It seems the Japanese language, like a bouncer at a nightclub on ladies’ night, is intent on keeping as many people away from it as possible.
Here are three reasons why: There are three scripts!
First, there is kanji, or pictographic characters imported from China. You need to know at least 1,000 to be considered moderately fluent. These are already monstrous to learn in Chinese—pure memorization–but even more so in Japanese because there are many ways to pronounce even one kanji depending on the context. (More on that some other day.) Then there are two alphabets–TWO! One is called hiragana and the other katakana. What’s particularly exciting is they represent the exact same 46 sounds, just written differently for pizzazz. (Actually, there are more like 71 letters because little additions to some “kana” give them a different sound: for example, ho ほ, bo ぼ and po ぽ.)
Why two alphabets? Well, the Guide Book explanation is that one, hiragana, is used to modify verbs, adjectives and particles, like turning the kanji 高 (high) into 高い (expensive); it’s also used to write native Japanese words like すし (sushi)、ありがとう, (arigatou), andちょっと待って (chottomate–kindly wait a moment—very Japanese). Katakana, on the other hand, is used almost exclusively to express foreign loan words like ピザ (pizza), クレジッツトカド (kurejittokado–credit card), and ティム (foreign names, like the one of this hairy curmudgeon complaining about the language). They are also used for onomatopoeia—sound words—like when a manga character is startled and shouts “オ!”
You will notice one script is curvy and the other angular.
When I was in college, my Asian Studies professors (who were all China scholars) presented the idea of having one alphabet exclusively reserved for foreign loan words as an example of why the Japanese were weirdly ethnocentric: a people fixated with making a clear distinction between what was Japanese and what was not Japanese. It’s important to the Japanese, these professors would say, that you know that tatamiたたみis Japanese, but a salad サラド most certainly is not; thus they are written in different alphabets. The implication was that the desire to keep foreign things denoted as foreign came first, and that a script system was later developed to ensure such distinctions remained locked in place.
Actually, that’s not true, and has it pretty well backwards. (Sorry Prof Jian.)
As mentioned previously, the Japanese language had no written script until Chinese characters were introduced between the 4th-9th centuries AD. The problem is that the Chinese language and the Japanese language had (and continue to have) almost nothing in common; they are from totally different language families, in fact. For instance, in Chinese you do not conjugate verbs; in Japanese you do. In Chinese you express past tense just by adding a 了 behind your action character; in Japanese there are a lot of sounds, often many different sounds, that make a root action past tense. This is to say that the nature of Chinese characters, while poetic and beautiful, was wholly unsuited to capture how Japanese was actually spoken.
To solve this problem, Japanese scribes evolved a set of abbreviated characters, or fragmentary characters, meant to capture ‘a sound’ rather than meaning. For instance, 高 (taka) could mean high, tall or expensive; you needed information on a modifying sound to narrow your options down. First came 高以, where the kanji 以, with the pronunciation “i”, was added to make clear we were talking about expensive: or ‘taka-i’ and not ‘taka’. But this was equally confusing because 以 already had its own meaning as a kanji, which conveyed nothing about highness, tallness or expensiveness. Therefore 以 was simplified to become い, so that expensive came to be written as 高い. Similarly, 世 (se) was simplified to せ; 女 (nu) to ぬ, etc, times 46 sounds. (See title photo for a chart on the evolution of kana from kanji.).
At one point there were many different fragmentary sound systems out there, but two came to be the most widely used.
Since writing in kanji and classical Chinese was what highly educated people did, that form of writing came to be known as 男手 (otokote), or Male Script, since only men had access to high education. Conversely, the simplified, ‘caligraphized’, sound-based letters that were developed to modify kanji, and which eventually became its own alphabet, was used by anyone not literate in classical Chinese. Over time this script came to be known as 女手 (onnade), or Women’s Script, since women were the ones mostly using it. This script allowed women to write diaries, letters and poetry without having to undergo the lifelong process of learning classical Chinese. It came to be called hiragana.
Katakana, on the other hand, was developed by Buddhist monks during the Heian period along the same lines but was developed specifically to aid in the translation and pronunciation of Buddhist texts, which came to them in Chinese, Pali or Sanskrit. It eventually was used to translate government texts as well, itself containing a lot of imported words like resources, ministry and taxes.
Both scripts were out there in the literary ether, and both were originally used in all contexts, but over time one script, which was associated with words like bodhisattva and the Ministry of Labor, became the alphabet for things not that close to you, while the script associated with your grandmother’s birthday cards became the alphabet for things near to your heart. As such, there evolved a convention (not a rule) of using hiragana for homeward leaning or Japanese sounding things, and katakana for foreign or distant sounding things. It’s the exceptions that help prove the point, where old foreign loan words like たばこ (tobacco) and ぱん (‘pan’, for bread) are written in hiragana (mother’s script) because those words were introduced into Japan before such native/foreign distinctions were the convention.
Personally, my brief experience in Japan tells me that the Japanese are not particularly conscious or concerned about what is Japanese and what is foreign… at least not any more so than, say, the British. A Japanese teenager eating ピザand watching テリビ(te-ri-bi) will do so daily, and neither her nor her grandfather sitting beside, will have the slightest concern that she is partaking in something originally not Japanese. It is the conventions of how the scripts came to be used that gives this impression.
But where Japanese is quite nativist, however, is in making distinctions between what is close to you, and what is not close to you. Informal speech vs formal speech; different types of formal speech depending on hierarchy and friendship; language of family versus speaking to foreigners from afar, etc.… these linguistic nuances are deep and important, and clearly separate the master from the monkey.
And yes, a language steeped in an awareness of “close to you” and “not close to you” can mean foreign people (not their things) can be forever “katakana people”—always on the outside.
There is no small hint of imported Confucianism in this linguistic layering, but the Japanese language has taken it to a whole new level, for reasons to be explored some other time.
And no, I’ll never master those levels. While I might one day get past the Bouncer of Three Scripts, I have no chance in hell of getting past the Bouncer of Appropriately Deferential Language.
The most I can ask of him is a bar seat by the トイレ (to-i-re). I am old, after all.