Joel at Far Outliers is posting excerpts from Ultra in the Pacific: How Breaking Japanese Codes and Ciphers Affected Naval Operations Against Japan, 1941-45, by John Winton, and I was struck by this passage from his latest post, Sources of (Mis)information After Pearl Harbor:
The most valuable radio intelligence was obtained from the interception and decryption of encoded or encyphered enemy messages. The Japanese themselves regarded their language as a sacred mystery, not to be vouchsafed to outsiders. Japanese hearing for the first time a Westerner speak their language were known to shake their heads disbelievingly. Such a thing was not possible; they must be dreaming.
Learning to speak or read Japanese was in itself a formidable challenge to western minds. To unravel Japanese in code would seem a virtually impossible mental obstacle. In fact, many Allied cryptanalysts found that decyphering Japanese was a matter of persistence, of ‘quantity and time rather than difficulty’. It was, if anything, tedious rather than difficult.
That mentality — that certain languages are a “sacred mystery,” unlearnable by foreigners — is so alien to my mind that I find its very existence amusing. Of course, as an embassy brat who was born in Japan and learned the language natively alongside English (though I forgot it as soon as we moved back to the States), I have a particular perspective on the issue. Still, we’re all human and any of us is capable of learning any language with enough time, work, and exposure. Nationalism carries with it all manner of silly ideas.
The notion that your language is private property and should never be shared with outsiders is quite common in North America, though for rather different reasons.
The Koasati used to teach outsiders Mobilian Jargon if they asked to learn Koasati, for this reason, and apparently many Shawnee explictly said that they would rather have the Shawnee language die out than teach it to any of the Long Knives.
The notion that the Japanese language is unique has a long history in Japanese culture; it has quite often taken the form of maintaining that the language is uniquely defective – anything rather than being a language like any other.
Still, we’re all human and any of us is capable of learning any language with enough time, work, and exposure.
Any language except Wutung!
“It appears that there is no-one in the village who has acquired Wutung as an adult; certainly, I met no-one who had done so, and Wutung people consistently claimed that this was the case. There are several individuals who married into the village more than twenty years before, and have lived there since, but while they have a good understanding of the language, they claim not to be able to speak it, and I never heard them doing so. One man who has been resident for nearly thirty years stated that he is still unable to say much, although he can understand everything said to him in Wutung.13 Even individuals who speak the closely-related language Skou and who live at Wutung are reported to have very low levels of fluency in Wutung (Mark Donohue, pers. comm.).”
Marmion (2010), “Topics in the Phonology and Morphology of Wutung”, pp. 13-14
In Japan’s Modern Myth, Roy Andrew Miller tells of how mid-twentieth-century state-supported efforts in Japan to teach the language to foreigners, sought to teach them an artificial version of the language. Foreigners could never learn the real thing, the thinking went.
Miller’s book has loads of interesting facts on Japanese sociolinguistics, though I have been told that much of it is now out of date. Especially with the influx of workers from other East Asian countries at kombini shops and other customer-facing areas, the Japanese can no longer see foreigners learning their language as that unusual.
Jack Seward, in his entertaining Japanese in Action, talks about the “Fool Valve”, the refusal of Japanese to believe that a foreigner is actually capable of speaking Japanese even if he clearly is doing. He recounts an episode when he was at a ryokan where the staff spoke no English to speak of, with an American companion of Japanese descent who spoke no Japanese at all; the staff consistently replied to Seward’s Japanese by addressing her in Japanese.
He was eventually driven to an elaborate ploy involving asking one of the maids a question about the Imperial Rescript on Education, behaviour so unmistakably Japanesoid that the message finally penetrated and the manager formally apologised for his discourtesy …
Published 1968, mind.
