MAKING SENSE OF JAPANESE t t xt D't ll Y Jy Rbn
KDANA NTNATNAL Tky· k·
Pr�viously published in th Pwr Jaans Sris undr th titls ne sn (1992) and n ense jnese (1998). Distributd in th Unitd Stats by Kodansha Amrica, Inc. 575 Lxngton Avnu Nw York, NY. 10022, and in th Unitd Kingdom and continntal Europ by Kodansha Europ Ltd. Tav Quy Rop Strt, London SE16 7TX. Publishd by Kodansha Intrnational Ltd. 17-14 Otowa 1chom Bunkyoku Toky 112-8652, and Kodansha Amrica Inc Copyrit© 1992 and 1998 by Jay Rubin. rights rsrvd. Prntd in Japan First dtin 1998 First trad paprback dition 2002 ISBN 4770-2802 4 06 07 08 09 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4
pp
Pr�viously published in th Pwr Jaans Sris undr th titls ne sn (1992) and n ense jnese (1998). Distributd in th Unitd Stats by Kodansha Amrica, Inc. 575 Lxngton Avnu Nw York, NY. 10022, and in th Unitd Kingdom and continntal Europ by Kodansha Europ Ltd. Tav Quy Rop Strt, London SE16 7TX. Publishd by Kodansha Intrnational Ltd. 17-14 Otowa 1chom Bunkyoku Toky 112-8652, and Kodansha Amrica Inc Copyrit© 1992 and 1998 by Jay Rubin. rights rsrvd. Prntd in Japan First dtin 1998 First trad paprback dition 2002 ISBN 4770-2802 4 06 07 08 09 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4
pp
ONTENTS Preface 7
[ 9 Introduction: Leaing the Language of the nnite 11
o o F? The Myth of the Subjectless Sentence 25 W and G The Answers to Unasked Questions 31 The Invisible Man's Family Reunion 50 Giving in Two Directions Yru, geru Sshigeru
Kuds Kudsru, ru, Kurer Kurer 51 Receiving in One Direction: Moru Moru,, Itdk Itdkuu 54 The Causative with and without Directionals 56 56 Passives, Passivication and the Passive-Causative 63 The Natural Potential 72 The Explainers K Kr r Wk kee , No 75
o F The Johnny Carson Hodo 89 Kanji 92 Shiru and Wkru To Know You Is Not Necessarily to Understand You 94 9 4 Taming me 99 sumori and the Vanishing Beefsteak 101 You Say Kimeru and I Say Kimr 105 Waing This Language Works Backwards 106
The Pleasures of Reading Japanese 11 The Unbelievable Compleity of Being vs. Aru 112 o Jup in te e ut Be Se to oe c 115 Fiddlers ee= ee Fiddles? 16 ating n the Wong Direction 117 nticipation or Progressive Splificaton or Analyzing Upside-Do Sentences 119 Notes 130
Prece This book was called Goe Fh n ts firt incaaton, and though t has prompted moe njoyable feedbak than anything else Ive ever publihed the editos tell me they ae tied of sponding to eades omplaining that the boo concentates too muh on Japaes grama and not enough on trollng for salmon. They have come up with a ttle that supposedly gves a bette dea o the boo's contents whle my own contbuton to ths edton i limited to a new secton on analyzng dicult sentences. A numbe o typos have been xed as well. I hd a get deal o un wtng ths boo-pehaps too much un o some tastes but beng nethe a gammaan no a lingust I elt ee to ndulge mysel in the nd o play wth language that I have enjoyed ove the past twentyodd yeas o eadng tanslatng wtng about and teachng Japanee lt eatue and the language n whch t s wtten My appoach may not b othodox and it cetanly s not scentc but t deves pmaly om the satsacton heent n the use o a leaed oegn language wth a high degee o pecon. I nothng else I hope to shae my convcton that Japanese s as pecse a medium o expesson as any othe lan guage and at best I hope that my explanatons o peennal poblem points n gamma and usage will help eades to gasp them moe clealy as they pogess om cogntve ab sopton to ntutve mastey As much as I enjoyed the wtng once t got stated I must than seveal people o mang me put up or shut up. My we Rauo was the st to uge me to wte down some o the ntepetatons I was teachng my students at the Unvesty o Washngton suc as the Johnny Cason hodo Many o the students themselves wee helpul: Jody and Anne Chaee now much mo than ome students who wll neve again tans late actve Japanese vebs nto Englsh passves; John Bggs and
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Veonca Baus among othes who povded new temnology and mateals Sanda Faux o the Japan Soety ofered a sounding boad he newsletter and Mihael Base o Ko danha nttoal was the one who made me blve that a bunch o dconnected chpte ould b hped no book. almot hstate to th Mcho utsu and Chrs Boc ett wo odnaly espectable lngusts whose reputatons ould be besmched by assoaton with ths poject but they savd me from some howls at sveal pont and gve me moe condence n the valdty o my anlye than I would have had wthout the help. Chs n patcula both cheeed and dis appointed me when he nomed me that othes had beaten me to the nventon o the cental concept o Pat One he "zeo ponoun o ths day howeve I eman innocent o what he calls a vey ch theoy o zeo ponouns in govement and bndng theoy a act o whch I should pehaps be ashamed but my scholaly nteests le n othe dectons Lngusts may conclude as he suggests that I am meely enventng the wheel o oten wong n the da athe le a nneteenth centuy engnee agung aganst phlogston but students o the language ae the ones wtng o not lngusts whose techncal lexcon eeps most o the nodoubt useul theoes eectvely hdden om all o us al about phlogston! would stongly uge anyone who has ound the boo woth eadng to send me coectons o suggestons o moe and bette example sentences o addtonl topcs n need o ex plcaton shold a evsed veson become a possblty some tme n the utue le the abovenamed ndvduals wee im measualy helpul n the development o ths boo eos o act and ntepetaton ae entely the esponsblity o Po esso Edwn A Canston o Havad Univesty to whom complants should be addessed I the omat o ths sees allowed o a dedcaton page t would have boe a ulsome tbute to my daughte ana whose good sense adaptablty ntellgence and patence made me vey poud o he dung the often tyng months n whch much o ths boo was conceved and wtten.
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ntroduction Leang the Language of the nfnte Japans economic magneism has araced unprecedened crowds of sudens o Japanese language courses in recen years bu sill he number of Weseers who have for mally sudied Japanese mus fall miserably shor of he number who have been charmed by he language lesson James Clavells Shn The heroine of he novel Mariko inroduces he language o he hero Blackhoe (Anjin san) as follows "Japanese is very simple o speak compared wih oher languages [she ells him] There are no aricles no he a or an No verb conjugaions or inni tives Yukimsu means I go bu equally you he she i we hey go or will go or even could have gone ven plural and singular nouns are he same sum means wife, or wives Very simple Well how do you ell he dierence beween I go yukimsu, and hey wen yukimsu? "By inflecion Anjin-san and one Lisen yuki
msuyukimsu "Bu hese boh sounded exacly he same Anjisan has because youre hinking in your own language To undersand Japanese you have o hink apanese Don forge our language is he lan guage of he innie Is all so simple Anjinsan (New York Dell 1975, p 528)
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Of course, Aninsan has he righ idea when he mu ers under hs breah in response o his Is all s The implcaion of he scene however, is ha he hero will evenually wise up and immerse hmself sprually in he language of he nne For all he curren widespread awareness of Japan, he couny remains myseriously Orienal in Amercan eyes, and he mhs surrounding he language are simply one par of he overall pcture Japanese, we are old is unique I s no merely anoher language wih a srucure ha is dfferen from English, bu says hings ha canno be ranslaed ino Englishor ino any oher language Based as i s on picographic characers Japanese acually op eraes in he more inuiive and arisc rgh lobe of he brain The unk nd Wgns Enoped ells us ha, Compar wih he Indo-European languages, Japanese is vague and imprecise Thus i would seem he Japanese senence is subec more o rules of agrance han of grammar I s a delcae blend of incense All ha a parcular grammacal form does s o change he blend n some ineffable way adding a lle sweeness or pungency here and here We merely have o inu he overall drf NonJapanese novelss and supermarke encyclopedas are hardly he exclusive source of he idea tha Japanese s fundamenally vague n conras o Wese languages Japanese hemselves promoe he myh and someimes wh he ad of so venerable a medum of ruh as National Public ado Once carred an neview wh a mem ber of the Tokyo Strng uare who asserted ha he orginal members of he ensemble were able o communi cae more clearly with each oher now ha hey had begun speakng in Englsh among hemselves he swich in lan guage havng become necessary when a nonJapanese vio NTODTON 12
lns oned he roupe Japanese he concluded s vague whle Englsh s more precse Whle he no doub sincerely beleves hs he is wrong The Japanese lnguge can express anyhng needs o bu Japanese sol nos ofen requre people o express hemselves ndirecly or ncompleely When all membes of he Quare were Japanese and speakng her nave lan guage, hey undoubedly ineraced in convenional Japa nese ways, whch ofen mus have requir hem o be less han frank wih each other The arrval of he nonJapanese volnis made necessary for hem o swich o Englsh ntrucng no only an amosphere n which openness was more naural bu forcng hem oo o communcae n a foregn language n whch hey had far less command of nuance They were boh lberaed from socal consrans and handcapped by a reducon n he number of verbal mechanisms a her command Apparenly hey found he lberaon more refreshing han he handcap limng And now hey hnk ha hey are speakng n a more exact or precse language Granng ha socal norms can inuence lingusic usage in he drecion of ndrecion invesgaons nto he hisorical or socologcal sources of lngusc behavor can be useful and informaive Some have raced he apparen silen communicaion in Japanese socey o he Tokugawa legacy of auhoriaransm and geographical solaion The Tokugawa peri was an exremely repressive age when he commoners were a he mercy of he samurai class, and any misbehavior could be severely punished Japan was subsanially cu off from he res of he world and he people had wo and a half cenuries o lea how o inerac wih one anoher free from ouside nerference Under such condiions people had lile diculy in in ealizing he sringen rules of social behavior If as a NTODTON 1
su of he Edo legacy Japanese oday seem o now wha ohr Japanese are hinkng wihou recourse o words i is no so much because hey disrus words and have highly ened abiliies in ESP bu because everybody nows he rules Anoher allooofen-ci source of Japanese nonver bal communicaion skills is Zen and he value placed on silence by he eachings of ha religion2 One scholar who has bough ino such a view whole-hog ells us ha he Japanese are suspicious of language iself Silence is prized He furher saes The Japanese dsrus of language wrien language in paricular comes from many years of having o express heir ideas in he hieroglyphic characers ha orignaed in China Ineresingly, he Japanese of earlier imes be lieved ha an idea would lose some of is value he momen i was verbalized Hence arose he convicion ha words wren ones in parcular, canno convey he ruh One byproduc of cenuries of such discred iing of language is a vas quaniy of empy words ha reec neiher socal realiy nor ones rue inner inen ion In oher words he praise of silence and he prevalence of meaningless words are wo sides of he same coin3 Graned here are a lo of meaningless words ha go ino making he Japanese publishing indusry one of he worlds mos prucive bu he fac remains ha here are few peoples in he world who so love hings o be ex plained in wordswords boh spoken and wrien You can si in a beauiful Zen garden in Kyoo wihou being harangued over a inny loudspeaker abou he hisory and symbolism of every rock and bush You can pick up a NTODTON 14
paperbac novel without being told at the end in some au thoritative commentators kisetsu what the boo is sup posed to mean and how it relates to the details of the authors life You cant watch a simple music video on without the location of every natural scene being labeled at the bottom of the screenoften in those omnipresent Chi nese hieroglyphs the apanese supposedly dont trust It is true that medieval aesthetic concepts in apan fa vored the unspoen the subtly suggested the beauty of the halfrevealed that is strongly associated with a Bud dhist belief in the illusory nature of the physical world and a Zen focus on a nonverbal experience of the profound Nothingness of the universe But the medieval period ended a long time ago, and Edo lies much closer to hand, that age in which arose the garrulous Kabui theater, where a character could plunge a dagger into his guts and go on talng for half an hour about all the social and eco nomic factors that had led him to choose death and how he wanted his family to carry on after he was gone The great heyday of vague apanese was of course the Second World War when apans military leaders were touting the divinity of the emperor and his troops and promising that the apanese spirit and apans unique na tional polity would defeat the shallow materialism of the West Not even then did all apanese believe the myths One canny joualist declared that his magazine simply had nothing to do with this ind of lofty thinng which probably could not be understood by the people of any other nation in the world even in translation (if, indeed translation of such ideas is possble, and which cannot be understood by us apanese either• No apanese is not the language of the infnite apanese is not even vague The people of Sony and Nissan and Toyota did not get where they are tay by wafting in NTODTN
cense bac and forth The apanese spea and wrte to each other as other literate peoples do If apanese is unique, that is because it possesses vocabulary and gram matical constructions and idioms that occur n no other languagebut of course that is what maes all languages unique5 Undeniably apanese s different from Englsh The lan guage is different, the people are different, the society s dfferent and all of these are enormously nteresting pre cisely for that reason The apanese do so many thngs bacwards from our point of vew A apanese sentence, with its verb coming at the end is not only backards but upsidedown One of the most satisfying experiences a human being can have is to train his or her mind actually to thnk in a foreign modethe more nearly upside-down and bacwards the better But we mut never let its ap parent strangeness blind us to the simple fact that apanese is just another language And we can increase the precision wth which we understand that language if we do away with some of the mystcal nonsense that continues to cling to it even in the age of the computer and the electrc nose hair trimmer The nonsense that surrounds apanese would be lttle more than a source of mild amusement to me as a teacher of the language except that, year after year I nd my job made more dicult by the myth of apanese vagueness standing as it does as a positive obstruction to the leaing of the language If students are convnced from the start that a language is vague there i little hope they will ever lea to handle it with precision If you beleve a language to be vague, t will be, with all the certainty of a selfful flling prophesy None of this should be taen to mean that apanese is not difficult for speaers of English to lea apanese NTODTON 6
grammatical forms are dificult for us, but that is simply because they are structurally so different from their cor responding English expressions not because apanese wors on a different spiritual wavelength or in a different part of the brain The US govement itself nows just how difcult apanese is When the govement wants to teach its employees Class One (ie easy languages such as French and Spanish, it puts them through twenty-ive wees of concentrated study at thirty hours per wee, for a total of 750 hours, at the end of which students have at tained what is called Limited Woring Profciency in reading and speang The goveent nows exactly what it means by Limited Worng Proiciency In reading this means Sufficient comprehension to read simple authentic written material in a form equivalent to usual printing or typescript on subjects within a familiar context Able to read with some misunderstandings straightforward familiar, factual material but in general insuficiently experienced with the language to draw inferences di rectly from the linguistic aspects of the text The description goes on from there but its too de pressing to quote Even more depressing s how long it taes the goveent to brng students to Limited Wor ing Proiciency in Class Four (ie, ller languages such as Arabic Chinese apanese, and Korean Instead of twentyive wees students have to study for fortyseven wees at thirty hours per wee, for a total of 1,410 hours, following which they are sent to their choice of health spa or mental hospital for another fortyseven wees of re covery At ive hours per wee thirty wees per year a fairly NTODTON 7
typical university languageleaing pace students would have to stay in college ve years to receive the same num ber of hours as govement students in order to attain mere Limited Worng Profciency in French, and to do so in apanese would tae them 9.4 years6 If then universities want their students after two or three years of study to be able to deal with sophisticated material, ome coers must obviously be cut What happens is that we forge ahead with our ngers crossed hoping that through a combinaton of homewor, determination, initiative and adult intelligence students will compensate in part for not having leaed the lan guage as children By the third year, we may have them dealing with some pretty challenging wrtten material but they are often doing it more cognitively than intuitively At least part of the time they have to use their brains and analyze sentences and thnin Englishabout what the text meansin English ust as it is a mistae to expect students to master a language by translating it into their own, it is alo a mistae to exclude translation from the classroom entirely And unless students do lea to chec the accuracy of their understanding in terms of their own language they will probably end up joining the misguided chorus that proclaims to the world the vague mysterious wonders of apanese Faced with such seemingly intractible problems most sensible people would simply throw up their hands in de spair Instead, I have taen the undoubtedly misguided step of writing this boo the purpose of which is to demonstrate how certain difcult apanese constructions can be understoodfully and preciselyin terms of En glish constructions that perform similar functions The most difcult apanese constructions would not quite so difficult if at the very outset textboos and teachers NTODON
would mae one thing clear namely that lie other sen tences the world over apanese sentences consist of com plete statements about people and things They have subjects and predicates though often when the subject is nown from context it may not be specically mentioned within the sentence All too oten however students are subtly encouraged to thin that apanese verbs just happen without sub jects deep within some Oriental fog In the world repre sented by apanese actions occur but nobody does them It is no coincidence that the linguistic structures that cause students the most trouble generation after generation are related to the problem of the subject This is true both for the eteally mystifying w and g, which are nown to all beginning students and for such complex verbal agglomerations as ysumsete itdkimsu, with its causative followed by a humble directional verb of re ceiving Of course the deal is to reach a stage of mastery in which comprehension through the medium of another lan guage becomes unnecessary Lie all languageleaing boos this one is designed to mae itself obsolete as you move more and more into the language itself and use fewer and fewer languageleaing crutches Unlie other boos however this one by rights ought to be obsolete be fore you use it A lot of what it explains has already been explained to you more thoroughly and sstematically in your textboos though often with chewy jargon and airy theorzation that when you rst read them put you to sleep faster than Moby Dick. I am often going to tell you to go bac and loo at those explanations again after I have shown you how to grasp concretely what is going on in the apanese by nding familiar parallels in English That way you should be able to stay awae longer NODN
The point of this boo is to help students of the lan guage thin more clearly about the structures of apanese that gve them headaches year after year, generaton after generation The emphasis is on wrtten texts but the gram matical structures treated here occur commonly in speech as well (If you want to be a literate speaer of a language you have to now its literature Rather than specifying which year or level this boo is designed for I would suggest that it can be of most use to students moving out of the closely controlled pattemastery stage into the less predictable area of reading texts written for apanese read ers rather than those manufactured for textboos In the early stages of the study of any language, vrtu ally every utterance you encounter is presented as an ex ample of how the languages grammar wors Each is a patte to be memorzed and mimiced and taen as holy writ Once you get to a more advanced stage, though, and especially once you begn reading actual texts from news papers and boos, it is important to realize that not one single sentence you read has been written to illustrate a grammatical point Each sentence is there not to teach you a grammatical structure but to tell you somethng the au thor wants to get across The author wants you to now more after reading the sentence than you dd before you read it This may seem so ridiculously obvious as to b not worth mentioning but it has revolutionary implications for the way you deal with the material As you begn to read more and more actual texts you will see how mportant context can be No longer can you deal with sentences in isolation rather than as parts of a developing argument One of the worst things I see stu dents doing when they start to translate texts is numbering their sentences They tae a perfectly sound paragraph in which the author s trying to develop a thought and they NTODTON 20
surgically slice it up, writing the translation of each sen tence separately n their noteboos as if it had no rela tionship to the others Especially in a langage lie apanese with its frequently unnamed subjects, it is crucial that you tae each sentence within its context Part One is a series of interrelated essays on aspects of the one most challenging problem presented by apanese the subject or more precisely eeping the lines clear be tween subject and predicate The culprit here, we see is the apanese pronoun which causes dicultes in eeping trac not only of subjects, but of objects and other all-too volatile elements of the sentence Since the later pieces as sume an acquaintance with the earlier, the reader is urged to approach them in order Part Two is a compendium of perennial problems both major and minor, and although they have been arranged according to the ancient principles of association and pro gression found in the imperial anthologies of poetry, they can be read at random with no great loss of signicance
NTODTN 2
Who's on First?
