiatric thought.

Those with an interest in psychiatry and in Japan knew his work well. When I studied Japanese at university, it was considered de rigeur to have read Dr. Doi’s book, Amae no Kozo (The Anatomy of Dependence). For everyone else, however, Dr. Doi might as well have been Lord Jones, and that’s how the English-language press treated his passing.

That treatment is something of a tragedy, because his work and the concepts he presented offered an important new perspective for Japanese to understand themselves and for foreigners to understand them. Perhaps that’s shikata ga nai, as the Japanese say; it can’t be helped. The interest of the lumpen readership in either Japan or psychiatry is limited, and the concept of amae is difficult to understand for anyone not familiar with Japanese society. In fact, I suspect it would be next to impossible to understand unless one were Japanese or had lived in Japan for several years and paid close attention to what was going on.

Amae defined

Dr. Doi used the word amae because there’s no real English equivalent. Indeed, it is said to be a back formation he coined himself from the verb amaeru. The underlying emotions, said Dr. Doi, are instinctual and present in every society, but the Japanese have a greater awareness of those emotions because they have specific words to describe them. Thus, Western terminology is insufficient to describe the Japan psyche. That further complicates the understanding of subtle concepts difficult to describe and prone to misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

One trustworthy source translates amae as “dependency wishes”, in which a person relies on the love, patience, and/or tolerance of other people or groups who form the other pole of an emotional relationship. Dr. Doi himself described it as presuming on another’s love, basking in another’s indulgence, or indulging in another’s kindness. Right away, that definition causes problems with misinterpretation. Westerners often view relationships and emotional dependence of that sort in a negative light. Dependency is to be outgrown because it is a manifestation of weakness and childishness.

That view does not predominate in Japan, however. The word amae has the same root as the word amai, or sweet, imparting a positive sense that makes it impossible to render into a single English word or phrase. In that spirit, the name of his book could also have been rendered literally as The Structure of Amae. Translators know better than anyone that converting from one language to another is not the same as handling an algebraic equation.

Amae in everyday life

A Freudian, Dr. Doi postulated that the origin of amae lies in the restoration of the lost mother-and-child union, a relationship that might be considered even more important in Japan than elsewhere. He then used it as a way to describe the dynamics of different relationships in adult life, including those between parent and child (in which amae is present even after children become adults), husband and wife, teacher and pupil, patron and acolyte, master and apprentice, and even feudal lord and samurai.

In many instances, the one-way direction of this relationship is only temporary, and in other cases, the dynamics move in both directions. People often use as an example of amae women indulging in emotional dependence on men, but that works in reverse from men to women as well. Also, pupils grow up to become teachers, and apprentices grow up to be masters. While Westerners may consider dependency a weakness, in Japan amae can strengthen the social fabric through a relationship between two people or among a larger group of people.

Dr. Doi used the concept to explain the importance in Japan of developing a rapport or relationship that transcends the feeling of simpatico, in which there is merging, or tokekomu. He held that amae helped explain the blurring of the distinction between subject or object—or self and other—in Japan, and why the notions of privacy and individual rights were different here than elsewhere.

He extended his theory by using it to explain the Japanese dislike of cut-and-dried logic, frequently referred to as “fart logic” (herikutsu), the nature of long-term business relationships, and the importance of nonverbal communication.

Giri-ninjo

Another layer of complexity was added by his application of amae to examine the contrasting feelings of giri, or obligations in social relationships, and ninjo, or human emotions—in other words, the conflict between what one should do or has to do, with what one would naturally want to do. This issue is a much greater part of both the daily dialogue and general cultural discussion in Japan than elsewhere. In Japan, Dr. Doi claimed, ninjo is characterized by both using and responding to amae, while giri is infused by ninjo.

While giri may seem to be an unpleasant burden that Westerners might prefer to shuck as soon as it becomes convenient, the Japanese recognize it as an important social lubricant. Unlike ninjo, it is not universal, so it is restricted to specific relationships. It can involve helping those who help you and returning favors to those who do one favors. People neglect these obligations at the risk of their social standing.

Of course these same obligations are present in the West, but they seem to have an added dimension here. Try giving an unexpected present, no matter how insignificant, to a Japanese with whom you are on friendly terms and watch what happens.

This side up

There’s still more. One of the first things a foreign student of Japan learns is that it is a vertical society, rather than a horizontal one. Dr. Doi claimed that amae was the reason for the prevalence of vertical integration in Japan to begin with.

Incidentally, the Japanese themselves are aware that vertical structures can be inefficient and frequently discuss them as an obstacle rather than an advantage. For example, people often criticize the excessive verticalization of the governmental bureaucracy when discussing ways to reform the system. Some think it was one reason for the poor performance of the military command structure during the war. That might provide a hint why bureaucratic reform has been so difficult to achieve–how does one change the natural default position of everyone’s emotional structure?

Those who disagree

Naturally, these theories were, and are, wide open to criticism. All the Japanese with whom I’ve discussed the book said that while they thought it was essentially accurate, the doctor tried to stretch the concept too far by applying it to every aspect of life. Perhaps that’s to be expected of pioneers anxious to spread the awareness of new ideas they’ve developed.

Some of this might also be dated. Dr. Doi was born in 1920 and formulated his theories after a psychological culture shock while visiting the United States in 1950s. For example, he thought that the phrase “help yourself” was rude. He assumed it meant “no one will help you”, when it actually means “do as you like”. (Let’s also not forget that some Westerners raise their children by emphasizing “no one will help you” as a way to inculcate self-reliance.)

Lately, however, it seems that some of these tendencies might be disappearing. Perhaps this is most apparent in the way that single women now deal with men. In passing, it should be noted that people often fail to consider just how fast Japan is able to change or adapt to change, and yet retain its stability. This was still a feudal society fewer than 150 years ago, and it is astonishing how quickly it has incorporated concepts for which it took hundreds of years to evolve in the West. Thus, it’s not surprising that emotional structures in place for more than a millenium might melt in the space of a few decades.

One of Dr. Doi’s Western critics was Peter Dale, whose book The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness no longer seems to be in print. (None of the on-line descriptions I found of Mr. Dale’s objections cite his qualifications, though he must have had some.)

Dale dismissed the whole concept as belonging to the class of ideas known as nihonjinron, or theories on the Japanese people. That was once a thriving cottage industry for the presentation of claims that the Japanese were unique, which itself gave rise to another thriving cottage industry for the snorters offended by those claims.

More specifically, Dale criticized Dr. Doi for irrationally expanding the meanings of common Japanese words to convey the idea of uniqueness. He compared it to the prewar twisting of such words as kokutai (national polity) and kokusui (national essence) for propaganda purposes.

One can imagine the criticism that would have erupted had Dr. Doi analyzed the Japan-U.S. relationship through the prism of amae.

