The Land od the Rising Yen

two
syllables end on n, so they are pronounceable. When one syllable of a
foreign word ends on a consonant, a vowel is inserted: desk becomes desuku. They
cannot pronounce l’s (they say r’s instead). London in Japanese becomes Rondon. (The Chinese do exactly the opposite. When a Chinese speaks English he will say lice meaning rice; a Japanese will speak of fright meaning
flight.) Hotel in Japanese becomes hoteru. They have no f sound
before an e, so coffee becomes kohi. Little wonder you cannot
pick up the English words in Japanese when restaurant becomes resutoran, high-class (an accepted and much-used term) becomes hai kurasu and
sandwich sando (an abbreviation, on top of it all): strike is sutoraiki
(suto for short) and an engine-stop (a stall) an ensto. All these
are English words.
     
    In Japan people keep giving you their
cards when you first meet them and I collected about three dozen cards every
day. As it would have been most discourteous to throw them away, I have bought
a special air-travel bag for cards and I shall keep my vast collection — even
if I don’t look at it ever again — till the end of my days. But perhaps I shall
look at them, because it is always amusing to study them: one side is in
English (name, occupation, address), the other in Japanese. It is, of course,
the Japanese side which repays study. You point at a name and ask a Japanese
friend what it is. He will say: Mountain Rice Paddy.
    ‘Mountain rice paddy?’ you ask
slightly surprised. ‘But it is Mr Yamada’s card.’
    ‘Quite. But Yamada means Mountain
Rice Paddy.’
    Many of the popular Japanese names
mean something: Ishibashi means ‘stone-bridge’, Nakamura means
‘inside the village’ and Mitsui means ‘three wells’. This is the same as
in English. Some names (Young, Barber, Winterbottom) mean something, others
(Bing, Shackleton, Cholmondeley) mean nothing. Both English and Japanese names
may have their complications, but they are of a different kind. In English you
have the name Cholmondeley or Maugham and you tell people that you pronounce it
Chumley and Maum and they will either remember it or not. In Japanese, however,
you may write the names which have a meaning either in kana or in kanji. (Here I may remark that the Japanese post-war simplification of writing began
with the sacred vow: no more new kanji. This was put into practice by
introducing fifty new kanji only for names.)
    The same ideograph, in many cases,
may be read in the Japanese or in the Chinese way. It is — needless to say —
more U to read it in the Chinese way. Ordinary people read their names in the
Japanese way because to read them in the Chinese way would be pretentious and
‘above their station’, but when a man becomes truly eminent, they suddenly
start to read his name in the Chinese way. The writing remains the same but the
pronunciation changes. Hirobumi Ito was Hirobumi for most of his life; when he
became Prime Minister in 1885 he suddenly became Hakubun.
    That a man should change his name on
becoming Prime Minister sounds hilarious to us. As soon as I get back to
London, I’ll tell this story to Lord Home — sorry, he became Sir Alec
Douglas-Home on becoming Prime Minister , — and we shall have a jolly good
laugh together at those quaint Japanese.
     
    Japanese is an extremely difficult
language. There are a hundred ways of saying ‘I’.
     
    There are different Ts for men and
women, young and old, city folk and country folk, members of good families and
those of lowly families; different Ts used according to situations (such as
among friends, addressing subordinates or superiors); special Ts that one uses
in correspondence; and Ts used in different ages of the past. 13
     
    Rice means rice on a plate, served in the Western
way; gohan is Japanese rice, always served in a bowl. Iron is kane but real ladies must never say kane (I never heard that kane was
a dirty word in any other language; but it is undeniably a four-letter word in
Japanese) — real ladies must call it okane. And so forth. I could go on
for hours. What can a foreigner do?
    He can choose between two
possibilities. He can take the risk of saying garasu (pane-glass) when
he really means gurasu (drinking glass) — both words coming from glass; he can refer to himself with an ‘I’ denoting a man of good family although he,
as a gaijin, is a man of lowly origin; he can make a variety of other
equally absurd mistakes, and hope to be understood and