The Myth of the Subjectless Sentence The very rst time they present an apparently subectless sentence all Japanese language textbooks should have large waings printed in red Yre :w 'nteng tle wift Z It is here more than anywhere else tha the language suddenly begins to melt into that amorphous mass of ceremonial tea and incense and Zen and haiku, where distinctions between self and other I and Thou subect and obect disappear in a blinding ash of satori. Now the student sees that the phenomenal world is but an illusion it is all within you and without you Absorbed into the great Oneness (or Nothingness; take your pick we enter into the true Japanese state of mind and we experience rsthand what makes the language vgue. Meanwhile the Japanese themselves go about their business commuting and shopping and cooking and raising their kids math scores to some of the highest in the world and making super color s and cars using unnamed subectsand obects and everything elseall over the place utterly unaware that their language makes it impossible for them to communicate precisely. Enamored of ther vaunted "uniqueness the Japanese have been as eager as anybody to promote the illusion that their language is vague and mysterious Not all of them buy nto the myth of course. Take the linguist Okutsu Kei ichir6 for example. "Japanese is often said to be vague 2
he notes "partly because subects and other nouns are often deleted but if the speaker and listener are both aware of the verbal or nonverbal context in which the utterance takes place, all that is really happening is that they don't have to go on endlessly about matters they both un derstand perfectly well. In fact Japanese is an extremely rational economical language of the contextdependent type.1 The greatest single obstacle to a precise understanding of the Japanese language is the mistaken notion that many Japanese sentences dont have subects. Wait a minute let me take that back. Lots of Japanese sentences dont have subects. At least not subects that are mentioned overtly within the sentence. The problem starts when students take that to mean that Japanese sentences dont refer in any way to people or things that perform the action or the state denoted by their predicates. The same goes for obects. They disappear ust as easily as subects do. What Japanese doesnt have is pronounsreal actual pronouns like he she and "it that we use in English to substitute for nouns when those nouns are too well known to bear repeating. And thats all that we use pronouns for because we dont want to hear the same things over and over, whether subects or obects or whatever. Can you magine what English would be lke without pronouns Look Cloquet and Brisseau had met years before under dramatic circumstances. Brisseau had gotten drunk at the Deux Magots one night and staggered toward the river Thinking Brisseau was already home in Brisseaus apartment, Brisseau removed Brisseaus clothes but instead of getting into bed Brisseau got into the Seine. BJETLE ENTENE 26
When Brisseau tried to pull the blankets over Brisseaus self and got a handful of water Brisseau began scream ing.2 No one could stand that for long. Now lets try it with pronouns as in the original: Cloquet and Brisseau had met years before, under dra matic circumstances. Brisseau had gotten drunk at the Deu Magots one night and staggered toward the river. Thinkng he was already home in his apartment he removed his clothes but instead of getting into bed he got into the Seine. When he tried to pull the blankets over himself and got a handful of water he began screaming. What a relief! But Japanese is even less tolerant of re peated nouns than English. Lets see the passage lookng more like Japanese without all those repetitious pronouns: Cloquet and Brisseau had met years before under dra matic circumstances. Brisseau had gotten drunk at the Deu Magots one night and staggered toward the river. Thinkng already home n apartment removed clothes but instead of getting into bed got into the Seine. When tried to pull the blankets over self and got a handful of water began screaming. Of course this sounds "funny because of what were used to in normal English but the meaning is perfect ly clear. Once t is established that Brisseau s our subect we dont have to keep reminding the reader. This is how Japanese works. (And in certain very eplicit situa tions so does English: "Do not bend fold or spindle BJETLE ENTENE 27
Pull in case of emergency etc. There is only one true pronoun in Japanese and that is nothing at all. I like to call this the zero pronoun. The nor mal unstressed way of saying I went in Japanese is not Wtsh w kmsht but smply Ikmsht (In fact, strictly speakng Wtsh w kmsht would be an inaccurate translation for I went. It would be okay for I dont know about those other guys but I at least went. See W and G: The Answers to Unasked Questions. y stops Instead of using pronouns then, Japanese simpl y naming the known person or thing. This doesnt make the langage any more vague or mysterious but it does require that we know who is doing thngs in the sentence at every step of the way. This is not as dfcult as it may sound. After all take this perfectly unexceptional English sentence He mailed the check To a begnnng student of English this sentence could be very mysterious indeed. Speakers of English must seem to have a sxth sense whch enables them to intuit the hid den meaning of he. How do we native users know who "he is? Well, of course we dontunless he has been identied earlier. Again the same goes for objects. He mailed the check could be He mailed it (or even Mailed it in the right context and nob y wuld bat an eyelash I recently caught myself saying Hes his father ad the person I said it to was not the least bit confused. On the matter of unexpressed subjects Eleanor Jordens excellent Jpnese e Spoken Lnguge notes that A verbal can occur as a complete sentence by itself there is no grammatical requirement to express a subject. Les son 2 contains a strongly worded waing to avoid the overuse of words of personal reference noting how often Japanese exchanges avoid "overt designaton of you or I. The explanation offered for this is sociolinguistic: B�T B�TLE LE ENENE ENENE 28
This avoidance of designation of person except in those situtions where it hs specil focus is a reec tion of the Japanese deemphasis of the individual and the emphasis on the occurrence itself rather than the individuals involved (unless there is a special focus.4 I would be the last to argue that Japans is a society of hgh individualism but I do think it takes more than a glance·at the socety to explain why not only human beings but pencils and newspapers and sea bream can and do dis appear fom linguistic utterances when reference to them would b considered redundant. In the beginning stages of language leaing especially, example sentences are often thrown at students outside of any context which can cause more bewildement than enlghtenment when dealing with grammatical points that make sense only in a context. Imagine a Monty Python character walking up to a stranger on the street and suddenly blurting out "He mailed the check. Hed probably get a good laughand ust us t because of the lack lac k of context. cont ext. If you have leaed such words as wtshi, boku, nt, kimi, kre, knoo etc. you probably think Im forgetting that Japanese does have pronouns but those are only adapted nouns originally meaning servant or "over there or the like, and they are not used simply to avoid repetition as English pronouns are. If you tred putting kre or kre no in for every he and "his in the Brisseau passage you would end up with Japanese ust as stilted and unnatural as our rst version above. (One way that cetain Japanese authorsAutagawa Rnosuke Rnosuke comes to mindgive their prose an exotic foreign tone is to use more pronouns than are strictly necessary. Its true that when these pseudopronouns are used they are standing in BJETLE ENTENE 2
for other nouns but Japanese uses these things only as a lastditch stopgap method of keeping the discussion clear when the zero pronoun threatens to evaporate. As long as the writer or speaker is condent the referent is clear the only pronoun is zero. I said above that Japanese unnamed subects require that we know who is doing things in the sentence at every step of the way and without a doubt the most important single step is the verb that the subect is doing (or being. Subects may drop away but verbs rarely do.5 In fact sub ects re subects only when they do somethng or re something otherwise theyre ust nouns hanging in space. "Ralph is not a subect until we give hm something to do or be Ralph croaked. What did Ralph do? "He croakedor n Japanese "Croaked (Nkmshit. "Ralph is a frog. What is Ralph? "He is a frogor in Japanese "Is a frog (Keru desu. I repeat: All Japanese sentences have subects. Other wise they wouldnt be sentences. True as Jorden says "there is no grammatical requirement to express a subect but ust because we dont overtly refer to it doesnt mean the subect isnt there. Subects and verbs do not exist n separate universes that oat by chance into positions of greater or lesser proximity. They are securely bound to one another and unless we insist upon that our grasp of the Japanese sentence becomes more tenuous with each more complicating verbal inection. The need to keep track of subects becomes absolutely crucial when the material you are dealing with contains verbs in some of the more complex transmutations that Japanese verbs can undergo: passive causative passive causative and te forms followed by such delicious di rectional auxiliaries as kureru, geru, yru, moru, and itdku. BETLE ENTENE ENTENE 0
Its one thing to say that the need to keep track of sub jects is crucial but quite another to say how to do it. One extremely effective method can be found in the now dis credited languageleaing technque of translationextremely precise translation in which you neer translate an active Japanese verb into a passive English one in which you carefully account for every implied "actor in a Japanese verbal sandwich in which you consciously count the number of people involved in an expression such as Sugu kk· o yonde kte yrsero
The next two chapters go into more detail on the re lationship between the subject and the rest of the sentence.
and Te Anwe to Unaked Queton
I dont suppose many of you remember the "Question Man routine on the old Steve Allen show. Steve would come out with a handful of cards containing answers which he would read aloud and then from the depths of his wsdom he would tell us what questions these were the answers to. For example: Answer Go West. Question What do wabbits do when they get tred of wunning awound?1 Oh well. The funniest thing about the Question Man was not so much the routine itself as when Steve was so tickled by a joke that he couldnt stop cacklng. The pro
ducers of "Jeopardy have effectively circumvented this problem. Which brings us to the eteal mystery of and g. If the Japanese are going to insist on using a postposition (or particle to mark the subjects of their sentences why cant they make up their minds and choose one instead of switching between two (not to menton occasionally substituting no for ? Which is it Wtshi wa iki mshit or Wtshi ga ikimshit? Both of them mean "I went dont they? So which one is right? Well that depends upon what question the statement is an answer to. (In fact for a plain simple I went both would be wrong but let me get back to that in a minute Note here too that I am ignoring such stricty conversa tional forms as Wtshi, ikimshit. The dfference between w and depends entirely on context Neither is automatically correct outside of a con text any more than "a dog is more correct than "the dog Their use depends entrely upon what the author as sumes you know already and what he feels you need to know They function primarily as indicators of emphasis. If at any point in your reading you are unsure where the em phasis lies, one of the best things you can do s ask your self "What question is this sentence the answer to? In the case of Wtshi wa ikimshit and Wtshi ga ikimshit, each is the answer to a question. But lets not forget the sentence Ikimshit either In guring out what the implied questions are this could help you in both in terpreting texts and decding whch form to use in speech. The Answers 1. Ikimshit "I went. 2. Wtshi wa ikimshit. "Me? I . 3. Wtshi ga ikimshit. "went. WA ND A 2
The Questions 1 D shimshit k What did you do? Or Iki mshit k Did you go? 2 Soshite, Ymmursn w D shimshit k
And now you, Mr Yamamua. What did you do? 3 Dre g ikimshit k Who went? Ive included number here because that is the way to say I went in the most neutral, unemphatic way em phasizing neither who went nor wht the person did Thats why I said above that for a plain simple I went both the other forms would be wrong, because it is precisely to add empha is that they would be employed. When we say I went in nglish, were assuming that the listener knows who the I is. And when we assume that our Japanese listener knows who did the verb, we just say nothing for the subject Speakers of English are so used to stating their subjects that it takes a lot of practice for them to stop using ether form 2 or 3, but perhaps becoming more aware of what they are actually saying could help break them of the habit W is a problem for English speakers because it is doing two things at once It differentiates the subject under discussionor rather the topic (more laterfrom other possible topics, and then it throws the emphasis onto what the sentence has to say about the topic. Lets deal with the irst functon irst. Early on we are usually gven as for as the closest English equivalent to w which it indeed is but after en countering w several thousand times and mechanically equating it with as for, we forget the special effect that as for has in nglish and it simply becomes a crutch for translating Japanese into a quaintly Oriental version of En WA ND A
glish before tung it into real English. Wtshi w iki mshit "As for me I went I went. The last equa tion in this sequence is wrong Sure we have the expression as for in English but sane people use it much more sparngly than do students of Japanese Take Patrick Henry for example "I know not what course others may take but as for me gve me lib erty or gve me death! Now theres a man who knew his asfors! The next time you are tempted to say Wtshi w iki mshit, stop and think about whether you really want to proclaim to the world I know not what course others may have taken but as for me I went! Your w differ entiates you as a topc of dscussion from other possible topics (I dont know about those other guys but as far as I am conceed . and then after building up this rhetorical head of steam it blows it all into the rest of the sentence (Yes I did it I went Notice that w builds susense arousing curiosity in the reader or listener about what is to come. If the speaker were to pause at the w, the listeners brain would whisper subliminally "Yes yes and then what? After having differentiated the named topc from implied other potential topics w dumps its emphatic load on what comes fter it This makes it very different from g, whch emphasizes what comes bore it. Have you ever stopped to think about why you were taught never to use w after interrogative words such as dre, nni, and dore? Because g puts the emphasis on what mmediately precedes it and when you use those in terrogative (questinaskng words they are precisely what you want to know "Who went? "Wht came out of the cave? "Which one will kill it most effectively? And just as g points at exactly what you want to know in the ques tion g will always be used in the answer to emphasize WA ND A 4
the information that is being asked for: Dre ikimshit k I Who went? Wtshi ga ikimshit I "/ went or Ymmotosn ga ikimshit I "Miss Ymmoto went This is why you don't want to say Wtshi ga ikimshit for a simple I went because what you are really saying s went to which the proper response is "OK OK calm down. Notice how the same information can be requested either before g or after w: Dre ga ikimshit k I Who went? or /tt no wa dre desu k I Who is it that went? To both of these the marked answer will be Ymmoto-sn ga ikimshit I Miss Ymmoto went (she seems to get around a lot. It is because g emphasizes the word before it that this subject marker is frequently softened in modifying clauses by replacing it with no, a modifying particle that throws your attention ahead. Shmizu-sn no hirott sifu w koko ni rimsu I The wallet that Mr. Shimizu found is here. G can be retained, however if we want to emphasize the subject: Shimizusn ga hirott . . . gves us The wallet that Mr. Shimizu found is in here. Unless we see the direction in which g focuses our attention a Japanese sentence can seem to be belaboring the obvious. Take the denition of crucifxion from the En clopedi ponic, for example. After pointing out that the punishment had long been practiced among the Jews, Greeks, and Romans, t goes on, Omo ni Kirsuto-k no hkugi ni mochirre, /esu Krisuto no hritsuke ymei de ru, which, without due care gven to the g could be interpreted Primarily used in the persecution of Christiani and the crucixion of Jesus Christ is famous. The g indicates, however that the point is not that Christs crucixion was fmous; rather that the crucixion of Jesus Christ was famous among crucifxions. Hence WA ND A
Piariy used in the persecution of Christianity the cru ciixion of Jesus Christ being the best nown example. Students sometimes get the ipression that w apears egtive sntees d g n positive. Tis is sipy ls. hre trong tndny or w to ppear n neg ative sentences, but that is because w is being used in tese cses to do wat it always does, and tt is to throw te empsis oto at comes ater ittht youre not going, tt it int te one you ant, tt tere ren 't any let, etc. Copare kitaku ni I " don't want to go wit kitku w nai I " dont wnt to go (thoug igt lie to ear ow it was.'' ut loo at how te w does exactly te sae ting in positive constructions: Nihonin ni mo mn wa ru no d I Japanese peope do ve teir dis cotets, too. yku w tshik ni kuts o knw sh wa sht g, sono kwri ni kimy n genkku o mo trsht I e arcotics did ease te pain, but tey also gave ise to strange alucinations.• (To empasize te dif ferentiating function of w we might more wordily para prase Ikitku w ni like tis: As far as wanting to go is conceed (in dstinction to oter possible reactions to tis situation, dont Fumn w ru can be paraprased, As for discontents (in distinction to oter sorts of feelings, tey exist. Our verb to do can be anoter andy tool for con veying in Englis translation some of te empasis tat a w often trows on te verb. Compare Okne g ru I " ave money wit Okne w ru I do ave money (but dont ave time to spend it, or owe it all to the govement, or some suc implicaton owng to s usual differentiatng function. Te whole uestion of empasis in language is involved wit te ueston of what is nown inforation and what s new inforation. Tere is no need to accentuate the ob A D A 6
vious. It is for this reason that there are often correspondences between w and g in Japanese and "the and "a in English. "The man (Otoko w . is someone we know about and are now gong to get new information on whereas "a man is someone new who has ust entered the scene ( . otoko g htte kt (That is why "the is called the "denite article: we know ust what we are referrng to while we use "a the "indefinite article when were not so sure. In his encyclopedic Jpnese Lnguge Pttes, Al fonso has not these correspondences and wisely chosen not to dwell on them. The fact remains however, that there is a good deal of overlap n linguistic function be tween Japanese w and g and nglish "the and "a. Since both have to do with unspoken assumptions con ceng how much speaker and listener know, both convey some of the subtlest nuances of their respective languages and both are extremely dicult for foreigners Even the most accomplished Japanese speaker of English will contnue to make mitakes with "the and "a and native users of English will probably always have some degree of difficulty with w and g. Ths is surely one of those intutive areas of language that can only be fully mastered n early childhood. 5 In the days of his youth (though well past his child hood a sharptongued colleague of mine once had a serious fallingout with his Japanese employer over "the and "a. He was working in Japan as a translator at the time and his boss suggested that they were payng him too much because Englsh was so full of these useles little definite and indenite article. Snce he was beng paid by the word the employer suggested they ought to omit all the thes and as from the word count. The prospect of a pay cut did not set well with my colleague who somewhat WA ND A 7
petuously replied "Better yet you do the translations and you can pay me to put in the thes and as For this impolitic thrust at one of the most insecure areas of Japanese knowledge of English he was ired on the spot. G we can fairly safely conclude is a lot simpler than the doublefunctioning w. G marks the gratical sub ect of an upcoming verb or adjective but w marks the topic the topic of a verb but the topic of an upcoming discussion This topicsubject distinction can be more confusing than helpful until you see what a word is the topic of or the subject o For more on this pay close attention to the next paragraph. G marks somethng that is going to have a piece of grammara verb or adjectiveconnected to t but w is far less restrictive: it marks something that is going to have a remark made about it but it gives absolutely no clue as to what kind of remark its going to be. W merely says "Hey Im going to tell you about ths now so listen. G says "Watch out for the next verb that comes by: Im most likely the one that wll be doing or being that verb G l wys marks the subject of a verb or adjective and if that verb is the main verb that means g is markng the sub ject of the sentence W neer does this. Wait a minute. Did I just say that w neer marks the subject of a sentence? Yes and I mean it. W neer eer marks the subject of a verb and so it never marks the sub ject of a sentence W only marks a topic of dscussion that about which the speaker is talkng. And as Anthony Alfonso so sensibly remarks "Since one might talk about any number of things the topc might be the sube of the inal verb or time or the obect, or loction etc.7 Alfonso gives lots of good examples of each type of topic n a passage that is well worth studying. As a time topic he gives Aki wa sor g kirei desu which can be WA ND A 8
translated "The sky is clear in autumn or more literally "Autumn well the sky is clear or for autumn (as opposed to the other seasons the sky is clear etc. One example of an obect topic that Alfonso gives is Sono koto wa k hmete kkmsht "I heard that today for the rst time or That matter well today for the frst time I heard it or "As far as that matter goes I heard about it today for the rst time etc. Alfonsos remark about the possible contents of a topic suggests that a w topic cn be the subect of a sentence but I am still going to insist that it never is. Lets expand on those cases n which the marked topic seems to be the thing or person that does the verb. One go example of this is our old Wtsh w kmsht. Earlier I translated Wtsh w kmsht as "Me? I went. Doesnt ts look suspiciously like those double sub ects your irstgrade teacher told you never to use? "My uncle hes a nice man "My family and me we went to New Jersey "Mistah Kurtzhe dead In each case you name the topic of your upcoming remark and then you go ahead and say a sentence about it. The subect of the verb in each sentence is not my uncle "my family or "Ms tah Kurtz but rather the following pronoun. And notice that all the redundant subects re pronouns. Once youve established that its your uncle you are talking about you can demote him to pronoun status when you give him a sentence to do. Likewise in Japanese once youve established the topic you are going to b talking about you can use the Japanese zero pronoun when you give it a verb to perform. And thats ust what is happening in Wtsh w kmsht.
