Nihongo--the Japanese Language

1

WHEN the bombing of Pearl Harbor forced a declaration of war against Japan, it became at once apparent that this country would need large numbers of Americans able to speak and read the language of the enemy. To meet this need there existed only the relatively small number of Army, Navy, and State Department men who had been assigned to Tokyo as language students, and a still smaller number of civilians who had, in one way or another, acquired varying degrees of competence. Beyond these, there were scattered yearners who became mistily soulful about Japanese flower arrangement and the dainty boredom of the tea ceremony, and uncounted millions who for years had turned their backs resolutely on Japan and things Japanese.

To create a corps of linguists, the government enlisted the aid of many universities, most of which had had no experience in Oriental studies. There were students in abundance, but in many cases teachers and textbooks were lacking.

The teacher problem should not have been so acute. Until 1933, there were several thousand Americans resident in Japan. Unfortunately, very few of those thousands could speak a sentence of Japanese or read an ideograph. While it is not flattering to national pride, it must be said that in this blindness we offended more than any other nationality. A businessman of thirty years’ residence in the country told me with relish that he not only did not know a word of Japanese, but that he did not want to. “If they want to talk to me,” he announced, “let ‘em talk white man’s talk.” Beside him may be set. an Englishman, also an oldtimer, who tried to get across to a Japanese the idea of Lindbergh’s flight. The best he could do was to call a plane (for which there is a Japanese word, of course) a nikai jidosha, meaning “second-floor automobile” — which was a tribute to his ingenuity if not to his intellectual curiosity.

Thus our national aversion to an exotic tongue canceled almost entirely what should have been an asset. At the present time most of our staffs are manned by returned missionaries (although some whom I knew were capable of little more than pidgin talk), American-born Japanese of tested loyalty, a few native-born Japanese even more carefully tested, and some Koreans. An important task lies in the hands of this group, few members of which are trained teachers.

The problem of textbooks was about as difficult. Even in Tokyo, the center of language study, such volumes were not easy to find, particularly dictionaries. So the first work of the new faculties lay in the creation of modern texts, geared to a highly accelerated course. Out of these texts should come something really definitive and American for future students.

Should a prospective student ask: “What is the Japanese language?” of two or more philologists, he might well precipitate a savage battle. One school holds that it belongs to the Ural-Altaic group and hence is vaguely associated with Korean, Mongol, Manchu, and, to the layman’s astonishment, Turkish and Finnish. Another group clings to a theory of Polynesian origin, which it backs with a wealth of illustration and some heat. A third states flatly that it belongs to no known group and is, in fact, a linguistic sport. All three do meet on one point, and in meeting shatter a widespread misconception: in no way is it akin to Chinese, save for words borrowed from the Chinese by the Japanese.

A grammarian, waving aside the philologists, might content himself with saying that it is a poverty-stricken tongue of a poverty-stricken group of islands. Pressed further, he might add that it is an agglutinative tongue, expressing its ideas in long, involved sentences loosely basted together with particles; that its nouns do not have gender, number, or case; that its verbs are not inflected for number or person; and that its adjectives and adverbs do not vary in form when used comparatively.

The rival claims of the philologists belong in the realm of science and may well be left there. But the observations of the grammarian have a direct bearing on the problems with which our soldiers, civilians, and faculties are wrestling today in many universitits.

2

I HAT the Japanese language is poverty-stricken must be apparent to any new student almost at his first plunge. Linguistically speaking, Japan has always been a debtor nation that has borrowed enormously and lent almost nothing. This poverty becomes apparent from the extent of borrowing from China alone.

In early contacts with that country, the Japanese were confronted with innumerable ideas and objects utterly unfamiliar to their own experience. To express these, they lifted the Chinese word bodily, approximated its pronunciation as nearly as possible, and incorporated it into their own tongue. If it was to serve as a verb, they added that most useful Japanese word suru, meaning “to do” or “to make.” So when the idea of study came to Japan, there was probably no suitable native word to express it and they promptly took over the Chinese noun benkyo, added their own suru, and blandly unveiled the new thought: benkyo suru, “to do or make study.” Often, through linguistic snobbery, the Chinese word replaced a Japanese word as being more elegant, more johin.

