Departments
Notes on the Japanese Language
Adapted from the book Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One (ISBN: 0-9748330-1-0)
Japanese is spoken by about 130 million people, most of who live in the Japanese islands. Japanese is not a global language like Spanish, French, or English, but the language is understood in a number of locations outside Japan. During an extended business trip to Sao Paulo, Brazil, I was surprised to discover that many of the second-, third-, and fourth-generation Japanese living in the area still understood the language.
In fact, a number of Japanese-language newspapers and radio stations continue to thrive in the Sao Paulo area, although the influx of Japanese immigrants tapered off more than half a century ago.
During the Great Depression, Japan's economy was thoroughly battered, prompting an outpouring of economic refugees. American laws to limit Asian immigration had recently made the U.S. a less than friendly destination. Brazil, conversely, had liberal immigration laws, and millions of acres of cheap farmland. The Japanese came by the thousands, and the region surrounding Sao Paulo, Brazil, today hosts the largest Japanese population outside the home islands. The Japantown, or Nihonmachi district of Sao Paulo is a bustling mixture of Japanese restaurants, bookstores, and other interesting businesses. The area might easily be mistaken for one of the smaller cities in Japan, were it not for a few excessively quaint touches that are obviously designed for tourists, such as streetlights shaped like traditional Japanese lanterns.
Ironically, the Brazilian-born children and grandchildren of many of the original economic immigrants from Japan themselves became guest workers in the land of their forebears. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Japan's factories were operating at full capacity, and the country experienced a severe labor shortage. Although Japan had always had tight immigration controls, guest workers from abroad were granted temporary work visas. These guest workers came from a variety of countries, but Brazilians of Japanese descent comprised a singularly large percentage.
The Japanese immigrants to the United States settled mostly in California and Hawaii. In the American tradition of the Melting Pot, the language was preserved for superficial ceremonial purposes, but mostly vanished from everyday communications. Although remnants of Japanese culture persisted in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, these lacked the linguistic authenticity of Sao Paulo's Nihonmachi.
Then, in the 1980s, the Japanese language began to receive widespread attention in the United States. Japanese citizens suddenly had money, and their favorite tourist destination was America. Japanese businesses were also coming to the United States. A new influx of Japanese came to southern California as expatriate managers for companies like Sony, Ricoh, and Toshiba. Service companies like the Japan Travel Bureau followed.
Local companies vied for a share the nouveau riche yen, often using the Japanese language as a sales and marketing tool. At the height of the Japanese investment boom in the United States during the early 1990s, Japanese-speaking tour guides, interpreters, and real estate agents enjoyed a lucrative seller's market.
The existence of so many Japan-related jobs, and the rise of Japan as a major industrial power caught the attention of educators. The Japanese language, which had previously been relegated to the academic backwater of Far Eastern Studies, suddenly became a sought-after skill for engineers, MBAs, and others in the "mainstream." Every university seemed to be starting a Japanese-language program, or looking for a qualified instructor to start such a program. Prior to 1987, self-instruction books and courses for learning Japanese were as sparse as hen's teeth. By 1992, the Japanese instructional market was outpacing that of practically every other language.
Japan's economy hit the skids in the mid-1990s, and world events have since propelled a number of other languages to greater prominence. NAFTA revived Americans' flagging interest in the Spanish language, and the emergence of a unified Europe renewed interest in old favorites like French and German. In more recent years, the economic boom in China, and problems in the Middle East have perhaps made Chinese and Arabic the new "cutting edge" languages. The Japanese language has lost some of the luster it had back in 1990 or so, when "Japanese-style management techniques" were all the rage, and the press heralded the coming of Pax Nipponica.
Nonetheless, there are still plenty of good reasons for learning Japanese. While Chinese and Arabic may become more significant to the United States in future decades, Japanese is more commercially advantageous at the present time. Japanese is spoken in the boardrooms of Toyota, Honda, and other universally recognized corporations. Moreover, you do not have to travel to Japan to take advantage of all this Japan-related work. Japanese speakers are frequently sought by automotive component manufacturers in the Detroit area—about as far away from the streets of Tokyo as one can possibly get. Japan is a major player not only in automobiles, but also in consumer electronics, machine tools, and steel.
Japanese is an agglutinative language. This means that most words are formed by combining one morpheme (the smallest meaningful unit of a language) with other morphemes. True competency in Japanese is reached by learning how the various pieces of the language are used in combination. Example sentences are a key aspect of learning any language—but they are especially important when learning Japanese.
Japanese is classified as one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn. Learning Japanese requires you to enter an entirely new language paradigm. Although the language has borrowed a small number of words from English, German, and other Western languages, you will be mostly unaided by cognates. Japanese grammar does not resemble anything that you learned in English, Spanish, or German class. Sentences can exist without subjects, adjectives often behave like verbs, and the passive verb tense is used extensively. Japanese word order seems to have been deliberately designed to be the diametric opposite of English grammatical rules. Verbs typically fall at the end of the sentence. When you say, "I went to the office" in Japanese, you literally say, "I to office went."
Politeness, humility, familiarity and disdain are conveyed in Japanese through subtle distinctions in the parts of speech. You can insult or complement someone by your choice of a verb. There are several polite endings that can be added to a person's name, such as the suffix –san. When you are first learning Japanese, you may occasionally make a mistake and say something that is insulting or overly familiar. However, the Japanese are usually patient with foreigners who make such gaffes.
The most intimidating aspect of Japanese is the writing system. Japanese is written with two syllabaries - which are similar to alphabets - and about 2,000 Chinese characters known as kanji. However, Japanese instructional texts often make use of romaji - Japanese transliterated into the Latin alphabet. Therefore, you can learn grammar, vocabulary, etc., while you are still getting up to speed in the written language.