As a follow-up to Sino-Japanese from Dutch, here’s Alex Tabarrok’s Not Lost In Translation: How Barbarian Books Laid the Foundation for Japan’s Industrial Revolut[i]on:
Japan’s growth miracle after World War II is well known but that was Japan’s second miracle. The first was perhaps even more miraculous. At the end of the 19th century, under the Meiji Restoration, Japan transformed itself almost overnight from a peasant economy to an industrial powerhouse.
After centuries of resisting economic and social change, Japan transformed from a relatively poor, predominantly agricultural economy specialized in the exports of unprocessed, primary products to an economy specialized in the export of manufactures in under fifteen years.
In a remarkable new paper, Juhász, Sakabe, and Weinstein show how the key to this transformation was a massive effort to translate and codify technical information in the Japanese language. This state-led initiative made cutting-edge industrial knowledge accessible to Japanese entrepreneurs and workers in a way that was unparalleled among non-Western countries at the time.
Here’s an amazing graph which tells much of the story. In both 1870 and 1910 most of the technical knowledge of the world is in French, English, Italian and German but look at what happens in Japan–basically no technical books in 1870 to on par with English in 1910. Moreover, no other country did this. […]
Translating a technical document today is much easier than in the past because the words already exist. Translating technical documents in the late 19th century, however, required the creation and standardization of entirely new words. […] Here’s a graph showing the creation of new words in Japan by year. You can see the explosion in new words in the late 19th century. Note that this happened well after the Perry Mission. The words didn’t simply evolve, the authors argue new words were created as a form of industrial policy. […]
The bottom line for me is this: What caused the industrial revolution is a perennial question–was it coal, freedom, literacy?–but this is the first paper which gives what I think is a truly compelling answer for one particular case. Japan’s rapid industrialization under the Meiji Restoration was driven by its unprecedented effort to translate, codify, and disseminate Western technical knowledge in the Japanese language.
There’s much more at the link, including “an interesting biography of a translator”; Jack Morava, who sent me the link, says “I have reservations about the George Mason school of economics but this blog does turn up interesting stuff.” Thanks, Jack!
Also, I realized at the last minute that today marks the 22nd anniversary of this blog’s beginnings. Happy birthday, LH!
Happy graduation!
So Hat has been able to drink for a whole year? I can’t say I’ve noticed any drop-off in the quality of postings.
I’ll have to drink harder!
Is it too late for Rumspringa? Asking for a frind. Congratulations Big Hat!
Perhaps one of the greatest culminations of Japan’s gargantuan effort was its ability to defeat Russia in the Russo-Japanese war. Not to mention the annexation of Korea, the annexation of Taiwan, etc, all the way to its defeat in the Second World War. All in the span of less than a century.
The prolifically created new terminology was exported to China in the early years of the 20th century, accounting for the large amount of shared vocabulary. It partly accounts for the fact that both sides can communicate in writing (筆談), which is a result not only of a shared system of writing but also a shared literary tradition and the modern vocabulary the Japanese created and exported to Korea, China, and even Vietnam. Mongolia missed out, which is why it’s easy to relate Japanese vocabulary to Chinese (there is so much shared) but almost impossible for Mongolian. (I am particularly thinking of grammatical vocabulary but it applies to virtually every field of intellectual life.)
Japan is now declining while China appears to be on the rise, but the imprint of Japan’s frenzied period of growth will not be going away for a very long time. (Sorry for the trite summary but this is one of the most interesting aspects of East Asian linguistic history.)
Oh, and congratulations on 22 years. I don’t think I joined till about four years later but LH has been a wonderful
distractionjoy these past 18 years.My own particular revelation came when I first went to Japan (end of 1974) and mentioned to a Japanese person a naïve interest in the way the Japanese vocabulary was linked to its tradition (something along those lines), only to be told that it had all been created as translations from Western languages. This was something of a shock but the more I studied Japanese the more I realised it was true. As has been earlier covered at LH, this even extends to the ornithological naming of birds. Many of the modern Chinese ornithological names can be traced back to a book of scientific vocabulary, which included bird names, published in the early 1920s, which was heavily based on Japanese. (I’ve never been able to locate a copy of the book.)
Perhaps one of the greatest culminations of Japan’s gargantuan effort was its ability to defeat Russia in the Russo-Japanese war.