The problems of nihonjinron

Discussions of nihonjinron from either perspective have always seemed like a waste of time. First, it has little or no practical application for anyone’s life in Japan, regardless of nationality, giving the whole enterprise an airy-fairy quality. Second, some of the ideas are grounded in the social sciences, whose limits tend to be reached very quickly. Third, the debate attracts the type of people who think intellectual discussion consists of inflated claims informed by emotional predispositions, again from either perspective, and who enjoy it for that reason. We’ve all heard it said that academic arguments are so ferocious because there is so little at stake. Is it a coincidence that many of those involved seem to be either the overeducated or people who insufficiently digested what education they did receive? Given a choice, I’ll take in vito over in vitro every time.

Not to be overlooked is that those who most intensely argue against nihonjinron often use it as a vehicle for their real motive—Japan-bashing. And in turn, Japan bashing is often a vehicle for lashing out at some demon in one’s personal background entirely unrelated to Japan. Perhaps more Japanese should consider developing the field of gaijinron as it concerns foreigners’ views of them.

Nor should we overlook that those most scornful of nihonjinron somehow fail to notice the libraries full of arguments claiming a similar uniqueness for the Americans, the English, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Koreans, and scores of small tribes throughout the world known only to their neighbors and anthropologists.

So who was Lord Jones?

A website post cannot do justice to all the issues required to fully examine a concept as important and as difficult to grasp as amae, both pro and con. That’s why journalists might honestly struggle to describe for use as corner space filler the life and ideas of Dr. Doi–a Japanese Lord Jones whom the public did not know, and whose reputation was formed in a different era for a subject with which few people are conversant and even fewer would want to be.

So how did they handle it? Here’s one example from AP (emphasis mine):

Takeo Doi, a scholar who wrote that the Japanese psyche thrived on a love-hungry dependence on authority figures, has died, his family said Monday. Doi…wrote the 1971 book, “The Anatomy of Dependence,” which introduced the idea of “amae” – a childlike desire for indulgence - as key to understanding the Japanese mind.

One wonders just how many people in journalism—helplessly watching their credibility vanish, their market shares vaporize, and their stockholders hit the silk—realize that much of the public has grown to detest them for the habitual and intentional professional malpractice the above excerpt demonstrates. There is no question that the person who wrote that–and I don’t care what her name was–deliberately chose the most unflattering way to describe the man’s work.

One also wonders if the journalists realize that for the same disgusted public, watching them commit suicide is an opportunity to pop some corn and crack open a beer. It’s obvious to those of us familiar with Japan that the journalists assigned to cover this country are (pick one or more) superficial, ignorant, incompetent, eager to play off negative stereotypes, or ready to create new ones. They have an attitude of charity towards none and malice towards all.

If all your information about Japan is derived from the Western mass media, then everything you know about Japan is wrong.

Afterwords: I was curious about the statement that Dr. Doi coined the noun amae (it’s been a while since I read the book), so I did a quick check of Japanese-Japanese dictionaries. The word does not appear in the 1984 edition of Kojien, which was the standard reference in those days, but it is defined in Sanseido’s 1984 Reikai Shinkokugo Jiten. That dictionary was compiled for younger students, but it has excellent examples and concise definitions that are useful even for adults. There’s now a fourth edition, and I highly recommend it for foreign students of the Japanese language.

The tower of logo-babel

THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN are two countries separated by a common language, observed George Bernard Shaw, but at least the written matter in one country can be read by the people in the other. Those two countries, along with the rest of the Anglosphere, use the same writing system.

Imagine how much greater the separation must be in the Sinosphere, where there’s more than one way to write Chinese. Many languages are spoken throughout the region that might be called Greater China, but different approaches to the lexicographic system for the written Chinese language are one manifestation of the perennial battle royale in Taiwan over the question of how closely they should associate with the Mainland. On one side are those who want to adopt the PRC’s standard writing system (now that they’ve already adopted the PRC’s Romanization system). Arrayed against them are those who think that’s just a ploy to promote unification on PRC terms. The latter group is using an argument based on the unusual combination of preserving tradition and maintaining ethnic diversity to support their claim.

First, here’s some historical background to get everyone on the same page. The Chinese have been using ideographic characters since at least the 11th century BC. They’ve developed several writing systems throughout their history, but the characters they use today became roughly standardized about 2,000 years ago. Other people throughout East Asia adopted (or adapted) them to write their own language. They were used in the earliest documents written on the Korean Peninsula, and the Koreans used them until they developed their own alphabet. The Korean writing system was formally adopted in 1446, but did not come into common use until the late 19th century. Thus, literacy in Korea until fairly recently required the ability to read Chinese characters.

The Japanese used Chinese characters to write their own language at first, but only as phonetic symbols to express Japanese pronunciation and not necessarily for their meaning. While those early texts appear to be superficially Chinese, no Chinese reader would understand them because it’s still the Japanese language. Japan later developed two phonetic alphabets to use in conjunction with the characters to express vernacular grammatical elements, and these alphabets came into general use from the 8th to the 12th centuries.

The Chinese characters are called kanji in Japanese (which is now also an accepted English word), hanja in Korean, and hanzi in Chinese, but they all mean the same thing: Chinese (Han) letters.

Some of the traditional Chinese characters are quite complicated and require many individual strokes to write. In 1946, the Japanese started modifying their written language by reducing the number of kanji they required students to learn and simplifying their written forms. For example, the character gaku, which appears in such words as daigaku, or college, and gakko, or school, once had 18 strokes, but now has only eight. Some of the modifications were so extensive it would be impossible for contemporary readers to identify the connection. (Here’s a chart comparing the old and the new, for Japanese readers.)

The Chinese started simplifying the same characters in the 1950s, but their modifications were different than those the Japanese adopted, making the divergence between written Chinese and Japanese that much greater. The Koreans still use the traditional form of the characters for hanja when they do use them, but that is seldom. The Taiwanese are the only people to have retained the traditional form of the characters in everyday applications.

But now some people want to change that.

The current president of the Republic of China/Taiwan is Ma Ying-jeou of the reconstituted Chinese Nationalist Party, also known as the Kuomintang (KMT). That was Chiang Kai-shek’s party of the Chinese who fled China when Mao and the Communists took over to set up a government in Taiwan.

Earlier this month, the president proposed that Taiwan adopt the Beijing government’s simplified character set for writing only and retain the traditional characters for reading. The skeleton of the story is in this AFP article.

Said Mr. Ma:

“We hope the two sides can reach a consensus on (learning to) read standard characters while writing in the simplified ones…It is also our hope that the standard characters can be listed as World Heritage by the United Nations one day,” he said in a statement.

AFP is perhaps the least-bad of the major media outlets reporting on Northeast Asia, and this article gets the basic facts right. Yet they still manage to tilt perceptions in the direction they want all right-thinking people to support.

Relations with China have improved dramatically since Ma’s Beijing-friendly government was inaugurated in May 2008, vowing to promote reconciliation and trade ties.