Our old standby "as for can help clari this a bit further. "As for me [I] went The "I is in brackets here because it is present in the Japanese sentence only as an WA ND A
unspoken subject. Wtshi is not the subject of ikimshit and is not the subject of the sentence. It is simply the topic of the upcomng discussion The tells us only that the following discussion is going to be about wtsh as op posed to other possible people The subject of the verb iki mshit is not wtshi but the silent pronoun that follows it. In other words when you used to make up sentences with double subjects in the rst grade you were tryng in your childsh wisdom to use constructions in English You could have mastered at the age of seven but that pigheaded Mrs. Hawkins runed everything! Take a second and look bak at the example of a object from Alfonso Sono koto wa k himete kiki mshit "I heard that tay for the rst time or "That matter well today for the irst time I heard it. Notice that the actual object of the verb kikimshit is not the topic koto but the zero pronoun which we have to translate as it when we start getting literal. We cannot repeat too often that NEVER marks the subject of a verb It doesnt mark the object either And it certanly doesnt unpredctably substitute for other particles such as and o. All ever does is tell you "I know not about others of this category weve been talkng about but as for ths one . . W tells you nothing about how ts topic is going to relate to the upcoming informa tion: it only tells you that some nformation is coming up that wll be related somehow to the topic. In fact the only way that you can tell whether marks an apparent sub ject or object (or anything else in a sentence is in retrospect. But language doesnt work in retrospect. When a grammarian tells you that can mark the subject of a sentence he is able to say that only because he has seen the rest of the sentence and knows how it tued out. But when real live Japanese people read or WA ND A 40
hear a w topic at the beginning of a sentence they have absolutely no idea whats coming Look at Alfonsos time topc example on the clear autumn sky Aki wa sor g kirei desu The only reason Alfonso was able to use this sentence as an illustration of a time topic is because he had read it to the end and could go back and analyze the relationship of ki to the statement made about it after the w. When a Japanese person hears or sees Aki w though he has no idea whats coming (aside from any hints he might have picked up from the larger context. It could be dikiri desu I "Autumn hate it! or ichibn ii kisetsu desu I "Autumnits the best season making it in both cases an apparent subject (in Japanese if not in English translation not a time expresson. It could even be an ap parent object if the sentence went on tnoshiku sugoshit I The autumn: we passed t pleasantly or "(The other seasons aside the autumn at least we passed pleasantly. Whatever its varous pprent functions markng sub jects or objects or time expressions or locations these functions can be labeled only after the fact as the result of analysis. Agan the trouble wth w s that it always performs its double function it distingushes known topics from other topcs and it signals you to look for the important information that is about to be mparted in the upcoming discussion. When t does that it puts no grammatical restrictions on what those discussions can be. If you stop and thnk about it "as for works in the same way After Patrick Henry set up his topic with "as for me he had to mention the "me again to make grammatical sense ". give me liberty or give me death The subject of the main clause here is an understood "you or "King George or whoever t is that is supposed to give "me either liberty or death. And "me is not even an ob ject its what we call an "indirect object The direct ob WA ND A 4
!
ects of give are lb�ty and "death n other ords asor topcs n Engsh are as grammatcally exble as tics apanese: As for the men we pad them and set them ome or the tme she arrv around two ococ "As or her mothers future Mary Wang still woder what ies ahead. 8 "Madame Bovary cest moi. Notice how in the English examples the degree o dis tnction that as or sets up between the topics it marks and other implied topcs is quite variable The same is true or w Depending on the situation the amount of contrast can vary from quite a lot to nearly none. Here is a sobering anecdote to illustrate how potent a little w can be n differentiating a topic from implied others The topic in question happens to be a time expression not an apparent sentence subect but the differentiating function is the same I and a few other American scholars were at a party and one of us tried to compliment our Japanese host by saying Konbn wa oishii mono g tkusn rimsu ne By this he ntended to say Wat a lot o tasty dishes youre sering tonight. The host laughed and remark You mean Im usually stingy on other nights? By put ting w after tonight my colleague had in effect said Tonight for a change youre servng us a lot of tasty dishes. Although our host seemed to take this in good humor he unobtrusively committed seppuku later as the rest of us were drinkng cognac On the other hand as we shall see below w can ap pear to have virtually none of its diferentiating or con trastive function when we encounter it at the beginning of a text especially in ictional narratives Woever rst realized in those early murky meetings of English and Japanese that w is like as or had a brilliant insight As nearly as I can tell the credit for that WA ND A 42
particular phrase should go to Basil Hall Chamberlain the great nineteenthcentury Japanologst to whom so much of our knowledge about Japan and Japanese can be traced. Proting from some earlier remarks by W. G. Aston that drew parallels between w and certain Greek and French constructions Chamberlain went on to note the usefulness of "as for perhaps as early as 1888. The only problem with as for nowadays as I mentioned earlier is that we tend to stop interpreting t properly in English when we encounter so many s in Japanese. Understood correctly "as for is an excellent devce for helping us analyze a Japanese sentence, but when it comes to trnslting Japanese into real, bearable English, it is usually best disposed of So much for the general princples of w and g. Now lets look at a famous sentence in which we d both a w and a g: Z wa hn ga ng.
As literally as possible, we can render this for elephants (their noses [i.e, trunks the Japanese dont happen to have a special word for trunk its nothing to laugh about] are long That is to say, we rst note that our topic s elephants and conceing this topic we formulate the grammatical constructon trunks are long in whch "trunks is the subect and "are long is the predicate. So now we have "As for elephants their trunks are long. What do we do with it? What does it mean? How do we make it real live English that someone other than a language student could love? Does it simply mean Ele phants have long trunks? Maybe we should look at the Japanese When would anyone ever really say Z w hn g ng except to WA ND A 4
make a pont about how odd Japanese i? Isnt this sen tence about elephants really ust a red herring? Its only conceivable reallife use is for teaching a small child the dstingushing characteristics of various animals. It would have to come in a list probably while the speaker was tuing the pages of a picture book Giraffes have long necks lemurs have big eyes mnks have nice fur tapirs have huge rumps and as for elephants well they have long noses This is not to say there are not genuine Japanese sentences of the Z w hn g ngi patte They are in fact quite common. Here are a couple more: Aitsu w tm g mri yoku ni nee. I That guys
not too bright is he? Oyi w tm g hgete kit. I The old mans lost
a lot of hair. But such sentences dont est in a vacuum (except in classrooms and grammar books. There is always a larger context implied This is true prmarily because of the function of w in differentiating the knon topic from other topcs and directing the attention of the listener to the im portant information that follows. The man Well hes in Washington. The woman She disappeared. Notice the use of the here implying a certain amount of understanding already established between speaker and listenera context. You wouldnt say Otoko w Wshinton ni iru except as the continuation of a discussion that has already established the existence of the man and now im parts more information about h The same prnciple is at work in news reports. A story about a new appointment made by the American president may begin Busshu Bei Dit wa . going on the assumption that everyone WA ND A 44
nows about him and the office he holds. A close equvalent of the Japanese phrase would be "US President Bush . , which makes the same assumptions about what the reader nows as does George Bush THE President of THE United States . . A report on doings in the Diet start out Kokka wa . I "THE Diet . . . Where the existence of a less wellnown entity must be established though we will often ind a ga at work Hbdoda no sotsuronbun n Fu Santar nado Nhon no sarar man manga o torageta Ben ose Rsa Ros-san ga, T no tereb-oku de banm-sesaku no kensh-ch da I Lisa osef an American coed who did a study of
Fui Santar and other such salaryman comics for her Harvard graduation thesis, is presently on inteship for program producton at a Tokyo television station.10 Another famous grammatical red herring involves eels Boku wa unag da. Literally (no, not literally, but perversely), this would seem to mean "I am an eel But it's ust a sentence that Japanese with some conscousness of their own language like to chuckle over. If Sore wa pen da means That is a pen and Are wa kuruma da means "That is a car how can Boku wa unag da not mean I am an eel? Before we answer that its important to note that That is a pen is not the same as "Its a pen. When, aside from some kind of grammar drill in an ESL class, would we actually say, "That is a pen in English? The customer pointing through the glass mistakenly asks to see "this mechanical pen cil, please and we, the clerk, must point out to her that That is a pen The real answer to "What is this Im holding? is the nonsentence A pen, or, for those abnormally addicted to speakng in complete sentences It's a pen, but certainly not That is a pen Likewise, Sore wa pen da (or desu, since we are polite WA ND A 45
n the classroom) is mainly an obedient language students answer to the teachers question Kore wa nan desu ka. A natural answer to the question would be Pen desu The full Sore wa pen desu means "That one [ opposed to another object the teacher is holding] is a pen. But notice that even here, while pen may be the topic of the sentence it is not the grammatcal subject of desu. The sub ject of desu is, as noted earler, the unspoken "it "As for that (it) is a pen. All the wa does is hold up the topic and distinguish it from other possible topics and then it tells you that the important information on the topic is about to follow If the context has established that we are talkng about long slender objects or objects that people happen to be holding, the unspoken subject is easily and automatically equated with the thing that sore refers to If, however, the context has established that we are talkng about what the various individuals in a group want to eat, the slippery unspoken subject can easily adapt to that "(I now not what others may take for this course, but) as for me (what I want to eat) is eel The topic of Boku wa una da is boku but the subject of the verb da is "what I want to eat. 1 The one place where a wa topic mght seem to materialize out of a vacuum is the opening sentence of a ctional narrative but in fact what is going on here is that the wa is being exploited by the author to give the ctive mpression of a nown context. Natsume Sseks novel Mon (The Gate), for example starts out, Ssuke wa sakk kara engawa e zabuton o mochdashte . A reasonably readable translaton of ths might go "Ssuke had brought a cushion onto the veranda and . . This looks so unexceptionable both in Japanese and in English that we can easily forget how much literary history lies behind our being able to begin a WA ND A 46
thirdperson ctional narrative with the narrator establishing such apparent nstantaneous intimacy between himself and his character on the one hand and himself and the reader on the other A nineteenthcentury reader might ask "Who is ths Ssuke fellow? When was he bo? Who were his parents? What does he look like? Where does he live? When dd this happen? This cant be the beginning of the story. What happened to the introducton? It seems to start in the middle of things Of course, that is exactly the point. Many me novels and stories purposely try to give the impression of being direct observations of real lifevents and people that existed before the narrator started telling us about them. The effect is even clearer when the irst character we encounter doesnt have a name, as in the opening sentence of Ssekis earlier novel, Sanshir: Utouto to shite me ga sameru to onna wa I "He drifted off and when he opened his eyes, THE woman . Jack London opens The Call of the Wild 900) with the observation that "Buck did not read the newspapers. We now better than to ask, "Buck who? Hemingays "Indian Camp begins, "At the lake shore there was an other rowboat dran up, and his "Cat in the Rain starts out "There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel. As mode readers we have leaed not to ask Which lake shore? or "What hotel? Its the hotel, the one we and the narrator now about. We enoy the mpression of oulistic immediacy conveyed by this clipped style And perhaps we get impatient when Henry James begins the 880 Portrait of a Lady: "Under certain circumstances there are few hours i life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony non as afteoon tea, etc etc James rrulous narrator who even refers to himself as WA ND A 47
I and tells us that he is beginning to unfold this simple history, is but the most subtle permutation of the traditional storyteller, who mght inform us that Once upon a tme in a certain kingdom, there lived a girl with long, golden hair The Japanese formula for openng a fairy tale s Mukashi aru tokoro ni oiisan to obaasan ga sunde imashita I Long ago in a certain place, there lived an old man and an old woman We can almost hear the storyteller clearing his throat as he stands before us and nvites us to imagine the existence of a selfcontained, makebelieve world nhabted by an old man and an old woman, whose existence must rst be establshed in the form of marked subects before the tale can unfold The implied queston to which this is the answer is Who lived in a certain place once upon a time?' The mode author, by contrast, more often wants to give a strong impression of the preexistence of the elements in his ctive world rather than calling attention to the voice of the narrator and the mere existence of his characters In English, he does this wth the, and in Japanese wa serves the puose Murakami Haruk, for example begins a 985 novel Erebt wa kiwamete kanman na sokudo de sh o tsuzukete ita I The elevator continued its ascent at an extremely sluish pace2 The same thing is going on in the Ssek novel cited earler (I now not about other people, but) as for Ssuke [the one we all now about], he had brought a cushion onto the veranda and The implied question behind this opening sentence is What was Ssuke doing? Translated into the corresponding English medium we get nothing more com plicated than Ssuke had brought a cushion onto the veranda and It would be laughable to imagine a mode introspective novel like Mon starting out In WA ND A 48
Tokyo there lived a man named Ssuke which would, of course have a marked subject in Japanese The impli cation of the wa marker is that we now Ssukeat least as well as we new President Bush in the news story mentioned above Frstperson narrators will always refer to themselves at the outset with wa snce of course, they do not have to establish ther own existences ("Once there was a me) Inde part of what makes such narrators feel so powerlly real and present is their mplied existence, diarstlike, outsde their texts Now, don't go out and exult over ndng a marked subject in the opening sentence of a piece of mode fic tion More than likely it's the subject of a marked subordinate clause like this Veda Toyokichi ga sono rusato o deta no wa ima yori yoso ninen bakari mae no koto de atta I "It was some twenty years ago that eda Toyokichi left his native village Or Tomimori ga sono onna o roi no yama no waki ni aru ie ni tsurete kita no wa, hachigatsu mo haitte kara no koto datta I "It was already
after the beginning of August when Tomimori brought the woman to the house by the ghetto hill3 All of this business about narrators is meant to illustrate that you do not have to lea a lot of different functions for wa It is completely consistent in its double function differentiating the nown topic t marks from others and throwing the emphass on ahead n the sentence to what really matters
WA ND A 4
The Invisible Man's Family Reunion If the invisible man marred the invisible woman and several generatons later their offsprng decided to have a fam ily reunion ths would not only pose a terrible problem for the photographer, but choosing partners for the threelegged race could waste the entire day This is not as rrelevant as it may seem Izanagi and Izanami the creators of the Japanese islands, were proba bly invisible before they descended to earth where they acquired physical bodies We can be fairly certain that it was this orignal invisibility that gave rise to the zero pronoun in Japanese When they contain just one nvisible subject or object Japanese sentences are easer to keep track of but things start to get tricky when directional verbs of giving and receiving enter the action and by the time you get to causatives, passives passivecausatives, and causatives com bned with directonal verbs the number of zero pronouns running around the Land of the eed Plains can be positively overwhelming The following is ntended to help you work backwards from what you might ind on the page, operating on the assumption that you have already come through the material in the other direction The best advice I can offer you is to go back to the textbook It's all there and its probably all clearly explained in terms of both direction and levels of respect When you study it ths tme, though don't worry so much about politeness as direction The most important thing is to keep track of who initiates the action Because the verbs themselves make it perfectly clear who is doing the gving or receiving or causing or dong of an action there 50
is often no need to mention the parties involved overtly Whether mentioned or not they are always there
GVNG N O DRECTONS Y ru ; Kudru Kurru First the givingaway verbs yaru ageru, and sash ageru I have listed them in ascending order of respect but they all mean the same thing, "to give, and they all ndicate gving that moves away from the speaker Whether that giving is down and away, up and away, or upup and away the crucial thng is that the speaker describes the giving as being done by himself or someone he identiies with (f only momentarily) X o ageta then, is usually going to mean "I gave him X or "I gave her X or "I gave them X If the gver is not the speaker but a thirdperson member of our group t could mean "He gave him X It wll neer mean "He gave me X or "They gave us X, because that would have the direction wrong The gving never move toward us we are the ones who initiate the acton of the gving Ageru is especally clear in this regard because it lterally means "to raise upto raise something up to someone who is above you in the hierarchical Japanese view of socal relationships (though in fact this may not be true the important thing is the direction away) The direction remains ed whether the verb of gving takes a noun object (St o ageta I "I gave hm a sweater) or s used as an auxliary verb after another verb i its te form (gerund) to indicate the "giving of the "doing of the verb to someone else as in Kate ageta I "I gave her [my doing the] writing "I wrote it for her) Notce its I gave her my writing "I does both the writing and the gving You'll see why I emphasize this in a minute E BLE MN 5
and aso mean "t gv, but the di retion of the giving is always from the other person to the speaker or someone in his group, exactly the opposite direction of etc, but still giving and not "receiving The speaker describes the gving as being done by someone elsesomeone outside his grouptoward him X then is usually going to mean "He gave me X or "She gave us X etc It will mean "I gave him X and perhaps more importantly it will never mean "I got X from him The other person is the sub ect the doer, the giver the one who initiates the action of giving Notice what youre doing when you politely say to someone You are actually that person to do the verb literally, to "lower something down to you the direction opposite to s "raising up ( is an imperative evolved from the regular imperative, ) Because the verb implies that you are grovelling down here in the dirt waiting for the exalted other person to take the initiative to "lower whatever it is you want down to your lthy place, you can get away with issuing such a command It is ALWAYS the OTHE person who performs and the less polite which places the other person at a less elevated altitude thus preventing nosebleeds B very careful here though. When textbooks or teach ers say that and mean "someone gives to me, this does not mean "someoneanyoneome oat ing unspecied person gives to me but either "the stated subect gives to me or "the unstated but nown subect gives to me In English nown subjects are not called "someone they are referred to by pronounshe she you they. As with can follow a form to indicate E NVBLE MN 52
When verbs of gvngin either drectionare used as auxliares ater a -te form, the same person does both the -te verb and the auxilary whether I ageru to him or he kureru to me Tegami o kaite kureta I "He wrote a letter for me (or
to me)
Tegami o kaite ageta I I wrote a letter for him (or to
hm) Wth verbs of receving however there will be a split Lets move on to the next section and see what that s all about
RECEVNG N ONE DRECTON Mru du In one sense verbs of receiving are simpler than verbs of gving snce receiving happens in only one direction Whereas one set of verbs of gving means "I gve to hm and the other set means "He gves to me, morau means only "I get from hm (as s true of course for ts humbler equivalent itadaku to which all comments on morau apply) There is no form for "He gets from me Thrdperson descriptons of receving wll always mean "He gets from hm/her/them never "He gets from me In spte of ts sngle directon, however, when morau is used an auxilary after -te, it causes students much more trouble than ageru because there is a crucial split between the doer of the te verb and the doer of the auxilary of receiving In -te morau constructions I s the subect of the nal verb (the morau), while the one who does the -te verb is the other person You can't receive from yourself the doing of a verb nu o aratte moratta I I had him/ her/them wash the dog for me As with verbs of gving the nal verb the morau, E NVBLE MN 54
together it means "make him (or her) do it The sentence could be translated, "Go get the person n charge and make hm do it Altogether there are three people nvolved the speaker issung the command, the lstener at the front desk and the room clerk whom the lstener is supposed to make put the two single beds together Unless you take the zero pronoun nto account you might end up wth translations such as these actual examples by certain unnamed acquaintances of mine "Call the room attendant rght away call and get the person in charge quickly, goddammit "Call the person in charge immediately and have hm come "Immediately go and speak to the person in charge. Hurry up and get the duty person "Go and tell the room clerk immedately then come back Call the front desk right now and make him do it get ahold of the attendant right now (lterally, Call hm, come back, do t') get the person in chage and tell him to do it (yarasero is I cause you to tell him ya') (In faiess to these translators t must be pointed out that there is an diomatic usage gvng them some dfficulty See Jump in the Lake But Be Sure to Come Back.) Now here's a very short text wth a causatve n the -te form followed by itadaku, which differs from morau only in being more polite. The single sentence is engraved on a narrow footlong white plastic sign that I bought long ago n a Japanese department store to hang n my office Its graceful black characters proclaim to anyone who can read it my shameless determination to have the day off on jitsu wa yasumasete itadakmasu The wish it expresses is genuine enough, but that's not why I bought it. I bought itand still love itfor its verb forms. (No kinkness intended) At the time I bought it I suppose I was fling pleased E NVBLE MN 60
