Kanji Politics

Nanette Gottlieb, Gottlieb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780710305121
• eBook ISBN: 9781136882975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 1995. The nature of the Japanese script has been a matter of contention since the early Meiji period. It was not until 1902, however, that the government was convinced of the need to simplify the written language. The modernised system of kana usage and the guidelines on the use, shape and readings are thoroughly discussed in this book alongside the political nature of Japan's multiple written languages. This title has involved interviews with many of the key players in the post-war period as well as research on the vast amount of primary source material on the topic.

Chapter 1

What is language planning? Language policy?

Language planning and language policy formulation have been carried on with varying degrees of intensity in Japan since the turn of the century, beginning in 1902 with the setting up of the first National Language Research Council as the result of a steadily increasing groundswell of private activity calling for language reform. Language planning, or consciously engineered language change, has been variously defined in the growing body of literature on this subject. For Joshua Fishman, foremost and founding scholar of the sociology of language, it is ‘the organised pursuit of solutions to language problems, typically at the national level’;¹ for Rubin and Jernudd, ‘deliberate language change; that is, changes in the systems of language code or speaking or both that are planned by organisations that are established for such purposes or given a mandate to fulfil such purposes’.² More recently, Weinstein has defined language planning as ‘a government authorised, long term sustained and conscious effort to alter a language itself or to change a language’s functions in a society for the purpose of solving communication problems’,³ and Eastman as ‘the activity of manipulating language as a social resource in order to reach objectives set out by planning agencies which, in general, are an area’s governmental, educational, ecÔnomic, and linguistic authorities’.⁴ The common strands in these definitions are the presence, either stated or implied, of an official body through which language planning activities are channelled and the existence of the element of deliberation, of purposeful organisation of the activities pursued. A looser definition, still incorporating the element of conscious intent but not restricting the planners to authoritative agencies, is offered by Cooper: ‘Language planning refers to deliberate efforts to influence the behaviour of others with respect to the acquisition, structure, or functional allocation of their language codes’.⁵

Language policy refers to the specific strategies formulated and implemented by the planners to achieve their objectives. Eastman describes policy making in terms of four stages: formulation, ‘a process of deliberation and decision-making’; codification, ‘the technical preparation of the decided-upon policy’; elaboration, ‘the extension of the decided-upon language(s) or writing system(s) to all spheres of activity in which its use is envisioned’; and implementation, ‘the procedure used to bring about the change in language that allows the policy objectives to be realised’.⁶ It is the relationship between the changing objectives of language planning, the gradual advance to a stage of policy formulation and the subsequent shifts in policy within the context of major changes in Japanese society which form the subject matter of this book. It has been argued by Miller that language planning does not exist in Japan, being almost exclusively a concern of developing third world countries.⁷ In the light of the above definitions, however, it is clear that language planning does occur in Japan and has since 1902, albeit without teeth until after the war.

Japan is what Fishman describes as a Cluster B nation, or old developing nation, one which has for a long time embodied the attributes of both nation and sociocultural identity.⁸ In developing nations, territorial limits may have been defined with little reference to sociocultural identity, or several regional or local languages may coexist, none with any particular claim to a literary tradition, or the official language of politics and higher education may be that of another country as in former colonies. Japan, however, brought to her modern era a long-standing, well-defined literary tradition and a comparatively high rate of literacy among her population. This meant that Japanese language planners worked within the context of a uni-modal situation, facing not the problem of national language selection but rather that of modifying an existing and well-entrenched asset. The ‘what’ of language planning has therefore always been a given; it is the ‘how’, and in particular the ‘how’ of how the language is to be represented in writing, which has exercised the planners and policy makers. Not all planning has revolved around the written language, of course; in the early part of this century the issue of standardisation was an important focus,⁹ and the use of hÔnorifics and other matters relating to the spoken language have from time to time been addressed. A check of the list of policy documents issued by the bodies charged with language planning since 1902, however, reveals that by far the majority have related to the written language, verifying Haugen’s assertion that language planning attempts primarily to shape the formal written manifestation of language.¹⁰

How Japanese is written

In order to understand why this has been the case, it is first necessary to understand how Japanese is written. It will also be helpful at this point to explain the terms and issues which will figure in the policy debates of later chapters. Brief references to policy developments given here will be explained more fully in the following section.