I doubt if it would be possible to state the exact number of words that have crossed the China Sea under this philological Lend-Lease, but some idea of the amazing proportion of loans may be had by running through a dictionary. Captain Brinkley’s 1896 compilation, opened at random, shows ten Chinese words in a column of twenty-two, four in another column of eighteen, and seven in one of twenty.

It was thought by some that the Westernization of Japan, with its consequent introduction of new words and ideas, might permanently oust China as a source of linguistic loans. To an important extent, Western words have come in, but China still reigns supreme. When the Japanese were faced with what the West brought them, they flew back over

the well-worn path and came up with more old Chinese words: dempo for a telegram, denwa for a telephone, shashin for a photograph, and so on, adding a Japanese verb when necessary.

A good deal of history may be traced from Western words that have been built into the language. The first occurrence of a Portuguese or Spanish word may be placed between about 1550 and 1640, the former date approximating the first Western contacts and the latter marking the closing of the country to all foreigners save the Dutch, who were still there when Perry arrived. While the Portuguese-Spanish stay was relatively brief and ended over three hundred years ago, a few words still linger to show the Iberian trace. There is a famous sponge cake made near Nagasaki called kasutera, a word which looks and sounds quite Japanese, but which is, in fact, a corruption of the Portuguese form of the word Castile. Also pan for bread, kappa for a cape, biidoro (vitro) for glass, still remain, although garasu, a corruption of the English glass, seems more in use than the old Iberian form.

It is odd that the Dutch, who were in Japan from 1601 down to our day, seem to have left no trace on the language. Nor did the first English, whose stay was brief.

With the reopening of the country, a deluge of Western words, mostly English and American in origin, swept over the country and, like earlier borrowings, were incorporated into the tongue as everyday Japanese words, often with a special ideograph assigned to express them. From many of these borrowings we may ascertain quite accurately what was new and unheard-of in what the West brought, and when a given innovation appeared.

For example, old prints and much older paintings show that the Japanese had cattle. We may deduce that such animals were used almost entirely for draft until recent times, when we find that nearly all words describing dairy products are modern English borrowings. Our butter has become the Japanese bata; milk is miruku and the substance called aisu-kurimu is as much like ice cream as the corrupted word resembles the original phrase.

A shirt is a shatsu or waishatsu, from shirt or white shirt, the original sense of the wai being largely lost, so that one may buy at Daimaru’s a blue waishatsu. Collar quickly became kara, and a Japanese who put on too much side was called haikara (high collar) in exactly the same sense that we apply the term “high-hat.” A drugstore cowboy is a mobo and his bobby-sock counterpart is a moga, these being corruptions and contractions of our modern boy and modern girl. A torrid Hollywood film at Kobe’s Shochiku-za was billed as 100 passentoera (100 per cent erotic) and the Imperial Railways gravely advertised their crack trains as 100 passento sabisu (100 per cent service).

I remember seeing Mr. Beibu (Babe) Matsui of Meiji drive a fast ball into the vast Koshien bleachers, whereat the crowd bawled: “Homuranu!” An English friend of mine was puzzled at a blaring radio during the great Inter-Prefectural Baseball Series, which bawled out the details of a doburu purei (double play), Mori to Nishi to Ono. I myself was surprised to hear a crowd at a Rugby match greet a seventy-yard punt by Mr. Mishima of Kyoto Teidai with screams of “Naisu kiku (Nice kick)!”

A scholar, coming across a borrowed word in a manuscript, could probably ascribe quite closely the earliest possible date at which it could have been written, whether the word was benkyo (study) or sabisu (service).

Against this wholesale importation, there is almost nothing to set on the credit side of the ledger. I can recall only five words that have found a fairly secure lodgment in other tongues: hara-kiri (which radio announcers and columnists distort horribly), kimono, mikado, ju-jitsu, and geisha. Of these five, only two — geisha and kimono — are commonly used by the Japanese. Hara-kiri is usually replaced by the more elegant Chinese seppuku. The Emperor is alluded to by various circumlocutions such as the archaic Dairi, Tenno-Heika, and others; judo seems to have been preferred to ju-jitsu.

