Category Archives: Japan

by Joel | 14 July 2007 · 12:19 pm

Hawaiian Kanji Syllabary Design

Language Hat recently noted a kanji syllabary devised at a very unusual state charter school in Hilo, Hawa‘i, where Hawaiian is not just the medium of instruction, but also

the language of administration, support staff, grounds keepers, and school events for parents. This creates an environment where Hawaiian is growing much stronger than in standard immersion programs and also leading to a major increase in the number of families using Hawaiian as a first language of the home.

That’s exactly what the language needs to survive.

The kanji syllabary was not designed to replace the existing, steadily evolving orthography of Hawaiian. Instead, it was designed to give the students a better understanding of East Asia, where many of their ancestors came from. It also strikes me as a brilliantly concrete and practical way to instill some key linguistic concepts into young minds: the arbitrariness of signs, the phonetic basis of all full writing systems, evolution of writing systems, orthography design, syllable structure, and so on.

Unfortunately, the PDF version of the article posted online contains only graphic images of the entire kanji syllabary, the Hawaiian word chart on which the syllables are based, and actual samples of writing. So this blogpost unpacks the images and presents the characters as text in order to examine the design of this syllabary and compare it with similar systems. See the chart below.

Citation Order

The list-ordering sequence commonly referred to as “alphabetical” order differs according to the writing system of each language. In Korean, all the consonants of the alphabet precede all the vowels: ga na da la ma ba sa … a ya eo yeo o yo u yu …. Japanese kana are commonly cited starting with the five vowels, then adding a consonant before the same vowels: a i u e o, ka ki ku ke ko, sa si su se so, etc. Bilingual dictionaries in both languages arrange the native-language entries in those orders.

The citation order for the Hawaiian syllabary, known as hakalama, goes back to the earliest days of teaching Hawaiians to read and write. It owes little to foreign antecedents. Like Korean, however, consonant-initial syllables are cited before vowel-initial syllables. Unlike Japanese, all the consonants are pronounced with each vowel, then all the consonants with the next vowel, and so on: ha ka la ma na pa wa ‘a, he ke le me ne pe we ‘e, etc. If applied to Japanese kana the same principle would yield the order a ka sa ta na ha ma ya ra wa, e ke se te ne he me [y]e re [w]e, etc.

Choice of Symbols

The hakalama syllables of Hawaiian could easily have been written in Japanese kana, but Chinese characters (kanji) were chosen because they were common to all the East Asian ancestral homelands of the students: China, Japan, Korea, Okinawa. The first step in choosing logographic symbols was to turn the hakalama syllable chart into a chart of basic words starting with the same syllables—on the same principle as A is for Apple, B is for Boy, C is for Cat, and not Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta (or Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog), which are designed to enhance auditory discrimination. Thus, Ha is for Hana ‘work’, Ka is for Kanaka ‘person’, La is for Lani ‘sky’, and so on.

Basic kanji were then chosen to match the meanings of each of those words. Thus, Ha and Hana are written with the kanji for ‘work’ (作), Ka and Kanaka with the kanji for ‘person’ (人), La and Lani with the kanji for ‘sky’ (天). (Although I knew most of the Hawaiian words, I learned a few of them from the kanji.)

UPDATE: It should be stressed that these kanji were borrowed only for their semantics, not for their sound values in any other language. Thus, 人 is free of any possible Sino-Hawaiian readings (kini?) or Japano-Hawaiian readings (hiko?). Despite the origins in other languages, these symbols are used in strictly monolingual fashion.

Diacritics and Variant Readings

The kanji syllabary was not really designed to become a comprehensive orthography. It was primarily designed to expose students to East Asian Sinographic traditions, especially the concept of logography, where a symbol can stand for a whole word. The primacy of logography in its design is apparent from the clumsy way that diacritics are used.

When the symbols are used as logographs, no diacritics are required; but every time they’re used as syllables, diacritics are required to show whether the vowel is long or short. Thus, 石 without diacritics is to be read pōhaku, while the syllable pō must be written 石¯ to mark the long vowel and the syllable po must be written 石° to mark the short vowel. This seems completely backwards. In a true syllabary, symbols that represent syllables should be the unmarked case, while logographic usages should be the marked case. Matt at No-sword discusses the diacritic issues in more detail, with plenty of examples.

