a large sign. My father, of course, lost no time in getting rid of that sign!
Another friend was Mount Fuji. I used to get up very early, while my parents were still asleep, and creep out of the house and down onto the sand, and run along to the rocks at our end of the beach. I would make myself comfortable there on one of the rocks, and gaze for hours across Sagami Bay at the mountain, always radiantly beautiful in the dawn light.
That is how I filled in my mornings while my Japanese friends were busy with their homework.
CHAPTER 9
The Japanese Language
I DO NOT think many Westerners realize how extraordinarily hard Japanese have to work, from the time they are young children, in order to memorize the basic 1,006 kanji – the Chinese whole-word ideograms they are required to learn during their six grades of elementary school. And that is in addition to the two alphabets of fifty-six syllables each, called kana, which a Japanese monk invented in the ninth century when Chinese writing was adopted, to enable Japanese people to conjugate verbs and indicate Japanese parts of speech such as particles and prepositions, because of the great difference between Chinese and Japanese. (See also page 6, note 1.)
One’s mind truly boggles to think of all those complicated writing symbols the Japanese people have to cope with, when all we have is just one twenty-six-letter alphabet, or two if you separate capitals and small letters. In comparison with theirs, our written language is mere child’s play. Those 1,006 basic kanji, which must be mastered in primary school, are just the beginning. In addition to both fifty-six syllable kana alphabets, children must finish high school with a knowledge of 1,945 kanji, which is the present post-war figure officially endorsed for current use. In 1946, the government had issued a list of 1,850 characters, recommending that people confine themselves to these. But most newspapers still use about 2,500. And now they hardly ever make use of those helpful tiny hiragana that once upon a time were printed alongside difficult kanji indicating their pronunciation.
But it was much worse before the war. Then about 6,000 kanji were in use, and I remember often seeing Japanese gentlemen working out on the palms of their hands, while conversing, what certain kanji were! You do not see that now. Having the number of kanji for current use officially curtailed after the war enables many words now to be spelled out simply in hiragana, and many of the remaining kanji have thankfully been simplified. It was the pre-war variety that I later worked so hard to try and learn during some free periods at my English boarding school!
But learning written Japanese still takes a great deal of time, since besides memorizing over 2,000 of those complicated hieroglyphics, there is also the problem as to how they are pronounced. Kanji have a far greater variety of pronunciations than our few words that are written the same but pronounced differently. Each kanji has at least two pronunciations – the kun or Japanese reading, and the on or Chinese-derived reading.
Chinese is to Japanese what Latin is to English. Just as we use Roman letters, the Japanese use Chinese symbols, and just as the English language often has both native Anglo-Saxon words and Greek or Latin-derived words for the same things – for example ‘walking’ and ‘ambulation’ – Japanese similarly has both native Japanese words and Chinese-derived words. It is the same sort of connection. And moreover, the British are not a bit like the Italians and Greeks, although they look alike. Similarly, the Chinese and Japanese are not a bit alike in spite of looking more or less the same!
Surprisingly, where our Latin or Greek-derived words are invariably long words in English, the Chinese-derived words are very short in Japanese! Clarity-loving Winston Churchill used to say, ‘Don’t use a long word where a short word will do,’ but strangely enough it is the other way round in Japanese. Long Japanese words are much clearer and easier to understand than the short Chinese-derived words, of which so many sound alike.
Americans tend to use long words more than we do. For in-stance American stations have signs saying, ‘Expectoration forbidden’ while we just have ‘Do not spit’! And there was a teacher at my American university who deliberately used long words. Instead of saying, ‘Please phone me about it’ she would say ‘I shall require your telephonic communication’.
The kana alphabets invented by those Japanese monks are imperative in making meaning clear. Nouns and verb roots are generally written in kanji with the verb endings, prepositions, etc., added in kana script. For instance, here is the kanji for ‘walk’ 歩, basically read ‘aru’. Followed by き, the syllable ki in hiragana, the word becomes aruki, ‘walking’. The same kanji followed by ‘kô’ becomes hokô, ‘ambulation’, the Chinese-derived word for ‘walking’. It is just as if we had a picture-word for ‘walk’, and if you saw X-ing you would read it ‘walking’, and if you saw X-tion you would automatically know it should be read ‘ambulation’. This in itself shows how intellectually challenging written Japanese is!
Before the Second World War many more kanji were used, but now that thankfully the list of kanji has been officially shortened, let us hope that the two kana alphabets will be used more and more. It is interesting that the difference between katakana and hiragana is the same as the difference between the two varieties of our own alphabet – upper and lower case; katakana, like our capitals, is angular, whereas hiragana, like our small letters, is cursive.
You can see this difference in the Japanese vowels. Notice the different order from ours. The pronunciation is as in: ‘But he soon set off.’
| A | I | U | E | O |
| ア | イ | ウ | エ | オ |
(katakana)
| a | i | u | e | o |
| あ | い | う | え | お |
(hiragana)
Apart from the vowels, the only other single Roman letter sound in the Japanese kana alphabet is N (n) ン（ん) as used at the end of a word, because the alphabet is made up of syllables. consisting of the vowel sounds, in that order, preceded by successive consonants in the order K, S, T, N, H, M, Y, R, W, as follows:
KA KI KU KE KO, SA SHI SU SE SO, etc.
Certain syllables do not exist. For instance, SI, instead of which there is SHI. Neither are there any L syllables at all.
The nearest approach to f is the syllable fu.
G, Z, D, B and P syllables are formed by adding diacritical marks to the K, S, T, and H syllabic symbols.
Katakana are almost exclusively used today to spell foreign words and foreign names, for like any growing language, over the years Japanese has taken in a large proportion of words from abroad. Many Dutch and Portuguese words entered the Japanese language hundreds of years ago, such as pan from the Portuguese pao meaning ‘bread’, buriki from the Dutch blik, meaning ‘tin’, and koppu from the Dutch kopje, meaning ‘a drinking glass’, which I keep on mixing up with ‘cup’!
In later years, words from other European countries crept in, such as arubaito from the German arbeit (work) which in Ja-pan means ‘work on the side’, and abekku from the French avec (with) which has come to mean not just plain ‘with’ but ‘boy with girl’ – in other words ‘a courting couple’! But the language which has infiltrated Japanese to the greatest extent is the English language, and is going on apace. English has received from Japan a fair number of words itself, such as ‘geisha’, ‘ kimono’, ‘obi’, ‘samisen’, ‘ kakemono’, ‘ rickshaw’, ‘ tycoon’, ‘mikado’ and ‘ tsunami’, as a glance through any dictionary will show, but the greater debt by far is on the other side. Countless English words are by now well established in the Japanese language, and many have been abbreviated out of all recognition, such as suto, which is short for sutoraiku (strike), and biru, which is