3

IT WOULD be hard to find a more simple language than Japanese to pronounce, whether native words or loans are considered, for the latter are given Japanese form and molded to the standard pattern. Generally speaking, all syllables are uniformly accented and, when the word is written in Romaji (our script), each letter is pronounced. So we have Mo-ri-ta (a family name meaning Woodfield), a-rashi (storm), and Prince Ko-no-e (not K’noyah).

The few exceptions are quickly assimilated. Shita (below, under) becomes sh’ta alone or in compounds, so the General is Ya-ma-sh’ta (not Y’mashita). The sound g often has an ng quality that is hard to catch and may be best rendered thus: NAnGASAKI (Nagasaki) or TOKUnGAWA (Tokugawa).

The only sound which the Japanese habitually abuse is u, the verb form masu being usually pronounced almost mas, while the Ikuta Shrine in Kobe is something very like Ik’fta, Another pitfall is the word hito (person), alone or in combinations, for the h is given an almost Germanic ch value and the i is blurred, so the sound becomes ch’to and not hee-to as one might expect.

For the rest, the sailing is quite clear, the billows being further smoothed by the fact that there is little variation in pronunciation from one end of the Empire to the other—certainly far less than one would find between Dallas, Texas, and Bangor, Maine. In Osaka and sometimes in Kyoto you will hear the negative suffix sen rendered as hen, but such small points cause little or no trouble.

A student soon realizes that he cannot pronounce kakke (beriberi) and kaki (oyster) as carelessly as in English, and will come to articulate kak-ke in one case and ka-ki in the other. He will see that vowel qualities may change the meaning of two seemingly similar words, such as ho-hei for infantry and ho-hei for field artillery. If he is a military student he will grasp at once the difference between go-cho (corporal) and go-cho (porcupine), while still appreciating a certain factual similarity between the two.

As Chinese lacks the r sound, so Japanese lacks l. But this is by no means the only one missing. Si, di, du, hu,zi, ti, tu do not appear in the language, nor have I ever encountered a Japanese who could successfully cope with them. Similarly absent are all f sounds except fu, and all v sounds. Herbert Hoover’s patronymic becomes, in Japanese, Fu-fu-a, Fu-bu-a, or even Fu-ba.

All Japanese words and syllables, except those ending in n, which is the only final consonant they will allow, must end in a vowel. This, with the missing sounds noted above, accounts for such distortions as miruku for milk, ta-ku-shi for taxi and (although they have a perfectly good word of their own, benjo) do-bu-ru shi for W.C. While we hear stories from the Pacific Zone of great numbers of Japanese soldiers who “speak English perfectly,” I must say that I have never met a Japanese who could overcome these stumbling blocks. To one particular Japanese, who had been nearly forty years in this country without returning home, I was always Meesuta Rankasuta.

4

(GIVEN an agglutinative system whereby one may build word on word apparently at will, given a remarkably simple method of pronunciation and a vocabulary studded with recognizable terms borrowed from our own tongue, Japanese should be a fairly easy language to master. As a matter of fact, it is rivaled in difficulty only by Chinese and possibly Russian, because of a variety of factors.

One of the great obstacles is the method of writing employed throughout the Empire—the ideograph or kanji. Estimates of the number of characters in use vary with every authority, for of the known thousands — possibly as high as 80,000 — each is capable of wide variation.

By living in Japan it is quite possible to acquire a very fair abilit y to speak the language without mastering the kanji. But thus the written language remains a closed book, and one’s vocabulary grows slowly, which is not the case of a student trying to master French on the spot, where every newspaper, every signboard, every scrap of print, passes before him like a moving lexicon.

These brain-paralyzing and eye-torturing kanji are, once again, borrowed from the Chinese. There is dispute over just when they were introduced, but Sir George Sansom puts it in the neighborhood of A.D. 400. There is, however, no doubt about how the loan was made.