with myself that I could actually understand a verbal ex presson so dfferent from anything n my natve tongue, Loer Slobovn As Ive sad elsehere one of the great plsues n la Jse oes those oets o reeto atr yu have spoen or undstood oe o these strange expressios automatcally d you ealze tht you have leaned to make your nd ork n ys your mother never could have imgned Eve no ter more yers t this business than I cre to count t the moment such verbal agglomeratios still have the poe to fascinate me, nd heever they ome up n class le to pause over them to make sure the students ae getting the idea of ust how outrageous Japanese can be Honitsu wa yasumasete itadakimasu. Two verbs No subects no obects no agents nobody Ad the Honitsu wa tells us only that these two incredble verbs are happening "tay Despite ths the sentece s both complete and perfectly clear As the gat Zen master D6gen himself might have translated t "Gone shin Is that all it means? Well no not literally but it is ust as much of a cliche in ts culture as "Goe ishin' or "Closed for the Day might be n ours It can be a lot more fu, though, f we look at it closely The nal verb of the sentence s itadakimasu hich tells us that the unnamed subect is going to humbly re ceive something from someone more exalted Ad hat the subect is going to humbly receve is the exalted per son's dong of the causative part of the -te form verb that immedately precedes the itadakimasu So hat's goig on n this yasumasete that the more exalted person is going to do? Yasumu s the verb mean ig "to rest and t is in the causative form hich mens that our exaltd individual will cause someone else to rest i.e he is going to let the humble recever do the resting TE VE MN 6
If we go back to our nal ver and call the unknown subect of that X and the exalted other person Y we've got something like "X wll humbly receive Y's lettng X rest Now who are X and Y? How can a sign like this, with no surrouding text mean anything to anyby? Here the context comes from the real world The sgn hangs in a shop wndow and the wouldbe customer finds the place closed the sign tellng him that "(We, the shopkeepers) humbly receive (from you the exalted customer) (your) letting (us) rest today This is all phrased i tremendously polite language but the fact remains that the shop owner is telling the customer that hatever the customer may think of the mat ter the owner is closing the shop for the day Itadaku s performed by the subect, at hs own discretion and it car ries the message "I take it upon myself in all humility to get from you Its like those sgns "Thank you for not smokng which always impress me as havng an underlying growl that makes them even more intimidatng than a plan "No Smoking A completely naturalized translation for the sign mght simply b "Closed though that way we lose the interesting cultural difference Perhaps "We thank you for allowing us to have the day off or "We apprecate your permitting us to have the day of would begn to convey some sense of the respectful tone of the Japanese in naturalsoundng English But make no mistake about it the owner has gone shin' Now give ths one a try It comes from a story by the writer Hosh Shin'ichi A doortodoor salesman has just been told by the lady of the house that, since her husband isnt home she can't buy the automatic backscratcher he E NBLE MN 62
has bn tryng to sell her tay He gves up and says e wa, chikai uch ni, mata o-ukagai sasete itadaku koto ni itashimash 4 In the o-ukagai sasete itadaku, who do the ukagai part the sasete part the tadaku part Start from the itadaku, the nal verb of the clause mifying koto The speaker is the only one of the two present who could do itadaku, whch the other person
never does. Thus, he wants to get her to cause him to do whatever comes before the causatve Ukagai comes from ukagau, to humbly visitagain a humble verb that only the speaker would do A panfully literal translation of the phrase might be shall humbly receive from you your al lowing me to humbly visit you A less painful version might be I wll call upon you again if I may, whch retains some of the force of the speakers nitiative mplied by the itadaku Unless you keep track of the zero pronouns performing the parts of the sandwich, you might come up with such lteral translatons as these Please make yourself stop by for me, or May I cause you to receive my vist agan or "I will cause you to receive my calling on you (honorable person) or Perhaps you wll give me letting me vist again soon or Please allow me to cause another vist or Perhaps I'll vist again snce youve caused me to (by not buying the product) There are some real problems here If you recognize them take a hard look at your textbook
PASSVES PASVCATON AND TE PASSVECAUATVE The biggest problem surroundng the Japanese passve comes not so much from the form itself as from the overuse of the English passive to interpret active Japanese statements a bad habit that can be developed long before BLE MN 6
the textbook ever gets to the passive I spend so much energy wang my students not to translate active Japanese verbs nto Englsh passives that one brght young fellow named John Brggs invented a grammatcal term for my own exclusive use passivica tion (He was so pleased with hmself for coining the word that he grew a moustache.) Now what s wrong with passvication The answer is almost shockngly simple If you make an active verb passve, you tend to forget that the actve verb had a subect In fact, gettng rid of that subect is precisely what we often use the passive for n Englsh In a t of mesty, an author may tell us hs preface This book was wrtten during the Klench ebellon makng "book the subect rather than coming right out and admittng that "I wrote this book hmself. Ths s the same process that klled off our subect when our dog was washed for us above in the discussons of kureru and morau English verb is n the active voice when ts subect is the actor whle a verb is n the passve voice when the subect receives the action. Melvin ate his french fries s active while Melvin was eaten by hs french fres is passive (if not tragic) Note here that it s the relatonshp of the subect and the verb that determnes the difference Lets look at a few more Laura was arrested Laura is the subect and the verb s beng done to her so t's passive If we further specify that Laura was arrested by the police, Laura is stll the subect and the polce are the agents the ones by whom Laura has the verb done to her The police ar rested Laura Now it is the police that are dong the verb so they are the subect and Laura s the obect If the subect is doing the verb it is an active verb We should also note that if the subect is dong the verb to something, the E NiBLE N 64
verb s not only actve but trasitive the police didnt sim ply "arrest they arrested Laura If when they came for her Laura ran she would have bee doing an intransitive verb she would't have bee runnig something ust running In English, only a trasitive verb ca become passive Japanese is a little different, but we dont have to go into that yet The mportant thing to remember is that both in English and Japanese, transitive verbs always have subects and obects "Cameron slugged the intruder "Baskin married obbins, "Bob got it, "It got Bob "Iwata killed Terry "She counted them "They met her The one big difference of course, is that in Japanese those pronominal subects and obects wont be mentoned n the sentence Almost ivariably, when a student has trouble inding the subect of an active verb he or she wll panic and quickly trasform the verb into a Eglish passive to make the problem go away And when the allimportant connectio between subect and verb is lost, the setence enters the twilight zone Just to confuse things further Japanese has a different kind of passive using the same passive ending rareru ofte somewhat misleadingly called the "suffering (or adversatve) passve, in whch the subect does not have the verb done to it but "suffers the dong of the verb Although the form s often used in unpleasant situatons, genuine "suffering is not inherent to it and in fact the distress usually has to be explictly expressed wth an additional komatta or hido me ni atta or some such complaint The important thing is that the subect gets passively rareru', but it doesnt get acted upon by the rt of the verb This is tough because theres nothng quite lke it in English, but we ust make it that much tougher on ourselves when we lose track of the unnamed subect Let's TE BE MN 65
see how ths works by stealng a suitcase
Kaan o nusunda I X stole the sutcase 2 Kaan ga nusumareta I The suitcase was solen 3 Kaan o nusumareta I X suffered the Ystolethe suitcase Number contains an ordnary active transitive verb and it makes complete sense only in a context that tells us who X is As a transitive verb, nusumu must have both a subject and an object Here, the sentence doesn't name the subject because t assumes we already now who the sub ject is This s a typcal unstressed statement using the silent Japanese zero pronoun This could be " you he, she we youplural, or they stole the suitcase depending on the identty of the perpetrator (ie the subject) umber 2 is like the English passive (and, in fact, the widespread nowledge of Englsh in Japan has probably contributed to the acceptability of the form) The subject is named marked with the subjet marker ga and the whole verb is done to t The suitcase was stolen umber 3 s an example of the Japanese suffering passive a form that can be used with both transitive and intransitive verbs, and thus one that is very dfferent from the English passive The subject is the one who gets rareru whether the passive Japanese verb is transitve or ntransitive For example Ae ni furarete komatta I Being fallen on by rain was distressed "Damn, got rained on The passive is worng the same way n sentence number 3 Mared by o however, the sutcase is labeled as an object, and ths means it cannot be rareru' (or, here, for phonetc reasons, mareru') only a subject can be rareru', and kaan cannot be a subject when followed by o For ths reason, the sentence can E NVBLE MN 6
not mean The sutcase was stolen So, what was stolen? Well as a matter of fact the suitcase stolen So why don't we just translate it The suitcase was stolen and be done with it? Well if your suitcase had been stolen and the police didnt try to nd it for you youd not only be very re sentful, you'd probably never get your suitcase back. The sutcase itself may have been stolen, but the victm of the crime was you, and the use of the Japanese passive tells you that, whether t s mentoned or not, there s a subect who is suffering the doing of the verb Used wth a tran sitive verb, the passve is a neat way of saying that the vic tim/subect suffered the doing of the verb by someone else (the agent, marked with a when mentioned, though often a zero pronoun) to something else (the obect marked with an o when present, also often a zero pro noun). The subect remains you (or whoever else the con text has established as the subject), so you get 'ed by somebody, but you don't get stolen5 Pardon me oficer, but 've just been 'ed, you say to the policeman Oh, sorry to hear that, sr, but what were you rareru? was 'ed somebody's having stolen my suit case How's that again? was stolen my suitcase What an odd way to put it Of course it's odd 'm Japanese, and that's how we phrase these things when our English is a little shaky As the ocer says your expression may be odd, but it's perfectly clear From it, he nows that you are the vic tm that someone did the stealing and that the someone E NBLE MN 67
stole your suitcase Kaan o nusumareta then, is a clear statement involving you the robber, and the suitcase though only the suitcase is actually mentioned n translating a sentence like Kaan o nusumareta, dont resort to something like "The suitcase was stolen and was dstressed The suitcase was not passively stolen the unmentoned " was the one passively affected Much closer to the original would be a "literal equvalent such as, " was unfavorably affected by someone's having stolen the sutcase or " suffered someone's stealing my suit case These are pretty awkward of course and not for consumpton beyond the walls of the classroom Snce " was stolen my suitcase s probably even worse you mght finally want to go as far as "Oh no they stole my suit case or "Damn The rats took my suitcase or any num ber of other expressions of dismay beitting the overall tone of the translation Here by the way, is an example in which the "suffering passive implies no suffering The narrator of Murakami Harukis Tony Taktani informs us that Tonys father was a somewhat widely nown jazz trombonist n the prewar days Kare no chichioya wa Takitani Shzau to iu, sen zen kara sukoshi wa na o shirarea azu-toronn-fuki datta I "His father was a jazz trombonist by the name of Takitani Shzabur who suffered the nowing of hs name somewhat from before the war6 Much of the trouble with the passive, as have sad, starts long before it ever makes its appearance in the text book Let me add a word here to Japanese language teach ers on this matter whle the rest of you leave the room f students have been arbtarily translating active Japanese into either actve or passive English dependng upon whether the subject is more obvious or less obvious they wll not see that the intruction of the Japanese pas E BLE MN 68
sive voice allows them to say things in a whole new way One good method to prepare students for the coming of the Japanese passive is to demand that all translatng n the course before the passive is introduced even at the most elementary level, e done into the English active voice passive translation being called to their attention as an error or when unavoidable as a poor compromise (This wll also provde grammarstarved students with some grounding in what the passve is before they have to deal with it in Japanese ) Ths mght put some strain on the naturalness of the translatng but t would help students to remember that actve verbs always have doers Even somethng as natu rally passivized as the verb iu should be kept actve All right students can come back in now Japanese The Spoken Language says The verbal iu has two basic meanings say and be named or be called but one l lustraton further down the page gves a good approach for avoiding such misleadng passivication Kore wa Nihongo de nan to iu n desu ka I What is it you call this in Japanese? Who we might ask is the "you in ths translaton? Certainly t isn't the person being addressed by the speaker t's people n general the same ones who show up in "They say that fallng in love is wonderful where they are called they By now of course we now that they in Japanese is the zero pronoun and that is exactly who is doing the verb iu They do it again in the phrase It to iu hito which most of us (or at least those of us who had seen the movie A Fsh Called Wanda) would translate a man called t, but which, in the orgnal s closer to a man they call t Better to get away om he Japanese entrely wth somethng like a man by the name of t than to passivize E NBLE MN 6
Probably the most widely nown passivized translaton from apnese s one that has been made from the n scrpton engrved o the monument n Hoshma to those who were klled by the tomic bomb he oiginl n ipton whh contans what may be th most boadly nclusve zero ponoun s a sobering one wth far greater mpct in the apnese orignal than in its weakened En glish trnslation Yasuraka ni nemutte kudasai. Ayamachi wa kurikae shimasenu kara. I Rest in peace for X will not repeat the mistake.
This has been rendered, "Rest in peace for the mistake will not be repeated, whch is far less problematical than the orignal. Who will not repeat the mistake? people wanted to now when the monument was unveiled. And who made the mistake in the irst placethe Americans when they dropped the bomb, or the Japanese when they started the war? The transitve Japanese verb in the active voice calls for a subecta responsible actor. The passivized translaton makes far less stringent demands. With its unnamed subect the Japese sentence seems discreetly to avoid placing the blame on anyone but it is far more thoughtprovokng than the English translation would sug gest for the inescapable conclusion to the unavoidable search for a subect is we. Many intransitive Japanese verbs present another type of problem more one of translation than understanding. These verbs often demand the English passive for natural translation. Someone can "straghten up a room wth katazukeru but in Japanese we cn also speak of the room as "becoming straight katazuku, without reference to who does the straightening even as a zero pronoun. Then TE E M 70
it is difcult to avoid saying something like, The room has been put in order. is another tricky verb easy to translate when used with people I He got well, but hard to avoid passivizing when descrbing broken ra dios which in English we do not characterize as having gotten well I t got fxed t was repaired. Another form that is virtu�lly impossible not to passvize in translation is a transitive verb inected with . ga (or o putting more emphasis on a person's having done the deed) may literally mean The window is in a state of someones having shut it, but the passive is unavoidable if we are going to keep the window as the subject in a normal English translation: "The wndow has been shut. Otherwise, to make the translation natural we would have to tu the window into an object, "Someone has shut the window. The trouble here is that this particular Japanese construction focuses on the state of things someone has performed an active verb, something we just don't do in English. t s neither passive (The window was shut) nor actve (Someone shut the window) but it forces us to choose one or the other in English. gain, in for the eventual appearance of the true passive, stu dents should be informed when this construction appears that it is not passive and that they are being allowed to passivize it in translation only as an expedient. And inally, some good news. f you've got the caus ative and the passive down, the passivecausative is easy. The form is mainly used in complaints by the speaker that he was forced by someone to do something so the subject is almost always " is the one who gets 'ed, and of course someone else does the causing Being ired from a job, for example, is commonly described by the ree in terms of his having been forced to E BLE MN 7
quit, yameru (to quit) becomng yamesaserata ( suf fered Xs forcing me to quit). f the president of the com pany is to be named as the one who did it, we get Shach n yamesaserareta but his participation is implied even without such specic reference. n the case of a transitive verb like toru ("to take), made nto the sentence Torase rareta ( suffered Xs forcing me to take it " was made to take it), not only " and the one who forced " but also the tng " took can b present only as zero pro nouns. Keeping score of the players works the same way in thirdperson narratves.
THE NATURAL POTENTAL said in the intruction to ths book that All too often, students are subtly encouraged to think that Japa nese verbs ust happen,' without subects, deep wthin some Oriental fog. n the world represented by Japanese actions occur,' but nobody does them, and 've said a lot snce then to lay to rest such twilght zone notions about the Japanese language. Now take it all back. There really s a twilight zone in Japanese and the natual potential s it that misty crossroads where the passive and potential intersect where things appen spontaneously or naturally. Another term for the "natural potential (shzen kan) is the spontaneous passive hatsu ukem). We encounter ths form most commonly when an es sayist after supposedly regaling us with obectve facts suddenly ends a sentence with kangaerareru or omowaru or omoeru any of whch would seem to mean "it is think able or "it s thought, but not " think. Wat is he doing? Ducking responsibilty for his own ideas? Passive and potential forms are sometimes used in a way which might strike the Englsh speaker as strange says Anthony Alfonso. hen sometng is or thought E NVBLE MN 72
or even done involuntarly or naturally by a person the action is described in an OBJECTVE manner and by means of either the potential form or the passive form with a potential meaning.0 Take for example this somewhat spooky recollection of a childhood incident by the narrator of a story called ManEating Cats. The day hs cat disappeared into the gardens pine tree he says he sat on the verandah until late in the evening unable to take his eyes off the upper branches of the tree in the brilliant moonlight. Tokidoki sono eda no naka de tsuki no hikari o obite neko no me ga kirari to hikatta y ni omoeta. emo sore wa boku no sakkaku ka mo shirenakatta. Every now and then the ats eyes seemed to be ashing in the light of the moon. Maybe it was just a hallucination of mine. The italicized phrase translates the natural potential expression y ni omoeta, whch certainly does not mean was able to think that . . . and certanly does mean something more like t seemed that . . . One couldnt help feeling that One could not but think that . . . etc. m not sure if such a descrption is entirely objective but it does seem to be removed from the observers exclusively subjective domain perhaps oating somewhere in the mddle between pure subjectivity and pure objectivity. The implication is that the environment naturally leads the speaker to think or feel something. These forms dont translate properly as either passive (t was thought by me) or potential ( could think that). A few more examples When a sad occasion brings forth an involuntary gush of tears the verb naku, to cry is routinely inected as a potential nake, as in Nakete kichatta I just couldnt help crying. When a Japanese sherman pulls a sh out of the water he doesnt take the credit for it as English speakers do. nstead of shouting E BLE MN 7
"I've got one! he inects the verb tsuru to sh) with the potential ending and says sureta! I "It has spontaneously caught itself on my lne And when a Japanese writer talks about the successful completion of a novel he will often say Shsetsu ga kaketa, meaning not boastfully "I was able to write t but fa more modestly It was wrtable "It wrote itself. Good luck with ths one
Here is a chart summarizing the forms treated in this chapter These are all complete sentences, with implied subjects obects and agents using the transitive verb kaku to write) which appeared prominently in the explanatons above and supplying a tegami two cases to illustrate the different uses of the passive I have put all the verb forms into the perfective ta form as you would most lkely en counter them in statements about actual actions aving been performed by nown people and translated the examples using irstperson singular subjects and masculine thirdperson singular pronouns for smpliciy employng the feminine at two points to indicate the presence of a third party The emphasis here is on the number of players involved and direction of the acton not levels of respect Kaita Kaite yattaageta. Kaite kuretakudasatta. Kaite morattaitadaita Kakaseta. Kakasete kuretakudasatta
I wrote it I wrote it for him He wrote it for me I got him to write it for me. I made/let him write t He did me the favor of mak ing/letting er/me write it. Kakasete morattaitadaita I got h to let me write it or E BLE MN 74
Kakasete agetayatta Kakareta egami ga kakareta egami o kakareta. Kakaserareta Kaite atta Kaketa
I got him to make/let her write it. I let/made him write it It was written, or I was ad versely affected by hs having written it. The letter was written I suffered the consequences of his wrting the letter. I was forced by him to write it. It had been written. false passive) It successfully wrote itself
The Explaine Notwithstandng their reputation as lovers of silence, the Japanese do an awful lot of explaining. Sometmes it seems as they try to explain eethng They certainly do a lot more explaining than we do in English, even to the point of explaining when there's almost nothing to explain, just to give the impression that they're explaining objective reality when in fact they're just stating ther personal opin ions like everybody else. Now, after having given you an opening paragraph like this, I've got an awful lot of explaining to do myself hat I'm talking about are those little phrases that seem to pop up at the ends of sentences or clauses to tell 75
you that what you are reading is an explanaton of what the author said in the sentence before or that what you are hearing is an explanation of the realworld situation for those who are standing in it kara da, wake da, and no da. Of course, there are differences in nuance among these forms, but they all explain what came before Note, too, that all 's can be interchanged with desu or de aru even droppedepending on style.) et's start with an old standby Kore wa pen desu I And this it's a pen. We have to get this basic building block straight before we start wrapping whole little sentences like this around bigger ones Be sure to read "Wa and Ga if you don't now why the translation isn't simply This is a pen In Kore wa pen desu, the subect of desu is not kore but the zero pronoun that Japanese uses instead of it If we ust want to say It's a pen, we drop Kore wa and get the complete sentence, Pen desu. "It's a dog nu desu, "It's a desk sukue desu In other words, in the basic A wa B desu I B construction, the A wa part is often gong to disappear, so when you see a sentence in the form of Noun desu or Noun da or "Noun de aru), that noun is the B part of an A wa B desu construction When you nd a sentence ending with a inal verb or adective + kara da It's because construction, the kara is acting ust like the B noun in an wa) B da sentence.1 Instead of Nemui kara hayaku neru I Snce I'm sleepy 'm going to bed early, you could have: Hayaku neru Nemui kara da. I I'm gong to bed early. That's because I'm sleepy or Hayaku neru. Naze nara, nemui kara da. I "I'm going to bed early Why? Because m sleepy or any number of variations in which the explanation follows the main statement. The subect of the da here is the zero pronoun that or "it; ie, the fact that I'm going to bed early. Here is a straightforward example TE EXPLNE 76
from a story by Murakami Haruki about the mysterious disappearance of an elephant Sono shgakusei-tachi ga z no saigo no mokugeki-sha de sono go z no sugata o me ni shita mono wa inaito shinbun kiji wa katatte ita Naze nara rokuji no sairen ga naru to shiiku-gakari wa z no hiroba no mon o shimete, hitobito ga naka ni hairenai y ni shite shimau kara .
