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Japanese today is the language of the more than 100 million people living on the four home islands of Japan plus more than 680,000 on the island of Okinawa. It is also still used daily, especially in the home, by more than 580,000 Japanese immigrants and many of their children in Hawaii, on the west coast of the United States, in Brazil, and in other parts of South America.
Genealogical Affinities
Japanese is the easternmost representative of the Altaic family
of languages, and is ultimately to be related to Proto-Eastern
Altaic, which appears to have subdivided into Proto-Northern and
Peninsular Altaic sometime in the neolithic age. The Tungus languages
are the principal descendants of Proto-Northern Altaic. Proto-Peninsular
further split into Proto-Peninsular (today represented chiefly
by Korean) and Proto-Pelagic; it is to this last that Old Japanese
and its modern descendants are most closely related.
The essential Altaic character of Japanese is clearly seen in characteristic morphological variations of the Old Japanese pronouns as well as in much of the verbal morphology, including verbal negatives and the indefinite future.
The phonology of the Japanese-Korean linguistic unity (Proto-Peninsular and Proto-Pelagic) has been reconstructed in detail, but less is known about the earlier stages of Proto-Eastern Altaic, though it is clear that an original Altaic contrast between back and front vocalism was critical in determining the shape of many lexical items which Japanese inherited from the Altaic parent language (Altaic *dulig-, Japan. [a]tu-"be hot", but *duli"warm [vb.]", Japan. yu"hot water").
Dialects
Japanese scholars generally divide modern Japanese dialects into
three major groups; those of Eastern Japan, Western Japan, and
Kyushu. Eastern Japan includes the dialects of Shizuoka, Nagano,
Niigata, and the areas to their east, with the exception of the
island of Sado. Western Japan includes the dialects of Aichi,
Gifu, Toyama, those parts of Honshu to their west, and Shikoku.
The Kyushu dialects are found on several adjacent small islands
to the south as well as on Kyushu itself.
Japanese dialect history is greatly complicated by borrowings among the dialects at all stages in their history, particularly during the past 150 years, when shifts in focus of government and social prestige from the court at Kyoto to the shogun's headquarters in Edo played an important role in encouraging these borrowings. The earliest dividing line between the Western and Eastern Japan dialect areas was not only a linguistic reality but also of cultural and ethnological significance.
Universal compulsory education, together with modern communications, has encouraged the replacement of most local dialects by a standard language, based upon the speech of Tokyo, an Eastern Japan dialect. Earlier many local dialects, particularly those of Kyushu and other remote portions of the country, were linguistically quite isolated.
Writing
There is no evidence that an indigenous script was ever developed
in the Japanese language area. All writing has always been done
by means of various applications of Chinese script or, in recent
times and to a very limited extent, through use of the Roman alphabet.
The earliest evidence of written Japanese is found in a few words transcribed with Chinese characters used as phonograms on a sword and on the reverse of a metal mirror, both probably to be dated in the second half of the 5th century In their earliest texts the Japanese continued using Chinese characters solely for their sound, but use was also made of Chinese characters as semantograms (kun), as well as in more involved orthographic conceits involving wordplay and rebus relationships among lexical items and their associated Chinese graphs (ateji), and also to write Chinese loanwords (on). As the Japanese gained greater familiarity with the Chinese language, much writing in Japan was done in Chinese itself. Sometimes such texts were intended to be read as Chinese, but more often they were to be read as Japanese, through a simultaneous process of translation (kambun) and decipherment (kundoku). Many of the complications and ambiguities resulting from these involved adaptations of Chinese characters have survived in the script used in modern Japan where, in spite of subsequent simplifications and changes, its remains the most involved and needlessly elaborate system of writing in common daily use anywhere in the world.
