Globish, Technology, and the Plight of the Japanese Language (Part Two)

English and its various international manifestations — such as the strange phenomenon of ‘Globish,’ which I discussed in a previous article — represent a significant factor in the continuing effects of globalism in Japan and other countries. It is unlikely that English would have spread as quickly in a country like Japan simply with the aid of market and territorial expansion frequently seen in the New Imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries. More importantly, the culture of technology has played a crucial role in the unprecedented acceleration of the  propagation of the English language across the globe, especially in countries as wired and technologically sophisticated as Japan.

Regardless of language and local dialect, the internet has singlehandedly ushered in the developing world to an unprecedented reliance on digital machines, in particular, on keyboard/keypad/touch-based input to create and transmit ideas that up until now had been relegated to face-to-face dialogue and handwriting. What is less easily determined, however, is whether the effects that this new phenomenon has imposed on languages and culture should be viewed as profoundly damaging or merely as the next phase of an evolution in the way we exchange ideas and interact with each other.

Emily Parker of The New York Times argues that such technology is not only damaging, but the effects felt within Japan in particular are much more “wrenching” than the resulting “sloppy grammar and spelling” seen in English speaking countries. Even now, Japanese is a high-maintenance language with a three-tiered writing system that normally requires years of schooling just to achieve standard literacy.  Given the amount of time and effort involved, it is no small feat that Japan has up to now maintained an excellent track record with a reported literacy rate of 99%.

Unfortunately, the ability to read and understand kanji characters with their multiple semantics intact does not necessarily facilitate the ability to write the same characters from memory.  As such it is natural to forget characters completely when they are not used frequently, much in the same way an actor begins to forget lines if they are not recited regularly. Such has been the effect of rampant cell phone and web use in Japan, where the strokes that make up the characters are reduced to a single button or touchscreen icon.

As a result of widespread keyboard and keypad-based input, it is no longer necessary to write kanji characters on a daily basis. Thanks to the influx of transliterated, technology-related English terminology (which has introduced to the Japanese lexicon words like “blog,” “internet,” “e-mail,” “proxy,” “download,” “click,” “bookmark,” “appli(cation),” etc.) one could argue that the Japanese language as we know it is indubitably being ‘watered down.’

Whether or not this is a step in the evolution of a living language (or a sign of its imminent demise), I believe the language-filtration process to be an implicit mixture of both death and rebirth: the Japanese of the past is slowly fading away and giving rise to a ‘new’ Japanese language… yet again. A quick look into the past reveals that English is by no means the first language to have supposedly ‘invaded’ the Japanese lexicon. Wasei Kango [和製漢語] (words directly adopted from the Chinese language and modified for usage in Japanese) currently constitutes over 50% of the Japanese language.  In other words, over half of the modern Japanese vocabulary was never inherently ‘Japanese’ to begin with.

Nevertheless, the use of a great deal of these words has been linguistically modified within the Japanese language to a point at which they are not even used in the same way as in China, even though the characters themselves are written the same. Zhaozhong Li of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences emphasizes the stark differences between Chinese and Japanese kanji in his article, “Two Worlds Represented in Chinese Characters”. For example, the word “勉強” translates to “study” in Japanese, but in Chinese the meaning is construed as “reluctantly” or “forced to [do something].”  “夫” means “healthy” in Chinese, and yet translates to “solid/sturdy” in Japanese.  The examples are multitudinous.

Perhaps the most preeminent aspect Li points out here is the demonstrated ability of the Japanese to neither “passively accept” nor “pridefully reject” the usage of Chinese characters. Instead they “voluntarily obtain every character… [and] thoroughly digest” them. This attitude “boldly remodel[s] the characters to meet their own needs,” hence remaking them in “their own language.” In essence, the Japanese language has never been ‘watered down’ by Chinese; rather, the Japanese were the ones who actively assimilated the Chinese language at their own convenience.

It is upon this basis that I firmly believe that the same process is taking place with English. The only difference between now and what had occurred in the past is the presence of technology, which has rapidly accelerated the transmission of global culture and English into the Japanese state-of-mind. After all, as Cliff Goddard highlights in his book The Languages of East and Southeast Asia, the influence of China in the evolution of Japanese is “ancient but pervasive,” and represents a period of time spanning centuries from as early as the first millennium (Japan did not even have any formal contact with the West until the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854). As such, my concern does not rest so much upon the plight of the Japanese language itself in relation to English, but is focused rather upon the broader issue of a potent, technology-facilitated dissemination of global (i.e. Western) culture, of which the English language is merely a carrier.

David Bahia is a writer-translator living and working in Tokyo.