Note that the Taiwanese president also wants the standard characters to become a “World Heritage”. He does not explain why any Chinese should think a UN imprimatur would enhance the prestige of a written language several millennia old and still in daily use by more than a billion people.

Though it’s not mentioned here, Mr. Ma also hopes that the PRC will implement two United Nations human rights covenants (the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) in Tibet in the future.

Add his Harvard Law degree to his wishful thinking about Chinese behavior and it’s easy to see why Time Magazine chose him as one of their top 100 “Leaders and Revolutionaries” for 2008.

Meanwhile, AFP chose an over-the-top yardbird to provide the only dissenting quote in the article.

“Ma is seeing China as his master. He is even trying to change our writing habits to please China, which is absolutely unnecessary,” said Cheng Wen-tsang, spokesman for the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP.)

It’s not as if they didn’t have other people from whom to choose. Take this editorial from the Taipei Times:

Since taking office, Ma has been leaning toward the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as can be seen in many things, from his statement on the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre to his plans to sign an economic cooperation framework agreement with China.

This may be the trend of the times and Ma may not have a choice, but this does not mean that Taiwanese should learn only to recognize traditional Chinese while writing with simplified characters, because there is a thin line between this and unification — or, rather, being unified.

In ancient China, the standard for unification included standardized wheel width for carts and a standardized script. Today, Ma is promoting simplified Chinese without receiving any goodwill from Beijing.

This is not far from unification as seen by ancient Chinese — how can we not be worried?

And:

Ma may see an acceptance of simplified Chinese characters as part of cross-strait economic and cultural exchanges, but it constitutes a form of political recognition.

Mr. Ma’s statement on Tiananmen, incidentally, praised the Chinese for the progress they’ve made on human rights. (One of these days, perhaps we’ll understand why the people for whom Harvard Law degrees, Time Magazine lists, and the UN are so important think it’s commendable to be friendly with the maleficent Chinese regime, yet were so outraged by the existence of the South African apartheid government, or even the comparatively benign Chile of Augustin Pinochet.)

But the KMT wanted to quickly ameliorate any concerns. They explained:

President Ma Ying-jeou yesterday proposed a concept of “reading in traditional characters, writing in simplified characters…The Office of the President today explained that the suggestion was aimed at 1.3 billion simplified character users in China, not Taiwan. (emphasis mine)

The concept aims to make Chinese people get to know the traditional character symbolizing authentic Chinese culture, said the Office. Traditional characters should be used in publications, but simplified ones are allowed in writing. It is not necessary to promote the concept in Taiwan as Taiwanese are familiar with traditional characters, the Office noted.

The Presidential Office explained that some media misunderstood that Ma intended to push forward the use of simplified characters in Taiwan, and thus clarified that the use of traditional character in Taiwan, a token of preservation of Chinese culture, will not be altered.

Most Taiwanese people are accustomed to using traditional characters in writing. But, for the sake of convenience, it is difficult to ban the use of simplified ones in writing. However, schools, government agencies, and military units should still use traditional characters at all time, according to the Office.

Do we have that right? The KMT wants people to believe the president suggested adopting the simplified PRC writing system in Taiwan so that the people on mainland China will reconstitute its entire educational system for 1.3 billion people and have them turn back the clock and recognize traditional characters?

Did they really think anyone would believe that, or, as seems to becoming common for politicians these days, did they just say it because they had to say something and didn’t care if anyone believed it or not?

But that still leaves another question: if all the books and documents in Taiwan are going to be in traditional characters; the schools, government, and military will use all trad/all the time; and since most people today usually communicate in writing by using the Internet and text messages…

What’s the point?

The Taiwan News has some other objections:

Despite hasty denials by a presidential spokesman, such an interpretation (promotion of unification) is by no means far-fetched given the apish decision by the restored KMT administration to officially adopt China’s Hanyu Pinyin romanization system and exile to the margins Taiwan’s home-developed Tongyong system on the grounds that Hanyun Pinyin was the “international standard,” presumably because of the PRC’s rising global clout. This conclusion was based less on Hanyu Pinyin’s questionable advantages than on an ideological drive to “link” the PRC’s “putonghua” with “Mandarin,” which the KMT defines as the unitary “national language” of the “Republic of China,” and ignored Taiwan’s multilingual environment, in which Tongyong could well be more suitable.

Their concerns are not unfounded. While the advocates of Tongyong pulled off some backdoor maneuvering of their own to get it adopted a few years ago, the Ma administration quickly rolled that back, ditched Tongyong, and adopted the PRC Romanization standard after taking office.

One of Tongyong’s advantages, by the way, is that it allows foreigners who don’t know Chinese to better pronounce family and place names. For example, non-Chinese speakers are at a loss how to deal with the Q in Qingdao (青島) and the X in Xian (西安). Tongyong used other spellings.

The opposition might also have a point that the PRC will see this as a concession without making any of their own:

Ma’s proposal received immediate applause Wednesday morning from PRC Taiwan Affairs Office Spokesman Fan Liqing, who gushed that “both simplified and complex characters were rooted in Chinese culture” and proposed that “experts on both sides can actively discuss how to make mutual interchanges in writing more convenient.”

Notice that Mr. Fan said nothing about restoring the use of traditional characters for reading in the PRC. He knows that isn’t going to happen.

“(A) most objectionable facet of Ma’s remarks concerned his implicit privileging of Mandarin, “the” national language in Taiwan, and his complete lack of mention of the fact that Taiwan has at least three Sinitic languages (Mandarin, Hoklo and Hakka), which do not entirely use the same Han characters, and over a dozen Austronesian languages which have no relationship whatsoever to Han characters but are equally or even more entitled to be considered as “Taiwan languages.”

The anachronistic attachment of Ma and KMT ideologues to Mandarin and Han characters as an unitary “national language” reflects their continued colonialist imposition of a racial and patriarchal conception of “Chinese” culture on Taiwan’s multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual democratic society, as reflected by the arrogant and false declaration of his inaugural address last May 20 that “all the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to the Chinese race nation (zhonghua minzu).”

How refreshing to see the bogus concept of multiculturalism put to a positive use for a change. And then they drive the point home:

Instead of compromising Taiwan’s cultural sovereignty and democratic pluralism, the KMT government should demand that the PRC should fulfill its own international commitments and “converge” with the world community by implementing full freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of thought.

Writing in the August 2008 issue of Voice, Omae Ken’ichi suggested that the ties between the constituent elements of Greater China will loosen, and that the Sinosphere will eventually become a confederation rather than a single nation. The article itself was poorly written and poorly argued (and a disappointment, because that’s why I bought the issue), but this lexicographical dispute presents some of the reasons that confederation might come into being.

Kangolian?

Meanwhile, as the Chinese argue about how to best write their own language, a native of Inner Mongolia—also part of Greater China—studying in Japan is creating art by combining two different languages.