Yes indeed, and it shocked everyone, especially the Russians.
a book of scientific vocabulary, which included bird names, published in the early 1920s, which was heavily based on Japanese. (I’ve never been able to locate a copy of the book.)
How much older Chinese, Japanese, or other Asian language scanned printed material is on the web? Is there an equivalent of GBooks, The Internet Archive, or other similar digital libraries with a good coverage?
a book of scientific vocabulary, which included bird names, published in the early 1920s
Is that 動物學大辭典? That’s referenced by Gee, Moffett, and Wilder.
That could be it but I’d have to check, which I’m in no position to do at the moment.
The other one referenced by Gee, Moffett, and Wilder (IIRR) was a book from the 1920s that gave the common names of birds in north China. Those names still feature in Chinese bird lists as “other names” or “alternative names”. This is, of course, a valuable source, but it only suggests how much might have fallen through the cracks because no one bothered to collect them. It is a reminder of how patchy such lists can be compared with reality.
It does look like it’s in HathiTrust.
It looks like it’s available at ANU, but that would mean a very long trip to Canberra. (Or some way of borrowing it through my alma mater, if that is possible….) But getting hold of it might open the way to updating my long-stalled online list of bird names in East and Southeast Asia.
Is that 動物學大辭典?
Ha ha! As Bathrobe says, my allegedly ‘nearest’ holding is in Canberra, a mere 2,200 km away. (Must be some sense of ‘near’ I wasn’t previously aware of.) Or I could go to Hawaii, Singapore, …
Happy anniversary wishes to the Hattery.
Stating that the Japanese Industrial Revolution “was driven by” the technical translation effort is putting the cart before the horse, right? Or the horseless cart before the… never mind.
Yes. The paper purports to document that the Japanese industrial revolution was made possible by a massive dissemination of technical knowledge, which means both high quality primary education (=technical literacy) and systematic translation of terminology, standards and manuals, starting from around 1870. This was financed by a heavy land tax that was itself a result of the translation effort. Most of the economic reforms beginning in the 1850s have been shown to yield few positive (or even negative) results on Japanese output, but (my addition) some or all may have been important premises for growth once advanced technological literature was practically available.
(I guess that the land tax also was instrumental in moving capital and labor from low-yielding traditional agriculture to investments and employment in new technologies. This may eventually be discussed in the paper, but it isn’t really the topic of the study.)
Stating that the Japanese Industrial Revolution “was driven by” the technical translation effort is putting the cart before the horse, right?
Perhaps “enabled by” would be more accurate?
At any rate, it was a deep and concerted effort to learn from the West by generating the vocabulary to do so. The Chinese also attempted to create new vocabulary to render Western concepts in the latter part of the 19th century, through the translation of Western books, but these efforts were almost completely swept away by Japanese-developed terminology.
The most celebrated Chinese translator of that era was Yan Fu, of whom the Chinese are very proud, but ironically surprisingly little of his creations have actually survived.
OTOH, many of Fukuzawa Yukichi‘s kanji neologisms to translate Western concepts have survived in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. Can someone enlighten me about whether any of his neologisms made it into Vietnamese (perhaps via Chinese?)?
Happy Blogbirthday, Hat!
I don’t really know which coinages were Fukuzawa’s but 討論 is one of them according to the Internet. That is thảo luận in Vietnamese. So I would say yes, some of his neologisms made it into Vietnamese.
調査 is điều tra in Vietnamese, another clear borrowing. However, I don’t know if it was Fukuzawa’s.
There are lots more around. 社会 is xã hội in Vietnamese. 社会保険 is bảo hiểm xã hội (opposite order). Look at any Vietnamese dictionary and you’ll find a huge amount of Sino-Japanese vocabulary.
Incidentally, Japanese already had a word for ‘society’, 世間, but it was identified with ‘what other people will say or think’, the community of opinion, etc., so a new word was created to translate the word ‘society’.
The Japanese “Industrial Revolution” was driven, as it were, by a desire not to be colonized by the Western Powers like so many of the other countries around them-for example, China. The Japanese knew they had to get their act together and fast to obtain know-how from the West. This also involved inviting scholars to teach at Japanese universities. Soseki in his novels writes about his experiences with these Gaijin profs.