私はネコである。名前はもうない。

【６５】Japanese, English, and the Abolition of Kanji

　As a rule, I write the articles on my Facebook page and blog in both Japanese and English. If the source materials are in English, then I write first in English and then translate to Japanese. I don’t find this too difficult.
　However, when the source materials, etc. are in Japanese, then I usually write first in Japanese and then translate to English. This is a little bit more trouble.
　Japanese can be expressed in one type of ideograms called Kanji, and two sets of phonetic symbols called hiragana and katakana. In addition, by using “particles,” the word order within a sentence is quite flexible.
　On the other hand, English must all be expressed with only 26 letters. Those convenient “particles” do not exist, which limits flexibility in word order.
　Incidentally, the Japanese phonetic symbols are called “goju on” (fifty sounds), but actually if you add in the voiced ga, za, da, and ba lines, the half-voiced pa line, and the small symbols for tsu, ya, yu, yo, and wa, there are 76 hiragana. In katakana, there is also a symbol for the letter “v”, so there are 77 katakana. Added to that, there are 2,136 kanji approved for general use, which have a total of 4,388 different pronunciations. You can make very subtle distinctions in the meaning of a sentence by carefully choosing which symbols to use.
　As a result, there is no comparison to how much more freedom there is in writing Japanese sentences. Often if I think of a good ironic expression in Japanese, it is very difficult to make it work in English.
　Japanese has world-class expressive power, but in preparing my last article where I explained some of the history of Kimigayo, I ran across some surprising facts about the first Japanese Minister of Education, Arinori Mori.
　Mori studied in England as a teenager and was highly proficient in English. This pioneer of bilingual education thought that Japanese should be abolished and English adopted as the national language of Japan. He seems to have considered the complexity of kanji to be a major problem.
　It is true that the kanji used at the beginning of the Meiji Period (1868～) were much more numerous and complicated. Written Japanese was customarily written more or less in an inconvenient Chinese style, different from spoken Japanese. Because Japan was behind the times, even the very concepts expressed in English words necessary to learn politics, economics, and science did not exist in Japanese.
　For example, the words “shakai” (society), “sonzai” (existence), “shizen” (nature), “kenri” (rights), “jiyu” (freedom), “kojin” (individual), “hinsei” (character), “jinkaku” (personality), “joho” (information), “kindai” (modern), “bi” (beauty), “ren’ai” (romantic love), “geijutsu” (art), “kare/kanojo” (him/her), etc. did not exist in the Edo Period (1603～1868). These Japanese words were generated by the forward thinkers of the Meiji Period.
　If these words could not be used, then the job of writing Japanese must have been frustrating slow. Thus, Mori’s feelings are understandable. But from a current perspective, the ideas of Mori, who was assassinated at age 41, appear to be the rashness of youth.
　As a matter of fact, there is a country near Japan which abolished kanji altogether in favor of a set of phonetic symbols to be used exclusively. As a result, the people cannot read books or newspapers published as late as 70 years ago, and cannot squarely face their true history. Whether this is a tragedy or a comedy, that is the question.