A graduate student at Shikoku University conducting research into calligraphy is presenting an exhibit of his creations in Naruto, Tokushima.

Usually I include names with these stories, but in the article this man’s name was written in katakana, the Japanese alphabet used for foreign names (other than Chinese and Korean names, for which kanji is used). It’s not possible to track back the katakana and come up with an accurate Romanization of the man’s name–and doesn’t that dovetail perfectly with the theme of this post?

His calligraphic art is the combination of the 800-year-old Mongol script with kanji. Mongolian also has a calligraphic tradition, and he is studying ways to fuse kanji with that script. Written Mongolian is one of the few vertical scripts in the world read from left to right. (You can read more about it at this website.) The student has also created some works with the two scripts side by side that show identical words and phrases.

To create a bit of Mongolian atmosphere for the exhibit, the museum is serving chai, or milk tea, and playing tapes of horsehead lute in the background.

He came to Japan five years ago and began attending a calligraphy class to improve his Japanese. He was fascinated by the strength of the brushes and the beauty of the work, so he enrolled in college to focus on those studies. He’s now in his first year of grad school.

So to sum it all up, two countries with the same basic language want to impose their own lexicographical views on each other because they can’t read what the other has written, while in Japan a man can combine two entirely different writing systems, call it art, and hang it in a museum to be viewed while drinking tea and listening to music.

And some people wonder why I don’t read fiction any more!

Back to the ABC’s in Korean education?

THE TERM Anglosphere is sometimes used to refer to the English-speaking countries whose culture ultimately derives from Great Britain and their shared interests. James C. Bennett founded The Anglosphere Institute and published in 2004 The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century.

How many strokes do you count?

There is also the term Sinosphere, which is defined narrowly as those countries with primarily Chinese-speaking residents. Some, however, define it broadly to include other countries in East Asia that were significantly influenced by Chinese culture and language—particularly written Chinese characters, or kanji in Japanese and hanja in Korean.

The broadly defined Sinosphere is unlikely to function in the role Mr. Bennett envisions for the Anglosphere because the countries don’t share the same language and the contemporary cultural dissimilarities are too great. Yet everyone in Japan and Korea is aware of the impact of Chinese characters on their languages and cultures, even though both countries have developed their own phonetic alphabets. Written communication in Korean is conducted almost exclusively in their phonetic alphabet, called Hangeul.

But an estimated 70% of the underlying words themselves in both Japanese and Korean were derived from Chinese, to which local pronunciations were applied. Thus the word for teacher, or a title of respect, 先生, is pronounced xiansheng in Chinese, sensei in Japanese, and seonseng in Korean.

Most of the South Korean public does not consider hanja literacy to be that important, though the Chinese characters are taught there starting in junior high school. But just as there is a back-to-basics movement in Japanese education, some in South Korea are promoting earlier and more extensive instruction in hanja. A brief article on that effort written by the Seoul correspondent of the Nishinippon Shimbun appeared this morning. I couldn’t find an English-language article in any of the Korean papers, so here’s a quick translation:

*****
“The National Federation for Promoting Hanja Education in South Korea has petitioned the government to formally adopt instruction in hanja, the use of which was once widespread, as a course of study in primary schools. The federation maintains that instruction only in Hangeul, the alphabetical characters that express only sound, hinder understanding of academic and other abstract terminology.

“The application states, ‘The result of the mistaken policy of using only Hangeul has been to confront the cultural life of South Koreans with a crisis greater than the Asian currency crisis of 1997.’ It urges education in both hanja and Hangeul as the national written language. It was signed by 20 former prime ministers, including Kim Jong-pil, and submitted to the President’s office.

“A federation official states that the policy to remove hanja from South Korean society and use only Hangeul was promoted primarily by President Pak Jeon-hi (1963-1979). Among the reasons were (1) A reaction against Japanese-language education during the colonial period, and (2) The low recognition rate of hanja among people after independence.

“About 70% of the South Korean language is derived from Chinese characters, in which the characters are given a Korean reading. One example is 新鮮 (fresh), which is read shinseon in Korean (shinsen in Japanese and xinxian in Chinese). The federation points out that if people know the meaning of 乱 (meaning revolt, uprising, or disturbance, and read nan in modern South Korean, ran in Japanese, and luan in Chinese), they can intuit the meanings of words that incorporate the character, such as 混乱 (confusion, disorder) or 騒乱 (riot). (Note: That’s just how it works in Japanese, too.)

“More people are taking the hanja certification examination every year because large companies include questions about their meanings on the tests they administer to prospective employees. The application might spur a reevaluation of the ‘Hangeul-only’ Korean society.”

Afterwords: If anyone can find an English-language account of this, send me a link and I’ll incorporate it as an update. Here is an editorial by the Dong-a Ilbo supporting the effort.

They say:

Most of Korea`s cultural heritage is preserved in Chinese characters. As the number of people illiterate in Chinese character swells, precious cultural legacies of Korea such as classical literature are growing useless.

For those who read Korean, here is the federation’s website. It has a photo of their monthly magazine.

Reading this makes me wish yet again there were 36 hours in a day so I could find the time to maintain my Korean language studies. Studying from Japanese to Korean is a big help, by the way. It doesn’t take long to figure out the Korean readings for the Chinese characters working backwards from kanji, and that facilitates memorization.

Okinawans not talking the talk

FURTHER EVIDENCE of the growing integration of Okinawa with the rest of Japan appeared in an article earlier this week in the Ryukyu Shimbun that highlights the declining use of the Okinawan dialect/language.

The newspaper reports that three graduate school students working for a master’s degree at the University of the Ryukyus conducted a questionnaire survey on the use of the Ryukyu language throughout the prefecture. They also sent questionnaires to the outlying islands, which have greater dialect variety.

The survey results prove once again the validity of the old dictum that actions speak louder than words. Here’s a look at the important numbers:

92.5%: The percentage of respondents who agreed that the support and development of Okinawa culture required the survival of the Okinawa dialect/language.
80.2%: The percentage of respondents who said they hoped the dialect would survive.
61.7%: The percentage of respondents who said they never used the dialect at home with their children or grandchildren.
66.3%: The percentage of respondents who said that they never used the dialect at home with their children and grandchildren, combined with those who said they seldom used it.

One mitigating factor might have been the low recovery rate for the questionnaires. The students selected 1,548 households at random and mailed two questionnaires to each. Only 442 households responded, and the recovery rate for the questionnaires was just 15%.

Then again, 78.1% of those responding were 50 or older. Could it be that younger people no longer care all that much? They didn’t bother to fill out and return the questionnaire, after all.

In response to the question of how often they used Ryukyan in a day, 44.2% of those who answered said from 10% to 30% of the time. Slightly less than half of the respondents said they never used it. The vast majority of those who said they used the dialect did so exclusively at home.

Not mentioned in the article, but also worth considering, is that people who say they are using the original language might really be speaking Japanese sprinkled with local terms and expressions.

