(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌,
fragment 29)
Not long ago, one day my wife and I both
woke up before dawn.
‘What time is it?’
she asked.
‘Four-ten.’
Question and answer
were both in Japanese.
Trivial as that
little exchange may sound, to me it was a watershed. It meant that I had
finally resumed a focus, picked up a thread, that had been waiting in the
margins of my life for sixty years. By having a Japanese-speaking wife and by
saying a few words to her in that language, I was fulfilling a wish that I had
expressed on another continent at the age of seven.
My first contact
with Japanese was in the mid-1950s in Wisconsin.
My parents and I were living in a wooded neighborhood next door to an American
scholar, his Japanese wife, and their toddler son. One summer afternoon in
their back yard, I was terrifically impressed to hear this American guy suddenly
talking Japanese. What he was saying to his wife Akiko might have been no more
than ‘Should I take the clothes in now?’ – but to me it was a magical formula,
a language of the gods, transforming a banal situation into a scene of timeless
color and romance.
Akiko was the first
person to bring me into contact with Chinese characters. One day she sat down with
me and read me a story out of a Japanese children’s book, sight-translating
from those beautifully illustrated pages with their long vertical lines of
exotic script. I felt a terrific envy for her toddler son Karl, who was being
brought up to speak and understand Japanese. I suddenly decided to start coming
over as often as possible. I actually asked Akiko if she would teach me Japanese
‘together with Karl.’
Soon afterward, my
family moved out of the woods in Wisconsin and
into a city in Louisiana.
The ambient foreign language became French, and we actually had some awfully
superficial French lessons in school, but I soon discovered I was more
interested in playing baseball than in studying. Domination by the instincts
had begun. Competition. The ‘school of hard knocks.’ The playing field with its
straight lines and uniforms. Slugging and scrapping for a place as a ‘big man’
in society. And so it would continue for half a century. But the seeds of
timeless fascination, and their association with Japanese, had been sown.
Perhaps it was, in
retrospect, not surprising that the field of study which eventually became my
profession – Chinese, has the reputation of being the most difficult of all.
Maybe part of my attraction to Chinese – aside from the beautiful poetry and
beautiful women – was that it was the intellectual equivalent of a Bowl Game,
an arena in which brain could knock heads with brain and only an All-Star had a
chance. Physically, I knew I would never be a Babe Ruth. But mentally...
Some years later,
when I was just finishing up as a graduate student at Leiden University
in The Netherlands, there was a sudden vacancy in the Chinese Department and I
was offered a teaching job. Nobody was more amazed than myself. It had never
occurred to me that someday I would ‘use’ my Chinese for anything so worldly as
to earn money. I had always assumed someday I would teach Dutch children
English for a livelihood and then go home at night to do what I really wanted
to do, which was to learn more Chinese.
I had to decide
right away, and I said yes. I have never really regretted that decision, but in
the long run it did change my feelings toward the Chinese language. Starting in
1973, I was a full-time staff member in Leiden.
In my new job, the pressures that were on me could not have been called serious,
but being a perfectionist, I felt under pressure nevertheless. Before long I
began to associate the Chinese language itself with the tensions and
obligations of the ‘on-the-job’ situation. If I glanced at a Chinese newspaper
and could not understand a headline, rather than this being just another
interesting challenge, it became a threat. I started to feel guilty for not
knowing the language perfectly. After all, I was now a professional, paid
teacher! Soon I began, like every bourgeois office clerk or shopgirl, to look
forward to the weekend and to be glad when five o’clock rolled around. What I
had first loved to do, I now ‘had to’ do.
In the case of
Japanese, there never was such a division between my ‘life’ and my ‘self.’ The
language itself was never wrenched away from my personal realm of musings and meanings
into an alien area of Philistine worries. It remained in a still-possible,
still-to-come state, and there it waited for sixty years.
Even that phrase, ‘sixty years,’ is
significant here. In Japan
as well as China,
there is an ancient tradition of sixty
being considered the number of years in one full human life cycle. Not so long
ago in Japan, a person celebrating their sixtieth birthday would actually wear clothes
or colors symbolically suggesting a baby’s clothes – the idea being that you were
being born all over again.