Seward seems to have taken a scunner to MIller’s work, incidentally:
Japanese in Action
I loved that book! I’ve never forgotten the scene in the ryokan, and have often mentioned it to people. Alas, my copy seems to have vanished in one of our many moves…
Speaking of Roy Andrew Miller: I assumed on first reading Nihongo that, in spite of his American-sounding name, he must be British because of his cultural references and attitudes, but then I found I was wrong. It still puzzles me: sometimes you’d think that not only was he British, he was unfamiliar with America, though apparently he had his career in America. Could anyone illuminate this aspect of his apparently rebarbative personality? (I mean, it’s one thing to criticize Chomsky severely, which goes with the territory of actually knowing languages, but to support his view with extensive quotations from F. R. Leavis?)
My first reaction when reading “The Japanese themselves regarded their language as a sacred mystery” is to be skeptical. It sounds too much like a romantic outsider generalization (“the X are a happy people but quick to anger”, that kind of thing).
“the X are a happy people but quick to anger”
Sounds like my kind of people. What are some values of X ?
The Y, however, are perfect in every way.
In answer to your question, I made it up, but they are probably swarthy.
they are probably swarthy
I guessed that much ! It’s those hot-blooded north-shore Mediterranean folks.
Arab children.
“In winter the children generally wear a cotton shirt, which they have a frequent practice of turning up over their shoulders : in summer, most of them go naked. Before they are able to walk much, the mothers carry them astride on one shoulder: as they are then still tolerably chubby, it is pretty to see the beautifully-formed little brown leg and foot hanging down on either side. They are frightfully passionate; and on the slightest provocation throw themselves into perfect paroxysms of fury, shrieking and stiffening themselves till they seem almost going into convulsions—a proceeding which the parents witness with stoical indifference.”
from
Sounds like my kind of people. What are some values of X ?
Welsh, obvs.
And our womenfolk have almond eyes … (almost always …)
We don’t do so well on the “guttural” aspect, though. We leave that to the Irish.
I think I have seen something about Irish almond eyes.
When Irish eyes are almonds,
Sure it’s like a morn in spring…
Russians never smile:-/
(but seriously, it means you are quite likely to see very serious Russians in situations where you expect people to smile. It does not mean that Russians literally never smile)
I’ve always understood that that is because of the Great Slav Soul.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1106509-the-worst-kind-of-soul-is-the-great-slav-soul
but seriously, it means you are quite likely to see very serious Russians in situations where you expect people to smile
Yes, I’ve had to explain this to people for half a century now. (Also that Russians tend to assume Americans are feeble-minded for smiling constantly.)
My first reaction when reading “The Japanese themselves regarded their language as a sacred mystery” is to be skeptical. It sounds too much like a romantic outsider generalization
“Japanese uniqueness” is a long-running tendency in Japanese thinking. My take (very simplistically expressed) is that it was born out of a feeling of inferiority to China, from which the Japanese derived “civilisation” (their written language, much of their philosophy, their material culture, etc.). The reaction came with the kokugaku school (18th century), who sought to reach back into early times to find something that was uniquely Japanese. Motoori Norinaga was the master in this respect, devoting his life to unravelling the ancient Japanese chronicles and literature. It was Norinaga who came up with mono no aware, a uniquely Japanese sensibility not found in the Chinese classics.
And so it went that when Japan modernised in the 19th century (in response to the West) one of the main strands in building a solid Japanese identity was to draw on and elaborate on this tradition of identifying what was “uniquely Japanese”. The imperial cult and its very Shintoist ceremonies were a creation of the 19th century. The rigid separation of Buddhism from Shintoism also dates to this era — previously the two were often intermingled. The heavily Confucian heritage of bushido is ignored in the new telling.
With the import of Western knowledge, of course, the Japanese had to grapple with the same problem they had with China. When you import another culture wholesale, what do you have that is your own? The response is to take resort in “Japaneseness” again. There is an inferiority complex at work here, but with a corresponding reaction of “Whatever we have might not measure up to what you have, but it’s ours and you can’t understand it because it’s uniquely our own”. The fact that Japan was objectively very different from the West was a good reason for coming to this conclusion. China, of course, lost its old status as the source of civilisation to become a failed state that fumbled in its encounter with modernity, incurring the contempt of a resurgent Japan.
