Language Life in Japan

Transformations and Prospects

Patrick Heinrich, Christian Galan, Patrick Heinrich, Christian Galan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136935930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Despite its monolingual self-image, Japan is multilingual and growing more so due to indigenous minority language revitalization and as an effect of migration. Besides Japan's autochthonous languages such as the Ainu and Ryukyuan languages, there are more than 75, 000 immigrant children in the Japanese public education system alone who came to Japan in the 1980s and who speak more than a hundred different languages. Added to this growing linguistic diversity, the importance of English as the language of international communication in business and science especially is hotly debated.

This book analyses how this linguistic diversity, and indeed recognition of this phenomenon, presents a wide range of sociolinguistic challenges and opportunities in fundamental institutions such as schools, in cultural patterns and in social behaviours and attitudes. This topic is an important one as Japan fights to re-establish itself in the new world order and will be of interest to all those who are concerned language change, language versus dialect, the effect of modern technology on language usage, and the way national and social problems are always reflected through the prism of language.

1
Modern and late modern perspectives on language life in Japan

Patrick Heinrich and Christian Galan

1 Introduction

This book attempts to explore the transformation of, and prospects for, language and society in Japan. It does so from a variety of perspectives, including those of language rights, writing and technology, pedagogy, language ideology, new media, public philosophy, literacy, language change and language endangerment. By so doing, it takes account of the ongoing changes and challenges relevant to the way in which language and society in contemporary Japan are interconnected. In more concrete terms, the book is an attempt to understand the mechanisms, implications and limitations of the dialectic relationship between the modernist inventions of nation and national language, and the ongoing transformations of this relationship. What should be understood by the term modernity is not a specific period in time, but rather a specific way of thinking that gained prominence at a specific period of time. This way of thinking is in contrast with that of late modernity, the various manifestations of each giving differing degrees of importance to the process of ordering language and society.

At the heart of the modern–late modern divide is a difference of priorities. In chasing a dream of order, modernity came to view the real world as chaotic, and such things as pluralism, variety, contingency and ambivalence as failures in need of correction. Modernism is an attempt to exercise control over those things that stand in the way of bringing order to life, that is, to establish homogeneity, monotony and clarity. Late modernity, however, views such things as universality, homogeneity, monotony and clarity as less problematic, and is in these aspects essentially in opposition to modernity. Understandably, such conflicting views result in quite different approaches to the issues of language and society, but on a broader, more abstract level, what we are really talking about is a difference in attitudes towards freedom and security. The work of Zygmunt Bauman (1992, 1997), illustrates how the modern order prioritizes security and restricts freedom, while late modernity’s quest for freedom jeopardizes some aspects of security. Let us first consider, then, how the relationship between language and society has been ordered in the imagination of the modern mind, and how such order restricts freedom.

2 Modernity and its sociolinguistic consequences

Linguistically, the consequences of modernity have included the emergence of standard languages, the idea of language being detached from its speakers, the covering up of linguistic facts contradicting modernist language ideology, the stigmatization and silencing of those who represent deviance from the hegemonic standards of imagined speech communities, and the devaluation of specific languages and cultures. Pierre Bourdieu (1991) brands the modernist view of language as “linguistic communism.” Linguistic homogeneity, as imagined by the modern mind, is never a reality. Rather, it must be posited (Bakhtin 1981: 270), one of the effects of a posited unitary language being that a prescriptive norm is established, to which speakers, whether consciously or unconsciously, adjust their use of language. The idea of a homogenous, monotonous language becomes a default model, a standard against which one is judged. Bourdieu states that such a standard

becomes the theoretical norm against which all linguistic practices are objectively measured. Ignorance is no excuse; this linguistic law has its body of jurists – the grammarians – and its agents of regulation and imposition – the teachers – who are empowered universally to subject the linguistic performance of speaking subjects to examination and to the legal sanction of academic qualification.

(Bourdieu 1991: 45, emphasis in the original)

Those who deviate from modernist ideas of what language ought to be, disturb the invented order of homogeneity, monotony and clarity. Where they may be held accountable for their divergence, they risk penalization – where they may not, they face the risk of exclusion or expulsion.