Up to that disputed time, Japan had no written language. When the need for one became slowly apparent, the nation turned to China instead of originating an indigenous system of notation. To a certain extent, this was simple in so far as the mere recording of meaning was concerned. The kanji for mountain (which looks like a sports writer’s symbol for a three-base hit to center field) clearly conveys the idea of a cluster of peaks, and there was no reason why a Japanese might not read it as yama or a Chinese as shan. As Sansom points out, the character stands for a definite object regardless of the sound attached to it, just as 4 may be read as four, quatre, quatros, or vier.

Difficulties arose when the Japanese wanted to indicate their own sounds by means of Chinese symbols. This led to their using a given kanji phonetically, regardless of the Chinese meaning. An early Japanese who had to write down the idea of Kyoto would search until he found a kanji that approximated the sound of Kyo and another for to.

The confusion resulting from such artificial creation continues down to the present day. In some cases, Chinese sounds have been retained. In others, Japanese translations have been substituted or even added, giving several readings to one kanji. The symbol for man may be rendered as nin or jin, both Chinese, or hito, Japanese.

A few moments spent in any public place will furnish examples of the difficulties which this system presents to the Japanese themselves. A citizen having business at the Kencho (Prefectural Office) may give his name orally. The official who writes it down must ask what characters the man uses. If a card or seal is presented, it must be ascertained just how the individual reads the kanji, for the sound ki alone has two hundred and six different meanings and may be expressed by nearly as many different kanji. Many other sounds are as bad or worse.

The reading of kanji is further complicated by a habit of taking, when two kanji are used together, half of each kanji and applying an alternative reading to it. In early railroading days the line connecting the old provinces of Harima and Tajima was known as the Ban-Tan line. This name was derived from the fact that the first of the two kanji forming Ilarima was pronounced in some other contexts as Ban instead of Ha. The first kanji or Tajima is often pronounced Tan. There still are, I suppose, two tramlines connecting Kobe and Osaka. One was called the Han-Shin, the other the Han-Kyu, both names being formed from fragments of Kobe and Osaka. To a Japanese, this practice is entirely intelligible and logical.

Because the whole structure of the Japanese language has always differed widely from Chinese, it is obvious that Japanese sentences cannot be formed from the borrowed kanji alone. About the eighth century of the Christian era, two phonetic scripts called kana came into being, kata-kana and hira-gana, the k changing in the latter to g for euphony as the Japanese understand it. These scripts or syllabaries are the closest that the Japanese have come to developing an alphabet, although they are far from the Western idea of an alphabet. Formed from fragments of kanji, they represent syllables and run pa, pi, pu, pe, po, and so on, covering only those sounds of which the Japanese is capable. The only single sounds are the vowels and the lone terminal consonant n.

These kana were first used to supply constructions and parts of speech peculiar to Japanese, and to allow the kanji to be shaped into Japanese sentences. A given page of Japanese is a strange mixture of kanji, kata-kana, and hira-gana. In many cases there is a running commentary in either kana, or both, down the side of a page to elaborate the meaning of a kanji or group of kanji. A sentence may start off with the equivalent of they, rendered in kanji plus the kana sound wa to indicate the nominative case or wo or o for the accusative.

As kanji are literally picture writing, foreign names and words can rarely be rendered by them. Then the kana is brought into play and the sounds are worked out as closely as possible, allowing for the deficiencies of native sounds and the fact that n is the only possible terminal consonant. My name gave little trouble, breaking down into Bu-ru-su Ra-n-ka-su-ta. I have found Baltimore, which contains the impossible l and ti, rendered on a Japanese Navy map — in kata-kana — as Bo-ru-chi-mo-a. Some transcriptions are unfortunate. I have seen Japanese laughing up their kimono sleeves when faced with the sign of one Dr. Barker, whose name could only be put into Japanese by the kana, Ba-ka. Phonetically, this means “fool” and is about the only term of abuse or scorn known to the Japanese.