The survey also uncovered further evidence of an increased willingness to abdicate personal responsibility for a task by leaving it to the government. That was indicated by the 82.3% of the respondents who said that the Okinawan language should be taught in school.

The educators’ response

The prefecture’s schools didn’t agree, however. The graduate students also sent questionnaires to all of the 460 primary, junior high, and high schools in Okinawa. They received replies from 258 schools, or 56%. Of these, 69.9% agreed that the dialect should be used in school. The newspaper report said they had a “negative response” to the idea that it should be taught as a separate course, but it didn’t reveal the percentages.

What the school response means is that teachers think it’s fine to use the language in classroom discussions or conversations with the students, but they’re not on board with the idea of separate instruction in the language itself.

The researchers were alarmed by the results. They believe the Okinanwan language will not survive unless it is taught in schools.

If that’s the case, then perhaps it’s time to discount the views of those people with Okinawan nationalist sentiments. It’s no problem at all keeping a language, a dialect—or anything—alive when there are benefits to its use. As we’ve seen before, younger Okinawans increasingly see themselves as Japanese, rather than strictly Okinawan. That would underlie a realization that standard Japanese is a requirement for functioning successfully in everyday society.

I know from personal experience with my wife’s family how easy it is to maintain a distinctive dialect if the older family members use it frequently, or in the case of my father- and mother-in-law, exclusively with their children and grandchildren. My brother-in-law and his wife live in the family home with his parents. They have two daughters in their early 20s and a son in high school. All three of their children can use the local dialect more comfortably than their peers, simply because they’ve used it every day with their parents and grandparents since they were born.

Now consider the results of the Okinawa survey. Most of the respondents were older than 50, and most of them seldom, if ever, used the dialect with their children or grandchildren. The conclusion must therefore be that the Ryukyu language is slowly but surely becoming a luxury in Okinawa.

If people won’t use it at home, where it’s easily learned and applied, there’s no point in teaching it at school. Sentimentality for a culture by itself isn’t enough—you have to walk the walk by talking the talk.

Afterwords:

In this previous post about Okinawans creating special alphabetical characters for the Ryukyu language, one poster noted that I shouldn’t have called it a dialect because it is really a separate language. I’m sure he’s right, but I used both terms in this post because that’s what the Ryukyu Shimbun did. They called it both a dialect (hogen) and the Ryukyu language (Ryukyu-go).

On beyond zebra in Okinawa?

ALL JAPANESE ARE BILINGUAL, as a Japanese man I knew used to say, and he hit the linguistic nail on the head. Every Japanese is fluent both in hyojungo, the standard language used nationwide for the broadcast and print media and school textbooks, and in the local dialect that people use to varying degrees in their everyday life in the community. The less formal a situation, the more likely dialect, or elements of dialect, will be used.

Uchinaguchi in print

People from other parts of the country find many of these dialects impenetrable, and the impenetrability increases the further one goes from Tokyo. For example, the dialect in Kagoshima, the southernmost prefecture in Kyushu, is notoriously difficult for outsiders to understand. Even other Kyushu residents have trouble with it, and they have the built-in advantage of being able to recognize elements common to all the Kyushu dialects.

Imagine then how much the dialect of the Okinawan islands, an hour’s flight to the south of Kyushu, differs from standard Japanese and the mini-languages spoken everywhere else. Scholars say that it weighed anchor and sailed away from the main Japanese language about 1,500 years ago and never looked back. Everyone else in Japan finds it incomprehensible; CDs of Okinawan music sold with the lyrics printed in the booklet require translations into standard Japanese.

Modern living, mass media, and travel opportunities, however, have sharply reduced the use of the Okinawan dialect, and some in the islands are concerned that it might become extinct. Preserving what is locally known as Uchinaguchi has been the inspiration for some linguistic activists to keep it alive.

But a formidable obstacle had to be overcome: The dialect of the Ryukyus has 27 sounds beyond the 50 of hyojungo. It is not possible to express these sounds in written form using standard Japanese orthography. (One characteristic of Japanese is that there are no exceptions for the pronunciation of alphabetical characters. What you see is what you say.)

Here’s an example. The word omae is one of the rough-and-ready equivalents of the pronoun “you” in English. If the Okinawan equivalent were to be written in phonetic Japanese and then converted into the Roman alphabet it would look something like this: yYaa.

An Okinawan Alphabet

How the heck are you supposed to pronounce that? Well, you can’t. To ensure that the proper pronunciation of Uchinaguchi can be conveyed to younger people who might not have grown up with it in the home, Meisei University professor Funatsu Yoshiaki devised an extra Okinawan alphabet in 1986 to create symbols for these sounds. His technique was to combine two letters of the hiragana alphabet in different sizes to express them in one symbol. He also employed the older symbols of ゐ (wi) and ゑ (we), which are no longer used in modern Japanese.

Dr. Funatsu worked with another Okinawan native, Kanagawa architect Kuniyoshi Shinsei, to establish the Tokyo-based Society for Speaking the Okinawa Dialect. They used commercially available software that allowed the incorporation of end-user defined characters to create new word processing software capable of handling the 27 additional characters in Dr. Funatsu’s Okinawan alphabet.

Now, Oyafuso Keiko, a teacher at Okinawa Christian Junior College, is using the software in her classes to conduct research into teaching methods. She says that studying the characters with a PC stimulates all five senses, which makes them very easy to remember.

She told an interviewer:

I want young people to study Uchinaguchi thinking it is the language with the most immediacy for them. A person’s identity is fully formed for the first time by speaking their mother tongue. I want to create many opportunities for more people to speak it.

I realize that any negativity about this type of feel-good story is like telling the next-door neighbor that her children aren’t cute, but I think Ms. Oyafuso is going a bit overboard here.

It is a stretch in the modern era of standard Japanese to claim that the Okinawa dialect is the mother tongue of today’s islanders. To insist otherwise perhaps identifies her as belonging to the camp of those seeking greater autonomy (and in some cases independence) for Okinawa.

As this post from more than a year ago shows, however, she’s trying to swim upstream if she wants to reverse the linguistic and cultural trends in the region. Young Okinawans are less interested in autonomy and independence than their elders, and they are more likely to consider themselves Japanese.

I would also argue that a person’s true identity transcends their native language, but that opens up a philosophical/religious discussion beyond the scope of this website.

Nevertheless, the Okinawan alphabet and the software that employs it are bound to be useful for linguistic scholars and those with an interest in the dialect. Assuming that the additional Okinawan alphabetical characters are easy to learn and honestly represent the currently unrepresentable, I hope that its use grows. To expect it to be anything more than that, however, is a bit like saving Confederate money in the hope that the South is going to rise again.

Afterwords: Here’s another older post on the use of dialect in Japan.