These pupils were the last eyewitnesses, and no one had seen the elephant after that, according to the arti cle. s as ease the keeper always closed the gate to the elephant enclosure when the six o'clock siren blew, making it impossible for people to enter. Notice how naze nara and kara da work together as a pair Why is this? It's because . .) I've conated this common construction in the phrase this was because. For more on this pair and pairs n general, see the chapter "Waing This Language Works Backwards Notice, too, that these explanatory expressions, being comments upon something said earlier, powerfully imply the presence of a human mind doing the commenting The construction shows up in situations in which someone is evaluating or udging or preaching, and in positive statements there is a strong presumption that the speaker or writer has a better grasp of obective reality than the listener "Look, it's this, it's this, it's this, this is what you should do, I'm tellng you the tuth Here ae a couple of examples of kara da from essays by the novelist Mishima Yuko, who was always convinced of his rightness and who used the form so frequently that he inally ost his head The irst conces his feelings at the time he wrote his rst "novel the irony is his), E EXPLNE 77
Kamen no kokuhaku Confessions of a Mask): . . sukoshi nen-iri ni jibun no shinpen o aratte mitai k ga ru Naze na kn htu t ore kara nen-g n saish no eka-ok t e watahi n henreki jidai wa hobo owatta to kangaerareru kara a
I would like to examine my pvate le here in some detil at s ease my yers o wndeing would seem to have com pretty muh to n end with this novel and with the world tour I made a few years later3 his next one doesnt use naze nara but sets up a wa topic to be explained: Hanazakari no mori shohanbon no jobun nado o ma yonde mite iya na no wa nanwar ka no jibun ni, chiisa na chsa na opochunisuto no kage o hakken suru kara de a.
That I feel sick now when I read such things as the preface to the first edition of [my] Hanazakari no mori . . . s because I discover in a certain prt of my self the mage of a petty opportunist.4 One sentence in the old Hibbett and tasak textbook that always threw students for a loop was ths one at the beginning of a paragraph written by Funahashi Seichi n no daibubun ga, Nihonin no eikatsu kara kanj o nakushite shima to iu kangae no hito bakari de atta kara
The maorty of the committee members were made up TE EXNE 78
only of those who wanted to eliminate kani from the lfe of the Japanese once and for all aa a. 5 The problem was always what to do with that kara da hanging on the end. Well, if we see that kara da means "Its because, we have to start looking for the zero pro noun subject of the da The antecedent of the "it, then, has to have been established somewhere before this sen tence, but since this is the rst sentence n the paragraph, that forces us nto the previous paragraph. With a horrible wrenching in the gut, we come to realize that Funahash Seichi has purposely thrown a paragraph break in just where it can best disrupt the logical connection of his ideas In the last sentence of the previous paragraph, he tells us that he was always viewed as something of a heretc on the committee, and he continues in the new paragraph, Thats because the majority of the committee members . . etc. This teaches us a couple of things. First never trust Japanese paragraphing or punctuation) to work as it does in English Second, never gnore those kara da at the ends of sentences because these are the very tings that are going to connect a sentence to wat came before it In fact, the kara da S the sentence, and everythng leading up to it is just a modifer The main clause of in no daibubun ga, Nihonin no seikatsu kara kani o nakushite shima to iu kangae no hito bakari de atta kara is nothing more nor less than kara da, which becomes, in English, "That is because, the main verb of the sentence being da and the subject of da beng the zero pronoun pointing back to the previous sentence. Dont let this throw you, its really very simple. When a long sentence ends with a "Thats because, it means That [i.e., what was just sad in the previous sentence] is because of ev EXPLNE 79
erything in this sentene that precedes the kara da. All of these little elainers at the ends of sentences work this way ey are the main sentence, and evething else modies them. In one sense wake da and no da are even easier to un derstand than kara da because wake and no are clearly nouns as kara is not) and they are being modiied by what precedes them ust as surely as sen is modifed by akai in the phrase akai sen I red balloon. Akai sen da I It is a red balloon. Unlike no, which is an element of grammatical struc ture probably evolved from the noun mono, thing) wake s an independent noun deined by Kenkyusha with such terms as meanng sense; reason cause grounds. Sore wa d iu wake desu ka I hat do you mean by that? and wake o hanasu I to tell the reason to ex plain are examples of this usage Coming at the ends of sentences both wake da and no da mean "the reason for that s or more simply it means or that means or it's that or it's not that in the sense of It's not that Im a big fan of Van Damme or anythng it's ut that I like the music in his lms) with the "it or that being a zero pronoun pointing to what has been said in the sen tence before or something in the obective situation observable by both speaker and listener. Kenkyusha gives us some good examples of the negative usage Warui imi de itta no wa nai I "It's not that I said it with a bad meaning "I meant no ill will. Betsu-ni fukai imi ga atte s itta wake de wa nai I It's not that I sad so with a deep meaning "I didn't mean anything serious when I said so.
These interestngly enough are to be found under the TE EXPLNE 80
definiton of imi, whch means "meaning Notce that these two sentences are basically saying the same thng, and that the no and wake are perfectl nterchangable. It would be unnatural but understandable to replace either of them with the word imi tself, since both are commentng on the "meanng or sgnficance of what was, by im plcaton, sad before The meanng of what I just said is not that soandso but suchandsuch) In speech, no da contracted to n da or n desu or simply no in femnne speech) endngs often refer not to any thing that has been sad but to the objective situton, there for both speaker and lstener to observe Anthony Alfonso llustrates ths vividly with the followng contrasting pair, both members of whch could be translated Is t in terestng? Omoshiroi desu ka is a queston you would ask a person about a book he owns. Omoshiroi n desu ka is a queston you would ask of someone [reading a book] whose attention is visibl absorbed, or who has broken into a smile or a laugh. N desu ka is a questona complete, selfcontaned sentence mplyng Does our shared experience mean ? In texts the shared experience is the context that has been establshed to that pont, usually n the preceding sen tence Everything precedng the n or no is a dependent clause modifying the noun no. It is a mstake to call no da an "extended predcate, as f t were an extenson to the predicate, just a lttle more nformaton about the subject wth which the sentence started. By the tme you get nto the no da, the subject has changed. For example Sono toki mo, watashi wa tabun kokoro no naka de sono ki to hanashi o shite ita no dar to omou I "I think I must have been conversng wth the tree n my heart that tme, too TE EXPLNE 81
Much more literally "That tme, too, as for me, I) probably n my heart was doing a conversation with that tree t) probably is, I) think hether or not you agree with me about zero pronouns "I is clearly the subect of shite ita I was doing a conversation) but that s where the predicate about I ends, and we enter a whole new sentence, It is, following whch the topic reemerges to comment, I) thnk. The main verb of a sentence ending no d is da, and the subect of the s not the subect of the clause that modie no The subect of is the zero pronoun refer ring to the established context, whether the context is a statement or a realworld situation shared by speaker and listener, or an earlier statement shared by wrter and reader This is true even of so brief an utterance as Omoshiroi n de I Is it [your laughing, snorting, droolng] that it [the book] is nterestng Omoshiroi, which mies n, has its own subect the zero pronoun standing for the book, while the subject of desu is all those unseemly ac tons noted in the brackets equally unverbalized. Lest there be some confuson, note that the desu in Omoshiroi desu is simpy a polite lengthener after the adective, while the one after the n is the copula, "Does A B hen we take away politeness Omoshiroi and Omoshi roi are as blunt as we can make the question Omoshi roi desu Omoshiroi no and Omoshiroi no are blunt or familiar verons of Omoshiroi n de Here, the copula s routnely dropped, but it shows up again in macho postve tatements Omoshiroi n .) I recently came cross the following forbiddng, no da studded passage in a list of rules for Japanese high school students studyng in Amerca TE EXPLNE 82
Moshi, minasan ga Amerika de wa ini asobimakutte yar to iu kangae dake de kita no shia, Amerika ni ite wa narimasen. Amerika e wa Eigo no benk, Amerikajin no kurashiburi, Amerka to iu kuni no bunka o manabu tame ni kita no te, asobi ni kita no de wa a kara.
If it [the meaning of your being here] is that you have come to America only to have a good time, then you should not be here. Because it's that you are here to study English and lea about American culture, it's not that you are here to play Interestingly, this was translated into Japanese from an English original that had no such overtly explanatory or di dactic elements but which were felt to be necessary by the Japanese translator. The English original read simply If you have come here only to have a good time, then you should not be here. You are here to study English and lea about American culture, not to play. In the Japanese text, the authoritarian writer s there, udging, explaining, and wagging her yes, her ! ) nger at the hapless high school kids who probably do want to study English but ought to be able to have a little fun, too. One highly explanatory paragraph from Murakami Haruk's story about the disappearing elephant provides us with some ne examples of these usages and a couple of tame for good measure; see Taming ame for more) The passage is a little long, but it demonstrates the struc tures in a developing context Z ga machi tsumari boku no sunde iru machi da ni hikitorareru koto ni natta no mo, sono rrei no tame datta Machi no kgai ni atta chiisa na dbutsuen ga TE EXPLNE
keieinan o riy ni heisa sareta toki dbutsu-tachi wa dbutsutorihiki chkaisha no te o tshite zenkoku no dbutsu-en ni hikitorarete itta no ga sono z dak wa toshi o tgite i tame n kiukete o mitsukeu t ga dekinakatta Dn dbutun mo sude ni jbun na dake n kazu n z o shoy shite ita shi ima ni mo hinzhossa o okoshite shinde shi mais na yboyob no z o hikitoru y na monozuki de yoy no aru dbutsuen nante hitotsu mo nakatta no . Snna wake de sono z wa nakama no dbutsutachi ga minna ippikinokorazu ugata o keshite shimatta haikyo no gotoki dbutsuen ni, nan o suru to mo nakuto itte mo motomoto toku ni nanika o shite ita to iu wake de wa nai no keredsankagetsu ka yonkagetsu no aida tatta hitori de inokoritsuzukete ita.
The elephant's advanced age is what led to its being adopted by the town (the town I live in). hat is to say that when the little zoo in the suburbs suffered the losing of its doors due to nancial problems, the ani mals were taken in by zoos throughout the country through the mediation of an animal dealer, but because that one elephant was too old, it was impossible to nd anyone to take it in. hat is to say that the zoos all had plenty of elephants and there was not one single zoo that had the wherewithal to take in, on a whim, a feeble, old elephant that looked as if it might die of a heart attack at any moment. For that reason the elephant styed alone for nearly four months in the decying zoo rom which all of its compnions had without exception disappeared with nothing to do though saying this, it is not that I mean that t espe cially had anything to do before. TE EXE 84
This is a grammatical translation that not only forgoes any sense of style in the English but also raises the question of what all those explanatons are doing theresome of them sounding rather forced. To be sure a stylistcally smoother English version is probably not gong to leave much sign of the explanatory phraseology. For example The elephant's age is what led to its being adopted by our town. When fnancal problems caused the little zoo in the suburbs to close ts doors, an animal dealer found places for the anmals with zoos throughout the country, but no one wanted to take such an old ele phant The zoos all had plenty of elephants, apparently, and not one of them was willing to take in a feeble old thing that looked as if t might die of a heart attack at any moment. And so after all of its companions had disappeared, the elephant stayed alone in the decaying zoo for nearly four months with nothing to donot that it had anything to do before Granted, may have smoothed over more than had a right to, but what has happened to those overt verbaliza tions of explanation? Well, often, we just don't say such thngs in normal English. Who needs em? Remember that I said before that both Omoshiroi desu ka and Omoshiroi n desu ka could b translated, Is it interestng? ypically, in English, we don't distingush verbally between the two situations, at least not by such a subtle shift in phraseol ogy. Omoshiroi n desu ka might come out Interestng, huh? or Hey, I see you lke it or "Jeez Frank youre making a mess of that shirt, but Japanese s routinely going to both ask for and offer explanations of contexts far more often than English does E EXPLE 85
No or no shows up frequently in texts, especially expository texts in whch the writer s trying to convince you he has a handle on the truth Some writers will bombard you with them, telling you at the end of virtually every sentence "The obectvely true explanation of what I ust said s No s not functioning n such cas as some kind of amorphous emphatic addtive but always with its explanatory functon, whether there is really anything to explain or not I.e it is functioning as a rhetorical device. Thus, when a writer of ction gv us a narrator who speaks as an essayst or anthologzer or clipper of newspaper columns, such as the narrator of Murakami's story of the vanishing elephant we get a lot more no 's than in a dcriptive piece by the same authoror a descriptive passage in the same piecein whic say, a lttle, green monster burrows its way to the surface of the heroine's garden The no 's are constant reminders of the presence of the narrator observing, qutionng udging and often subtly hinting to us that he or she knows more than we do So watch it
TE EXPLNE 86
Out in Lef Field
The Jhnny Crn Hodo e dy tat Johnny Crson retired om tnigt teei sion ws sad moment for te tecing o Jneor t ast for te teang of te use o te quantittie nouns hodo nd kura in postive epressions Stunts sem to catc on to te use of tese wods n negative sntnces re is no straight an s oveweight s d a on etc) but when Carson went tat my ave ended our only ope for a lear conceptuaiztion of te positive uses of hodo All About Partcles Power Japnese p 66) provides exampes of both kinds of usage. For te easy negative type Kotosh wa kyonen hodo samuku na de I "his year is not as cold as ast year.
For te harder postive type we ind Ky wa benky ga dekna hodo tskareta. I ody Im so tired tt I cant study.