Hawaiian Kanji Syllabary Chart

Syllable	Word	Meaning	Symbol
ha	hana	‘work’	作
ka	kanaka	‘person’	人
la	lani	‘sky’	天
ma	maka	‘eye’	目
na	nahele	‘forest’	森
pa	pahi	‘knife’	刀
wa	waha	‘mouth’	口
‘a	‘ai	‘eat’	食
he	hele	‘go’	行
ke	keiki	‘child’	子
le	lepo	‘dirt’	土
me	mea	‘thing’	品
ne	nele	‘lack’	欠
pe	pepeiao	‘ear’	耳
we	wela	‘hot’	暑
‘e	‘ele‘ele	‘black’	黒
hi	hiki	‘able’	可
ki	kino	‘body’	身
li	lima	‘hand’	手
mi	mile	‘mile’	里
ni	niho	‘tooth’	歯
pi	pipi	‘cattle’	牛
wi	wili	‘mix’	混
‘i	‘ike	‘see’	見
ho	holo	‘run’	走
ko	komo	‘enter’	入
lo	lo‘i	‘paddy’	田
mo	moku	‘ship’	舟
no	noho	‘stay’	住
po	pōhaku	‘stone’	石
wo	wō (= hola)	‘hour’	時
‘o	‘oki	‘cut’	切
hu	hulu	‘feather’	羽
ku	kū	‘stand’	立
lu	luna	‘high(er)’	上
mu	mū	‘insect’	虫
nu	nui	‘great’	大
pu	pua	‘flower’	花
wu	wū (= makuahine)	‘mother’	母
‘u	‘umi	‘ten’	十
a	ali‘i	‘chief, king’	王
e	ea	‘life, breath’	気
i	i‘a	‘fish’	魚
o	ola	‘life, live’	生
u	ua	‘rain’	雨

UPDATE: Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat offers a very interesting analysis of writing systems that are not syllabaries, but do mark in an interesting variety of ways the vowel codas or lack thereof after each consonant.

In Canadian Syllabics, for example Cree, the shape of a symbol represents the consonant, while its orientation represents the vowel that follows it, and length or labialisation may be represented by dots.

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Filed under China, Hawai'i, Japan, Korea, language

by Joel | 12 July 2007 · 3:24 pm

North Korean Ideology: Juche as Kokutai

The North’s successful quasi-Stalinist economic development did not mean that North Korea adopted the particular blend of Marxism-Leninism developed under Stalin in the 1930s. On the contrary, if the North’s ideology resembled any socialist experiment, it was closer to the Chinese model [under Mao]. In retrospect, it is now clear that North Korea actually developed an independent ideological line from the beginning. Perhaps because of its early close association with the USSR and the PRC, the North continued to parrot a line of Marxism-Leninism, but from Kim Il Sung’s first formal elaboration of Chuch’e [= Juche] thought in a 1955 speech, Marxism-Leninism progressively declined as a formal category of thought in the North. In hindsight, it is difficult to see how the North’s economic and social revolution had anything at all to do with Marxist antecedents. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites after 1989, North Korea quickly disassociated itself from Marxism altogether. Moreover, the development of Chuch’e thought in tandem with the rise of the cult of the leader has provided the North with a ready explanation for the survival of its revolution even after the collapse of the Socialist world order.