From golddigger to gold miss in South Korea

THE PHRASE wasei eigo refers to a word or words that look and sound as if they might be English, but were in fact created by the Japanese. Baseball is a natural inspiration for many of these words. One example is naitaa (nighter), which is what the Japanese call a night game.

Another is “old miss”, a phrase coined some years ago to describe what native English speakers used to call an old maid once upon a time, when people still used “old maid” to describe something other than a card game.

In yet another link in the fascinating chain of one culture borrowing from another culture that which was borrowed from yet another culture, the South Koreans seem to have appropriated the Japanese wasei eigo expression “old miss” to create a new expression that describes an entirely different phenomenon: “gold miss”.

As a recent Japanese-language article by the Seoul correspondent of the Nishinippon Shimbun explains, the Korean Employment Information Service (KEIS) defines the term as that group of single women aged 30-45 who are college graduates with annual incomes of at least 40 million won (US$ 38,700). Unlike the old maid/miss, a fate that most women dreaded, the Korean gold miss has become an object of envy for her freedom to lead a carefree life unencumbered by financial or family concerns.

In fact, the article uses the gold miss phenomenon as the point of entry for a brief exposition of the changes that have taken place in Korean society over the last generation, primarily for women and family life.

The correspondent interviewed a 31-year-old woman who said that as recently as the 80s, the traditional roles of breadwinner for men and housewife for women were still the standard in South Korea. Now, she claims, it is difficult for a woman to get married unless she has a job.

By the time of the Seoul Olympics in 1988, the country’s GNP had risen to 10th worldwide, but the purchase of an apartment in a condo in that city was so expensive that both the husband and the wife had to work to afford it. Spurring the entry of women into the workplace was a law passed in 1987 that required equality in employment opportunities.

Who are the Gold Misses?

KEIS reports that in 2001, about 2,100 South Korean women were in the gold miss category and employed in seven occupational sectors, such as chef, doctor, and designer. By 2006, KEIS had expanded the range to include 36 sectors, among them teachers and writers. The number of gold miss women then totaled more than 27,000—a nearly 12-fold increase in only five years.

The author also describes two other types among contemporary Korean women—the alpha girls and the Ω girls (omega girls). The former take their name from the book by Dan Kindlon, who describes them as “the girl who is destined to be a leader. She is talented, highly-motivated, and self-confident”.

With characteristic cultural myopia, the book is subtitled, “Understanding the New American Girl and How She is Changing the World”. There were plenty of Japanese alpha girls before Kindlon claimed the type as an American pioneer. But with a previous bestseller about boys called Raising Cain, perhaps the author felt compelled to quickly follow up his success, causing him to skip over the research that would have showed him the rest of the world was there already.

Now the Koreans have come up with a new twist on the alpha girl. At the end of April, the Chosun Ilbo published an article defining the omega girls as those alpha girls too incompetent to manage the affairs of daily life and unable to find mates. The Chosun article included interviews with mothers, one of whom described a doctor daughter who didn’t know how to pay the electric bill or her taxes. Another mother was anxious about her college professor daughter who “couldn’t even find a divorced man to marry.”

The Chosun piece also suggested that omega girls were a flop with men because they were perfectionists. It advanced the theory that men feel threatened by the omegas (isn’t this starting to sound like a college sorority?) because they believe logic is required to appeal to the new breed of woman. For the omega girls, maturity rather than financial security has become the standard for choosing a mate, making it likely they would be susceptible to having affairs with older men.

Students of evolutionary biology, however, will know they’ve ventured onto shaky ground here in more ways than one. For starters, all women are susceptible to having affairs with older men, and both maturity and financial security are among the reasons.

The Chosun also presented the idea that some of the alpha/omega types do not like the idea of having a relationship with men who would arouse their sense of competition, so they wind up marrying unemployed men. A more detailed explanation of the dynamics of those relationships would undoubtedly make juicy reading.

More Precious Metals

There’s more, but it gets increasingly difficult to separate the froth from the substance. Some people see a category they call “platinum miss”, which is similar to the gold miss but has a stable job at a mid-tier or large company and assets of at least 80 million won. Then there is the “silver miss”, the unmarried woman of the same age with an annual salary of at least 30 million won.

Here’s an earlier English-language article from the Chosun with additional information.

Try this passage:

Women like these are entitled to VIP “gold” credit cards, so they’re called “gold misses” — a term, created from the broken English “old miss,” that made it onto a list of fad words of 2006.

It’s a shame they can’t bring themselves to explain that the origin of “old miss” is Japanese. With the popularity of the Korean TV show “Old Miss Diary” in 2005 and a movie spinoff in 2006, perhaps their emotional stake in the phrase is too high to say it out loud in front of a Korean audience.

Believe it or not, there’s even more. As this article from the JoongAng Daily explains, Koreans have also created the terms King Kong Girl and doenjang nyeo (soybean paste girl). This is getting to be more complicated than all the words Koreans need to describe family relationships.

Doenjang is a dish in traditional Korean cuisine, but to call someone a bean paste girl means she is the familiar type of airhead known around the world for her interest in clothes, brand names, and coaxing money out of her parents and the men in her life. There must be a tasty explanation of the connection between bean paste and brainless golddiggers, but I couldn’t find it.

The King Kong girl is named after the King Kong theory of French novelist and filmmaker Virginie Despentes. Here one describes her moment of epiphany:

“I suddenly felt tired of playing the roles required of me when meeting men, of being innocent yet not a prude, the femme fatale, naturally thin with no obsessions about dieting, independent but vulnerable, seductive but not slutty.”

In other words, the King Kongettes have voluntarily withdrawn from competing in the sexual marketplace, perhaps to lead the life of a gold miss.

And doesn’t that put it all together? Leave it to the journalists to explain social trends with cute artificial phrases that will have evaporated in a few years’ time. What we’re seeing with all these gold/silver/platinum/bronze/tin misses and the King Kong/Bean Paste girls is the Korean manifestation of one of the forces responsible for the low birth rates in the advanced industrial countries.

As one of the Chosun articles explains, even the alpha girls that get married and have children will dragoon the grandparents into performing the parental chores while they pursue a career. Now isn’t that ironic? Some women wanted the opportunity to have a career, and where did they wind up? In an extended family that essentially functions in the same way their grandparents’ family did. The only difference is that the woman wears a fashionable outfit to go to work downtown in an IT-festooned office, rather than work clothes to go outdoors and toil in the fields.

To put it in brief: A lot of women just can’t be bothered anymore to go to all the trouble to have children and raise families.

Some governments think that providing financial incentives will bring the birthrates back up. They’re mistaken, of course, but that won’t stop them from wasting everyone’s money in the process.

People can’t be bribed to do what they don’t want to do to begin with—particularly when it doing it in good conscience requires one’s undivided attention for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for a minimum of 20 years. If they yearn for companionship, it’s easier to buy a dog.