5

THE need for Americans to learn Japanese m prewar days might have been more apparent had there existed a Japanese literature able to survive export and translation. Many are familiar with the Genji Monogatari (about A.D. 1020) of Murasaki Shikibu and may feel that it is but one example of a treasure house as yet untapped. Foreign masters of Japanese are divided on the merits of Genji. Sansom calls it one of the great books of the world, and Aston, high among Japanese scholars, agrees with him. Basil Hall Chamberlain heartily endorses Georges Bousquet’s comment: “Cette ennuyeuse Scudery japonaise.”

My own feeling is that much of Murasaki’s appeal is due to Waley’s superb translation. His English captures the very essence of the time — gently weary, thin, tenuous, nostalgic, and melancholy as the evening mists among the rushes of Lake Biwa, and wavering as the vague columns of smoke that rise from the bronze vases of Kiyomidzu-dera. The work may have appealed to Sansom and Aston chiefly as a record of court life in old Kyoto.

There is another work, ably translated, which seems little known in this country. Jippensha Ikku’s early nineteenth century book Hiza-Kurige has been called both universal and timeless and may be read without that faint feeling of affectation which Genji arouses in some readers. This work, which is authentic Japanese Rabelais, deals with the picaresque adventures of two moneyless Japanese Panurges who make the long journey afoot over the old Tokaido from Tokyo to Kyoto. There is much that is coarse and much that may be called shocking in this tale, but it rolls on with a sweep and swing, rich in laughter and gusto, utterly living and breathing.

Ikku’s book must be considered a sport, since nothing approaching it has been given the outside world in general. Since Murasaki, the native strain has remained timid in thought and prolix in expression, as witness the modern Bakin’s romance, Hakken Den (Tale of Eight Dogs), which runs to one hundred and six volumes.

Another factor that militates against Japanese literature is that most of the heroes rise to fame through what must strike a Western reader as abominable treachery and deceit, obedience to an equally treacherous lord usually being extolled as the one cardinal virtue. Readers who have toiled through the saga of the Forty-seven Ronin will be aware of the point, and the tale of the Ronin is the rule and not the exception. Pearl Harbor and the treatment of our Bataan prisoners are justified to the Japanese by age-old precedents.

Despite the fantastic output of poetry, that branch of letters has fared no better in the outer world. Most of the poems consist of five lines, totaling thirty-one syllables, and are governed by rigid conventions. Few, if any, can be translated save very roughly. The very limitations imposed by custom actually render the turning of a verse into a mere tour de force, and the content, thus cramped, can do little beyond vaguely indicating the poet’s emotions at a prescribed sight or sound. One poem, widely quoted by the Japanese, has a certain resonance and suggests solemnity: —

To construe is impossible. The first line is an exclamation repeated. The second suggests “Only this,” and the last specifies the flowers on Mount Yoshino in old Yamato.

6

A BEGINNER, having considered the various obstacles in his way, might feel a slight degree of encouragement on opening a Japanese grammar printed in Romaji. Most of the verbs are regular; one form covers all persons; negatives are usually formed with a simple suffix, as are interrogatives.

For a complete torpedoing of such encouragement, we may examine the regular verb yobu (to call) as analyzed by Arthur Rose-Innes in his Conversational Japanese. Here we find ten tenses, but no true infinitive and no real participles. Among the ten are unfamiliar forms, such as the probable past, probable present, frequentative and desiderative, but no suggestion of anything like je suis, tu es, il est to memorize.

There is plenty to occupy the memory, however. There are four different versions of the present, six of the imperative, six of the probable present, and so on. Further, these numbers are doubled by the fact that in each case the negative is a form by itself. To express the thought probably call, you may use yobo, yonde iro, yobu daro or desho, yonde iru desho, yobimasho or yonde imasho.

In the negative there is no simple tacking on of a ne . . . pas, for entirely new forms are brought into play — yobumai, yonde imai, yoba-nai daro or desho, yonde i-nai daro, yobimasumai, yonde inasumai. And all this applies merely to one tense of one regular verb. It does not help to find that some regular verbs may, here and there, present forms identical to other verbs of different meanings. The verb yomu (to read) keeps meshing with yobu, and yonde kudasai may mean either “please read” or “ please call.”