Out of the Chinese characters borrowed for use as phonograms the Japanese evolved two original systems of purely phonetic writing, the kana ("borrowed names") syllabaries, in which each graph represents either a vowel alone or a syllabic combination of vowel plus consonant. Both were in use by 900 : the hiragana, a running-hand based upon cursive writings of Chinese characters earlier used as phonograms, and the katakana, a square-hand based upon abbreviations or portions of Chinese phonograms. The hiragana was originally used for most secular purposes for which it was thought necessary to write in Japanese; it was considered a "woman's script," since men were expected to write in Chinese. The katakana was originally a hieratic shorthand employed for phonetic glosses on religious texts used in certain Buddhist sects. Both survive to the present time. The hiragana, in conjunction with Chinese characters, is used to write the bulk of modern Japanese texts, and the katakana is generally used to write loanwords from European languages.
The continued use of Chinese characters for writing Chinese loanwords (on) has meant that the number of such graphs that must be committed to memory has always been one of the major problems of Japanese writing. Before World War II, at least passive reading control of a relatively large number of Chinese characters was expected of the literate adult, and one small dictionary designed to help foreigners learn to read listed nearly 15,000 Chinese characters as commonly used in writing Japanese at the time. Following Japan's military collapse, some Western-oriented elements in the society favored total abolition of Chinese characters and the use of either one or both of the two kana systems, or Roman letters. Others urged a limitation on the number of Chinese characters in common use and simplification of some of their written forms. The more moderate views held by most Japanese educational authorities prevailed, and on Nov. 16, 1946, a list of 1,850 Chinese characters was officially approved "for use for the time being." It has remained in effect ever since. The first 881 on that list now form the basic curriculum in Chinese characters for the first six years of compulsory education, and newspapers, as well as most nontechnical books and magazines, now limit their typography to the 1946 list of 1,850.
The most commonly used system for writing Japanese in Roman letters is one devised in 1885 by the American missionary James C. Hepburn. In the late 1930's the Japanese government promulgated several slightly different systems of romanization that reflect more markedly the symmetry of the kana syllabaries.
Phonology and Grammatical Structure
Old Japanese, the language of the 8th century texts, had an eight-vowel
system (a, i, u, e, o, i, e, o). By the time of the texts the
distribution of these vowels with respect to the consonants that
they followed was quite limited, but comparative evidence and
internal reconstruction show that originally each of these eight
vowels was found following each of the consonants k, g, t, d,
s, z, n, F, b, m, y, r, and w. Before a, u, o, and o , the phoneme
s was pronounced [ts] and z was [dz]; F was a voiceless bilabial
fricative for most of the Old Japanese period, but goes back to
[p]; and r never appeared in word-initial position. By the end
of the Old Japanese period, i, e, and o had become even further
restricted in their occurrence, eventually falling together with
i, e, and o, with o following k surviving as the last holdout
of the earlier eight-vowel system.
In Late Old Japanese (9th to the end of the 12th century) the [ts] and [dz] were leveled to [s] and [z], which in turn eventually became [] and [] before i and e. Nazalized varieties of at least two of the vowels, and , complicated the vowel system, and the loss of certain inflectional consonants before -i- and -u- led to far-reaching changes in the morphology of many forms (tugitate > tuide; sukigaki > suigai). Meanwhile, other innovations, including double consonants (katite > katte), and a syllabic nasal ( ), for which the first unambiguous kana-notation appears in 1061, markedly altered the regular consonant-vowel sequences that had distinguished the language since earliest times.
Middle Japanese (13th to the end of the 16th century) is notable chiefly for assimilatory changes operating in vowel sequences (eu > eo > [o:], but au > [:]) so that the vowel system comprised short a, i, u, e, and o, plus long u, o, and . Some of these vowel changes (for example [teo > t o:]), accompanied by a fronting and a palatalization of certain stops, and the development of consonant combinations with medial -y- and -w-, considerably altered the structure of the language in this period. Meanwhile, t and d before i and u were affricated to become [t , d ] and [ts, dz].