Not only do North Korean ideologues assert they have leaders such as the world has never seen before, they also have an ideology that completes their self-image as the center of a world revolution. This ideology revolves around the seminal idea of Chuch’e. Chuch’e is a Sino-Korean compound formed from Chinese characters for the words “subject” [or ‘lord, master’] and “body” [主体]. Together they adumbrate the concept of “autonomy” or “self-reliance.” In its most straightforward use, Chuch’e can denote one’s independence and autonomy from any external control or manipulation. Therefore, one core meaning of Chuch’e resonates in society-wide contexts to describe an autonomous, independent, and self-reliant nation. The ch’e in Chuch’e is the same character used in kukch’e, often translated as “national body” or “polity” (see below). Here it can also carry the connotation of the “national face,” as in self-respect. Thus an independent and autonomous nation’s face (honor) must not be besmirched or denigrated. This core definition goes a long way to understanding the intense emphasis in North Korean ideology on their independence, whether in terms of their national integrity, their position earlier in the global socialist revolution, or their autarkic economic policies. The nationalist connotations of Chuch’e developed in the late nineteenth century, when it was used as an antonym of the concept of “serving the great” (sadae), a term used originally to describe the interstate relationship between Korea and China during the Chosŏn period. In the twentieth century, sadaejuŭi (the “ism” of sadae) became synonymous with being subordinate to another, with being a toady. To have sadae consciousness means to worship the outside world while denigrating one’s own culture. Chuch’e thus had come to mean an independent stance, in mind and in body, and in nationalist context it means to uphold the independence and integrity of the nation.

Chuch’e was a useful concept in creating distance with the early Soviet presence in North Korea, and later, during the time of extensive Soviet assistance in the rebuilding and first Five-year Plans, it was deployed to signal North Korean independence. The term, first elaborated by Kim Il Sung in 1955, moved to its central position during the 1960s as Kim maneuvered between his giant socialist neighbors during the Sino-Soviet split. By the 1970s Chuch’ e thought had become so linked to the genius of the Great Leader that it literally became the “ism” of Kim Il Sung, as in “Kim Il Sung-ism.”

In the polemical warfare between the two Koreas, the North’s Chuch’e stance gave it an advantage over the South, especially in the first decades of division. The South was an economic dependent in the 1950s, and until the mid-1960s it relied heavily on American military protection. Although the North was also relatively dependent on the PRC and USSR in the early years, foreign troops withdrew after the Korean War, leaving the North to defend itself. To the North Koreans, the continuing presence of the US Eighth Army in the South has been proof of the ROK government’s “slavish” dependence on outside power. The Chuch’e argument continued to resonate with opposition forces in South Korea into the 1980s, since they had from the start questioned the legitimacy of the ROK government and they railed against the continuing US military presence in the South. They pointed to the contrasting stance of the North and its resolute emphasis on autonomy. Whatever the facts may have been with regard to the North’s actual independence, its consistent propaganda and its emphasis on national independence reminded all South Koreans of Korea’s historical humiliations at the hands of imperialist and colonial powers.

Chuch’e has become the principle behind all government policy in the North, which, of course, has significant implications for economic policy. Indeed, in keeping with astrict adherence to independence in all matters, North Korea has developed perhaps the most autarkic economy in the world. Economic achievements are touted as successes based on self-reliance, and great pains were taken to seek internal solutions to economic problems. The story of the creation of the synthetic fiber “vynalon” by North Korean scientists using indigenous raw materials (in this case limestone) became an often-repeated morality tale of technological self-reliance in state propaganda. Where indigenous capital was scarce or other inputs unobtainable inside the country, the state resorted to exhortation and mobilization of the innate creativity of the masses. Thus all problems, technical or otherwise, are solvable if the people retain a staunch consciousness of Chuch’e. Such a stance inhibits overtures to the outside world for the economic or technical assistance the North now desperately needs to solve its economic woes. With the principle of Chuch’e inviolate, the state finds itself in its own straitjacket. And as we will see below, the new policies that have created zones for foreign investment, initiatives to find foreign capital, and, most obviously, accepting foreign food aid during the 1995 famine are issues that must be justified in terms of the unitary logic of self-reliance.

At its most abstract, Chuch’e operates as a code word for North Korean identity itself. Thus holding a consciousness of Chuch’e is to have a North Korean subjectivity. Some speculate that Kim Il Sung developed the idea in reaction to the vague and virtually indefinable concept of kokutai (kukch’e in Korean) used to evoke “national essence” in Japanese ideology before 1945. All North Koreans are enjoined to hold Chuch’e in their minds and hearts, as only in so doing will their actions be appropriate. Since Chuch’e is the leader’s core inspiration, all his subjects carry the leader in their hearts when they hold fast a consciousness of Chuch’e. Just as the emperor embodied the essence (kokutai) of the nation in pre-World War II Japan, so does the leader, now Kim Jong Il, embody the very essential principle that guides all thought and action in North Korea today.