Modern Japanese uses a combination of three scripts: kanji (Chinese characters) and the two phonetic scripts hiragana and katakana.¹¹ Characters were imported from China in the sixth century in the absence of any native script, but were not in themselves sufficient to represent the Japanese language in writing because of the widely differing features of the two languages. Chinese was an uninflected language, in which each character was used to represent a separate morpheme; in Japanese, however, the presence of verbal and adjectival inflexions and grammatical postpositions made the development of a supplementary script imperative if characters were to be used to write down Japanese and not just to write Chinese as a foreign language. Likewise, while characters could be used to represent a morpheme having a particular meaning, they gave no indication of how the Japanese equivalent was prÔnounced. After a period of experimentation with various diacritics and rebus forms, hiragana and katakana were eventually developed in the tenth century to address this lack.¹² Both scripts represent the phonemes of Japanese. Each hiragana symbol was originally an entire Chinese character, later so abbreviated as to be intelligible only to Japanese. In the beginning there were several hundred such symbols, used in poems and letters dealing with daily life and also in the writings of the noblewomen of the Heian court. Katakana, which were developed at approximately the same time as an abbreviated form for indicating Japanese pronunciation and grammar in Buddhist texts written in Chinese and used mainly by priestly sects in Nara, were representations of only one section of a character rather than a concise version of the whole. As the writing of pure Chinese in Japan underwent a gradual process of attrition and assimilation to Japanese norms over the following centuries, there gradually developed a number of Chinese-derived literary styles in which characters and kana were intermingled to perform various functions.¹³ At first, kana were written to the right of a string of vertically-written characters in Chinese word order to indicate Japanese grammar and/or glosses; later, the characters were written out in Japanese word order with kana in between, in the orthographic convention known as kanji-kana-majiribun (texts combining characters and phonetic script).

Sino-Japanese texts, the accepted form of public written discourse until the development of the modern colloquial style based on the grammar of the contemporary spoken language rather than that of the middle ages,¹⁴ were written in a combination of characters with katakana well into this century. As the use of colloquial style in the press and other fields of writing spread, however, the use of the characters-hiragana combination increased outside the area of government documents. Even this last bastion of tradition fell in 1946 when it was decided that hiragana would replace katakana in the text of the new constitution. Today, Japanese is written with characters to represent meaning, the rounded, flowing hiragana to indicate Japanese grammar or to write a word without resource to characters, and the angular katakana to indicate foreign words, non-Chinese loan-words and the Japanese equivalent of italicisation. Katakana are also used in domestic telegrams and bills. The following example illustrates how the three scripts are used together. The sentence ‘I am an Australian’ is written in Japanese as Watashi wa ôsutoraria-jin desu. Chinese characters are used for the prÔnoun ‘I’ (watashi) and the suffix ‘person’ (jin). Hiragana are used for the case-marker wa (topic) and the copula desu. And the foreign place name ‘Australia’ is represented phonetically in katakana.

This system is clearly more complex than a single-script orthography, particularly in view of the size of the character set. It nevertheless seems workable enough in theory so long as the basic rules described above are observed. In practice, however, there are several issues which complicate matters either by virtue of their inherent nature or because they blur the boundaries. These may be broadly divided into matters relating to characters, such as the number of characters used, their forms or shapes and the readings assigned to them , and matters relating to kana, such as the use of okurigana and furigana¹⁵ and, at least until 1946, the distinction between historical and phonetic usage.

Characters

The exact number of characters available is debatable. Major dictionaries list different numbers. The largest, the 12–volume Daikanwa Jiten, lists a staggering 49,964, including all those necessary to read the classics. Smaller ones do not reach these heights: the Daijiten contains 14,924 and the Shinjigen 9,921.¹⁶ Not all of these are in use, of course. The official number of characters listed at present by the National Language Council as those for use in writing in the non-specialist areas of society such as the press and government documents is 1,945; in practice, general texts generally employ quite a few more than this owing to the addition of characters used to write personal and place names.¹⁷ This represents a major change from the prewar situation, when a 1933 survey based on comparisons of school readers since the Meiji Period, newspaper surveys and literary works, for example, came up with the total of 6,478.¹⁸ The impossibility of ever expecting the ordinary person to master such a number of characters with their attendant readings formed a major plank in the platform of those who advocated either the abolition or restriction of characters¹⁹ from the Meiji Period on, much to the irritation of traditionalists who accused reformers of exaggerating the case by implying that all these characters were actually in use on a regular basis rather than just available for occasional use. Despite what opponents of postwar attempts to limit the number of characters for general use in society have claimed, no effort has ever been made to restrict the number an individual uses in private documents. What has been the focus of attempts at rationalisation is the number used in the general business of society at large, in particular in areas such as education, the press and government documents.

