Japan – William Lise

Japanese Government-mandated Orthography Chaos

Japan was considerably later than numerous other civilizations in acquiring a written language. When it did, it was basically by adopting Chinese characters to the task of writing Japanese. Those characters are still used, and promoters of schemes to replace them totally with phonetic writing have universally failed. They’re here to stay.

Before the early 20th century, the use of kanji logograms (not ideograms, a long-standing misconception I will write about shortly) in Japan was without much government interference or guidance. It was a lawless land of kanji logograms.

Then came the kanjicrats, with numerous well-meaning attempts to regulate or guide use of kanji, most of which did not reflect—and was ineffective in controlling—the way kanji were used in real life. Some of the highlights of the kanji evolution in Japan are as follows.

1923	Joyo Kanji Table May 9 1962 characters, 154 abbreviated characters
1931	147 characters removed from and 45 characters added to the Joyo Kanji Table, making it 1858 characters.
November 16, 1946	Toyo Kanji Table established by cabinet order (Cabinet Notification/Order) (1) 1850 characters for use in statutes, public documents, newspapers, and general society) (2) Proper nouns such as personal names and place names are exceptions, considered separately because of legal and other reasons.
February 16 1948	Toyo Kanji onyomi and kunyomi Tables and Toyo Kanji Separate Table established (Cabinet Notification/Order) (1) Generated to indicate the onyomi and kunyomi to be used going forward for each of the characters in the Toyo Kanji table. (2) 881 characters (so-called educational characters) of the Toyo Kanji table listed as necessary in education during compulsory education to enable reading and writing.
April 28, 1949	Toyo Kanji Character Form Table (Cabinet Notification/Order) (1) Created to show the standard form of kanji in the Toyo Kanji table (2) To facilitate and make accurate the reading and writing of characters in the table, organization of simplified characters and unification as much as possible in accordance with printed character forms.
May 25, 1961	Personal Name Character Table (Cabinet Notification/Order) 92 Kanji characters indicated for use in proper nouns.
July 30, 1976	Added Personal Name Character Table (Cabinet Notification/Order) 28 Characters added for use in personal names.
October 1, 1981	Joyo Kanji Table (Cabinet Notification/Order) (1) 95 Characters added to the Toyo Kanji table for use in statutes, public documents, newspapers, magazines, broadcasting, and daily life in writing Japanese, making the character count 1945 (2) Place names and personal names are treated as exceptions. (3) The Joyo Kanji list of characters should be used as a reference in selecting names for children.
December 8, 2000	(Response from the National Language Council) Non-listed character list of characters for printing established (1022 characters) as standard printing character forms. JIS standard JIS X 0213 modified accordingly.
Subsequent Addition of Characters for Personal Names
1981	54 characters added.
February 2004	Several characters added, making the total number of characters for personal names became 290.
September 27, 2004-9-27	488 characters added + 205 characters added () Of the 205 characters, 195 are old forms of Joyo Kanji, 10 are the old forms of characters for personal names. This makes the current number of personal name kanji is 290 + 488 + 205, for a total of 983. As of 2010, the list of Joyo Kanji* includes 2136 characters.

All of that said, while the print and broadcast media (particularly NHK) are careful not to use unlisted characters, there are numerous instances of Japanese writers ignoring the above guidelines. Even Japanese patent specifications—arguably public documents—provide numerous examples of characters not included in the current Joyo Kanji list of 2136 characters. And, of course, most literate Japanese, which includes a higher portion of the population than in cultures with ostensibly “easier” languages, are able to read and use many characters beyond the official lists.

Another aspect of kanji that I have noticed is that, while many anglophones comment that kanji are so difficult that young students are unduly burdened, I have almost never heard such comments from native Japanese speakers, outside of educators. Kanji are just accepted by the general public, like the air around us, with no complaints heard or reforms demanded, except perhaps from lingering kanjicrats in government agencies.

Things I can do without ♫ In Kvetchalot ♫

I am on the high-functioning curmudgeonism spectrum—high-functioning so that people don’t think I’m dysfunctional, and spectrum, so that I benefit from the trendy “spectral advantage.”

I have problems with numerous things. I would have “issues” with them, but I just cannot purge the word problem from my active vocabulary. Such is the cross that must be borne by a person who arrived just about a month before the baby-boomers.

Problems I kvetch about form a list that grows, shrinks, and changes to suit what pisses me off on any particular day. Some of the items remain unchanged, however. Here are some current annoyances, some frequent annoyers and a few targets of annoying opportunity.

Foreigners in Japan who know almost nothing about the country, the culture, and language, but who stay here for years, endlessly complaining about Japan
Foreigners in Japan who know almost nothing about the country, the culture, and the language, yet are hopelessly and senselessly in love with Japan and everything Japanese and cannot bring themselves to see that, like all countries, some things are awry in Japan too. There is a significant overlap between these people and those who can’t name any Japanese food other than sushi.
Foreigners who think that Japanese eat sushi all the time.
Foreigners who believe that veganism is common in Japan and that everybody here is a devout Buddhist. Perhaps that’s true in the atypical places they hang out, or what the view of Japan is where they live.
Social media companies such as Meta, which use information donated to them by their willing victims to make money by helping their criminal clients.
People sending spam selling fake goods from China.
Spam selling fake goods from China.
Fake goods from China.
China.
Japanese ketchup bottles designed so that, when squeezed, they remain in the squeezed shape unless they are carefully coaxed back to their designed shape. Definitely a candidate for the Japanese government’s Bad Design award.
Public toilets in Japan with neither paper towels nor hot-air hand driers. If you expect people to wash their hands after pissing or shitting, please provide means for them to dry their hands. My response is not to wash my hands in such places; no apology is needed.
Train station platforms in Japan with no trash bins decades after the Aum Shinrikyo sarin-gas domestic terrorism that prompted railroads to take them away, for fear that they would serve as drop points for poison-gas bombs. Many people have long-since forgotten why they can’t find these receptacles.
People getting so drunk in Japan that they need to chuck their noodles in public. To be fair, this has become quite rare, but one is still occasionally treated in the morning to sidewalk “flower displays” of last night’s noodles.
Japanese broadcast media that avoid mentioning cigarette smoking in the same breath (or in the same news story) with cancer or other specific ailments. This is probably either because they are NHK, certainly influenced by the Japanese government, which is the leading shareholder of Japan’s only tobacco company, Japan Tobacco, or because they are private broadcasters making money from JT’s “health-washing” corporate identity advertising.