SOURCE: Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History, by Michael E. Robinson (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2007), pp. 158-161

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Filed under Japan, Korea, philosophy

by Joel | 4 July 2007 · 2:16 pm

Fingerspelling: From Alphabet to Syllabary

National standards for sign languages of the Deaf have evolved in different ways, but almost always with foreign influence. Much of the vocabulary of American Sign Language (ASL) was adapted from earlier standardized French Sign Language (FSL), and both remain very different from British Sign Language (BSL).

The standardizers of ASL also adapted the one-handed manual alphabet (fingerspelling) of FSL. Most letters in the BSL alphabet, by contrast, require the use of both hands. As relative latecomers, the standardizers of Japanese Sign Language (JSL) also adapted its fingerspelling standards from the FSL/ASL tradition, but with a twist: they turned the manual alphabet into a kana-based syllabary. According to Karen Nakamura’s Deaf Resource Library:

JSL appears to be a much “younger” language form than many other national sign languages. The first school for the deaf was established in Kyoto in 1878 and we have very little evidence for sign language communities before that time (although they no doubt existed in small pockets). The current form of fingerspelling was introduced in the early 20th century and is based on the fingerspellling used in Spain, France, and the United States. However, many older Deaf do not know the fingerspelling forms or numerals and most Deaf born before the end of World War II (1948) did not attend school since it was only after the war that compulsory education for the Deaf was instituted.

Fingerspelling is much less common in JSL than it is in ASL. Japanese signers appear to rely much more on “airwriting” kanji rather than spelling out pronunciations by means of signed kana. Nevertheless, let’s examine a few of the ways a 26-sign alphabet was adapted and expanded into a syllabary of almost twice that many signs. For more discussion, see Wikipedia; images of JSL finger spellings can be found on the Tokyo Green Systems website.

Borrowing directly – The five vowels of ASL serve as the five vowels of JSL: A, I, U, E, O. Eight ASL consonants (K, S, N, H, M, Y, R, W) serve as the top row of the syllabary: KA, SA, (TA), NA, HA, MA, YA, RA, WA. ASL T is an obscene gesture in Japan, so a thumb raised above a fist (rather than inserted between the first two fingers) was substituted for it. The same sign means otoko ‘man’ in JSL.
Using numbers for sounds – The signs for numbers are used to represent syllables that occur in those same numbers: 1 = HI(totu), 2 = NI, 3 = MI(tu), 4 = YO(tu), 6 = MU(tu), 7 = SI(ti), 9 = KU. (The number ‘1000’ can be signed either by katakana TI [チ] or by airwriting the kanji [千] from which the former derives.)
Signing katakana shapes – The following signs evoke the shapes of the katakana representation of the same syllables: KO, SU, TI, TU, NO, HU, HE, RI, RU, RE, RO, N.
Signing pictographs – Several signs are pictorial: KI ~ kitune ‘fox’ (with outside fingers raised like ears and middle two touching the thumb like a snout); SE ~ se ‘spine’ (a raised middle finger, but with the palm facing the viewer); SO ~ sore ‘that’ (pointing); TE ~ te ‘hand’ (an open hand); TO ~ to ‘and’ (first two fingers side-by-side); NE ~ ne ‘root’ (all fingers pointing down); HO = ho ‘sail’ (back of hand like billowing sail); ME ~ me ‘eye’ (between thumb and forefinger); MO ~ mo ‘too, also’ (JSL sign for onaji ‘same’); YU ~ yu ‘hot water’ (three fingers like symbol for public bath house).
Adding diacritics – As in the kana syllabaries, voicing is indicated by diacritics. For instance, GA, DA, and BA are derived from the shape of KA, TA, and HA, respectively, by adding a short sideways motion, and PA is derived from the shape of HA by adding a short upward motion. Vowel length is shown by adding a short downward motion after a syllable, like the length mark in katakana.