Once we come to understand modernist language ideology for what it really is, that is, an over-simplification of sociolinguistic reality, it loses much of its power to control. Its inconsistencies quickly become visible, and the modernist ideology of Japanese is no exception. Japan is, and always has been, multilingual, and the image of a monolingual society it presents both to its own people and the rest of the world is purely a modernist fabrication. Already, the myth of a monolingual Japan has been undermined (and its multilingual heritage thereby defended) by a significant body of academic work, by such authors as Goebel Noguchi and Fotos (2001), Denoon et al. (1996), Honna and Kann

(1999), Kanno (2008), Long (2007), Maher and Yashiro (1995), Masiko (2003) or Yasuda (2000). Besides autochthonous languages like Ainu, the various Ryukyuan languages and Japanese Sign Language, there are now more than 75,000 immigrant children within the Japanese public education system, who arrived in Japan from the 1980s onwards, bringing with them more than 100 different languages. Of these, Portuguese, Mandarin and Spanish are the most prominent (Vaiepae 2001). Roughly the same number of children of foreign nationality as have attended school have not (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication 2005). These newcomer immigrant communities (see

ta 2000) add to the so-called oldcomer communities of Korean- and Chinese-Japanese, and those of Korean and Chinese descent granted permanent residency (see e.g. Takeuma 1998). About 10,000 kikokushijo (Japanese nationals who have spent much of their childhoods living abroad) may also be found within the Japanese education system. So significant a group do the kikokushijo constitute that their numbers are also constantly monitored, one reason for this being that they are perceived to constitute a problem (Pang 2000). Further adding to Japan’s increasing linguistic diversity, the importance of English as a language of international communication in business and science is growing, and its future status is hotly debated (Suzuki 2002). Japanese, too, has entered the global era, with an estimated ten million people now speaking Japanese as a foreign language, and the majority of Japanese now supports the idea of Japanese becoming an international language (Kat

2000). One result of internationalization is the creation of yasashii nihongo, or Easy Japanese, designed to smooth the way for Japanese to become a language of global communication (see Hirosaki City 2005). All these developments have one thing in common. None of this was predicted under the ideology of modernity. Linguistic modernization sought the opposite: uniformity, clarity and monotony.

For a long time, one’s identity as being Japanese was largely defined by one’s proficiency in the Japanese language. Today, such a definition of identity is challenged both by the increasing number of foreigners who use Japanese fluently, and by the many people of Japanese descent – like the nikkeijin (returning descendents of Japanese migrants) – who cannot. The issue of keigo (honorific language) remains, though whether one can convincingly argue the case for basing one’s identity as Japanese on one’s ability to use keigo is doubtful, given the large number of Japanese people who are not fully proficient in its use. Faced with this diversification of language use, modernity is forced to relocate, and to reaffirm its position ever more vocally because it does not view diversity and ambivalence in a positive light. Rather, to the modern mind, they are evidence of the ineffectiveness of its efforts to establish order thus far.

Despite these challenges to modernity, as an ideology that informs and regulates everyday social activities it remains in place. Evidence of this is to be found in the fact that all of Japan’s languages apart from the national language, Standard Japanese, are endangered (UNESCO 2009). Linguistic diversity is slowly giving way to uniformity, with minority languages becoming endangered as a result. Regional dialects, too, are in decline (Inoue 2008b), and folk bilingualism finds itself undervalued, as uniformity remains the order of the day in schools. The right to mother-tongue education is granted only to native speakers of Japanese, while the Ministry of Education is unwilling to recognize schools attempting to teach in languages other than Japanese (Kanno 2008). One consequence of Japan’s efforts to internationalize has been the introducion of a parallel system of monolingualism, whereby English has become the medium for international communication (Miura 2000), while Japanese remains the language of national identity and everyday communication in Japan (Katsuragi 2007). Modernist efforts to give order to language and society such as these are to be found everywhere in Japan.

The quest for linguistic homogeneity is disturbed, however, by the movement of people, and by the defining and redefining of the geographical borders of the state (see Iriye 1970), and as a result ideology does not match the realities on the ground. The fact remains that some people and places simply do not fit into the modernist idea of what Japan ought to be, and the existence of such people is at odds with the modern order. As a consequence of modernity, not only foreigners, but all those who find themselves caught between the imposed “foreigner versus Japanese” dichotomy, must negotiate the gap between Japan, the idea and Japan, as it is. Those who uphold the modern order, however, are themselves experiencing hard times, forced to defend the ideology of homogeneity in the face of increasingly strong arguments to the contrary. And homogeneity finds itself threatened from within, too, attacked, albeit indirectly, by the political, ideological and economic neoliberalism of recent governments.