As I mentioned above, this is a very simplified version of events, but the idea that there is something unique about Japan and its people, something that outsiders couldn’t understand or master, was still very strong at the time of Seward and (especially) in my earlier days in Japan. Things are changing, of course, but a lot of that old mindset still lingers on. I remember a (fairly unsophisticated) Japanese student in China in the 1990s who, on finding that I could speak Japanese, blurted out “But I bet you can’t eat sushi”.
Sorry for any essentialising. The picture is obviously much more complex, but an encounter with the “Japanese uniqueness” industry and mindset is a strong incentive to try to figure these things out.
Thanks, Bathrobe. It makes more sense if “The Japanese” is read as “normative Japanese mindset”: the norm can be well-defined, without implying that it is representative of a majority (or even of anyone at all). I hope that’s what Winton meant.
“was to draw on and elaborate on this tradition of identifying what was “uniquely Japanese”.”
but
“The fact that Japan was objectively very different from the West was a good reason for coming to this conclusion. ”
Japan is unique.
The people Winton was characterizing were the Japanese military top brass, who (he notes elsewhere) also suffered from a “victory mindset” (勝利 shouri) inasmuch as modernizing Japan had never lost a war since 1895 against China and 1905 against “the West.” This made them scornful of their enemies and overambitious in their war aims, planning to occupy not just China, but Australia, Hawaii, and beyond.
BTW, the author is a military cryptography historian, not a Japan historian, and the book contains quite a few typos and inconsistencies in the names of Japanese naval officers and ships, and even a few Pacific place names.
Japan is unique.
Yes, indeed: just like every other country (it’s one of the things we all have in common.)
Japan is unique.
If you are drawing dichotomies, sure. Japan vs West. But if you look for continuities and similiarities, it’s not so dramatic.
Winton is perhaps characterising the mindset over-dramatically.
@DE, I am not going to object:)
@David Eddyshaw: “at a ryokan where the staff spoke no English to speak of, with an American companion of Japanese descent who spoke no Japanese at all; the staff consistently replied to Seward’s Japanese by addressing her in Japanese.”
Yeah, and I remember once traveling with a Japanese woman in rural Australia, where locals insisted on directing their answers to her questions to me. Even after I asked them not to. Possibly they thought Australian English was uniquely sacred.
It’s not?
What would be the local equivalent of asking pointed questions about the Imperial Rescript on Education?
Something to do with Australian Rules football?
Farnarkelling (which is a thinly-disguised simplification of Aussie rules) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X454D3Fzwso
Looks legit.
I shall try it next time an Australian talks to my Australian friend instead of replying to me.
I don’t think the phenomenon is uniquely Japanese or Australian. How good was the Japanese woman’s English? Did she have a strong accent? Perhaps they were seeking a familiar face (culturally familiar face) to explain to. This was rural Australia you’re talking about. The bush, maybe, where people have less occasion to encounter Asian faces. Japanese who look for a familiar face were acting no different, although the fact that Seward’s companion knew no Japanese might have reasonably tipped them off.
Anyway, Seward’s stories were always embroidered for comic effect. He was a very good storyteller. What is more interesting was his method of breaking the baka-ben. He actually sat down and started writing the Imperial rescript on education in brush writing just as a maid was coming into his room. She was so shocked that her entire perception of him was turned around 180 degrees. That was the funny bit. (Seward also said he was lucky that he didn’t have to write much more because he actually only remembered the start of the Imperial rescript.)
Perhaps they were seeking a familiar face (culturally familiar face) to explain to. This was rural Australia you’re talking about. The bush, maybe
I have been told of visits to remote West African villages where the small boys were so frightened at the sight of Europeans that they ran away (instead of the normal healthy small-boy response of following after them shouting “European! European!” in the local language.)
It never happened to me, but that is probably because I look like a White Father* (apparently), the most familiar and least threatening sort of European. (It was a while before I worked out why I was being greeted with Bonjour, mon père all the time.)
* Actually, I think I look like the local stereotypical idea of a White Father, rather than the real thing. The few I’ve met were clean-shaven and wore shorts and T-shirts. Où sont les Pères Blancs d’antan? I’m glad to say that there are black White Fathers now, too.
