But the only hitherto apparent evidence of such defects is an excessive clinging to the letter of the law; a marked reluctance to exercise discretion; and that, perhaps, is attributable rather to the habit of obedience. Certainly the Japanese have proved themselves capable of great things, and their achievements seem to have been helped rather than retarded by their attention to detail.
III.—Language and Literature
Language.—Since the year 1820, when Klaproth concluded that the Japanese language had sprung from the Ural-Altaic stock, philologists have busied themselves in tracing its affinities. If the theories hitherto held with regard to the origin of the Japanese people be correct, close relationship should exist between the Japanese and the Korean tongues, and possibly between the Japanese and the Chinese. Aston devoted much study to the former question, but although he proved that in construction the two have a striking similarity, he could not find any corresponding likeness in their vocabularies. As far back as the beginning of the Christian era the Japanese and the Koreans could not hold intercourse without the aid of interpreters. If then the languages of Korea and Japan had a common stock, they must have branched off from it at a date exceedingly remote. As for the languages of Japan and China, they have remained essentially different throughout some twenty centuries in spite of the fact that Japan adopted Chinese calligraphy and assimilated Chinese literature. Mr K. Hirai has done much to establish his theory that Japanese and Aryan had a common parent. But nothing has yet been substantiated. Meanwhile an inquirer is confronted by the strange fact that of three neighbouring countries between which frequent communication existed, one (China) never deviated from an ideographic script; another (Korea) invented an alphabet, and the third (Japan) devised a syllabary. Antiquaries have sought to show that Japan possessed some form of script before her first contact with either Korea or China. But such traces of prehistoric letters as are supposed to have been found seem to be corruptions of the Korean alphabet rather than independent symbols. It is commonly believed that the two Japanese syllabaries—which, though distinct in form, have identical sounds—were invented by Kukai (790) and Kibi Daijin (760) respectively. But the evidence of old documents seems to show that these syllabaries had a gradual evolution and that neither was the outcome of a single scholar’s inventive genius.
The sequence of events appears to have been this:—Japan’s earliest contact with an over-sea people was with the Koreans, and she made some tentative efforts to adapt their alphabet to the expression of her own language. Traces of these efforts survived, and inspired the idea that the art of writing was practised by the Japanese before the opening of intercourse with their continental neighbours. Korea, however, had neither a literary nor an ethical message to deliver, and thus her script failed to attract much attention. Very different was the case when China presented her noble code of Confucian philosophy and the literature embodying it. The Japanese then recognized a lofty civilization and placed themselves as pupils at its feet, learning its script and deciphering its books. Their veneration extended to ideographs. At first they adapted them frankly to their own tongue. For example, the ideographs signifying rice or metal or water in Chinese were used to convey the same ideas in Japanese. Each ideograph thus came to have two sounds, one Japanese, the other Chinese—e.g. the ideograph for rice had for Japanese sound kome and for Chinese sound bei. Nor was this the whole story. There were two epochs in Japan’s study of the Chinese language: first, the epoch when she received Confucianism through Korea; and, secondly, the epoch when she began to study Buddhism direct from China. Whether the sounds that came by Korea were corrupt, or whether the interval separating these epochs had sufficed to produce a sensible difference of pronunciation in China itself, it would seem that the students of Buddhism who flocked from Japan to the Middle Kingdom during the Sui era (A.D. 589–619) insisted on the accuracy of the pronunciation acquired there, although it diverged perceptibly from the pronunciation already recognized in Japan. Thus, in fine, each word came to have three sounds—two Chinese, known as the kan and the go, and one Japanese, known as the kun. For example:—
| “KAN” SOUND. |
“GO” SOUND. |
JAPANESE SOUND. |
MEANING. | |||
| Sei | Jo | Koe | Voice | |||
| Nen | Zen | Toshi | Year | |||
| Jinkan | Ningen | Hito no aida | Human being. |
