The Devil's Tongue

Misunderstandings can create both obstacles and insulation

The first-person pronoun I is a basic starting point: ego, je, ich, io, ya. In Japanese, where nothing is that simple, the word has two dozen or more forms, depending on who is talking, and to whom, and the social relationship between them. An elderly man might refer to himself as washi, but his wife would say watashi, or, for that matter, atakushi, or atashi; their daughter might say atai and their son boku. Then there is temae, which means both you and I. But the Japanese often evade these social difficulties by dropping all pronouns entirely.

The "devil's language" is the description generally attributed to St. Francis Xavier, the 16th century Jesuit missionary. Others have seen in the intricacies of the language a major influence on Japan's intellectual and artistic styles, even on its basic national character. Yet sympathetic observers also believe that the language may represent a serious obstacle to Japan's functioning as a world power. According to former U.S. Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer, "Japanese ideas are transmitted abroad only very weakly and through the filter of a few foreign 'experts'. .. Japanese intellectual life for the most part goes on behind a language barrier."

To cross that barrier, translators and interpreters are more necessary but less effective, since the Japanese language not only is difficult in itself but represents a quite different concept of speech. Anthropologist Masao Kunihiro notes: "English is intended strictly for communication. Japanese is primarily interested in feeling out the other person's mood." Misunderstandings are a constant hazard. At one top-level conference, for example, President Nixon asked for a cut in Japanese textile exports, and Prime Minister Sato answered, "Zensho shimasu," which was translated literally as "I'll handle it as well as I can." Nixon thought that meant "I'll take care of it," but the Japanese understood it to mean something like "Let's talk about something else."

Over the centuries the Japanese have adopted many Chinese words, though the two languages remained entirely separate. Nor was Chinese the only foreign element. Portuguese missionaries later introduced pan (bread), and Dutch traders biiru (beer). Then came the tidal wave of English. Some of these Japanized words filled a practical need (takushi, taxi, or rajio, radio), while some were primarily fashionable (kohi-shoppu, coffee shop).

Despite the absorption of foreign words, however, the Japanese language developed in a society that was hierarchical and isolated, that avoided controversy and valued subtlety. Even today the language still requires sharp differentiations--different vocabularies, different verb endings--among various levels of polite speech and familiar speech. Some believe that the language is inherently and purposely vague, while others see something more subtle. "Japanese can be made vague," says Paul Anderer, who teaches Japanese literature at Columbia University, "but the language is extraordinarily precise in determining who you are as you speak to someone else about what it is that you or that other person needs."

One of the greatest difficulties in Japanese derives from the fact that it developed as a purely spoken language until about the 5th century A.D., when imperial officials decided to adopt Chinese characters (kanji) as their form of writing. Not only was this system extremely difficult in itself, but the two languages were completely different.

Partly because the Chinese kanji did not fit Japanese, partly because they were so hard to learn, the Japanese began in the 9th century to develop a supplementary set of phonetic symbols known as hiragana. At the same time, because priests had trouble transcribing kanji, they invented another set of phonetic symbols all their own (katakana). To this day, Japanese is written in kanji, which number almost 50,000 (though high school students have been required since 1946 to learn only a basic 2,000) plus the two phonetic sets of 48 characters each. There are also two different systems for translating all these sounds into the Latin alphabet (or romaji). Finally, and most formidable of all for a foreigner to interpret, there is a quasilanguage known as haragei, roughly translatable as "belly talk," in which the Japanese communicate without using any words at all--only with techniques like the artful silence. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.