We are accustomed to make wide use of the infinitive and are brought up short when we find that there is none in Japanese. I want to read cannot be rendered by running down the Japanese word meaning “to want” and tacking on yomu. A completely new tense, the desiderative, must be used — yomitai.

Potentials also take us far from beaten paths. Can you speak English? is usually rendered Eigo wo hanasu-koto-ga dekimasu-ka (English speak-thing can)? While this is fairly simple, it is more customary to alter the verb itself by tacking on a potential suffix, which further complicates conjugations.

Nor are we on more familiar ground with the word expressing the thought to be, which assumes almost as many guises as the tanuki of Japanese folklore. For, having assimilated aru, de aru, gozaru, and de gozaru with all their ramifications, we find lurking around still another group approximating to be. This group was originally applied to animate beings only and covered everything from consulsgeneral to mosquitoes. With the increased tempo of modern life it is often stretched to cover moving objects such as trains, rickshas, and even the sun and moon. Then the next discovery is that to be may often be omitted or replaced by to do (suru) or to become (naru).

To have leads us into alien pastures. Never does this verb, such a useful auxiliary in other languages, serve to indicate completed action in the past. Indeed, it is often, in our sense, replaced by to be unless its use implies actual physical possession. When it does come into play as an auxiliary, it goes into a clumsy compound to express the thoughts to bring and to take, which by Japanese logic become possesscome and possess-go, somewhat suggesting the Hindustani take-come and take-go.

Permissives, imperatives, and obligatives whirl about in a maze of Nipponese whimsy. You may go to the bank turns into Going to the bank will be all right. Don’t throw away this book even if it is old comes out as Although this book may have grown old,throwing it away will not go, and the “will not go ” is a literal translation of ikemasen. There is no convenient omnibus expression like our you must or the French il faut. A whole phrase must be used, such as If you don’t do it, it won’t go — Shinakereba, ikemasen.

Definite imperatives, to be strictly correct, must be neatly wound up. In fact, they are likely to miss their purpose if they are not. I once told an amah to take a book upstairs and put it on the table. She gravely trotted off and returned as gravely, still holding the book. To her Nipponese mind, I, for some inexplicable Occidental reason, had wanted her to give the book a ride up and down the stairs. My error lay in not saying, “Put the book on the table and leave it there.” If you tell your office boy to go out and buy cigarettes for you, you will do well to complete the order: “Tabako wo katte kinasai — Go buy tobacco and come back.”

7

PRONOUNS are often omitted, if not almost universally. After a glance at this part of speech one can only wish that the omission were absolute. Take the best-loved personal pronoun — I — and run it through its Nipponese course. Brinkley lists no less than twelve forms, some of which may be used at will, some by special classes or groups or under certain conditions.

Nouns, adjectives, and adverbs are not much more difficult than those encountered in any other new language, although the adjectives and adverbs, under certain conditions, undergo virtual declensions patterned somewhat on Japanese verbs. To compare them, motto in the sense of more is prefixed in the comparative; and in the superlative the Japanese says, unbelievably, ichi-ban or number one — as number one good for best.

Having looked at some aspects of the unassembled parts of the Japanese language, the student may be tempted to build some of them into a sentence. Remembering Latin or German struggles, he may approve of the Japanese lack of relative pronouns and clauses. The custom of having modifying words precede the principal clause may also appeal to him. In the latter case, he wall be quite right.

But he will find that he has been horribly wrong about relatives when he tries such a sentence as The man who sat next to me last night is the Osaka branch manager of Brown & Company of New York. To get across that gem of thought, something like the following must be sweated out: Last night’s my-sitting-beside-man New York’s Brown Company’s Osaka’s branch’s manager is.

It would be bad enough if the Japanese were content to use standard forms, but they have a habit of contracting and changing that makes German with its words of the Gestapo type seem downright docile. It is all very well to say that the past tense of the verb meaning “to write” is kakimashita, but the Japanese sees nothing illogical in shaving it down to kaita, or in contracting ikimasho (which may be rendered as “let’s go”) into iko.