In my own life as I now look back on it, ‘sixty
years’ was the period during which I was continually being forced to adapt to
society and its demands. When I was about seven, my family moved out of the woods
and into the town with its herd and its hedges. When I was sixty-seven, my wife
joined me in retirement and there was no longer any definite ‘public’ pressure
in either of our lives. Surely it was no coincidence that right after turning
sixty-eight, I suddenly felt a mighty impulse to get back to learning Japanese.
Is Japanese difficult to learn? According to
Arthur Waley, one of the most famous translators from Oriental literature, not
so very. In the introduction to his little-known Japanese Poetry: The
‘Uta,’ he writes: ‘The translations in this book are chiefly intended
to facilitate the study of the Japanese text; for Japanese poetry can only be
rightly enjoyed in the original. And since the classical language has an easy
grammar and limited vocabulary, a few months should suffice for the mastering
of it.’
Well, that sounds easy enough! But as other
contexts show, Arthur Waley was not above indulging in a bit of intellectual
show-offery. In his preface toThe Secret History of the Mongols and Other
Pieces, he actually says: ‘Despite the fact that in this book I translate
from Chinese, Japanese, Ainu, Mongol and Syriac, I do not want to give the
impression that I am a master of many languages. Chinese and Japanese I do know
fairly well...’
For a different and perhaps more plausible
opinion, we may turn to the wise words of Arthur Rose-Innes, whose dictionary
and textbooks have guided generations of students. In the ‘introductory
remarks’ to Part II of his five-part First Steps in Japanese Reading,
he writes: ‘As many of the characters and combinations of the characters may be
read in more than one way the beginner may be surprised at the amount of
guessing that has to be done: but it is well that he should exercise from the
very beginning that faculty of guessing aright which, as Chamberlain says, is
a sine qua non to the student of Japanese all through his
career...Before going very far the student may come to the conclusion that the
Japanese written language, though very interesting, is one immense muddle; and
that, in the absence of logic, the only way to learn it, is by the process
known as muddling through. Be that as it may, let him be sure that he will not
make much progress except by hard work and perseverance.’
In short: ‘Not fare well, but fare forward, voyagers!’
This is a far cry from Waley’s suggestion that one need only ‘learn the
Japanese syllabary and some (perhaps about 600) of the commoner Chinese
characters’ to be able to ‘use the native texts.’
By the way, a Japanese schoolchild would be well into the fifth grade of
elementary school before being officially required to know as many as 600
characters. Let me just add in passing that ‘the Japanese syllabary,’ an
alphabet-like series of phonetic signs used to spell words or parts of words, itself
comprises more than a hundred symbols which must be learned by rote...
As for grammar and syntax, I think few students
would disagree with the description, laid down in 1928 by G. B. Sansom in his Historical Grammar of Japanese, of ‘...some
obscure characteristic in Japanese speech which impels those who use it to pile
one redundant verb upon another. It is a feature which will not have escaped
the notice of those who listen to orations where sentence after sentence ends
with some phrase like de aru de arimasu,
which literally stands for “being-is-being-is-is,” and can be adequately
rendered by the one word “is” in English.’
Sometimes the grammar seems difficult not because
it is a ‘muddle’ but for the opposite reason: that it is somehow burdensomely
logical and over-analytical, as when ‘I’ve been to Kyoto’ comes out as ‘the
fact of having gone to Kyoto exists,’ or at the table when ‘please pass me the
salt’ becomes ‘do bestow getting the salt.’
And what about the phenomenally complex problem of
the so-called polite forms, such that not only the choice of words but even the
grammatical forms constantly depend on one’s judgment as to the status
relations between oneself and the interlocutor? In all the Japanese textbooks I
have used or browsed, my favorite quote on this is: ‘Another common honorific
verb is irassharu, which has more
honorific value than precise verbal meaning. It expresses the vague idea of the
existence of a person either in motion or at rest and consequently can be
translated “to go,” “to come,” or “to be”.’
On the other hand, some of the difficulties
students complain about really are rather exaggerated. For example: remembering
the Japanese names of the days of the week. True, at first sight kayoobi and suiyoobi don’t seem inherently very suggestive of ‘Tuesday’ and ‘Wednesday.’