Some March 11th Memories

It was March 11, 2011, and I had interpreted for about two hours for a client located near Tameikesanno Station. The meeting with their overseas attorneys lasted for about two hours, and the attorneys were going to be left alone in the meeting room for a while after I departed. I imagine they might have had dinner with our shared client in store for them after I left, but what was to happen in just a few minutes would probably interfere with those plans, and I heard later it made them swear that they would not come back to Japan for quite some time. I heard that the quake hit while there were none of their hosts around to assure them that they were not going to meet their end during their trip to Japan.

Meanwhile, I headed toward the Metro station, reached the platform several floors below ground level, and was waiting for my train.

It was around 2:45 pm, and the tremor that hit was undeniable and frightening, but nobody on the platform could imagine the much greater tragedy unfolding hundreds of kilometers to the north of us.

The platform, of course, shook wildly. The ceiling above the tracks and platform looked like a flimsy dropped ceiling resting on a flimsy matrix-like support, which probably served to hide pipes and cabling. I thought parts of it would come down with all the shaking. One waiting passenger hugged a thick pillar standing in the middle of the platform; others ran for the stairs.

I kept sitting still and looked at my Blackberry (it was 2011, you see), only to see an email reporting that a cement wall near the sender somewhere in the West end of the city had collapsed. A fellow peeking at my display was rather distressed to see this. About 20 minutes after the shaking subsided, no train had arrived, and a voice came over the PA system: “We’re terribly sorry to cause you inconvenience. Train service will be starting again shortly, so please wait a bit longer.” I wondered whether the person making the announcement believed that, or was just reading from a prepared text to be used in the event of an earthquake.

The announcement turned out to be quite optimistic. No train was going to arrive, not shortly, and not until the next morning.

After hearing a more-realistic announcement that we should make our way up the stairs to the ground level, we all obediently made our way outside, up what seemed like more flights of stairs than we had descended.

Upon reaching ground level outside, there were numerous people in normal business attire but wearing white helmets who were urging people to “walk this way.” If they had done that in English, I would have been tempted to take them up on their straight line, but my concern over what had happened and just where it had happened stifled my desire for comedy relief, and nobody would have gotten the joke or movie reference anyway.

So what now? Silly me, I thought I could walk to the ANA Hotel to wait for a taxi to go to some station where a train would be operation. It was immediately apparent that things were more seriously disrupted than I had imagined. From the hotel taxi stand, I could see an elevated road with cars stopped bumper-to-bumper, and the sidewalks of the roads beneath that and running past the hotel were filled with people walking in the direction of Shibuya, although who knows where these people were headed. Home, I imagined.

After a wait of about an hour, it was apparent that there were going to be no taxis swerving into the hotel taxi stand to pick people up. I was getting hungry and decided to walk to Devan des PTT, an okonomiyaki place I had been going to for at least three decades. Upon arriving—it was already about 5:30pm—there were already other quake refugees sitting at the counter. Some had been staying at a nearby hotel that couldn’t serve meals because of the gas supply being cut off.

After enjoying the usual good okonomiyaki served up by the owner, Onyama-san, I headed back to the ANA Hotel, again hoping that things had settled down to the point at which taxis would be picking people up at the taxi stand. No such luck. Several other refugees and I gave up and entered the hotel from the taxi stand. Not surprisingly, there were no rooms available, but I had not intended to get a room, anyway.

I pulled together three or four smallish chairs in one corner of the lobby, unfortunately in a location in which a cold wind would strike me for about 15 seconds each time someone exiting or entering caused the nearby automatic doors to open. That happened about every two minutes, but I managed to fall asleep. I awoke around 2am to find that someone had put a blanket over me, two actually. I don’t think this would have happened in a US hotel.

I slept surprisingly well, and felt so thankful that that I popped for a horribly expensive hotel breakfast for 3000-plus yen. It was worth it. The tables around me were occupied by people in diverse predicaments caused by the earthquake. There were people on business trips to Tokyo, including one from the affected area. Then there was a mother and daughter, in Tokyo for a school entrance exam. Would the exam be delayed? they wondered.

My mobile service was limited, but good enough to learn how tragically things had unfolded to the north of Tokyo.

And here we are, 14 years later, just after a wide-ranging forest fire hit one of the same areas struck by the tsunami that followed the earthquake. That forest fire would be called a wildfire in the US—and was called that in some English reportage of the fire—for sociopolitical reasons that some in Japan would probably claim don’t apply.

Japan is a resilient country with a resilient people living in it. This becomes clear every time a natural disaster occurs, although part of the aftermath of 3-11 earthquake was arguably made worse by lack of forethought by the bureaucrats and their friends running the Fukushima nuclear power plant that experienced a meltdown, a distressing term we tend not to use here in Japan. But I digress.