From this stage of the language it was not far to the structure of early modern Japanese (17th century through 1868) and the modern standard language. Changes included the falling together of and ; the leveling of the sequences ae, ai, and ei under ; loss of the medial element in the combinations kw- and gw-; leveling out the [, ] allophones of s and z before e to [s, z]; and the falling together of [i] and [d i] on the one hand and [zu] and [dzu] on the other. Since almost all the modern dialects have distinctive pitch contrasts, similar suprasegmental systems must also have been important features of earlier stages of the language.
This history of change in phonological structure was not paralleled in grammar and syntax, which have remained relatively constant. The major syntactic difference between earlier stages of the language and the present is the existence of earlier distinct forms of many inflected words for attributive (takaki yama, "the high mountain ") and conclusive (yama takashi, "the mountain is high") syntactic structures. In the modern language the overall structures are still parallel, but one inflected form (takai) serves for both (takai yama; yama ga takai). In general, at all stages in the language, attributes precede their heads. The adjective is a subclass of the verb, with which it shares many features including inflection for categories of time. Attributes are often quite involved syntactic structures, involving inflected verbs and adjectives with subordinate heads, all modifying other major heads in syntax (hito ga kaita tegami, "the letter (which) the man wrote"; kado ni tatte iru junsa, "the policeman (who) is standing on the corner"). Also common to all stages of the language are the grammatical particles (ni"on," in kado ni, "on the corner,"ga for nonemphatic subject in hito ga"the man "), which always follow the heads to which they refer; their forms and meanings differ widely at different stages of the language, but their overall structural role remains unchanged at all periods.
Vocabulary
Early in the history of the language, the original inherited Altaic
vocabulary was enriched and in the process all but replaced by
borrowings from other nearby languages, especially from Middle
Korean and Chinese, which have greatly influenced the growth,
development, and resources of the Japanese lexical stock. Most
of the earlier Chinese loanwords in Japanese were genuine linguistic
borrowings, reproducing living Chinese lexical items in Japanese
pronunciation and fitting them into Japanese syntax. More recently,
however, the Japanese vocabulary has been further enriched with
large numbers of Chinese neologisms coined in Japan from Chinese
roots.
Like the earlier Chinese loanwords, loanwords from European languages have also had to be adapted to Japanese pronunciation habits (bsubru, abekku, arubaito, from English "baseball," French "avec," and German "Arbeit"). At times the meaning of the resulting Japanese lexical items are as far displaced as is their pronunciation (abekku means "a date between a boy and a girl," and arubaito, "a part-time job").
Levels of Speech
One of the most distinctive features of Japanese in all its historical
stages is the system of levels of speech, sometimes called "honorific
language" (keigo). This is a set of obligatory categories
operating along two principal axes; one of address and the other
of reference, both being sets of stylistic and expressive choices
chiefly determined by the speaker's attitudes toward the person
addressed and toward the topic discussed. Inflected forms (verbs,
adjectives, and copula) and, to a lesser extent, nouns have formal
categories that implement these categories of choice; thus, for
the copula, on the axis of reference alone there are different
forms for at least five different levels: humble, neutral, respectful,
elegant, and exalted. To these must be added the further complications
introduced by the three levels found on the axis of address: plain,
deferential, and polite.
Roy Andrew Miller,
Yale University
Bibliography
Jordan, Eleanor H., and Noda, Mari, Japanese: The Spoken Language,
pt. 3 (Yale Univ. Press 1990).
Miller, Roy A., The Japanese Language (1967; reprint, Univ. of
Chicago Press 1980).
24. Literature
Japanese literature is most commonly divided into periods approximating the nation's main political periods: Nara, from the middle of the 7th to the end of the 8th century; Heian, to the end of the 12th century; Kamakura, to 1333; Muromachi and the age of the great civil wars, to the end of the 16th century; Tokugawa, or Edo, to 1867; and modern, since 1867.