Etensive research has demonstrated tat the soundest ilumination of tis second usge ws ofered t irrer intervals by Johnny Carson nolly ery in te sow during te monologue t some point Crson woud mke a sttement involving an etreme condition such s ow hot or cod the weather was or ow bad the economy was 89
to wch the weltraned audience responded, for eampe, ow cold is t or How bad is it Carsons answer illustrated te extent to hch his orignal sttment s tru n te udience skd bout the onomy "ow bd i it e migt rspond with suh an egedy vr reoinder s t's bd tat Organized Crime d to ay off ten udges, or Its bad tt oysters are producing fke pers1 So . tht is the key to nterpreting positive statments o etent using hodo or the virtuay equivent gurai or krai) ry to brek the hbit of mcnicy using te word etent f we apply the Carson method to clarfying the sentence n which the student tels us how tired he is, we cn sk ke the audience, ow tired are you o whch e answers ike Johnny Im tired that studying is impossbenot a particulary amusing reoinder but scarcey inferio to the fake pearls The important pont is to note rst what the central statement is without the hodo construction If we throw out te hodo and the clause that modifies it we end up with a simpe positive statement, sukareta I Im tired e subect of tsukareta is of coure, "I [the zero pronoun in Japanese, not ky I today, which is a time topic) Te hodo signals us to ask the speaker ow tred are you o ic e has aready replied "I'm tired that I ave this modifying clause hangng on meno m tired that cant study us when you encounter a hodo epression followed by a positive sttement and you ave troube guring out the ect reationship of the parts before nd after the hodo put yourself into the place o Jonny Carson's audience and ask How much did you do your nal statement hen quickly swtch to Jonny and answer, I TE CON H 90
did it so much tat watsaidbefore Here are some eamples severl with negtive endings before te hodo but all wit positive inal statements3 1 [Yam hima ga nai hdo hatarakima e works ow muc does he work e woks so much tat he hs no time to rest 2 Kono shigoto wa kodomo de m dkir hodo yasashii desu is job s esy How easy is it? t's so esy that even a cid can do it 3 Yoru nemuru koto ga dekina hodo shinpai hi mashita I worried How much did I worry I worried so much I couldn't sleep at night 4 [b mo iranai hodo] atatakai desu Its warm How warm is it Its so warm you don't need an overcoat 5 [akitai hodo] komatta I was upset How upset was I? I was so upset I wanted to cry 6 Ano hito wa [tsukaikirenai hodo] kane ga aru He has money How much money does he have? e has so muc money that he can't possibly spend it all
Now, just in case I assumed too much regarding hodo with negative statements let's apply a similar pproach to a few eamples Mzu wa [biiru hodo] oishku nai
ake the hodo clause out, and you ave te main clause Water is not goodtasting TE CO H 91
In other words, we're talking about water rst and foremost, and are comparing it with the thing in he hodo clause Once you've isolated the main clause, the hodo signals you to ask the unCarsonesque question As goodtasting as what? To which the answer is Water is not as goodtasting as beer A couple more eampl including one to go wth the beer Migi no me wa [hidari hodo akaku nai The right eye is not red Not as red as what? The right eye is not as red as the left Konsh no shiken wa [sensh no hodo muzukashiku nai This week's eam wll not be difficult Not as dificult as what? This week's eam will not be as difficult as last week's [Sore hodo omoshiroku nai desu yo It zero pronoun) is not interesting Not as interesting as what? It is not as interesting as that This can work like the Englih idiom, with no clear antecedent to either sore or that It's not all that interestng Say, how was that ick, Double Impact'? Oh, it wasn't that interesting
Knji Kanji are tough Kanji are challenging Kanji are mysterious and fun and maddening Kanji comprise one of the 92
greatest stumbing blocks faed by Westeers who want to become iterate in Japanese ut kani ave noting to do it grmmar or sentene stture or thougt pattes or Jn word vew nd tey e tny not te Jpns nug y re ut prt o te wods most unky iting system nd a wting system cannot cause nguge to be procsed in dierent part of the brin ny moe thn it n or it to some otr prt f te body eepting of ourse Lower Sobovian wi is proessed n te t ebow) eorge Sansom d the right idea back in the tirties wen e noted that the sounds of Japanese simple and few in number, are vey well suited to nottion by n lphbet nd it is perhaps one o the trgedies of Oriental history tat the Japanese genius dd not a tousand years ago se to its invention Certainly wen one considers te truly appalling system which in te course of the centuries they did evolve, that immense and intricate pparatus of signs for recording a few dozen little syables, one is inclined to tink that te weste alpabet is perhaps the greatest triumph of te human mind1 o tis an only add that banana skins provde one o te best surfces for writing kani if one is using a ballpoint pen Since tis book is intended to elp th an understanding of te Japanese language it ill ave noting furter to say about kani
93
Shiru and Wakaru
To Know You Is Not Necealy to Undetand You Believe it or not, one of the irst instructors I had when I was a sincere impressionable beginning student of Japa nese at a great educational instituton that shall remain nameless but which is situated very close to the shores of Lake Michigan in a very windy cty, once told me that the reason the Japanese say shitte iru rather than shiru for "to now was to avoid the embarassment of having to say shirimasu, containing the shiri that means "backside in the sense of "butt or "tush). Even more amazing than the fact that she told me this was that I BELIEVD HER! What's that? They told you the same thng? No, impossble Any decent textbook wll give you the straight dope early on complete with the nformation that its okay to say shiri in shirimasen when you have to tell someone you don't now something. Well, if shirimasen is okay, why not shirimasu? Obviously, there s something more going on here than delicate avoidance of an anatomical featureespecially among the Japanese who are far less delicate than we are in discussing physical matters The fact s that shiru does not mean "to nw It means "to come to nowto nd out, "to lea s the Japanese conceive it "nowing consists of nd ing out about something and keeping it in your brain When you want to say "I now in Japanese you have to say "I have found out about that and I still have it up here where it belongs or, I am in a state of having found out. Shitte iru is very common, but you won't hear shiru being used very often n conversaton. Unless you realize 94
that doesn't mean to now however it could seem stranger than it actually is when you encounter it as more often happens in written material. Thus when Nakamura Mitsuo tells us that the Japanese mazu gaikei no moh n yotte kagaku o shiri [blush] etc. he is saying they rst learned about science through the imitation of exteal forms not that they kne scienceand certainly not i the biblical sense hen you want to say I don't now in Japanese you ne to say I havent found out about it yet shirimasen) rather than I am not in a state of having found out about it shitte imasen) which if you could get away with it would sound more like a declaration of ignorance to be maintained I intend to remain in a state of not having found out about it and although this may in fact reect yo own personal conviction it would sod vey strange. Aside from these problems of meaning and form shiru is not too mysterious It is transitive taking direct objects the same way that "know does in Englsh Ano hito o shitte imasu ka I Do you now him? For speakers of English however wakaru is much trickier. Wakaru, when it causes trouble does so through a combination of backtranslation and misunderstanding of wa. Because understand is a transitive verb English I understand that) students tend to think of wakaru as a verb that people do to things Watashi wa sore o wa: wrong) Under ordinary circumstances wakaru does not take an object People dont wakaru things things them selves do wakaru they "are clear or they "are under standable and if we happen to be in the neighborhood they are clear to us Notice I said to us. If we are going to put people into a sentence about things being clear they are usually followed by ni, as in Watashi ni wa waka ranai hen the people in the sentence are not followed SH/RU ND WAKRU 95
by , you should think of this as a kind of contraction is short for I To me, it is not clear The trouble probably starts with those contractd forms looks awfully close to the transitve English I don't understand it) If youve read and The Answers to Unasked Questions, however, you realize that a topic is never the subject of a verb. And if you've read the paragraph before this one, you now that dont do things do it themselves, so for that reason too can't be the subject of . Kenusha gives to see [i.e. understand or get] a joke and as miss the point of a joke In both cases you are sayng that the joke itself subject marked by ) s or doesn't If we put me into the latter sentence we get a form that looks like this n wa ga Let ths be our model for a full expression in which the understander and the understandee are both named in a sentence using . A natural English version of this model would be I dont get that joke, but of course it is a good translation only because it avoids any attempt to ect the Japanese structure which is something like To me that joke doesnt clarify itself. Perhaps better would be That joke doesn't make sense to me. So you think, Hey that's easy The subject of s going to be marked by No problem! Uh not so fast Sometimes itll be but often it'll be , too And this brings us to another source of vagueness re garding It seems to be drowning in s some HIRU ND WAKRU 96
times the understander is marked by a wa and sometmes the thing the person is understanding or not understanding is marked with a wa instead of a nice clean ga ets look at some of the examples from Kenkyusha's long denition of wakaru Kimi ni wa koko no imi ga wakaru ka I Can you make out the eaning of this passage? This corresponds to our full model and should be no problemunless youre not friends with the speaker, who is being far from polite. Watashi no iu koto ga wakarimasu ka I Do you un derstand what I'm saying? Here, the you is understood from context but otherwise were still with the model Snna koto wa watashi ni wa chinpun-kanpun de wakaranai I It's all Greek to me. Here, the to me looks familiar, but the matter that we are not under standing is marked by wa and comes at the beginning of the sentence If youve read "Wa and Ga and The Myth of the Subjectless Sentence though, this shouldnt be much of a problem. for matters such as that to me they [zero pronoun actual subject] are nonsense and n understandable Kimi no iu imi wa wakatte iru I I now what you mean far as the meaning of what you're sayng ges it [zero pronoun] is in a state of having become clear More on wakatte iru later.) Kare ni wa sono share wa waaranakatta I The joke was lost upon him Wait a minute heres the same dictonary that gave us share ga wakaranai now suggesting share wa wakaranai. Why can't they be more consstent? Actually with a negative verb like this, wa would b more common than the ga of the model sentence, merely be cause in a negative sentence you usually want to throw the emphasis ahead to the negative verb. With wa, its more HIRU ND WAKRU 97
He didnt get t With ga t's more "He ddn't get it. Sore o wakaraseru koto ga dekinakatta I I could not get it across to them. This might look like an object with wakaru but with the causative you're causing somebody to a
I have not come to now that fact yet I Mada shiri masen. JSL 0808 also offers some enlightening analyses and the useful contrasting pair anaka-san o shitte imasu ka I Do you now Mr./s. Tanaka? Michi ga wakarimasu ka I Do you now the way?
Taming Tame The word tame can be confusing because it seems to have two entirely differentin fact virtually oppositemean ings. Sometimes it seems to mean because soandso happened and at others it seems to mean "in order to make soandso happen which s sort of close to "for the sake of another common interpretation. How can we tell the difference? By far the easiest way is to ask the author Failing that we are left with our old iend G. D. Context One clue that will not work is the presence or absence of ni after the tame. Either kind of tame can have a ni after t so don't expect a mechanical approach to work. Look at these pairs: Shiken no tame ni benk shita I I studied for the exam. Shiken no tame ni ikenakunatta I Because of the exam I couldn't go. *
Sakana o taberu tame ni tsuri o shite iru I "He is shing n order to eat sh. 99
Sakana o tabeta tame ni tsuri o shite iru I He is shing because he ate the ish. ame means because or owing to when it follows a structure implying a completed action or unalterable state it means "for the purpose of when it follows a structure mplying an incomplete ie., future) action. Notice that, even though both of the sentences about exams describe past events the exam was still a future event in the rst case the studying was done or the upcoming exam . Likewise, the eating o the ish has yet to occur n the rst sentence about shing: he s shng r the sake of being able to eat a sh. In the second exam sentence, the exam itself may not have taken place when the person became incapable of going on the picnic, say), but it was an unalterable fact that caused him to become unable to go In the second ishing sentence, the fsherman seems to have given in to his temptatons and eaten an earliercaught fish so now he has to replace it with a new one because of that. In defending the use of kani against leftwing critics who want to get rid of them, Funahashi Seiichi says, Yes, it's true that there was a highpressure selling of the kanji for loyalty and lial piety [ch-k in prewar eduation, but, he goes on, Shikashi sono ame no kani no haishi wa mub na shdosenutsu ni suginai I But getting rid of kani because of that is sheer overkill, and he continues, Chk sono ta ichibu no kani no haishi no me ni, zenkani teppai-ron ni naru koto wa, okusekikonk de issai no kako to no danzetsu de aru I "Advocating the dis carding of all kani in order to get rid of just a ew such as ch and k is to confuse ewels ith stones and represents a complete break with the past.1 The same author using the same tame in the same paragraph is using it in its two TMNG ME 100
"opposite senses. The first sono tame refers to an accomplished fact in the past the prewar highpressure selling of the suspect kanji. The haishi of the second occurrence hasn't taken place yet so haishi no tame means for the sake of gettng rid of or "in order to get rid of. Haishi no tame could just as easily mean because they got rid o in a context that made it clear that the gettng rid o was something that had already been done. ame, then, signals purpose for future actions and cause for past actions or unalterably established facts. Or was it cause for future actions and puose for past actions or unalterably established facts Future for actions that have been caused on puose, and past actions for future facts that have been altered to protect the establishment? You get the point.)
Tumori and the Vanishing Beefsteak Edward Seidensticker is such a magnicent translator of Japanese ction that I can probably be forgiven for gloating over catchng him out at a little ub he made in what happens to be one of his best translations that of my favorite Kawabata Yasunari novel he Sound of the Moun tan. All in the interest of pedagogcal accuracy, of course. The error occurs in one of the key scenes of the book the moving night passage in Chapter , when the aging protagonist hears the mysterious sound of the motain that seems to augur his approaching death. It goes like this in English Then he heard the sound of the mountain. 101
It was a windless night . . . . Not a leaf on the fe by the veranda was stirrng. . . . Shingo wondered if he might have heard the sound of the sea. But not was the mountan. . . . Thinkng that it might be himself, a ringing in his ears Shingo shook his head. The sound stopped and he was suddenly afraid. A chill passed over him as if he had been notiied that death was approaching. He wanted to question himself calmly and delberately, to ask whether it had been the sound of the wind the sound of the sea or a sound in his ears. But he had heard no such sound he was sure. He had heard the mountain. 1 We might wonder why Shingo wanted to question hmself about the three possble sources of the sound since he has just done exactly that. Something is wrong. The Japanese original says Kaze no oto ka umi no oto ka miminari ka to Shingo wa reisei ni kangae mo datta ga, which mght better be translated "Shingo felt certain that he had questioned himself etc. or believed or new) that he had questioned himself. s I said it's just a little ub and t don't materially change the impact of the passage The culprit here is a usage of tsumori that never seems to get explained quite right. Most of the textbooks introduce the word as following nonpast verbs with the meaning of intention Ashita iku tsumori desu I I intend to go tomorrow. They rarely go on to discuss the use of tsumori after perfective verbs where we see that the word means something more like belie or "mindset than intention. Makno and Tsutsui give a good example: Yoku yonda tsumori desu I "Im convinced that I read it carefully.3 "I am of the tsumori that I read it carefully [no matter what you may say]. UMORI !02
Of course, someone less fully convinced of his own accuracy might say Yoku yonda tsumori deshita I "I was convinced I had read it carefully [til you showed me my mistake]. lfonso says, "The basic sense of tsumori can be considered to be conviction, that is a state of mind free from doubt4 but doubts can of course be inserted afterward. In a ta tsumori constructon one is often defending one's convictions in the face of evidence to the contrary a situation that can call forth humor as we shall see). Kenkyusha s extremely generous in offering denitions that illustrate the broad range of meanings that tsumori can encompass, but it gives only the most inscrutable tantalizing hnt conceing tsumori with the perfective and that in the form of a kanj compound tsumorichokin whch they translate using none of their deinitions as "selfdenial savings This translation can only be understood if you realize that it is possible to say something in Japanese like this Bifuteki o tabeta tsumori e kane o gink ni azuketa I I put my money in the bank with the tsumori that I had eaten a steak. Well wheres the steak? It has vanished. Or rather, it never existed. I denied myself the steak told myself that I was being good and dong the right thing by saving my money instead. I mentally enjoyed the maginary steak to compensate for the unexcitin act of handing my money over to the teller. Sigh. few more examples M yatchatta tsumori da kedo. I I assume I already did it all but . . . [m I wrong?] sshkenmei yatta tsumori desu. I I believe I did my best. Shinda tsumori ni nareba donna koto de mo dekiru. I If you tell yourself I have died [Oh well the UMORI 103
worst thing that can hapn to me is Ill get klled] you can do anything.7 Perhaps I ought to add that its not so much the mechanical combination of ta + tsumori that do the ob as the use of tsumori after something that implies an ongoing condition or accomplished fact rather than futurity. A noun-notsumori or adective + tsumori can work ust as well Ano ko wa m otona no tsumori desu ne. I "That kid thinks hes a grownup already eh8 Ano oiisan wa mada wakai tsumori nan desu yo I "That old man considers himself still young.9
Gven the rght situation tsumori can be a source of ironic or selfdeprecating hmor. A lively lady broght some homemade sweet bean pastries (manj) to a party at my hose earlier tonight and was asked by a wry gentle man Manj desu ka I "Are those man He obviosly new what they were bt was gently kiddng her abot ther slightly northodox appearance. Withot batting an eyelash she answered Manj no tsumori desu kedo I Well in my hmble opinion they are man. She got a good lagh and yo can too next time someone asks yo something that is fairly obvios Amerika no kata desu ka I "Are yo an American Amerikajin no mo desu kedo . . . I ell I was the last tme I looked . . . .
Here for extra credit is a wonderfl long sentence sing tsumori from an interview with the novelst Mrakami Haruk i which he denies that he ever consciosly UMORI 104
soght to be at the forefront of a new "rbanization movement in lteratre Boku wa kesshite s iu mono o motomete ita wake de mo nai shi ima de mo motomete nai shi ibun no kakitai koto o ibun no kakitai y ni kaku to iu itten ni ishiki o shch shite yatte kita m nan desu keredo ne "I never was striving for anything lke that and I am not striving for it now I beieve that what I have done all along is to concentrate my attention on one pont and that is to wrte abot what I want to write abot in the way I want to write abot it.0
You Say Kimeru and I Say Kimaru Keepng this particlar transitve/intranstive pair straight can be more dificlt than yod imagine. See if this scheme helps: to pick a category (Heya o kimeta "We decided on a room). X ga kimaru: a category gets picked (Heya ga kimatta "A room has been decided on). X o kimeru
to pick an individal (Kono heya ni kimeta "We decided on this room) X ni kimaru an individal gets picked (Kono heya ni kimatta This room ted ot to be the one). X ni kimeru
!
Warning This Language Works Backwards As sl ofcil policies of the nited Sttes towd Jpan re totlly misdirected Instead o pressrng the Japnese nto lowrng trde brriers or taking greter shre of the sponsbility or thr on defnse we shold be rgng tem to bring their verbs from the nds o their sentences into second plae rght after their sbects where they belong. Unlss we ccomplish this th rest of or foreign policy s so mch tof. If yo think yo have troble with Japanese verbs being wthheld from yo ntil yo get throgh all the intervening time expressions nd modifying clses nd whtever else the writer decides to pt in yor way dont worry the Japnese have the same problem themselves. They know ther langage works backwards bt they persist in keep ng it that way as a matter of national pride. Of corse some writers sch as Kabki playwrights have capitalized on the perverse placement of the verb at the end The theater s charged with sspense as the retainer center stage slowly tantalzingly intones the lines As to the estion . . of whether or not this severed head . . s the head of my liege lord the mighty general Kaimra Sabr Mitsmar . . knon throghot the land for his brilliant mlitary explots . . beloved by the people of his doman for his benevolence towards even the lowlest famer . . I can say here and now wthot a single dobt cloding my mnd . . that althogh the throngs gathered here before s may wsh the trth to be otherse . . and the happiness of hs entire family hangs in the balance . . . ths my masters head . . s . . . NOT More often thogh nstead of enoyng the delicios dilemma of 106
havng to wait to the end sers of Japanese give each other and expect to be given lttle hints along the way of what lies in store for them. Take conditonal expressions for example. In English we now were getting a conditional right from the start "If yo by it today yo can save ifty percent. Since most Japanese dont want the npleasant srprise of nding a ba or tara (i) ending attached to a verb they expected to be a straightforward statement theyll ash each other the adverb moshi which we also translate if early in the sentence often at the very beginning. Kenkysha gives s Mosh tenki ga yokat ashita undkai ga aru I If the weathers good tomorrow there will be an athletic meet. We dont tnslate the moshi and the tara separately; they work together as a pair which we represent as a single if. Japanese has lots of other sch pairs consisting rst of an earlywaing element and second the constrction that does the actal work sally as an inection of the verb or some other expression associated with the verb and therefore held off ntil a later point in the sentence. Like moshi and ba, they work together and do not call for sep arate translation The followng are some examples Maru-de is an adverb meaning "entirely that often was yo a comparison is comng as Ma- shach ma ni mieru I He looks as if he were the president of the company and Ma- kichigai no yo da I He looks as if hes mad (both from Kenkysha) We cold throw in a "st for the marude bt it isnt necessary Ma de kri no ue o subette iru m da I Its just ike skating on ice. Ma- etsubo o irodoru kini no enogu no y ni taiy no hikari ga iej ni shitatari-ochite ita I "The snlight dripped over the hose like golden paint over an art ar.2 NNG 107
Expressions sch as naze nara or naze ka to iu to or dshite ka to ieba ("if yo ask why) wa yo that an ex planaton is comng probably with a constrction sch as kara da ("its becase) at the end For example Taka hashi Kazmi tells s it wold be seless to look for the key to a novel in the facts of the writers life and then he remarks Naze ka o u o iitsu to iu mono wa shsetsu-ka ga naizai sasete iru katt no inshi o shigeki shi sz to shik no und o okosaseru koto wa dekite mo sono katt no kzu sono mono o keisei suru koto mo hen y suru koto mo dekinai kara de a I "e reason for this is that while facts may be able to stimlate the el ements of trmoil that the writer has within himself and set his magnative and thoght processes in motion they are incapable of ether forming or transforming the composition of the trmoil itself3 See the kara da section of "The Explainers for several more examples. Tada, an adverb and dake, a postposition both of which can work independently and whch are sally translated "st or only often work n pairs wth the tada waing yo that the dake s coming T inna koto ga sono iken o sakai ni yukkuri to henka shite itta ke sa I Its ust that all knds of things gradally started to change after that incident4 One st will do for the par. A mch heaviersonding version of tada . . . dake is hitasura . . nomi Hitasura an adverb meaning ntently and by extension concentrating solely pon or st "solely ts ot to be nothing more than a fancy wrttenstyle version of tada, likewse anticipating dake (or nomi, a wrttenstyle dake), as in Kenkyshas Kanoo wa hra naku n( de atta I She did noh ing but cy Hra Nihon-in ke wa risuku o sake kiken kara tzakatte itai I "The Japanese want to be the ony ones who avoid all the risks and keep a distance NNG 108
between themselves and danger The rest of the examples are of this latter sort more literary in natre and less commonly heard in speech. Tatoe (tatoi) s an adverb meaning even i or even spposing that was yo that yo are going to get a -te (de) mo, which also means even i or even spposing as in Kare wa sonna tokoro e aoe iku koto ga ate mo goku mare da I Even if he does go to sch places its very seldom (Kenkysha). Taoi dtoku-teki hihan o ku dasu beki bunshi ga konny shite kuru jiken ni tsui kore o tokugiteki ni kaishaku shinai de tokugi to wa maru-de kankei no nai kokkei to nomi miru koto mo dekiru I Even supposing it is in regard to an event nto which some small element deserving moral censre be comes commingled we can choose not to interpret this ethically bt to view t as entirely comical and having noth ing to do with ethics.6 Aruiwa an adverb meaning maybe or perhaps an ticpates an expression of the same meaning ka mo shire nai as in Aiwa s ka mo shrenai I It might be so Sakura no mori no mankai no himitsu wa dare ni mo ima mo wakarimasen. Aiwa kodoku to iu mono de atta ka mo shrena I Even now no one nows the secret of the cherry forest in fll bloom Perhaps it was what we call solitde. yashikumo (even a little) . ij (or kara ni wa) is a pair that together means insofar as soandso s the case or as long as yore going to do soandso. Ken kysha and my mother give s Iyhikumo yaru kara ni wa yoku yare I If yo do it at all do it well and Kenkysha hikumo tatakau kara ni wa akumade tatakae I If yo do ght fight to the nish. idsha no nai mukashi wa iza-shirazu hkumo hatsumei sareru o jinrikisha wa jidsha ni makenakereba naranai I NNG 109
Leavng asde the qeston of the old days before the atomoble exsted now that it been nvented the rckshaw will nevtably gve way to the atomoble.8 In general these early wangs whch gve ad and comfort to Englsh speakers are more characterstc of written than spoken Japanese hen Japanese people speak Englsh thogh yo sometmes hear them makng sen tences that work mch lke these matched pars Theyll start ot wth normal Englsh thoght order Maybe soandso bt toward the end of the sentence they nstnc tvely feel the need for nsertng the maybe agan where t belongs so yo hear Maybe they coldnt make t maybe or I thnk Ill go now I thnk. Please dont do that when you are translatng sch pars from Japanese.