I can imagine myself behaving like this because of a fear of misunderstanding.
No, I can talk to foreigners независимо от того, насколько хорошо они владеют русским и знают ли они его вообще. I can use gestures if needed. And when I am speaking a foreign language, my fears only affect my eloquency, not willingness to talk.
But the fact is, various irrational fears related to communication are common. If talking to a foreigner is an Imortant task (an Exam) and you have no idea if she understand you or not (different from normal communication) – and you need to perform well, or else you look silly…
The response is to take resort in “Japaneseness” again.
The Japanese people, it is said, have absolutely nothing in common except Japaneseness.
To add to what I wrote: There is also an element of wounded pride in this story (perhaps more often found among white people who feel they can go anywhere, learn the language, and be treated like a local — but this is just a speculative aside).
Seward was proud of his Japanese ability, which many white people in Japan did not share, and his ability to deal with locals in their own language. “I know the language; she doesn’t! Why are you talking to her?”
(The belief among Japanese that their language is uniquely difficult for non-Japanese to master would have been a contributing factor to the situation, but Ook is right, this is not a uniquely Japanese phenomenon.)
Yes, he makes quite a thing (not unreasonably, I dare say) of the remarkably low ability of many Europeans in Japan when it comes to communicating in the language, and (by implication, and also fairly explicitly) his own marked superiority in that regard (again, not unreasonably. But even so …)
Part of his gripe seems to be that people didn’t even make reasonable efforts in that direction, which rather chimes with my own feeling about not only fellow-Europeans but also southern Ghanaians in northern Ghana: admittedly, not everyone is at all interested in learning languages*, and some have even come to believe that leaning local languages is impossibly difficult anyway, but I find it hard to see any excuse for living in a place for years and not even being able to say “Good morning” properly.
* It’s true, Hatters. We are not altogether representative of the general population in some respects.
He actually sat down and started writing the Imperial rescript on education in brush writing
Seward works too hard to impress the unfortunate maid. I once shocked and impressed some Japanese colleagues by remarking that the tea they had just served me contained 玉露茶. After that, I was Mr Culture Guy, but really I had just watched how they were preparing the tea and noticed were using 玉露茶.
Well, the attitude that it’s qualitatively impossible to learn some language is alien to me, too, but on the quantitative side – your response to Georgian has been to just sit down and learn it, and let me tell you, that’s not a widespread reaction. I’m far too lazy for that.
has an exquisite taste that I might recognize (…even though the only time I had any was about 15 years ago).
After everything everyone said about 玉露茶 would be stupid to learn the translation. Better I keep thinking of it as 玉露茶, whatever it is.
But the central character has too many strokes and I don’t know it:((
But the central character has too many strokes and I don’t know it:((
Go with the flow ! GT says “gyokuro tea”.
Per DeepL:
玉露茶
variety of sweet tea produced from gyokuro tea
alternatives
wellingtons tea
variety of high-quality green tea
high-quality green tea
Wellington (‘)? s tea?
There is a British tea merchant named Wellington.
WP tells us…
Gyokuro (Japanese: 玉露, “jade dew”) is a type of shaded green tea from Japan. It differs from the standard sencha (a classic unshaded green tea) in being grown under the shade rather than the full sun. The name “gyokuro” translates as “jewel dew” (or “jade dew”).
The Tokyo tea company that invented the Gyokuro process is called Yamamotoyama 山本山. What’s going on there? I guess “Yamamoto mountain” as a first approximation, but both Yamamoto and Motoyama exist as compound toponyms, and other compounds with moto too, both first and last, so I surmise that moto is a basic toponymic element, What sort of thing is it, written with the same character as “book”?
Playing with Google Maps, I find that there’s a quarter in Yokohama called Motomachi. That’s written 元町, with another character for Moto-, the one also used for the Chinese Yuan. If I change it to 本町, i get a toponym Honcho, just a few blocks north.
