The Land od the Rising Yen

The typewriter is so unpopular and
unpractical that in most offices letters and documents are still scribbled out
in long-hand and then xeroxed: this, in the second half of the twentieth
century, in one of the most industrially advanced countries of the world.
    Linotype machines, on the other hand,
are surprisingly small, but they need a near-genius to operate them. He uses
both hands and operates three or four pedals with his feet, and he can actually make up the 1,850 kanji he needs (and he also has kana.) Proofs, however, have to be read four or five times.
    (3) Conservatives say that kana would impoverish the language. In fact, it would enrich it. It is the use of
1,850 kanji which impoverishes Japanese — a very rich and expressive
tongue. Where there are ten synonyms, only two may be used; rarer words have to
be abandoned and they drop out of everyday use. Kana would stop the rot:
everything can be written out in kana (as in telegrams everything is written out in kana) and everyone could use any word he pleased.
    (4) The final argument is that
Japanese has many homophones. Take the sentence: hashi de tabemasu. Hashi means
‘I eat’ and the whole sentence means ‘I eat with chopsticks’. But it may also
mean ‘I eat on the bridge’, and also ‘I eat on the edge’ (of something). When
the sentence is written down all doubts disappear: the proper kanji makes
the meaning clear.
    I admit that certain Japanese
scholars have a definite advantage over me: they know Japanese. Homophones,
they told me, are much more frequent than in English and although few of these
Japanese scholars knew English, I bow to that. Nevertheless homophones exist in
English, too, so we are not unfamiliar with the problem. In any case, when a
Japanese speaks no one knows which kanji he would use if he wrote
his words down. His meaning must be made clear by the context. Take an English
parallel. Imagine that Lord Soandso who owns a stately home near Southend
invited some people to stay with him and his guests brought their children with
them. One of the children says: ‘This morning we played hop-scotch on the
pier.’ This will be clear enough: they played hopscotch on Southend pier. But
suppose that the noble lord suddenly died that morning and the naughty children
marked up his corpse and played hop-scotch on it. One of them could then
say: ‘This morning we played hopscotch on the peer.’ Only our own kanjis- writing either pier or peer — could make the speaker’s meaning
crystal clear. Yet it is no more common for real misunderstandings about
homophones to arise in English speech than it is for naughty children to play
hop-scotch on dead peers.
    Kana is a good syllabary; it is purely Japanese
(while kanji is not); it is more than a thousand years old. The Koreans
are dropping kanji soon and will use kana only (their own version
of kana) very soon and the Japanese too will have to take the plunge. No
nation — certainly no leading industrial nation — can squander eleven years of
its children’s lives just learning the two Rs. No modern nation can afford to
risk that after those eleven years most of the children — except the most
brilliant ones — should be able to say: ‘I have spent eleven years learning the
ideographs but I can proudly claim that after all this time I can neither read
nor write properly.’

NONSENSU
     
    You listen to Japanese and do not
understand one single word of it. You may not know Finnish nor Arabic either,
but listening to these two languages you will pick up an occasional word here
and there, words like ‘democracy’, or ‘football' or ‘terrorist’, and you may
jump to the conclusion that they are, or might be, discussing democracy,
football or terrorists. Nothing like this will happen while listening to Japanese:
you will not get one single word of it. Yet you know that Japanese is as
predatory a language as English: it snatches words where it can. Indeed,
Japanese purists are up in arms against the invasion of foreign words. But
where are the invaders?
    The answer is that the Japanese take
the words and then twist them, adapt them, beyond recognition.
    As no Japanese word can end on a
consonant — they just cannot pronounce it that way — they add a vowel to the
end of every borrowed word. Cheese, as I have mentioned, becomes cheesu; my name, in no time, became Mikeshu; and nonsense — a fully naturalized
word in Japanese — becomes nonsensu.
    In nonsensu the first