But this can be overcome by simply carrying out a few simple steps. First, take
a course in French and stick with it until you know the days of the week by
heart. This will give you the information that Tuesday, mardi, has the mythological or astrological association of being ‘Mars
day’ while Wednesday, mercredi, is
associated with Mercury, etc. Knowing these links between the ancient European
gods and the successive days will turn out to be crucial in getting the Japanese
weekdays right.
Next, go to your local university library, check
out the second volume of Joseph Needham’s Science
and Civilization in China, make a photocopy of page 262, ignore the top
half of the chart, and memorize the table of associations of the Ancient
Chinese ‘elements’ with the ‘planets.’ Keep in mind that the English name of each
‘planet’ corresponds to the ancient Roman god of the same name, which you now
have learned in French. From there, you can easily work out that in ancient
East Asian tradition, Mars is associated with ‘fire’ and Mercury with ‘water,’
and so on.
After that, every time you see the Japanese days
of the week written in Chinese characters, you will plainly see that kayoobi is the ‘fire’ or ‘Mars’ day,
hence mardi or Tuesday; suiyoobi is the ‘water’ or ‘Mercury’
day, thus mercredi or Wednesday, and
so on. It remains true that in spoken Japanese ka is not the ordinary word for ‘fire,’ nor sui for ‘water’; these are actually ancient Chinese words in an
archaic Japanese transcription, but this is nit-picking. Ignore it. Ignore also
the fact that the element yoo in
these words is written with a distinct Chinese character which Japanese-English
dictionaries define simply as ‘part of the names of the days of the week.’ Actually,
historically it means ‘bright,’ so that Tuesday is actually ‘fire’s bright day’
and so on.
A breeze, isn’t it?
Another problem, this time
definitely a real one, is how to read Japanese names aloud when they are
written, as they usually are, in Chinese characters. Since characters
ordinarily have more than one possible pronunciation depending on meaning,
custom and who knows what else...how can you be sure you are reading a person’s
name correctly?
The bad news here is that quite
often you simply can’t. The good news is that neither can the Japanese.
Basically, you just have to know, whether by being tipped off by an insider
or...though this is not foolproof...by looking the name up in one of the
special name dictionaries giving attested readings of attested names.
Traditionally in Europe, the advice
given to students of Japanese was to first learn enough Russian to be familiar
with the Cyrillic alphabet, then find a way to buy a copy of the 1207-page Slovar’ Yaponskikh Imyon i Famil’yiy
(Dictionary of Japanese names and surnames) published in Moscow in 1958, and
then...look up to your heart’s content!
English-speaking readers got what seemed
like a big break in 1972 with the publication of P. G. O’Neill’s Japanese Names: A Comprehensive Index by
Characters and Readings. But the author himself in his preface says: ‘There
is no final or complete solution to the problems of reading Japanese names
written in Chinese characters. Such characters usually have special name
readings which...have to be learned separately. Virtually all these characters
have more than one recognized name reading, and may have other unpredictable
ones as well...It is therefore not surprising that, faced with such complexity,
the Japanese should regard possible but mistaken readings with equanimity. It
is usually only in speech, however, that they have to commit themselves to a
particular reading of a name, for, when writing in their own language, they can
leave the name in the obscurity of its characters.’
O’Neill’s dictionary is ‘only’ 359
fine-print pages long. So far I have never been disappointed in using it, but
still, I keep the Russian tome at hand just in case.
Well, to sum up after all these
by-ways...yes, Japanese really is difficult!
Then the question is, at least in
some people’s minds...I know because they have asked me...why do you want to
spend your retirement working at anything so difficult?
The answer is that in studying
Japanese, I am pursuing my own dream. I am not straining to fulfill someone
else’s. Undoubtedly, by ordinary academic standards my knowledge of the
language is still ludicrously inadequate, but my dream is not subject to
limitation by other people’s notions of ‘adequacy.’ There is no particular
level that I need to attain. If I can say ‘Should I take the clothes in now,’ I
am already doing fine. If I can say ‘four-ten in the morning’ to my wife now, I
am back where I was with Akiko sixty years ago. I am back home in the realm of
the timeless...
--Lloyd Haft
August 2015