Addendum

Here’s a two-minute YouTube video showing a young blonde woman describing in English her lunch with two doenjang dishes backed by a salsa soundtrack. (Northeast Asia is just full of surprises!) Was she cast to type? It seems as if she too has a bit of the soybean paste girl in her.

A dongba workshop in Osaka

PEOPLE WHO ARE BORED and can’t come up with a way to fill their spare hours in Japan have only themselves to blame. In every town there is at least one, and usually more, of what are known as karuchaa sentaa. There, for a modest fee, a person can choose to learn or learn about something interesting from among a cornucopia of subjects in classes offered from morning to night, all under the same roof.

If you want to study art, you can dabble in watercolors, oil colors, sketching with pencil (regular lead or colored), charcoal, woodblock prints, ceramics, pottery, origami, wood sculpture, and stained glass–and that doesn’t begin to exhaust the list at only one center in a small town.

There are classes in natural makeup, mah-jongg for women, chess, go, shogi, tarot, feng shui, cooking (just about anything), yoga, chi gung, exercises for the lymphatic system, and martial arts. Budding musicians can learn how to play any kind of instrument, Japanese or Western (including harmonica and ukulele), sing any kind of song, or dance any kind of dance. There are even special classes for karaoke singing.

Those interested in foreign languages can apply themselves to English (at several levels of difficulty), Korean, Chinese, French, and Italian. It goes without saying that there are classes in calligraphy, as well as classes in what’s called pen-ji, or writing kanji using a ballpoint pen.

And if you live in the Osaka area, earlier this month you could have taken part in a dongba workshop for free at the National Museum of Ethnology (link also on right sidebar).

What is dongba? The word is used to refer to the priests, culture, and pictographic script of the Naxi, an ethnic group of about 290,000 people that live in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan. The dongba that drew the Osakans to the workshop was the writing system, which consists of the only pictographs in use in the world today.

The system is used exclusively by priests as a prompt for interpreting ritual texts during weddings, funerals, and other religious ceremonies. By some accounts, there are as many as 2,000 symbols. It cannot be used to represent the Naxi language, but since the Naxi now write in Chinese they don’t need to use it for that purpose.

Students at the museum’s workshop listened to a lecture on Naxi culture and the use of the characters, watched a practical writing demonstration, and tried to write a letter on their own with the script.

There is what the Japanese call a quiet boom in dongba at present. Its popularity is not hard to understand. As you can see from the accompanying examples, the glyphs are simple, unpretentious, and easy to comprehend, particularly for people who use ideographic characters to begin with.

It’s exactly the sort of thing the Japanese find attractive, and the characters are even used in this country on the labels of PET bottles and as motifs on merchandise.

Some dongba manuscripts have been registered in Memory of the World, a UNESCO program to protect cultural heritage that the body thinks is in danger of dying out. How like UNESCO and the UN! To begin with, there are more than 5,000 dongba texts in libraries in the United States and Europe. In addition, the first photo here shows dongba used in a Kirin advertisement, and the second photo shows a dongba decal (translation: I love you) stuck on a cell phone. Since the danger that the world will forget about dongba is negligible–at least the part of the world that already knows about it–one has to wonder if UNESCO just finds it a convenient way to justify its own existence.

For those with an academic temperament, here’s a paper (.pdf file) comparing the development of written Chinese with dongba that you might enjoy. It explains that the dongba pictographs are a relatively recent invention (18th century), and their use became widespread when the Naxi prospered from the opium trade and had more disposable income to produce the texts.

Li Yang and Crazy English: Crazy like a fox

SEVERAL ARTICLES about China’s Li Yang and his Crazy English teaching approach have appeared on the Internet over the past few years, and he also does business in Japan and South Korea, so people in Northeast Asia are already aware of him.

But his recognition factor outside the region is likely to skyrocket now that The New Yorker has given him their full treatment. They’ve used him as the face for this report on Chinese efforts to mobilize the population and encourage them to learn English for this year’s Olympic Games. China’s organizing committee has recruited Li to provide as many people as possible with as much English fluency as possible before the world pays them a visit later this year.

Some aspects of the article will be familiar to people in Japan—the Chinese attitude toward English education is reminiscent of the Japanese approach about 20 years ago:

China has been in the grip of “English fever,” as the phenomenon is known in Chinese, for more than a decade. A vast national appetite has elevated English to something more than a language: it is not simply a tool but a defining measure of life’s potential. China today is divided by class, opportunity, and power, but one of its few unifying beliefs—something shared by waiters, politicians, intellectuals, tycoons—is the power of English. Every college freshman must meet a minimal level of English comprehension, and it’s the only foreign language tested. English has become an ideology, a force strong enough to remake your résumé, attract a spouse, or catapult you out of a village. Linguists estimate the number of Chinese now studying or speaking English at between two hundred million and three hundred and fifty million, a figure that’s on the order of the population of the United States. English private schools, study gadgets, and high-priced tutors vie for pieces of that market.

There’s a good reason why that fever is raging, but if you’re from an English-speaking country and have never lived abroad, it might be difficult to understand the imperative to learn the world’s lingua franca.

(T)he gap between the English-speaking world and the non-English-speaking world is so profound that any act of hard work or sacrifice is worth the effort.

This quote from another article five years ago goes a long way to explaining regional attitudes and Li’s appeal:

“Don’t take me as China.” Li Says. “Take me as Asia.” Because Crazy English isn’t just for the Chinese. Li believes all Asian countries are facing the same problem of speaking “terrible”, “stupid” English. So it is not surprising that Crazy English would be popular in other Asian countries. “What is surprising,” he adds, “is that Koreans would want to learn from a Chinese.”

Yet another factor is at work, though Li is more blatant about it than some Japanese teachers and students I have known:

“One-sixth of the world’s population speaks Chinese. Why are we studying English?” he asked. He turned and gestured to a row of foreign teachers seated behind him and said, “Because we pity them for not being able to speak Chinese!”

Indeed, Li’s approach highlights one undercurrent in English education throughout Northeast Asia: using English as a tool for national development and catching up to the West. According to Mark Abley’s Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, Li’s personal motto is “stimulating patriotism, advocating national spirits, conquering English, revitalizing China.” He is also critical of the Chinese educational system for failing to instill confidence in the students. I’ve heard some Japanese teachers say the same thing almost verbatim.

What are some of the emotions Li is manipulating? This broader article on ESL provides a hint:

During a question and answer session with the crowd, one student told Li that he hated the Japanese for their rape and occupation of the mainland prior to World War II. The student then said he didn’t want to study Japanese because of this hatred.

“If you really hate the Japanese, then you will learn their language,” Li told the student and the crowd. “If you really want revenge against Japan, then master their language.”

Again, these are not exclusively Chinese attitudes—I’ve met a few people in Japan with an identical outlook, and undoubtedly there are some of the same type in South Korea. (Japan’s national successes have tended to dissipate the emotions that give rise to this mindset, particularly among the younger generation.)