The best known Motomachi (‘original town’) in Japan are in early open ports that acquired foreign settlements, in Hakodate, Yokohama, Kobe, and Nagasaki, so maybe the names were applied to distinguish the old towns from the foreign settlements. Yokohama, Kobe, and Nagasaki also have prominent Chinatowns for similar reasons. (I spent my high school years in Kobe.)
One of my retirement projects a few years ago was helping to document the names and places (in kanji & kana) on old Japanese gravestones in a large Japanese cemetery in Honolulu that dates from the early 1900s. Most gravestones list the home prefecture, town, and village where the family came from. In tracking down many of the towns, I found that most of the 町 machi had been incorporated into larger cities, where the same kanji is now read chou (in Sino-Japanese). Machi can also be written with another kanji that meant (shop-lined) ‘street’ (Sino-Japanese gai), as in a Japanese board game like Sim City, but played with dice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machi_Koro
Both Ultra in the Pacific and Ultra at sea are available via Kindle Unlimited as are most other John Winton books
> What sort of thing is it, written with the same character as “book”
The original meaning of 本 (Modern Mandarin běn, Sino-Japanese hon) was “root” or “base” — hence the glyph, which indicates the bottom part of a tree (木). As with English “root,” this could be extended metaphorically to mean “origin” or “original.” Japanese moto, which can be a kunyomi for 本, does not mean “root,” but it can mean “base,” and its metaphorical semantics are similar. Thus 本町 (honchō, honmachi, motomachi, motochō) all mean “original town.”
The common Japanese meaning of hon = “book” derives from a usage referring to “the original (of a text being copied),” later extended to refer to books in general. In modern Chinese, this usage occurs only in compounds (shūběn 書本 “books”, běnzi 本子 “notebook”, bǎnběn 版本 “edition”, zhēnběn 珍本 “rare book”) and as the measure word for books (yī běn shū 一本書 “one book”), but in modern Japanese it became the standard word for “book”. I’m not sure exactly when the latter happened, but it may have been in the Meiji period or even later. In the Edo period, hon in the sense of “book” seems to have been mostly restricted to compounds, e.g. mono no hon 物の本 “book of things” = “serious book,” ehon 絵本 “illustrated book,” yomihon 読本 “book for reading” = “novel,” etc.
Incidentally, the most common words for “book” in modern Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese are all of Sinitic derivation, but a different word became the standard in each case:
Mandarin: shū 書 (“write” > “writing” > “book”)
Korean: chaeg 冊 (“bamboo scroll” > “volume” > “book”)
Japanese: hon 本 (“root” > “original” > “book”)
Thanks for that very enlightening comment!
Thanks! I actually saw that connection to “book”, but deemed it too far out to suggest. I still don’t understand how moto “origin(al)” works as the head of a compound toponym, though. Is it a clipping of “original [town, village, house, whatever]”?
Or is it non-metaphoric use? “Physical base”? Yamamoto = “Mountain Base” or “Piedmont”? Or “source”, if Japanese makes that metaphor? Both “Mountain Spring” and “Spring Mountain” work as placenames.
Wellington Teas are named after (one of the?) first tea plantation in British Ceylon. The plantation, established in the 1860s, was, in turn, obviously named after the Iron Duke (who had died in 1852).
Yes, “Yamamoto” would naturally be interpreted as “base of the mountain,” although a quick glance at the terrain view of Google maps of various places called Yamamoto seems to indicate that this isn’t always an accurate reflection of the local topography. Similarly, “Sakamoto” = “base of the slope” and “Kawamoto” would naturally be interpreted as “source of the river” — again with varying degrees of aptness. I’m not sure how to understand place names like “Motoyama” (the name of one district in Nagoya and also a town in Kōchi prefecture).
Japanese wikipedia has a long list of places called 本町 (honchō, honmachi, motomachi; motochō seems to be much less common, but there are a few). I would be surprised if all of these are “original towns” that acquired these names after the establishment of new towns nearby. I suspect instead that the main connotation in many of these cases is something like “main town” or “town center” (for districts of larger urban areas). But I might be wrong about this — I haven’t looked into the histories of all these place names.