Nara Period
The word "literature" must be defined broadly if it
is to include the earliest Japanese writings. Two major chronicles,
which in later centuries became the principal sacred texts of
the Shinto religion, date from the early 8th century: the Kojiki
(Chronicle of Ancient Happenings) of 712 and the Nihon Shoki (Chronicle
of Japan) of 720. Each begins with the legendary origins of the
Japanese nation and its ruling family, the establishment of whose
legitimacy was probably the main reason for the compilation, and
each becomes semihistory as it tells of later centuriesthe Kojiki
down to the late 5th century, the Nihon Shoki to the end of the
7th century. It would be wrong to say that they are devoid of
interest, but they tend to be flat and fragmented and they have
little of the emotional appeal that one finds in Western epics
or in the best of Chinese historiography. The great folk heroes
of the Japanese come not from the earliest chronicles but from
writings about civil wars of later centuries.
The chronicles contain considerable numbers of short lyrics, which give them their chief literary interest. These primitive lyrics are irregular in form and tend to be declamatory or exhortatory. Many of them were originally sung, and the prosodic irregularity was thus compensated for by the regularity of the musical setting.
Compilations having to do with regional history, mythology, and geography also survive from the Nara period, and certain short official and liturgical documents written down in the Heian period seem to have originated in the Nara period, preserving the language of that time.
The "Manyoshu." The last half of the 7th century and the first half of the 8th saw a great lyrical flowering. The Manyoshu (Collection of 10,000 Leaves), an anthology of poetry that many think is the greatest the Japanese have produced, was completed some time in the latter half of the 8th century. Otomo Yakamochi, who is believed to be the work's principal compiler if not the only one, died in 785. The last poem in the Manyoshu that can be definitely dated was composed in 759. Most of the poetry in the collection can safely be assigned to the century or so before this last date, although the earliest figure to whom a poem is attributed probably lived in the 4th century.
Japanese poetry is based not upon accent or rhyme but upon syllable count. Already by the time of the compilation of the Manyoshu, lines of 5 syllables and lines of 7 syllables had become standard, and the Japanese have been remarkably faithful to 5's and 7's ever since, breaking away from them with some determination only in modern times. By the end of the Nara period the 31-syllable waka or "Japanese poem," an arrangement of three 7-syllable and two 5-syllable lines, had so established its preeminence that when the specific context did not demand otherwise, the generic term uta, "song" or "poem," was taken to refer to it. Such standard Japanese poetic devices as punning, word association, and the use of stock epithets (frequently likened to Homer's) were also in evidence very early.
It is common to speak of the finest Manyoshu poetry as spanning three generations. In the first generation the greatest poet is unquestionably Kakinomoto Hitomaro, who probably died some time early in the 8th century. He is unique among Japanese poets in his preference for, and success with, longer forms. His finest elegies have a sweep and power that few if any later poets equaled. In the second generation, overt Chinese influences are to be detected in the work of two of the more remarkable poetsTaoism in the case of Okura Tabito, Confucianism in the case of Yamanoue Okura. Yamabe Akahito is admired for the freshness of his short nature poems. In the third generation, there is the anthologist Otomo Yakamochi in whose best lyrics natural imagery becomes something like natural symbolism, pointing ahead to the most interesting poetry of the late Heian period and of the Kamakura period.
The Manyoshu would probably not exist had the Japanese not been stimulated by the introduction of Chinese culture, and yet it is impossible to believe that the strong feeling of communion with nature derives from the Chinese. The Manyoshu was inspired by and at the same time independent of the Chinese.
Heian Period
Another sort of chinoiserie was prominent in the early Heian period.
From then until modern times the Japanese have been prolific and
assiduous composers of prose and verse in the Chinese language,
or some approximation of it. Though the body of such writing is
enormous, nothing will be said of it in this article save that
it had its greatest days in the early Heian period and in the
Kamakura and Muromachi periods, and that not many people pay much
attention to it today.
In the early Heian period Japanese poetry was virtually driven underground by the prestige of Chinese poetry. Four anthologies of poetry in Chinese were commissioned by the court in the 8th and 9th centuries. Japanese poetry in the same decades seems to have been thought unworthy of preservation.