Modernism’s attempts to eliminate diversity have unarguably failed, and there is nothing to indicate a reversal in fortunes. Diversity will not disappear. Linguistic diversity, and the awareness thereof, unmasks the legislated linguistic order of uniformity as an order of power. It restricts the freedom of language and identity choices for all those at the shorter end of the power divide. Awareness thereof leads to discontent, which drives, in turn, further emancipation efforts. In order to gauge the prospects for language and society in Japan, we are well-advised to pay such discontent sufficient attention. The intensification of language ideology among all those deviating from imagined orders is, to borrow from Jane Hill (2006: 114), the reason why “history speeds up at the margins.” Discontent is located there because the margin was not considered to be a constitutive element of what was to be given order under modernity. It was either pushed aside, or regarded as a problem to be solved. It is this, and the awareness thereof, which results in discontent at the margin.

Consider some concrete examples. Foreign nationals are denied the freedom to maintain their languages through mother-tongue education programs, bilingual education or accredited foreign language-mediated school education. Deviance from the homogenous, monolithic view of language likewise undermines the specific uses of Japanese by returnees, immigrants, and children of international marriages (Tomozawa 2001), many of whom are neither balanced nor Japanese-dominant bilinguals. Under modernity, such problems were ignored, and those deviating were ideologically pressured to assimilate into the imagined orders in which their presence was never envisioned. In late modernity, this is no longer seen as an acceptable remedy, because the modern order is not seen as natural. Modernist ideology has become visible. It is recognized as an artifact, a fabrication, thus allowing for its discussion with the aim of improvement. Such discontent results in increasingly viable attempts to seek more freedom in the face of attempts to create security by restricting choice. Let us consider such conflict in more detail.

3 Quest for freedom – quest for security

To an increasing number of people, the linguistic consequences of modernity, as summarized above, are no longer perceived as constituting the progress that modernity once promised. Consequently, modernity is reflected upon and future-oriented alternatives are considered. Reflexive modernity, that is, the conscious questioning of popular ideologies and practices shaped in the course of modernity, results in a “chronic revision of social practices in the light of knowledge about those practices” (Giddens 1991: 40). Such knowledge leads to constant examination and, hence, to a change of ideology, norms and behaviors through reflexivity. With regard to language and society, late modernity implies that we come to understand, from a theoretical and historical perspective, that state, individuals, society, government, nation and culture carry different genealogies, which happened, rather accidentally, to be configured in the specific ways of modernity. The transformations in Japanese language and society studied in this volume are largely the result of the increasing awareness of modernity as a specific set of purposeful choices, not given facts.

Reflection on the consequences of modernity represents an opportunity for emancipation to those at the margin, which is the very reason why history speeds up there. The opportunity to overcome modernity lies, to quote Bauman (1997: 33) in “the right to choose one’s identity” and on “the ultimate, inalienable individual responsibility for the choice – and through laying bare the complex stateor tribe-managed mechanisms aimed at depriving the individual of that freedom of choice and that responsibility.” Reflecting, and eventually overcoming, specific injustices or drawbacks of modernity’s orders does not imply, however, that a newly evolving order will be devoid of discontent. In Postmodernity and its Discontents, Bauman (1997) makes it very clear that discontent is here to stay – it merely shifts and takes on different forms.

The value of what is gained in the quest for freedom is measured against the security lost thereby. Bauman argues that, beyond modernity, attempts to overcome it entail exchanging a degree of security for a degree of freedom. The readiness to exchange a piece of security for a piece of freedom is exactly what distinguishes late modern men and women from their modern equivalents or contemporaries. Tackling the discontent of modernity entails, in other words, a recalibration of the relation between freedom and security, though ultimately this leads to a new, late-modern discontent. The discontent of modernity, then, results from “too little freedom in the pursuit of individual happiness,” while discontent in orders beyond modernity stem “from a kind of freedom of pleasure-seeking which tolerates too little individual security” (Bauman 1997: 3). This is where it becomes clear that modernity and late modernity do not simply refer to specific periods of time, but to different mindsets.

In the case studies that constitute the present book, we find both signs of reflection on the orders of modernity and instances of shifts towards more freedom of choice as uniformity gives way to plurality. Let us consider shifts towards plurality first. In his chapter on standardization and de-standardization processes in spoken Japanese, Inoue (Chapter 7) describes how variati...