The Pleasures of Reading Japanese I often wa my lteratre stdents especally those whose langage sklls have reached the stage where they can handle new texts wth some degree of ndependence that as they read they shold try to mantan a dstncton be tween lterary pleasre afforded by the work tself and what mght be called "lngstc pleasre stmlated by the sheer satsfacton of makng ther way sccessflly throgh an orthographcal garden the gatherng of whose frts s only becomng possble for them after years of dscplned stdy. For the fact s that Japanese especally for those of s who have leaed to read t after chldho never loses ts exotc appeal each page ted reveals to the eye a new spectacle of otlandsh sqggles that momentarly takes 110
the breath away. And written in those sqiles or spoken by the people who were raised in the langage are eqally otlandish syntactic strctresnot ony passives bt casa tives and passivecasatives and forms with oku' at tached or morau' and itadaku' and zu' that make or minds work in ways that can never be conveyed to those who do not now the langage. There is a thrill in realiz ing that yo can process ths stff with yor very own brain I have long been convinced that as we speakbt es pecially as we read this foreign tongest beneath the threshold of conscosness a voice continally shots "Look Mom Im reading Japanese! And these sbliminal cries arose in s a pleasre that can easily be confsed with the satisfaction of reading a good story or book In fact there is a danger that the simpler the style of a work and the less challenging its content (which is to say the easier a pece of writing is to nderstand on the prely lexical level) the more likely it is to grant s that instant gratiication of having read something of exceptional interest. For years I assmed that ths was a handcap niqe to the foregn reader of Japanese literatre. Some months ago however at the reqest of a scholarly oal I trans lated an essay on contemporary economic problems that had all too obviosly been grond ot in response to the insatable needs of Japans pblshing indstry. The more I strggled to ind English eqivalents for its oalistic hyperboles its catchy neologisms intended to startle and stn the more convinced I became that the Japanese read their own langage the same way we do. The woman who wte the piece is qite the media gre these days in demand as mch for her ravishing good looks as for her fresh prononcements on the contempo PLEE OF EDNG ll
rary scene. I coldn't help feeling that there was an in escapable connection between that and the clever manner in which she combned Chinese characters to manfactre new conceptr at least concepts that sounded new and looked new on the page Perhaps she has something important to tell her readers bt there can be little dobt from the way she pts her words together that her rst intention is to entertain them to make them feel as if they have st read something new and important. And having strggled year after year to lea the thosands of characters needed to read and write me lterate Japanese her readers respond with a thrill of satisfaction and per haps with their own sbliminal shots "I understand what this beatifl brany woman is telling me! Look Okaasan Im reading Japanese
The Unbelievable Complexi of Being v Shakespeare posed the problem most memorably and sccinctly To be or not to bethat s the qestion There can be no dobt abot what "to be means here certainly not "to be an onion or to be green bt simply "to be to exist as in "I think therefore I am. If Descartes had wanted to se the kind of "to be meaning "eqals he wold have written I think therefore I am Ren. The "to be meaning "having the qality o might have yielded "I thnk therefore I am cool. Lets face t English is a hopelessly vage langage which fails to make even the simplest distnctions. 1 12
Not Japanese however It ignores the picky dfference between "eqalsbe and having the qalitybe bt it has two different kinds of to be the "eqals type and the "exists type and it keeps them completely separate This s sch a fndamental featre of the langage that care lessness in this area canand far too often doeslead to maor misnderstandings. Now woldn't it be nice f we cold say that one type of to be in Japanese is aru and the other is ohonpo no one wold ever get them mixed p. Unfortnately one is aru and the other one often takes the fom de aru, the written eqivalent of the spoken da or desu and non Japanese get them mxed p all the time To make matters worse the de and the aru can be split p within a sen tence. Most of the time this s done by a wa, so as to pt more emphasis on the postve aru Watashi wa neko de aru I I am a cat. Watashi wa neko de wa aru ga I I am a cat bt (that doesnt mean I like to eat mice).
The most widely separated de and aru I have seen oc crs n the novella Ku no sekai (World of Pain) by Uno K after the heros commonlaw wfe accses him of bing a dweeb and he reects: kujinashi! Soshite mattaku sono tri de watashi wa a no da I dweeb! Yes I was thatexactly The distinction between the two kinds of being is an old one and it shows p the famos poem by the Heian poet Narihira in whch nai the mode negatve of aru appears as aranu, and instead of mode de wa nai we nd naranu Tsuki ya aranu
Is there not the moon?
NBELEVBLE COMPLEX 11
Haru ya mukashi no aru nnu Waga m hitotsu wa Moo no mi n hite
And s not the spng The spring o old? My self alone emaiig s it ws . .
The mplcaton beng that f everythg is the wy t was te old days why isnt my mistress ee y more? Mch o the wild varitio amog Eglsh trsltis o tis poem has to do with the degree of the trsltors delty to the diferece between aru d de aru (iet ar and nari). The poem llstrates too that the dfferece btween exstbe and eqalsbe applies to the egative forms s well the negatves of aru and de aru being nai ad de wa (or ja) nai Heres a sefl pair to keep in mind nanimo nai and nandemo nai The first one means There isnt anything We hve nothing etc. The second one means Its nothing. Ths nanimo nai tokoro s a place where there exists othing they dot have any fitre or entertaimet or anythg Nandemo nai tokoro is a nothng place a place thats nothig at all a worthless borig dmp. Somewhat less problematical than the disticton be tween aru ad de aru is that between aru and iru Sow shovels and toothpaste tbes aru whle people and lop ards iru. Pe ga I Theres a pen here bt Kita batakesan ga I Ms. Kitatke is here The ggest challege wth this is simply remembering to se aru with inanimate and iru with animate sbects. Sometimes thogh when speakng of people n the abstract yo can se aru: Otto ga aru I I have yonger brother. One of the highly nEnglish thins that iru does is to act like a volitonal verb (the strain of tryng to "to be NBELEVBLE COMPEX 1 14
this way s what makes the opening of Hamlets speech startling). hen the police take Mmes father away to Sgamo prson and she chooses to stay on the island she declares tearflly to her teacher Sense atashi koko n iru I "Sensei Im going to stay here (in the ilm Setouchi shen yakdan I "MacArthrs Children 985) By the way orohonpo is a real word n the Saga dia lect and it means Im not too crazy abot it which is probably how most stdents feel abot having to keep track of aru and de aru
Go Jump in the Lake, But Be Sure to Come Back The idiomatic Japanese way of sayng Go do soand so is Do soandso and come. Instead of "Go mp in the lake a Japanese wold say "mp in the lake and come. Sch commands shold be issed to literalminded for eigners only in otdoor settings Natve Japanese dont say go mp n the lake so th form poses no inerent danger to yor carpet with them. Here thogh are some athen tc examples of the form: Yattsukete koi I Go get the bastards Sanpo de mo shite atama o hiyashite koy I " I thik Ill take a walk and try to cool down. Okane o moratte kite kudasai. I "Please go get the money. Yasai ni mizu o yatte kite chdai. I Go water the vegetables will yo?
1 15
Fiddlers Three = Three Fiddlers? Old Kng Cole called for hs fddlers three mainly be case they rhymed wth sol was he If qestions of rhyme and meter hadnt entered into the pctre he cold st as well have called for his three fddlers who we now from the his were a nit of some sort. If we wanted to keep them as a nt in Japanese however we coldnt be qte so ndfferent abot word order. Old King Krok wold have Sannin no baiorinhiki o yobiyoseta rather than Baiorinhik o sannin yobiyoseta. The second verson wold mean He called for three d dlers three chosen at random rather than the selfcon tained string band he was sed to The normal place to pt conters s after the non in qeston where it fnctions as an adverb telling to what extent the verb is to be performed Enpitsu o sanbon ku dasai means "Please gve me three pencilsny three pencils ot of a larger spply Sanbon no enpitsu wth the conter now modfyng the non tself means "Please gve me the three pencils. Krosawas move abot a grop of "seven samra is called Shichinin no samurai If someone singlehandedly klled that famos grop he wold have Shichiin no samurai o koroshita bt if n his wanderings he hap pened to kll seven gys who were samrai he wold have Samurai o shichinin koroshita. It Se had far less dramatc doings in mind when he wrote Watashi-tachi ikk shichinin no Nihonjin wa asa hayaku Tashikento o tatta I "Or sevenmember Japa nese grop left Tashkent early n the mong.
6
ating in the Wrong Direction Log log boe yo evr had o dietiol vrs o gvg d rg d rlzed tht ts d diretiolty th ver adaku old e sed the knd of compl otctons dsssd the sible Ma hptr yo proly leaed t as th polte ormla yo tter or tg pas swer to syg grce adak mau meg mre or less literlly I hmly reeve (teray t means to place somethg on yor had or hold somethg over yor head a gestre teded s hmble expresso of awestrck grattde t dont do ths wth yor food ) en yo proaly leaed itadaku as the normal hm le ver for eatig nd dring to e sed n plce of the more etral taberu nd nomu Yo leaed too that ther is hooric verb meshagaru to e sed in ref erece to the eatg ad drnkg of others to whom yo re spekg poltely Yo yorlf can never meshiaga oly honored gests ad the like can do that whn yo are speakg to or aot them. f deed yo have leaed all ths then yo wold have ee st s srprised as I was the other nght at a Seattle sshi ar whe the yong sshi "che (tamaesan, the mn n frot of the cttg oard) a recet arrvl from pa poltely sked me t the end of the meal Orenji tadakmasu ka I his mnd o dot this was the polte way of ask ig me whether I wated to et a orae for dessert It was ndeed polte t n the wron directo t wst hoorc toward me bt a hmle verb that cold only properly be sed to descrie his hmbly receving some thg from hs lstener. What he was really asg me was 1 17
Wold yo like most hmbly to receive an orange from my lofty se I blinked and sml and got a sweet icy and cleverly liced orange n retu I was tempted to chalk this one p to the increasingly scandalos nfamiliarity of the yonger generaton with proper modes of speech that one hears and reads com plaints abot mostly from the older generation. Then it oc crred to me there was somethng familiar abot this something that went all the way back to the mmedate postwar period In 947 Dazai Osam (then 8) pblshed his novel Shay (The Setting Sn) which was a sensational best seller and beqeathed its name to a generation of declining aristocrats. Ufortnately for Dazai one writer who iden tied strongly wth those aristocrats Mshima Yko ridicl the book for ts utterly uninformed portrait of the pper crst. His most damning piece of evidence was Dazas se of itadaku where he shold have sed meshi agaru. Dazai Osam was one of the great stylsts of mode Japanese cton and mch of hs hmor derives from the way he plays wth levels of speech and diction. Had he not committed sicide n 948, he might be 8 today and complaining abot the yonger generations ignorance of Japanese
E ONG DECON 8
Anticipation or: Progressive Simplification or: Analyzing Upside-Down Sentences Lets face t no matter how mch proges yo mae wth the spoke lagge yo are lways gong to rn p ganst writte apese sentees tht aret mmedtely clear the fst time throgh d tht ree yo to do some coscos alyzig f yo wt to drstd them precisely. At sch times ts a ood ide to kee i md the ttle of n artcle i rt of ths book Waig This Lagage Works Backwards The earlywarg system that applies there to certan pared expressons ca be p plied to etre seteces: thigs that come earlier in the setece cle yo i to what s comig later. The sigle most importat elemet aalyzg a Japaese setece is anticipato. We lmost always kow how a sentence is goig to ed before we ctally get to t. Ad I do mean we. Anticipatio is crcial for the efi ciet fnctioning of all lagages mage how slowly we wold have to readr how slowly people wold have to speakif no matter how far alog we got i a setece we still had absoltely o idea where it was 1 dont have to iish that setece becse yo have probably spplied the missig word or words lready. Headed? Headg? Goig? Goig to go? Did yo already have a word echoig i mind? Or re yo a more eciet reader who doest sbvocalze? y case ths s what mea by aticipatio ot a featre e to Japanese thogh Japese ems to tolerate more sspese tha Eglish as it moves alog leavg more dgemets ad distctos sspended n aticiptio of later clar cation tha Eglish wold allow. How have the apaese people bee able to pt p 119
with l tht sspense their lagage withot goig crazy? Well at frst they coldt. There were so my looies locked p n cages that by abot the middle of the seveth cty the Eeor who stll wldd ctl powr th ade a rle mayb the oe rle tht relly woks i the lagage and ever gets broke rom this day ford sbects wll aways come before ther vebs. Ad st to keep thigs et modiers wll aways come bere what they mfy. Never n ll the cetries hve there e ay exceptionsat least ot oal sytax. (Of cose n frgted speech thgs gt revesed all the time: Tsukareta no atashi I Im tired t here m talking bot the kid of grammatically correct sentence strctres that are reqired by the written langage) here sholdt be ny problem wth the idea that sbects come before their verbs. Withot that rle there wold e cofsio betwee predicates ad modiers wa shmetsu shta s The elephant vaisheda complte setence Shmetsu shita z is "The elephat that vansheda fragment st a on wth a moder in front of t By pttig it before the z weve chaged the shmetsu shita ito a modier. Im goig to go way ot on a lmb here ad call anything that modiies a on a adective. Shmetsu shita z (lterally vanshed elephat) works ex ctly the same way as utsukushi z (beatifl elephant). f were goig to call all omodifiers adectives we ca cll all verbmodiiers adverbs. Nan no maebure mo naku z wa shmetsu shta I Withot ay forewaig the elephat vashd. After the naku yo have to hold yor reath til yo get to the verb yove een signaled to serch for. Wether adverb or adective the modier comes before what it modiies ad antcipates t. For or prposes a adectiv s ay modier hat makes yo look for a no to relea the grammatical sspense it has bilt NCPON 10
p and an advrb is ay modier that makes yo look for a verb for similar gramatal completio. (ot forget real adectves like yasashii, are st verbs i disgise.) Ad orttly or s o the tiitd lt sws p th mdi rs t ergy d css to ti ay frther dow the setece so we dot hae to thik aot t ay more. As we move log throgh a pese setece we d that smaller ts t ot to e parts of larger ts Ths does ot make thigs more complicated t athe the reverse the setece redces itself to lge d sm pler nts as it goes alo. It gets progressively simpler rather tha more complicated. No matter how log t is ad o matter how many os ad particles ad whatot it may cotai ay modifyig clase is st a adectve f it ends p modifyig a o or an dver if it eds p modifyig a ver Lets look at some cocrete examples. Im goig to pll a ook off the shelf and go throgh the frst setece withot peekig ahead lookg for nos adectves vers ad advers ad tryg to aalyze what the earler parts of the setece lead s to atcpate aot the later parts. Heres the opeig tece of the reface to Iega Sabrs Taiheiy sens I The Pacic War (Tokyo Iwa ami Shote 968), p. ii I have read ths efore I admt bt yers go and I recall the ook as hvig ee tte a lcd interestg style which shold give s some meat to chew o t really I dot kow whats comg Well also have a pblished traslato to check t agst. Both books are right here o my shelf Sce the passge is the irst thig i the ook we dot have to worry ot a missig context. It starts ot like ths Honsho no I This books: Obviosly this is a modier for some o thats comig I solatio the NCPON
word honsho s a non meaning "this book bt the no immedately ts it into a modier of some other non. So for or prposes its an adectve becase we have been sgnled by it to tciate a on. (By the way if yoe dyg to see the whole passage in Jaaese rght away yoll nd it t the end of this section.) shomei I title is the non that Honsho no antcpated so onsho no has rn ot of energy and has nothing else to do in the sentence gving s This books title. Bt then the non shomei is followed by the verbal expression toshite I as. The phrase "As this books title anticipates a verb thats coming (toshite s adverbial not adectival yod need toshite no to modify a non) The athor has ndobtedly chosen or considered some thing as the books title. The expression also logcally anticipates the words of the title that he is going to sggest bt grammatically speang the only thing an adverb an ticpates is a verb Notice how the adective honsho no and the non shomei have now been absorbed into the adveb phrase and so far the whole sentence is nothing bt one big adverb waiting for a verb Is that verb what comes next? Knowing that verbs come at the ends of sentences in Japanese its most likely well get the words of Ienagas title before we arrive at the verb. $ Taiheiy sens I Pacic War Well thats not or vrb obviosly. More likely (especially as we now from having en the cover of the book) ts the ttle We have to keep going. to iu Theoretically iu (to say or call) cold be the verb weve been lookng for bt most stdents ap proaching a text like this wold have enogh experience to s that that woldnt make mch sense (Yes makng sense is allowed and even encoraged) and that to iu is NTCPTON 122
simply acting here as verbal qotaton marks the way it so often does. And besdes the ntence keeps going: � Tahey sens to u na o I the name Pcc Wr: The to u mkes Tahey sens modify the on na (ame) which is then mred s n obect by the partcle o. Ths obectmarker tells s to an ticpate some knd of transitive verb meanig give or at tach so now we know more abot the verb that the toshte antcipated: its going to be transtive. > t. mochta I sed: Aha! Its transitive bt not the one I expected. So far weve got: As the title of this book [I have] sed The Pacc War bt still the sen tence hasnt ended. For one thing theres no period after mochta � ry o I reason: We havent reached the end of the sentence bt have reached the end of a modifying clase Honsho no shome toshte tahey sens to u na o mochta ry o I The reason [I have] d The Pacifc War as the title of this book all to be taken as a non fnctioning as the obect of yet another transitive verb as signalled by the o. The earlier particle o has been exhasted by mochta, so now weve got a new obect in need of a new transtive verb. Mochta itself has sed p its energy and will not be fnctioning any more in the sentence either. By this point in the sentence things have gotten ridiclosly simple. All those lttle adectival and adverbial and other elements can now be seen to be part of one large non and that nit is going to be the obect of a transitive verb. Weve really got nothing more compli cated Omosh hon o (interesting bookobect) and are waiting for a verb to do somethng to the obect whch in the case of hon wold be something like yonda or katta (read or boght) This s the principle of progres sive smplication: small parts get absorbed into larr ones. NTCPTON 12
mazu I irst: This is an adverb anticipatng a veb most likely a verb sch as tell or explan to be sed on the earliermentioned reason thats going to be the obect of trnsitive verb the thor is going to tell or ex pli the reason nd do it irst. IYJ C � l -; t v ' akrak n shte okta I [I] want to make it clear (before going on with the rest of the book s indicated by the se of oku, which mplies dong something for ftre prposes or to gt it ot of the way or simply irst here it s working with mazu). is is the verb we hd to have following the non with obect marker. So now weve been throgh the whole sentence Hon sho no shome toshte tahey sens to u na o moch ta ry o mazu akraka n shte okta I First Id like to clarify the reason I sed The Pacfic War as the title of this book. If we strip away all modiers we nd that the core of the sentence is ry o akraka n shte okta I Id lke to clarify the reason which is no more complicated than Hon o kau I Im going to by a book. When ana lyzng a sentence that gives yo diclty yo shold al ways strip it down to its core this way to e how smple it really is. Heres how Frank Baldwin did this opening sentence for pblication: The title of this book The Pacc War, reqires a brief explanation. Well its not a literal translation bt for an opener ts crsp and clean Lets see what comes next in Ienagas paragraph :< Koko de I "Here: Adverb telling s were abot to get a verb that is to be done here NTCPTON 124
v ' taiheiy sens to iu no wa I As for saying The Pacic War u is the anticipated verb and the whole clase ts ot to be a non all of whch is offered s a topic of the sentence: As or syg The Paciic War here . . . The wa signals tht at lest ntl another topc comes along the entire sentence that follows is goig to be abot sig the expression "The Pacic War. 5 C f� v ' t 7 £ < jk jiken kara kku made no, I the from the Machrian Incden to the srrender: This s an adective becase of the no t the ed and it anticipates some sch cocept as period or time as in the tme from A to B. I tacked a "the on at the beginning of the translation of this part to indi cate that were still waiting for something to come along. We shold be gratefl that the athor has sed a comma at the end of this modier to indcate that it will not be mifying what comes next many writers are not so kind. In any case the no demands a non of some sort bt the comma sggests it wont be what comes next. Lets see what we do get: * t f t t:, Nihon to shogaikoku to no renzoku shita I the Japan and foreign contries contined This also ends with a comma and demands a non so were still in a holding mode waiting probably for a single non thats going to be modied by this adective. Again Ive pt a strange the in to keep s in sspense. >- ichiren fukabun no I one series in divisble he sspense only bilds as we get this added adective anticipating a non and a plral non at that: if something is an indivisible series its plral. Bt then the athor throws s a dashwhats gong to happen now? �± < t " ' - watashi wa s kaisubeki de aru to kangaete iru I "I think that we NTCPTON 25
should interpret it this way": The author parenthetically tells us that this pile of mers reects hs interpretation, but we're stll waiting for the noun. This s an instance of a il verb form hppeig wthin a sentence but not mfying a noun to come. It's a complete sentence within the sentence and thanks to the inuence of English punc tuaton, the author has set t off in dashes � sens o sasu indcates the wars" At last, we've got our noun! War" made plural by the modier one series indvisble" is modied by all those adjectives hanging suspended, the energy of which is now eausted, so we won't have to worry about them any more Does he really mean wars though, or battles"? He seems almost to b using the noun as singular and plural at once for the overall war and the smaller parts thereof Hmm we'll get back to this Sens is the obect of the transitive verb that immdiately follows, sasu indicates" but that s im medately followed by no de ar The verb sasu doesnt end the sen tence but instead it modies the noun no of the explana tory expression no de aru (=no da), which is there to explain why Ienaga is using the title he chose The verb part of no de aru is in its continuatve form de ar (is and"), indicating that the sentence is going to go on This shouldnt complicate things, though What we have here is a simple A is B statement with an explainer tacked on Weve reached the end of something that started wth the topic As for saying The Pacic War " As for saying The Pacic War' here [it=zero ronoun] is to indicate So far the whole thing adds up to As for saying The Pacific War, it is to indicate Japan and foreign coun tres' contnued one-series-indivsible wars1 thnk that we should nterpret it ths wayfrom the Manchran Incident to the surrender and " Of course, the author is not NTCPTN 26
through having his say about the topic he gave us at the beginning of the sentence; the nonnal d ar says we have to keep going �± genmtsu n wa strctly, at lest" Adverbial A verb is coming probably something about saying or dening something strctly.