The "Kokinshu." From about the second quarter of the 9th century on, lyric poetry in the Japanese language began to emerge into the open once more; and early in the 10th century its supremacy was recognized by the commissioning of the first "imperial anthology" in Japanese, the Kokinshu (Collection from Ancient and Modern Times), completed in about 905. (Not, apparently, given explicit imperial sanction, the Manyoshu does not qualify as an imperial anthology.) There are 21 such anthologies in all, the last of them from the Muromachi period, and they are dominated by the 31-syllable waka, testifying to the central position occupied by lyric poetry in the Japanese literary tradition. Not much in the imperial anthologies can be called dramatic or narrative. A great deal of Japanese prose narrative, too, is so heavily lyrical that it may be a little hard to get used to.
The Kokinshu style is courtly, cavalier, and highly contrived and makes elaborate and skillful use of such devices as punning and word association. The sense of communion with nature that is so important in the Manyoshu has given way to the subordination of nature to the subjective needs of the poet, so that by the time of compilation nature was providing a fixed vocabulary of images with which to express a fixed repertory of emotions.
Kokinshu notions of propriety, increasingly narrow and unadventuresome, dominated most Heian poetry down through the 11th century. The anthologists, notably Ki no Tsurayuki (died 945), also an important writer of prose, did a great deal to impose these strict notions of propriety. One goes back to poets active in the third quarter of the 9th century for a bolder and fresher voice, and particularly to Ono no Komachi, probably the finest of Japanese women poets, and to Ariwara Narihira (825880), who was well known as a lover and who put his experience to use in subtle, paradoxical lyric poetry.
Diaries and Tales. The 10th century saw remarkable advances in prose narrative that were to culminate early in the following century in the Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji), much the finest of Japanese romances and a work that can be ranked with the best fiction of any country. Several strains are to be traced through the 10th century. There are works that the Japanese call "diaries," although they seldom are precisely that. The Tosa Nikki (Tosa Diary) of Ki no Tsurayuki, the Kokinshu anthologist, describes his return to Kyoto by land and sea from the province of Tosa. Probably written toward the middle of the 10th century, it is a pleasant mixture of excitement and sentiment, with a considerable element of the supernatural in it. The Kagero Nikki, translated into English variously as The Gossamer Diary and The Gossamer Years, is more realistic. It is by a court lady who died late in the 10th century, and sets down in a manner both persuasive and obsessive her version of why her marriage turned out so unhappily. It covers the years 954 to 974, and is probably better described as a set of memoirs than as a diary.
Also developed in the Heian period were works of a peculiarly Japanese sort to which the origins of a great deal of later writing can be traced. Though narrative in a fragmentary and discursive way, they center upon lyric poems. The Japanese name for the genre, utamonogatari, might be translated into English as "lyrical episodes." The earliest of them is the best. It is the Ise Monogatari (Tales of Ise), by an unknown author, probably of no later than the middle of the 10th century. Ostensibly describing the affairs of the Kokinshu poet Narihira, it is a collection of verse, each preceded by a descriptive passage giving the circumstances of its composition.
The period also produced romances of a less lyrical nature, all by unknown authors: the Taketori Monogatari (Tale of the Bamboo Cutter), the Utsubo Monogatari (Tale of the Hollow Tree), and the Ochikubo Monogatari (Tale of the Lower Room). They were probably written in that order, and if so they show how the interest of 10th century fiction writers shifted from the supernatural to the mundane. The first, though not without a certain tart and cynical interest in human affairs, is essentially a fairy story about a maiden who descends from the moon and eventually goes back to it. The last, though not without romantic idealization and exaggeration, is the story of a Cinderella-like lady whose affairs contain not a touch of the supernatural, and it must have seemed very real to the contemporary reader.