Different pronunciations may be assigned to the same character, depending on the context in which it is used. When the character is used to represent a Japanese word, it is given its kun, or Japanese, pronunciation. When it is representing a Chinese-derived word, usually in compound with another character, it is assigned an entirely different pronunciation, known as its on or Chinese pronunciation, arrived at by earlier Japanese attempts to approximate the Chinese pronunciation of the word represented by that character. The character E. , for example, representing the word ‘flower’ has a kun reading of ‘hana’ in the sentence ‘hana ga kirei desu’ (花がきれいです, flowers are beautiful) and an on reading of la’ in the word ‘kafun’ (花粉, pollen). And so on. Many characters have more than one of each kind of reading, and it then becomes a matter of knowing which to use in which context. A Japanese (or a student of Japanese) must learn these different readings for each character. Obviously, the larger the character set, the more work this involves. In addition, the fact that so many characters have the same on reading (because the simpler phonemic structure of Japanese meant that attempts to reproduce different Chinese pronunciations came out sounding the same) means that Japanese has a large number of homonyms (dôon-igi, or literally ‘same on, different meaning’). The word ‘kanshô’, for example, has 22 different meanings listed in the fourth edition of Kenkyûsha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary. This aspect is not limited to on readings; many words with the same kun reading have different characters representing similar meanings assigned to them (dôkun-iji, or literally ‘same kun, different character). The verb ‘tsukuru’ (to make), for example, can be written with one of two different characters, as can ‘atatameru’ (to heat). Writers have traditionally opposed attempts to limit this to the use of one form, on the grounds that the use of different characters permits a richness of nuance essential to full literary expression.

Then there are the exceptions to the basic on-kun format. Some characters are used as ateji, remnants of the early practice of attempting to use Chinese characters phonetically (for their sound without reference to their meaning) to write Japanese words, e.g. the word ‘furo ‘ (bath), in which the two characters mean ‘wind’ and ‘backbone’ respectively but came to be used in this compound because their on readings of ‘fû’ and ‘ro’ approximate the sound of the word ‘furo’. Other words , called jukujikun, are written with two or three characters , with no relationship at all between the pronunciation of the word and the characters. An example of this type of irregular kun reading is ‘shigure’ (late-autumn shower), where the two characters mean ‘time’ and ‘rain’ respectively but have no kun readings corresponding to those in this word.²⁰ Other examples of commonly used words of this type are ‘miyage’ (souvenir) and ‘inaka’ (countryside).

Kana

Kana figure in several ways in the Japanese writing system. It would be entirely possible, of course, given that they are phonetic symbols, to write Japanese in kana only, thus ending the domination of characters of foreign origin, and a good part of the language policy debate has centred around the feasibility or otherwise of doing just that. Within the framework of their use as an adjunct to characters, however, the major issues have been whether spelling should be historical or phonetic, whether kana should be used as side glosses to indicate the pronunciation of difficult characters (furigana), and how much of an inflected word should be represented . by the character and how much by okurigana.

Since 1946 the long-standing battle over the issue of whether the historical or phonetic kanazukai (kana usage) should be employed has been resolved in favour of the latter. The difference between the two may be summarised by saying that whereas the phonetic system is based on the sounds of modern Japanese, the historical system was based on the sounds of Japanese at the time it was invented, some of which no longer exist, and consequently the former contained several symbols not found in the latter. Historical usage had been developed for both words of Japanese origin and those of Sino-Japanese origin, the latter (known as jion kanazukai) being mainly the work of eighteenth-century classical scholar Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801). Supporters of retaining the old system despite the seeming logic of revising it to conform to modern needs argued that it had long been recognised to be a set of literary conventions rather than a strictly phonetic system and as such was perfectly acceptable. Its opponents argued inter alia that language was a living thing, and that as it had changed over the intervening centuries since the development of historical kanazukai, so should the manner in which it was represented on paper. In addition, there were major arguments pitting the ties of history and tradition against the imperatives of convenience and contemporaneity, which will be examined in more detail shortly. It is not my intention here to provide an exhaustive description of the features of the two systems; my interest lies rather in the policy debate which has surrounded their use, and readers wishing to investigate further are referred to Chapter Six of Seeley’s A History of Writing in Japan.²¹ Suffice it to say here that today’s usage...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Notes
• English Bibliography
• Japanese Bibliography
• Index