To kanji or not to kanji, that is the question

Brendan wrote a comment on the "Hiragana and Katakana" post that I thought deserved a more considered response in the form of a separate post. He writes, "I was wondering if someone might be able to answer why so many Japanese words are [not?] written in Kanji? I understand about タバコ、but it seems to me that certain other words, like ニンジン, are never written with kanji, and I can't figure out where they might be from. Are these just more loan words, or are the kanji so obscure they go unused, or is there another explanation?" Assuming I got the omission of "not" correct, let me try to answer this.

First, don't fool yourself--I see the kanji 人参(にんじん) written in grocery stores all the time. You may not have noticed because, as often happens, those kanji you don't know blend into a blurry background and are in effect invisible. I was amused in Kyoto two years ago to see one grocer label his potatoes 馬鈴薯(ばれいしょ) instead of じゃがいも. I'm sure I had seen that 20 years ago when I was a college student in Kyoto, but then I only knew the word じゃがいも, and ignored the sign with 馬鈴薯 on it. But, I digress.

The real question is, why do some words for which there are perfectly good kanji get written in kana? It doesn't have to do with whether a word is a loan or not, even if we consider Chinese words loans. Rather, it has to do with who is writing and when. As I wrote earlier, women in the classical era (Heian) wrote mostly in kana with a little bit of kanji sprinkled in. If you look, for example, at the Tale of Genji you'll see a good example of this. But, some men of the time, such as Ki no Tsurayuki who was composing waka and of course Tosa nikki was using a similar style. So, to make a broad generalization (never a safe thing in academe!), at that time if one were writing in Japanese then the amount of kanji was relatively small. Why? Well, to be entirely academically irresponsible and write off the top of my head, I'll conjecture that part of the reason was that composing in Japanese (not Classical Chinese) was only a few centuries old, and it took a while to blend kanji into the fold. The problem with this guess is that, of course, the first texts in Japanese were written in man'yogana, which was, in effect, kanji that was proto-kana. Man'yogana--named for the Man'yoshu--were kanji used for their phonetic value, not their semantic value. Eventually the cursive form of those kanji evolved into kana, et voila!, a phonetic system was born. Man'yogana was/is notoriously difficult to navigate, and mere mortals don't do it. Maybe the swing to mostly kana usage (once kana were established) was a psychological reaction to the torture of reading Man'yogana. Just kidding. Sort of.

Moving forward, we see that over the next nine or ten centuries kanji became more common in Japanese writing, for more reasons than I can list, including the education of the author and the audience to whom he/she was writing. Perhaps the pinnacle of kanji (although, again, I have not studied this properly) comes in the Meiji Period, when people were using kanji for words like kore and sore, and even for exclamatory particles at the end of a sentence like ya. Perhaps they thought it made their writing look more sophisticated, perhaps it was just what everyone else was doing, perhaps it is what they were taught in school (none of these are mutually exclusive). This was also the period when the common practice for printers was to provide a phonetic gloss (furigana) on all words in a text, almost in a nod to the difficulty of reading it, but not really. For example, I have a volume of the Natsume Soseki complete works that has every single word glossed. It was certainly not a book printed and marketed to an illiterate audience! Rather, there is some arcane beauty to the printed word in this form, and Soseki (and his contemporaries) recognized that. For those of you taking EAJ411 next term, we'll be reading some of these texts so hang on to your hats.

Then, as we progressed through the 20th century that trend was reversed and slowly kanji usage diminished, although it has never gone to the "extreme" of Korean, where kanji (hanja)have been eliminated almost all together. The cynic in me wants to say that the culture is being dumbed down, thus less kanji, but that seems a bit harsh. But, the truth is, often writers will choose kana over kanji for their own inexplicable reasons. In EAJ410, we recently read an excerpt of a Mishima novel in which he uses kanji for a word in one sentence, and then in the next paragraph opts for kana for the same word. In these cases, all we can do is chalk it up to artistic license.

With the advent of text messaging, keitai shosetsu, etc., maybe we'll see even more changes in the near future. I can't hazard to guess what those will be, though. I mean, typing in Microsoft Word which handily and quickly finds the right kanji for me when all I have to do is enter the kana has made me more likely to use the kanji than in the "bad old days" when I would have had to pull out my (non-electronic) dictionary. The downside is that my calligraphy has suffered; really, my handwriting was much better 15 years ago than it is now. Maybe I should take Kaya-sensei's summer course on calligraphy as a refresher!