See also Wayne H. Smith’s (2005) article in Language and Linguistics 6:187–215 about Taiwan Sign Language (TSL), which appears to share nearly half its vocabulary with JSL. Taiwan signers don’t fingerspell Bopomofo syllables. Instead, they rely exclusively on “airwriting” hanzi.

UPDATE: Unlike the JSL kana syllabary, which was clearly adapted from earlier manual alphabets in ASL and FSL, the Japanese Morse Code syllabary is utterly distinct from alphabetic Morse Code. Compare:

K –·– vs. KA ·–··
S ··· vs. SA –·–·–
T – vs. TA –·
N –· vs. NA ·–·
H ···· vs. HA –···
M –– vs. MA –··–
Y –·–– vs. YA ·––
R ·–· vs. RA ···
W ·–– vs. WA –·–

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by Joel | 1 July 2007 · 10:03 pm

Japan, Korea, Manchuria :: Torso, Arm, Fist

THE YEARS BETWEEN the collapse of the United Front in the fall of 1931 and the outbreak of the war with China in 1937 brought colonial Korea’s ironies and contradictions into sharp focus. While the fall of the United Front meant the collapse of overt nationalist resistance, what emerged in its place was a more violent anti-Japanese movement represented by the guerrilla movement in Manchuria and the Red Peasant Unions in the far northeast of the peninsula. Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in 1931 altered Korea’s position in the empire, for Korea then became a middleman in the empire’s development of northeast China’s vast untapped resources. The subsequent, seemingly anomalous industrialization of North Korea provided new jobs for peasants, but at the price of dislocating them from the densely populated south and moving them to the north; furthermore, Korea’s industrial labor force expanded simultaneously with the deepening immiseration of the Korean countryside. Finally this period witnessed the flowering of a capitalist mass culture in Korea’s cities, a popular culture providing the façade of a modernity that had evolved unevenly in the colony. The alluring consumer culture and glittering nightlife in the cities contrasted with abject poverty in the countryside, symbolizing each end of the economic spectrum of a dual economy—dual in the sense that parts of Seoul were as modern as anything in Tokyo, yet in rural backwaters profound poverty and wretched material conditions remained unchanged from the nineteenth century.

The addition of Manchuria caused large-scale shifts within the Japanese Empire. Increasingly isolated in world affairs and threatened by economic isolation as trading nations erected tariff barriers to protect their own economies, Japan began to create an autarkic economy formed around its colonies. The main axis of this system ran from Japan proper through Korea and Manchuria, with Taiwan playing an important, but less crucial role. Because Korea was more firmly integrated politically, had a more developed infrastructure, and was labor rich—not to mention its being geographically central—Japan began to industrialize Korea in order to exploit the raw materials of Manchuria. The state-led industrialization of Korea in the 1930s was an anomaly in colonial history. No colony had ever before been industrialized to the level of Japan’s Korea colony, a process that shifted labor from the densely populated south to the sites of huge new factories in northern Korea and Manchuria and spurred urban growth as well.

The increasing economic importance of Korea within the empire motivated Japan to intensify its efforts to spread Japanese values, language, and institutions within the colony. By the mid-1930s Japanese authorities were demanding active Korean participation in Shinto ceremonies, stepping up the pressure within the education system to spread Japanese language use, and trying to eliminate the last differences in legal and administrative practices that distinguished the Japanese naichi (inner lands) from the colonial gaichi (outer lands). The goal in the minds of colonial officials was a seamless cultural, legal, and administrative assimilation of Korea, and where this could not be accomplished in reality, cosmetic fiction would do. This was especially true in the dark years of the Pacific War (1941–1945), when the Japanese assimilation policies became increasingly hysterical and unrealistic.