Substitute Japan and Japanese in the above sentence with America/Anglosphere and English, and you’ll see one element of the driving force behind English education in this part of the world. The other half of this yin and yang combination is a sense of inferiority, with the concomitant chagrin over the injustice of being saddled with a sense of inferiority in the first place.

Calling the program Crazy English is a stroke of genius. It provides the students with the justification for liberating themselves from centuries of cultural conditioning that expected people to be reserved and act within a group context instead of being openly assertive as individuals. Crazy people get to do anything they want.

Therefore, Li Yang is not just an English teacher—he’s also a motivational expert. (In fact, he interpreted for Anthony Robbins during the latter’s tour of China.) The technique for which he has become famous is having the students rear back and shout English phrases–a method that worked very well for him during his own days at university. His method focuses first on pronunciation, and then progresses to the memorization and presentation of recitations.

That’s a logical progression because it reinforces the student’s budding confidence, both internally and in front of an audience. Eventually confidence grows to the point at which the student will no longer have to deal with foreigners while hobbled by a sense of inferiority.

The author of the New Yorker piece oddly overlooks this point, and in fact seems to misunderstand the confidence factor in foreign language study altogether:

He had harnessed something universal—the cloak of confidence that comes with slipping into a language not one’s own—and added a Chinese twist.

I’ve studied Japanese, watched other foreigners study Japanese, and seen (and taught) Japanese studying English for many years now. A foreign language is not a “cloak of confidence”—in fact, it’s usually the opposite, and that’s the reason Li employs his trademark technique. The confidence comes after one has mastered the language, and it transcends those occasions when one is speaking the language. That confidence doesn’t become part of the speaker’s wardrobe—it becomes part of the speaker’s skin.

If a foreign language is to be compared to an article of clothing, it more closely resembles a stage costume than a cloak because it allows the speaker to perform as someone else altogether. Scores of Japanese housewives have told me that they can say things in English they wouldn’t dream of saying in Japanese. But the mere fact that they’re speaking English doesn’t make it work–they have to get good at English first.

Watching this YouTube video of a Li lesson/performance (at least I think it’s him) makes things much clearer. Just like any good educator, he’s part showman, and he’s superb on stage. It’s also easier to see why he gets people to shout in groups: not only does it break down individual inhibitions and increase individual confidence, but the group energy and dynamics serve to amplify everyone’s confidence. Traditional Northeast Asian culture may emphasize the group and discourage individualism, but within every person everywhere is the desire to step into the spotlight and shine as a star.

It’s no wonder that so many people are so enthusiastic about studying English Li’s way. Even if they don’t become fluent in the language and never use it in a meaningful way, they will have tremendously enjoyed being a part of the experience and come away feeling good about themselves. That makes it worth the money they spend on his books, courses, and seminars.

And that’s what has made Li Yang famous, a cultural figure, and gloriously rich.

You didn’t think his motivations were exclusively patriotic, did you?

What’s the good word?

THE PRESS IN THE UNITED STATES regularly prints stories about the efforts of the Académie Française to keep an ever-vigilant eye on the incursions of the English language into French and to coin new words that prevent the invader from sullying the native tongue as it is used in official and commercial contexts. Americans seem to enjoy reading those stories because they’ve always had an anything-goes linguistic spirit–when the original colonists crossed the Atlantic during the Elizabethan period, change was running amok in the English language—and because it conforms to Yankee preconceptions about French snobbishness and pretensions to cultural superiority

But officials in Japan are also struggling to keep abreast of changes in the way Japanese people use their language. Unlike the French, however, the focus of attention is not on speech, though some halfhearted efforts have been made in that direction. They’re halfhearted because officials probably realize it’s a losing battle; the Japanese can be just as wild and wooly as the Americans when hot-rodding their spoken language. In addition to adopting any foreign loan word that suits the national fancy, they make their own language jump through some surprising hoops. Here’s an example: some years ago, when the Matsumoto Kiyoshi chain of drug stores became popular, people (particularly young women) shortened the name to Matsukiyo. The abbreviation was then used in the same way as a compound verb: Matsukiyo suru? Are you going to the (Matsumoto Kiyoshi) drug store?

Instead, the Japanese are paying more attention to the written language, which already underwent one significant modification in the immediate postwar period, when the use of some kanji were eliminated and the form of many others was simplified.

Some proposals are floating around to rework the content of the Joyo Kanji, or the kanji in regular use. This list of 1,945 kanji was formulated in 1981 as a de facto standard for the print medium. It defines the readings and form of the kanji, which are used to write all laws and public documents. It is also the standard for language education in school, and newspapers and other media use it as their primary guideline.

The spread of computers and other information technology is causing problems, however. A total of 6,355 kanji are available for use in accordance with the Japanese Industrial Standards for PCs and cell phones. As this equipment is now omnipresent, people are regularly using kanji that are not part of the Joyo kanji list. The National Language Subcommittee in the Agency for Cultural Affairs has issued a report calling for a reevaluation of the Joyo Kanji.

One might think the use of information technology would improve the ability of Japanese to read their own language, but that isn’t the case. The National Institute for the Japanese Language wants to conduct a new study of the reading and writing ability of the Japanese people because they are concerned about international surveys showing declining linguistic proficiency among young people. This would be the first such government study of adult linguistic capabilities since 1955.

The problem as the Institute sees it is that increasing numbers of non-standard kanji are being used for personal names, and younger people are selecting kanji for names based on their pronunciation and the number of strokes used to write them (certain numbers being auspicious) rather than the intrinsic meaning of the characters themselves.

Compounding the problem, according to the Institute’s director, is the resistance some people have to language surveys, and the difficulty accents, dialects, and honorific language present.

Bringing up the subject of honorific language opens up a different can of worms. The government is mulling the compilation of a manual on the use of honorific language because incorrect use of the forms is growing, despite surveys showing that 96% of the population thinks that proper use is important.

I wonder about the utility of a new manual, however; people have been complaining about the improper use of honorific language for as long as I’ve been in Japan (24 years this month), and I suspect they’ve been complaining about it for centuries. There is also plenty of well-written manuals for the general public easily available in bookstores explaining the principles (in joyo kanji) if people would only read them.

Some of these trends are irreversible, because no country can put the toothpaste back in the linguistic tube. The progress of democracy and the general spirit of egalitarianism in Japan have made it inevitable that honorific language skills would decline. There are fewer situations in daily life in which people need to speak in accordance with rules that arose in the context of a vertically structured feudal society.

It might seem counter-intuitive that the increasing use of personal computers and cell phones, which have the capability for the use of a larger number of kanji, is leading to greater ignorance of the written language. But reports indicate that some adults have gotten so used to writing messages on the keyboard that they have forgotten how to write certain kanji by hand and have to ask their children for help.

Considering the use of symbols and abbreviations by the kids for text messages on their cell phones, I wonder if the parents get the answers they’re looking for!