"The Tale of Genji." Early Heian romances and narratives in a sense prepared the way for The Tale of Genji. Yet nothing that preceded it really paved the way for that vast and astonishing work. Written over an unknown number of years in the early 11th century by a court lady of the Fujiwara clan who is known today as Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji has a fairly simple plot. It tells of the life and loves of Prince Genji, of his public successes and private sorrows, and, after his death, of the less colorful affairs of the generation of his grandson. Beneath the simple plot lies a remarkable richness of implication, permitting each reader to make his own reading, so that one reader may see the book as utterly dissolute, another as grandly edifying. The essential fact is that although it has something of the episodic, lyrical quality of the utamonogatari, it goes far beyond the limitations of the latter to encompass an enormous amount of believable life and to become an evocation of a complicated and subtle society.
Later Heian romances seem weak and watery and derivative beside the Genji. It is probable that some of the romancers were women. There has been much speculation as to why women were so important in Heian literature, but that they were important is undeniable.
"The Pillow Book" of Sei Shonagon. A piece of nonfiction, a sort of miscellany or book of jottings, is generally placed by the Japanese beside the Genji at the very peak of Heian literature: the Makura no Soshi (Pillow Book) by the lady Sei Shonagon, a court rival of Murasaki's. The Pillow Book was written in the late 10th century or the early 11th or both. It is sometimes urbane and witty, sometimes movingly lyrical; but it is likely to seem slight and fragmented to most non-Japanese readers, scarcely a serious rival of the Genji. Its place in the stream of Japanese literature is an important one all the same, for it is the first example of the zuihitsu form of discursive essay, a form much loved by the Japanese even down to present times. If the Genji stands in grand isolation, The Pillow Book stands at the head of a prosperous line.
There are numbers of "diaries" from the middle and late Heian period. Perhaps the best of them, the Izumi Shikibu Nikki (Diary of Izumi Shikibu), by a court lady and poetess contemporary with Murasaki Shikibu, is actually more redolent of the utamonogatari than of the diary as that term is usually understood in English.
Late Heian Prose. The middle and late years of the Heian period made two original contributions to prose narrative. One was historical writing with a greater or lesser mixture of fiction; the other was short anecdotes, written sometimes to edify and sometimes merely to entertain. The first in a series of four historical works called "mirror pieces" (from the fact that each has the word "mirror" in its title) was written probably in the late 11th or early 12th century. The four cover Japanese history down to 1333, in a semidramatic form. The Eiga Monogatari (Tale of Glory), completed no later than 1107, has less curiosity in it about the workings of history than do the mirror pieces and more about brilliant happenings in high society. Most Japanese therefore assume it to have been written by a woman.
As for the short anecdote, it did not precisely originate in the late Heian period, but much the richest collection, the Konjaku Monogatari (Tales of Long Ago), is thought to be from the middle or late 11th century. It introduces the smell of the marketplace and the low life into Japanese literature, and has been described by an important modern writer as a huge scandal sheet.
Late Heian Poetry. If the late Heian period was not one of the finest ages for prose, it was an important period for lyric poetry. It saw a turning away from the subjectivism of the Kokinshu style and a revival of nature poetry. More than simple description, the most interesting and original poetry of late Heian and early Kamakura has properly been called a poetry of natural symbolism, for it carries strong overtones of quietist Buddhism and the natural images are meant to suggest something deeper and less ephemeral than their own immediate surfaces.
For obvious reasons, given this emphasis on the implied rather than the explicit, the age saw the development of the aesthetics of restraint, austerity, and understatement that were to be such an influence upon the tea ceremony and the No drama of the Muromachi period, and that in the West are thought to be most Japanese. The eighth of the imperial anthologies, the Shinkokinshu (New Collection from Ancient and Modern Times), completed early in the 13th century, is the best embodiment of the style and is generally thought to be, with the Kokinshu, the best in the series of imperial anthologies. Fujiwara Teika (11621241), one of the anthologists, became the poetic arbiter of his day and founded a durable line of poetic arbiters. The priest Saigyo (11181190), the poet most generously represented in the anthology, is the first in a series of wandering mendicant poets particularly admired by the Japanese.
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