The Tokyo tea company that invented the Gyokuro process is called Yamamotoyama 山本山. What’s going on there?
The Japanese Wikipedia has an explanation of the name. A tea producer named Yamamoto Kahei originally from Uji (a place near Kyoto, still famous for its tea today) opened a shop in Edo in 1690. (Yamamotoyama claims to be the oldest tea company in the world.)
(Itō is another well-known tea company in Japan.)
My sense is that Motomachi written 元町 is more likely to have gotten its name for being the older, original town center, while the far more common Honmachi/Honchō written 本町 refers to the main, core, base part of town, just as 本州 names the main territory/island, not the original territory/island of Japan. Compare 沖縄本島 Okinawa-hontō ‘Okinawa main island’ and 臺灣本島 ‘Taiwan main island’.
Moto is very common in names. P. G. O’Neill’s old Japanese Names book lists just under two columns for names beginning with Moto, almost all written with 元 ‘original’ and slightly more than two columns for those beginning with 本, which is usually pronounced Hon-. So Motoda is written 元田 and Honda 本田.
All this talk about Motomachi is making me nostalgic! I lived just across the canal from it (the one in Yokohama) for five years.
To make a linguistics connection, my apartment was next door to what a plaque called the “Site of Dr. Hepburn’s House” – he of the tenacious romanization system.
“But if you look for continuities and similiarities, it’s not so dramatic.”
@Bathrobe, some people here have been to Japan, have local freinds or are Japanese themeselves. But I am a mere consumer of Japanese art (literature, anime) and I have met some Japanese people. I clearly do not “understand” their culture. But based on what I know, they’re different from both China and the West.
For people in my situation the reason for comparison to “the West” (rather than to Sentinelese people) is not just that the West are “we”. Right here under my nose I also have, say, the culture of Russian village, very different from mine. They are “we”, but I know nothing about them, and I don’t compare Japan to them.
Japan has been an industrialised country for many years. Its artists make films, its companies make cars and moreover, their art is highly influential. In other words, it is a culture that educated Russian can know something about without deviating from the usual path of an educated Russian. They’re fashionable. And an educated Russian does not assign it to a niche like “today I am reading a collection of Dogon fairy tales”. If “India” appears in this comparison too, then not because it is “Western”, but because it has Raj Kapoor.
My two points are
– Apparently, when we trace influences – this element came from China, and this thing is Western – we do miss something. “But Buddhism came from India!” does not make them less unique.
– It looks like we are discussing a Japanese sin, and some unrealistic myth of uniqueness explains it.
But it is not unrealistic.
I agree though that the formulation “sacred mystery” does sound as some ideology.
—
What bothered me was a danger of sequence like “Russians drink vodka”, “no, they are nice people, they can’t do it”, “not all Russians drink vodka” – Russian vodka drinkers would not appreciate such defence of Russia by people who are hostile to vodka:)
Or similarly:
“not all Russians are lazy” (I AM!)
“not all Ancient Greeks are bisexual”,
“not all religious people actually believe in God, a synagogue and religious rites play an important role in community life”
Etc.
“syngogue” – Ginzburg published many articles explaining why he disagrees with the concept of God but is supportive of specifically Jewish religion. Because – for him, an atheist – Judaism is not really about faith.
“for him, an atheist – Judaism is not really about faith.”
Even certain rabbis are atheists (search for “atheist rabbis”). For them, as for Vitaly Ginzburg, Judaism is more than a faith.
The same is true for virtually all the Jews I know. Which doesn’t mean that Judaism as a faith is dead or irrelevant, just that being Jewish is a complicated business.
…though what I had was called gyokuro sumei; I don’t know if that makes a difference.
Well, his argument was not “not all believers are bad, some of them actually are not believers”, his argument was “religion is wrong, I’m still supportive of Judaism”.
The problem is: lack of understanding of [believers, vodka drinkers, bisexual Greeks etc.]. There are cultural practices that I consider unambiguously bad. Still to make sense of them, I must understand people who do it. Which is difficult.