t jgonen sens to yobubek mono de aru is a thing that we ought to call the Fifteen Year War Whew End of sentence At least that last part was short The core elements of this sentence are No wa no de ar mono de aru Noun wa noun de ar noun de aru, which is 00% structurally equivalent to oruchsan wa hasha de, suptsuman desu Mr. Horuchi is a dentist and a sportsman. Pttng it all together As for saying The Pacic War it is to indicate Japan and foregn countres contnued one series-indivisible wars1 think that we should interpret it this wayfrom the Manchurian Incident to the surrender and, strictly speaking it is a thing that we ought to call the Fifteen Year War This is almost English One way to smooth it out The use of the term The Pacic War refers to what I see the unbroken series of hostilities be tween Japan and other countries that continued from the Manchurian Incident to the surrender Stricty speakng this should be called the Fifteen Year War. Heres how Frank Baldwin did it for publication beginnng with the opening sentence The title of this book, e Pacc War, requres a brief explanation. The term Pacc War covers the period from the Manchurian ncdent in 9 to the unconditional surrender in 945 and en compasses the whole series of Japan's military NTCPTN 7
clashes [plural with other countries In my view these events are inseparable, all parts of the same war [singular Clever exploitation of this simulta neously sgulr ad lurl noun Precsio might be better sed by the term Ffteen Yer War or by a title which referred to that part of World War II i which Japan was nvolved Wat a mnute where did that business at the end come from The translator has done a ne ob of adapting the passage or an American reader who mght not im mediately now the mportant dates and he has worked in enagas somewhat awkward parenthetical sentence so that it reads very smoothly but perhaps he is padding too much Back to the next sentence of the orignal 1 ' �i aruiwa Or Oh enaga had more to say He may have ended the prevous sentence, but this lnk serves to restart it OK weve got a scholar here tryng to define something ever more precsely
= Dainiji sekai taisen no uchi de in the course of the Second World War This is ad verbial anticpating a verb something is going to occur in the course of the war Nihon no sanka shita bubun o
the part that Japan participated in So we have sanka shita the verb antcipated by the prevous adverb but that verb modies a noun bubun which is then going to be the obect of a transitive verb because t is followed by o Somebodys going to do something to the part (or parts) that Japan participated in during the Second World War sasu indicates No subect has been mentoned here We really are in a continuation of the previous sen tence Whatever was dong the indcating back then is oing it agan here Our topic Koko de Taiheiy sens to
NTCPTN
128
iu no wa is stil functioning Saying The Pacic War here indicates "
t ! to rikaishitemo yoi Its OK to un derstd t s" So r Baldwin was ot addng ate , though in conveying the overall sese he has bee rather free Or else its OK to understand it as ndicating the parts that Japan participated in during the Second World War I used to have students analyze a Japanese sentence by identifying the main verb which is usually easy to fnd at the end, then going back to search for the subect and ob ects and so forth in a game of ping-pong beeen the sen tences beginning and end with unpredictable bounces in the middlea real decing process there ever was one See Makino and Tsutsui's appendix Improving Reading Skill by Identifying an Extended Sentential Unit pp 8 for a good, if complicated, example of that method Id like to think the approach I've outlined here, emphasizing anticipation does less violence to the struc ture of the Japanese
*Q� t €J b' ? � v . E i f . vo € b , Q I
' l v . i Q
t Y0 t Q m L -
P7Q ± { l " t · > ! Q ll± 1€J t " Q H; Q Q r t o
NTCPTN
12
NOTES Introduction
1 . ne nguge un and Wagnalls ew Enclopeda
27 vols (Nw ork 175) 14158 2 S Hlmut Mosbah Words are Not Enough: Rading B wen he ines n aanese Communicatio, japan Socety (N w ork ork Marc Marchh 1 989) 989 ) o or both both o these the se vews. ewleer (Nw 3 . lrie Takanori rvw of nurous to Publc Morals Wrters and the Me Stae by ay Rubin, in japan Quartery (OctoberDe ember, 184, p. 45960 and expanded remarks in japan (anuaryMa yMar rh, h, 1 985), 985) , p. 1 1 3 . Quarterly (an . Hatanaka Shigeo, quoted in my nurous to Publc orals Wrters and he Me State (Settle: University of Washington Press 1984), p. 261. 5 See Ry Andrew Miller's Th japanese Language (The Uni versity of Chia Chi ago go Press 1 96 7 ) , pp. ixx ixx fo for a strong dose of common sense. 6. Paul Aoki irector of the Language Leaing Center, Uni versity of Washington has kndly shared these facts and fgures with me. The definition of Limited Working Poficiency comes from a govement document called Interagency Language Roundtable Language Skill Level escriptions (p. 9). This d ument says nothng about the fortysevenweek recvery program whch is a closely guarded secret. The Myth of the Subjectless Sentence
1 . Okutsu
Keiichir Bku wa una da no bunp bunp (Kuroshio Shuppan, 1978). 2 Adapted from Wdy Allen The Condemned, in Sde ts (New York: Bllantine Bks, 1981), p. 15. 3 . Certain grammarians believe that he was orignally Sir William Snodgrass of Ramsgate Heather, Surry. Eleanor Harz Jorden with Mar Noda, japanese The Spoken Language (SL), 3 vols. (New aven and London: Yale Univer sity Press, 1987) 1:59. 5 They suddenly cquire this nasty habit in one of the types of text that students most want to read: newspapers 6 The answer is three the speaker the listener and the person in charge, whom the listener is supped to make do it n ac 10
ton that can be known only fom context In ths partcular passage the acton alled for s puttng two sngle beds together to make a doubl From Watanabe Junch hongo de okoru, Ch Kron (January 1989) p. 39 Wa nd nd Ga Ga
1
Steve Allen, The Queston Man (New ork: Bellmeadows rss, 1959) pp. 2728. Ths rare source also nluds A He shot down ten Japanese planes : Why was Suk Yamamoto kcked out of the apanese Ar Force? 2 Hartsuke, nclopeda aponca Da hon hyakka ten 23 vo vols ls (Shg (Shgakukan 1 96772) 1 4:72 4:7 2 1 3 . Watanabe unch, Nhongo de okoru Ch Kron (January 1989) p. 39. . Murakam ak, Htsu o meguru bken (Kansha Bunko 1985) 1182 See the translaton by Alfred Bbaum A Wld Kanshaa Inteaton Inteatonal al 1 989) 989 ) p. 1 1 5 Sheep Chase (Tokyo Kansh The narcotcs eased the pan al rght, but they also esulted n halucnatons 5 I blame my colleague John reat for ths dscouragg obser vaton. Nether e nor I beleve, however, that the diculty of wa and ga s any more than that a lngustc dficuty much of whch wth proper tranng and conceptualzaton can be overcome. See Alfonso 2967993, for an excellent seres of wa and ga drlls. Notce that Alfonso des not attempt the dentve comparson and contrast unt hs thrtythrd lesson after students ave had a great deal of experence wth the language and then he devotes twentyseven pages to ths thoy problem. 6 For another vew see Susumu Kuno The Struture of the japanese anguage (Cambrdge: The MIT Press 1973), pp 7995. 7 Anthony Alfonso japanese Language Pattes 2 vols. (Too Sopha Sopha Unve Unvers rsty ty L. L. Center Center of of Appled Appled Lngustcs Lngustcs 1 966 96 6 ). 8 El s Home, joual Amercan (June 12 1989) p 1. Basl Hal Chamberlan A andbook of of Colloq lloqu ua/ a/ japanese fourth edton revsed (London and okohama Crosby Lockwod and Son and Kely and Walsh Lt 1907), pp. 8586. The pref ace to the fourth edton says (on p. ) that the book s lttle changed changed fr from the earler edtons edtons of 1 888 1 889, 889 , and 1 898. See also W. G. Aston A Grammar Grammar of of the japanese Wrtten Language second edton (London and okohama: Trbner & Co and Lane Crawford & Co., 1877) p. 132 whch suggests such En NTE
11
glsh paallels for wa as with respect to "in the case of in so ar as regads and at any rate' Clay MacCauley, An ntro okyo yo:: Shueisha Shuei sha,, 1 896) , a book book far far ducto Course n Japanese (Tok nfeio t Chamberlains or clarty of exposition, gives "as o and lso nots n the pa that the author has ly usd Chamblains andbook See pp 16667 Rudolf Lange, A Text-book xt-book of Cooq Cooqu ua/ a/ japanese apanese English edition by Christopher Noss (Tokyo: Mthodist Publishing House 1903) a generally muddled presentation of apanese grammar does distinguish wa rm ga by eerene to the questions they answer (p 3), but the book nexplicably omits any reference to Steve Allen 1. sah Shnbun March arch 1 2, 1 989 p. 1 7. 11. O course the da here an be viewed not as a copula but as a shortened substitute for n suru or ga tabeta much as "do can be substituted for longer verba stctures ("ho wants to be the frst one on his block to own a Captain Video decoder ing? I do.). Since we're dealing wth unspoken des it doesn't much matter whether we interet them as verbs or nouns personally, I like to treat da as a consstent copula, with the context doing the ipfops Okutsu Keiichr sensbly ponts out that the exbility of da s another feature of Japanese (along with the frequent dsappearance of nouns, as discussed in the previous chapter) that prompts people to call it vague language but that people communicate just fine using these stctures withn both verbal and nonverbal contexts See Okutsu Keiichiro Bku wa (Kur uros oshi hioo Shup Shuppa pa 1 978) 97 8) pp 1 2 1 3 unag da no bunp bunp (K 12 Murakam Haki Seka no owar to hdoborudo wan 985 Sh Shnc ncho ho Bu Bunk nko o 1 988) drando (Shinchsha 1 985 13 Kunikida oppo Kawar (1989) Nakagami Kenji zu no nna akagam Ken zen-tanpen shsetsu (Kawada Shob Shnsha 1984) p 630 The Invisibe Mn's Fmiy Reunion
1 By contrast the concept of orignal sn helps explain the Wes-
e xaton on who dd what when with whom, and using whch parapheala 2 Beware the note on morau in John Youg and Kmiko NakajmaOkano Lea japanese 4 vols. (Honolulu University of Hawai Press 1984 181, which gosses the word as gt or receive (something from someone) or is gven 3 hongo de okoru Ch Kron (January 1989) p. 39 oshi Shinchi Kata no ue no hsho in Akuma no ru tenNTE
12
goku (Hayakawa Bunko JA9: Hayakawa Shob 1973) p 104.
Actually the speake s not the salesman hmself but hs robot parro. I am not making ths up 5 One other possble ntepretaton of Kaan o nusumareta that the pa�sve s bng usd for purely hono pupss H mst exaltdly stole the sutcase I am not dscussng her th use of passves and passvecausatives for mere polteness in whh the le of thumb s the mor syllabls th pltr f th Emperor stole the sutcase you ould have Tnnheka n okaeraremahte wa kaban o onusum n naraserarmashta, n whh a mere onesyllable wa s stretched to ten syllabls Usually the context wll tell you that the writer s usng the passve for honorfic purposes 6 Murakam Hak; Ton Taktan, urakam Haruk zen sakuhn 9999, vols. (Kdansha 1991) 8227 7 JSL 323. Diacritcs omtted here 8 Thanks to Micho Tsutsu for brngng this to my attenton See "The Explaners for a discusson of the kara at the end. 1 Alfonso japanese Language Pattes 2952. Murakam ak Htoku neko urakam Haruk zen sakuhn 8270. The Expners
1.
Dont confuse ths with a kara da followng a verb n the te form whch wll mean "t was after soandso' not because Be sure you understand the dfference between tta kara and tte kara. Ths fotnote loks lke a convenently obscure place for me to menton that have no explanaton for the whereabouts of the zero pronoun when the copula dsappears as well Hayaku neru emu kara
2
Murakam aki Z no shmetsu n Murakam Haruk zensakuhn 9999 vols. (Kdansha 1991) 840 3. shima Yuko Watakush no henrek da shma Yuko bungaku ronsh (Kdansha 1 970) p 322 Agan the translaton onates ae nara and kara de aru For an nterpretaton of kangaerareru, see The nvisble an's Famly Reunion The Natural otental . ishma op ct p 307 have omtted the parenthetcal comment sono naka no bun no zenbu ga s da to wa wana ga m not sayng that the whole of me n t s that way but an unnecessary complcation here 5 oward ibbett and Gen tasaka ode japanese A Basc NTE
133
Reader, 2 vols (Cambrdge arvard Unversty Press 1 96 7)
223. 6 japanese Language Pattes 1:405. Muakam aki, "Midori-iro no kemono Bungakukai Spe-
cial Apil sue (Apil 1991), p 3 8 Murakam op ct, pp 4 The Johnny Crson
1 . These
examples have been taken rom alrt joualst Dave Barrys olumn n the Seattle Tmes (July 22, 1991), p A6 and do not neessarily epesent the opinons of Johnny Cason, Ed McMahon, the NBC televson network or anyone else for that matter ncludng Dave Bary 2 See Alfonso 2:700 ff for a full comparison. Occasionally the kanji ompound teido s used. 3. Alfonso 703 Kenkyusha hodo 1:2, Sechi Makno and chio Tsutsu A Dictiona of japanese Grammar (Tokyo: Japa Tmes 1989) 136, etc Knji
1.
G. B Sansom japan: A Short Cultural Histo (New York AppletonCenturyCrofts nc. 1 93 1 1943) p 1 36
nd k 1 . Makino and Tsutsu Tming
1.
pp 5293 1
m
I Kokugo mndai to minzoku no shrai Ch Kron (May,
1961), pp 456.
m nd the Vnishing Beefstek 1 . Yasunar Kawabata The Sound of the ountan tr Edward
G Sedenstcker (New York Knopf 1970) p 8 2. Kawabata Yasunari zensh 14 vols (Shnchsha 1969) 8234 3. 504 . Alfonso japanese anguage Pattes 2860 5 SL 220203 6. Alfonso 2859 but poorly translated there as I ntended to do my best 7 From Kenkyusha under shinu p 1564 whch translates the NOTE
14
sentence Nothng s mpossble to one who does not fear death. 8 Alfonso 2859 translaton slghtly altered. Alfonso 2861. 1 Kawamoto Saburo 'Monogatar no tame no bken Mur am Hak Bungakuka (August 1985) p. 40 rning
1 Muakam Ha Nemur Bungakuka (Janua 1989) p 46 2. F Scott Ftzgeald The Ice Palace t Muakam Hak Ma
rosuto htii (Chko Bunko 1 98 1 ) p 8 1 3 Bonn-suru m tohite n Manch Shnbunsha Gakugebu ed. Watakushi no shOsetu ah (Sekkasha 1966) p 210 . Muakam Hak anya saishugek Pan ya a-shugek
(Bunshun Bunko 1989) p. 21. 5 It Kench The apanese State of Mnd Delbeatons on the Gulf Crss joual of japanese Studies 1 72 (Summer 1 99 1 ) p 281 6 atsume Ssek Bungei to dtoku SZ 378 Ssek s speang n ths ponderous language about the moral dlemma created by a lecturer who farts loudly before hs audence. 7 Sakaguch Ango Sakura no mor no manka no shta Genda hon bungaku zensh 100 vols (Chkuma Shob 1967) p. 166 8 atsume Ssek Gendai ihon no kaika SZ 1 1 332 The Unbeievbe Compexity of Being
1 In ihon gendai bungaku zensh (Kdansha
1964) 58233 I use dweeb here n the sense of gutless wonder rather than as the precse equvalent of dork o ump in the Lke, But Be Sure to Come Bck
1 Jeffrey G. Garrson Body Language (Tokyo
teatonal 1990) p 1 7
Kdansha In-
Fiddler Three = Three Fiddler?
1.
t Se Bbhanun e no seppun t Sei zensh 24 vols (Shnchsha 1974) 12444 Eting in the rong Direction
1
Mshma Yuko Watakush no henrek idai n Mishima NTE
15
Yuko bungaku-ron sh (Kdansha, 1970) p. 15. Anticiption or: Progressive Simpiction, or Anyzing Upside-Down Sentences
1 Sabur lenaga, e acc War tr. Frank Baldwn (New ork:
Pantheon Bks, 1978), p xiii. 2 Ryk ken was the railway bombng on the night of Septem ber 18, 19 1 , that gave rise to the more general Manchurian In cdent Mansh hen a term better known in the West.