The Fall of Language in the Age of English by Minae Mizumura (translated by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter) caused quite an uproar when it was first published in Japan in 2008. Its Japanese title translated to When the Japanese Language Falls: In the Age of English and you can imagine how people reacted. When the English translation appeared seven years later, the author reworked the title to make it appeal to a broader audience but Mizumura does not talk about the ostensible decline of any other language than Japanese.
Mizumura defines the functions of a universal language, an external language, a national language and a local language. She made reference to them constantly, so it was important to understand their differences. I must state upfront that I am not an expert on the state of Japanese within that country nor am I familiar with the influence English has, or may have, on Japanese, but I think the original Japanese title was sensationalistic. I don’t think the Japanese language is in any way threatened by English, no matter how strong the drive is or was in recent history (if it is still at all) to make the population bilingual.
I found it fascinating that during the time when the Edo government imposed its isolationist policy in 1636, the only window Japan had to the western world came via the Dutch. The Dutch East India Company was allowed to establish a trading post under the provision that it not engage in any missionary activities. Thus the first works from Europe that entered the Japanese language came via translations from Dutch.
After World War II a movement developed to introduce romanization and abandon the Japanese scripts. Phoneticism was in higher regard than the alleged more primitive ideograms. Mizumura claimed that the Japanese people grew ashamed of their own language:
“In any case, the disquieting sense that one’s native language is somehow illegitimate is one of many tragic consequences of the rupture with their native heritage that people in Japan and other non-Western countries have undergone in modern times.”
Yet it wasn’t solely the occupying Americans who wanted this reform. Even in the late nineteenth century, the first minister of education, Mori Arinori, actually recommended adopting English as the official language. After World War II, Mizumura wrote:
“In retrospect, it seems almost bizarre that the hastily implemented changes and ongoing push toward romanization aroused no opposition at the time.”
Did Japanese educators really find no problem in this change? My immediate reaction would be to say Hell yes:
“But those who were aware of what was happening to the Japanese language–the media that had to use new printing and the schoolteachers who had to teach a new way of writing, not to mention the editors involved in drawing up new textbooks–consisted of virtually all those who had swung left after the war. People who might have had qualms voiced no protest, perhaps because they dared not. Most disturbing in the face of such governmental control over the language was the silence of public intellectuals–the nation’s ‘spiritual guides,’ those who could have spoken out and been heard. As writers themselves, not all of them could have been insensitive to the government’s tampering with the written language as they knew it. Behind their silence lay the unpleasant historical fact that the Japanese Empire left muddy fingerprints in Asia, including forcing the Japanese language on its colonies in Taiwan and Korea…”
and Mizumura keeps going back to make alarmist statements such as this:
“The Japanese government needs strong conviction to counter the mass hysteria that cries incessantly for more and more English. Above all, it needs to make it its mission to defend the Japanese language by giving it priority over English. One’s identity derives not from one’s nation or blood but from the language one uses; what makes Japanese people Japanese is not their nation or their blood but the Japanese language that they use.”
and this:
“At issue is the status of the Japanese language in the modern era. Despite their enthusiastic embracing of the ideology of national language, and despite the emergence of Japanese as a fully functioning national language, Japanese people remain unsure if their language is truly legitimate. Undergoing the ‘shock of the West’ also meant seeing Westerners as model human beings and oneself as anything but, a bias that lingers to this day. Foreigners who visit Japan must find it incongruous that any of the faces featured in the advertising flooding the streets are Western. The bias extends to language: Western languages are seen as models for the whole human race to use. While taking justifiable pride in a vibrant literary heritage, Japanese people at some point, without even knowing it, became captive to the notion that only Western languages are valid. Various non-Western peoples share a similar sense of estrangement from their own language.”
These are loaded statements, and ones that I am sure would not be welcome if I were to present them to Japanese people. But to read them from a Japanese author herself, and repeatedly throughout the entire book, as each quoted paragraph above seems to portend the imminent demise of the Japanese language, makes me believe that Mizumura is not being merely sensationalistic and headline-grabbing, but actually fearful for her native tongue. Does she really believe that the Japanese language will fall? As an English-speaking Westerner, am I too blind to know what my native language is doing to it? I just don’t see Japanese society as a whole dumping their history and heritage en masse for the tackiness of Western “culture”. But maybe because I have travelled a lot and am loathe to embrace American anything, especially now, I can see the diversity of cultures that are far away from my own continent. As I stated at the beginning, I am not familiar with the state of the Japanese language within the country, yet I don’t believe that it is threatened. Nor do I buy Mizumura’s claim that the population isn’t too keen on home-grown culture either. In my travels around the world I am dumbfounded how people can be so enamoured with that fast-food wasteland McDonald’s yet I understand that it is more the international, or specifically American, that my friends (in Finland and Switzerland) want to partake of. Even though the food in local restaurants is definitely better, they feel more trendy, and even more important, if they are seen eating out at an American chain. Is this feeling so pervasive among Japanese in regards to language? Would they feel more connected to the world by speaking the universal language of English? Bilingualism would be “cool”, but to abandon Japanese?