In combinations, words have maddening habits of changing letters or dropping whole syllables. My chief told me once that he had been playing golf at Akaboshi, which I thought should have meant “Red Hat.” Not at all. Theaka(i) was all right for “red,” but as my foreign ear had not caught the short o, the second half was really hoshi (star), the Japanese changing the h to b — and thus phonetically turning it into “hat” — because they liked it better that way.

When you call for a redcap at a station, you translate literally — on paper. Actually, you drop the i from akai and the shi from bos hi and an akabo answers your call. I once translated Kagoshima as “Basket Island” and found how wrong I was. True, kago does mean “basket” or “litter,” and shima does mean “island”—but not in this combination. The Ka I found to be an endearing prefix; go was really ko, meaning “little.” The shima was all right, to my surprise. So I came up with “Beloved Islet.” But shima can do unpredictable things. It stays untouched in Kagoshima, but in “Temple Island” it switches to Miya-jima. And in Tokyo the “Bridge of Japan,” which ought to be Nihon Hashi, twists into Nihombashi. I’ve scaled 3000-foot Rokko-san in Kobe and ancient Hiei-zan in Kyoto,

Every difficulty hitherto touched on fades into the realm of dummy-scrimmage when numerals are encountered. There are three sets of cardinal numbers up to ten, which is not too bad. But when you plunge into auxiliary numerals and try to count things, you find that the language is broken up into classifications of words, laid down, so far as the Occidental mind can see, with complete disregard for logic.

Sir Ernest Satow’s dictionary lists no fewer than seventy-eight different sets of numerals, each of which must be applied to its proper class of word. One set governs fish, insects, quadrupeds, actors, and certain measures of silk. Another covers goods, baggage, hats, regiments, and watches. A third goes with baskets, candles, scissors, guns, guitars, and India ink. It is probable that the average Japanese uses only a fraction of the seventy-eight, but that fraction still is impressive to the foreigner and important to the student. If you speak of four whales and use the auxiliary that should go with roads and towels, not only will you have erred badly but you may not be understood. It need not be added that many of these auxiliaries are irregular.

The honorific form is about the only manifestation of Japanese that has caught our public mind, although I should say that to translate any of these terms by honorable was wrong — if I could think of a better word in English. Honorifics are rooted in an ancient national habit of crying down the speaker and deferring to the listener, if they are of about the same status. You refer to your own mother as ha-ha, but to another’s as o-ka-sama, which combines two honorifics, the prefix o and the suffix sama. Further deference may be indicated by special nouns and verbs or verb forms. One word meaning “to give” suggests handing something up to a person; another reaching down and hence condescending.

Many common words have had the honorific o tacked onto them so long that it has lost most of its significance. I don’t recall ever having heard the word for a bath or for tea used without the o. To ask for hot water, you not only apply the honorific but undergo another bit of Nipponese whimsy. There is a word for hot and a word for water, but if you ask for atsui mizu the chief result will be a blank stare. You must use the one word o-yu, meaning “hot water.”

To a Japanese, the various gradations of formality are so inbred that he follows them automatically. Most of them are based on ancient usage, and it is doubtful if any foreigner, no matter how adaptable, can ever master all the intricacies. But the Japanese is likely to be hopelessly at sea when he runs into a set of circumstances not covered by old codes, He will go astray in manners on a train, at the cinema, or at a foreign dinner, for in none of these settings is he sheltered by old usage.

These are some of the aspects of the language with which many young Americans and their teachers are now struggling. The purpose of the struggle is grim. When we landed in Sicily we were able to put ashore at once, with the combat troops, large numbers of Italian-speaking Americans. As our armies pushed on, other linguists settled down to help administer the shattered territories. Shall we ever be able to land Japanese-speaking Americans at Kobe, Moji, or Yokkaichi? The answer to this question, which lies in the hands of these teachers and students, will vitally affect the war years to come and the long period of readjustment that will follow them.