As to which of the first two methods of pronunciation had chronological precedence, the weight of opinion is that the kan came later than the go. Evidently this triplication of sounds had many disadvantages, but, on the other hand, the whole Chinese language may be said to have been grafted on the Japanese. Chinese has the widest capacity of any tongue ever invented. It consists of thousands of monosyllabic roots, each having a definite meaning. These monosyllables may be used singly or combined, two, three or four at a time, so that the resulting combinations convey almost any conceivable shades of meaning. Take, for example, the word “electricity.” The very idea conveyed was wholly novel in Japan. But scholars were immediately able to construct the following:—
| Lightning. | Den. | |||
| Exhalation. | Ki. | |||
| Electricity. | Denki. | |||
| Telegram. | Dempō. | Hō = tidings. | ||
| Electric light. | Dentō. | Tō = lamp. | ||
| Negative electricity. | Indenki. | In = the negative principle. | ||
| Positive electricity. | Yodenki. | Yo = the positive principle. | ||
| Thermo-electricity. | Netsudenki. | Netsu = heat. | ||
| Dynamic-electricity. | Ryūdo-denki. | Ryūdo = fluid. | ||
| Telephone. | Denwa. | Wa= conversation. |
Every branch of learning can thus be equipped with a vocabulary. Potent, however, as such a vehicle is for expressing thought, its ideographic script constitutes a great obstacle to general acquisition, and the Japanese soon applied themselves to minimizing the difficulty by substituting a phonetic system. Analysis showed that all the required sounds could be conveyed with 47 syllables, and having selected the ideographs that corresponded to those sounds, they reduced them, first, to forms called hiragana, and, secondly, to still more simplified forms called katakana.
Such, in brief, is the story of the Japanese language. When we come to dissect it, we find several striking characteristics. First, the construction is unlike that of any European tongue: all qualifiers precede the words they qualify, except prepositions which become postpositions. Thus instead of saying “the house of Mr Smith is in that street,” a Japanese says “Smith Mr of house that street in is.” Then there is no relative pronoun, and the resulting complication seems great to an English-speaking person, as the following illustration will show:—
| Japanese. | English. | |
| Zenaku wo saiban suru tame no Virtue vice-judging sake of mochiitaru yūitsu no hyojun wa used unique standard jiai no kōi tada benevolence of conduct only kore nomi. this alone. |
The unique standard which is used for judging virtue or vice is benevolent conduct solely. |
It will be observed that in the above sentence there are two untranslated words, wo and wa. These belong to a group of four auxiliary particles called te ni wo ha (or wa), which serve to mark the cases of nouns, te (or de) being the sign of the instrumental ablative; ni that of the dative; wo that of the objective, and wa that of the nominative. These exist in the Korean language also, but not in any other tongue. There are also polite and ordinary forms of expression, often so different as to constitute distinct languages; and there are a number of honorifics which frequently discharge the duty of pronouns. Another marked peculiarity is that active agency is never attributed to neuter nouns. A Japanese does not say “the poison killed him” but “he died on account of the poison;” nor does he say “the war has caused commodities to appreciate,” but “commodities have appreciated in consequence of the war.” That the language loses much force owing to this limitation cannot be denied: metaphor and allegory are almost completely banished.
The difficulties that confront an Occidental who attempts to learn Japanese are enormous. There are three languages to be acquired: first, the ordinary colloquial; second, the polite colloquial; and, third, the written. The ordinary colloquial differs materially from its polite form, and both are as unlike the written form as modern Italian is unlike ancient Latin. “Add to this,” writes Professor B. H. Chamberlain, “the necessity of committing to memory two syllabaries, one of which has many variant forms, and at least two or three thousand Chinese ideographs, in forms standard and cursive—ideographs, too, most of which are susceptible of three or four different readings according to circumstance,—add, further, that all these kinds of written symbols are apt to be encountered pell mell on the same page, and the task of mastering Japanese becomes almost Herculean.” In view of all this there is a strong movement in favour of romanizing the Japanese script: that is to say, abolishing the ideograph and adopting in its place the Roman alphabet. But while every one appreciates the magnitude of the relief that would thus be afforded, there has as yet been little substantial progress. A language which has been adapted from its infancy to ideographic transmission cannot easily be fitted to phonetic uses.
Dictionaries.—F. Brinkley, An Unabridged Japanese-English Dictionary (Tōkyō, 1896); Y. Shimada, English-Japanese Dictionary, (Tōkyō, 1897); Webster’s Dictionary, trans. into Japanese, (Tōkyō,
