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!

A Very Brief History of Tobacco

Judging by the direction taken in the responses posted to Professor Fessler's recent blog entry concerning katakana, there appears to be a related interest that has arisen concerning the history of tobacco.  Or, more accurately, how the word "tobacco" made its way into the Japanese language and when it was first used - in hiragana, katakana, or any of the numerous incarnations out there which involve kanji.

Thus, to chime in for a moment as the resident Japanese historian in the department, I want to make clear that the word "tobacco" does indeed date back to the late sixteenth/early seventeenth centuries in terms of its usage in Japan.  It is not found among the words listed in the first major Japanese-Portuguese dictionary published around 1600, the Vocabulario Da Lingoa De Iapam, probably because it was not a "foreign" word to the Jesuit missionaries who compiled this text.  But the word "tobacco" is attested to elsewhere.

One good example comes from an early seventeenth-century law code issued by the Uesugi family (上杉氏), the daimyo in charge of Yonezawa domain (米沢藩).  The code, promulgated in the eighth month of 1612, contains an article that states the following:

"It is strictly prohibited for those serving under a lord to smoke tobacco in the courtyard of his residence." (たばこ．．．主人の供仕、門庭において飲候事、一切停止之事)

A couple of points about this passage and the larger code:

1) "Tobacco" is written in hiragana.

2) The verb that is used together with tobacco here is nomu (飲む).

3) The remainder of the law code also makes clear that one is additionally to refrain from smoking around both the sick (病者) and the elderly (老人).

It therefore seems likely that it was indeed the sound of the word "tabaco" in Spanish and Portuguese that was first converted into hiragana before various ateji (当て字), or variants, using kanji were assigned/invented thereafter.

It is also probably worth noting that, back in 1612, there were already lawmakers who realized that tobacco is bad for your health...

Hiragana and Katakana

There has been some confusion in Japanese classes recently about the use of hiragana and katakana over the centuries. Wikipedia is not a big help on this--the description for hiragana simply implies that it is a cursive form of Chinese (which, in an extreme derivation, it is, but that in itself is an entire lecture unbefitting of a blog post).

O.K., let's get this straight. Although hiragana (one of the Japanese phonetic scripts) looks rounder and softer than katakana (the other of the phonetic scripts) does, that does not really give credence to the idea of one being exclusively for women and the other being exclusively for men. What was important was what people were writing, not which sex they were. It so happens that, in the Heian period, women wrote almost exclusively diaries, and men wrote almost exclusively government and official texts, hence the difference in how they wrote. Men were writing in kanbun (classical Chinese) and women were writing in hiragana, mixed with a few kanji. Katakana was developed at the same time as hiragana, but it was largely used for glossing kanbun texts.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, katakana continued to be used for official documents, but it also came to be used in the same way that we use italics in English--for emphasis, and for foreign words. So, it is always important to ask yourself what you are reading before you assume that some odd term in katakana is a foreign loan word.

Meiji Japanese

It's summer and time to focus on the wonderful minutiae that professors love. My own work is currently pointed at a scholar of religious studies, Anesaki Masaharu 姉崎正治. I'm looking at a series of open letters that he published in the Meiji journal Taiyō 太陽 in 1902. The content is a dissertation in itself, but as an aside I've been musing about the language that he uses. Those of you studying modern Japanese would not recognize it. Sure, it is in classical Japanese, but besides that, the punctuation is anomalous and the diction is entirely different from the prose that the same writer produced in the same decade.

All this has led me to wonder about linguistic "rules" (as such) of the Meiji period. Did this essay seem unusual to the readership? It certainly seems odd now. And other material written at the turn of the century didn't necessary use the same conventions. Don't get me wrong--it isn't just a difference between classical and modern grammar--there is a qualitative difference beyond that which I find odd.

Thoughts, anyone?