By the end of the colonial period in 1945, Korean society [like Japan—J.] was suffering under a cripplingly harsh mobilization for total war. It was no consolation that the Japanese Diet had recommended the complete elimination of the distinction between naichi and gaichi, or true Japanese from their imperial subjects on the periphery. [One might say the same for the distinction between soldiers and civilians—J.] Becoming assimilated meant that Koreans would be allowed the same privileges to sacrifice for the emperor granted the citizenry of the main islands—namely, to be conscripted for the military and labor forces, to render their rice and precious metals to the imperial treasury, and to be forcefully moved wherever manpower was needed. Of course while distinctions disappeared in theory, Koreans and other colonials still carried identity cards designating their ethnicity.

SOURCE: Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History, by Michael E. Robinson (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2007), pp. 76-77

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Filed under China, industry, Japan, Korea, war

by Joel | 30 June 2007 · 3:01 pm

Changing Roles of Katakana (and Italics)

A recent post on Language Hat about the official name of Iwojima changing back to its prewar form, Iōtō, sparked a bit of discussion about the reason for the change to Iwojima in the first place. That prompted me to take another look at Japanese military communications, the changing role of katakana in Japanese writing, and then the changing role of italics in western writing. In each case, current usage misleads us about usage in other times and places. Here is a small collection of corrective lenses on the past.

Origins of italic type and its shrunken role

Italic type originally served very different roles. It wasn’t invented just to set off words that were emphasized or foreign.

The humanist spirit driving the Renaissance produced its own unique style of formal writing, known as “cursiva humanistica”. This slanted and rapidly written letter, evolved from humanistic minuscule and the remaining Gothic current cursive hands in Italy, served as the model for cursive or italic typefaces….

Surviving examples of 16th century Italian books indicate the bulk of them were printed with italic types. By mid-century the popularity of italic types for sustained text setting began to decline until they were used only for in-line citations, block quotes, preliminary text, emphasis, and abbreviations.

Origins of the kana syllabaries

In A History of Writing in Japan (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2000), Christopher Seeley describes the origins of the kana syllabaries (p. 59).

The two Japanese syllabaries known to us today as hiragana and katakana came into being as the result of a process of simplification to Chinese characters used as phonograms [purely for sound, not meaning]. The phonogram principle was known in early China, where it was sometimes utilised to represent foreign words in writing, as for example Sanskrit names and terms in Chinese translations of the Buddhist sutras. In Japan, too, Chinese characters were employed in this way from an early date, at first only to represent proper nouns, but subsequently in an increasingly extensive manner. This gradual trend towards the wider use of phonograms provided a strong incentive to the development of simplified forms.

Hiragana developed through a process of cursivization—linking, blurring, and eliding separate strokes in order to write whole characters more rapidly (a bit like cursive script and its derivative italic type in Europe). Katakana developed through a process of writing just one key part of a whole character.

Early roles of the two syllabaries

Nowadays, hiragana is the more basic of the two syllabaries, in that respect more akin to roman type; while katakana is used to represent foreign words and names, onomatopoeic sounds, or emphasized words, in those respects more akin to italic type. However, the earliest common usage of katakana was to gloss Chinese characters with their native Japanese translation in kuntenbon, Chinese texts marked for reading as Japanese, dating from around the tenth century. In those glosses, katakana indicated the native Japanese reading (kunyomi), not the foreign reading (onyomi for Sino-Japanese). This style of reading Chinese texts, called kundoku, required the reader to translate each Chinese sentence not just into native Japanese word order, but into native Japanese words, even adding Japanese honorifics. Readers in the ondoku style, by contrast, would render the Chinese text in Chinese order and Sino-Japanese (onyomi) pronunciations.

While monks and learned gentlemen decoded Chinese texts with the aid of katakana glosses, noble court ladies employed the more elegant and flowing hiragana to compose Japanese-style letters, poems, and prose fiction. In fact, cursive hiragana was referred to in those days as onna-de ‘women’s hand’ (the term hiragana is not attested until 1603); while otoko-de ‘men’s hand’ denoted a blockier script heavily dependent on Chinese characters (Seeley, pp. 76-80). This doesn’t mean that men never wrote in hiragana, or that women never employed kanji or katakana, only that cursive hiragana was considered more feminine, and blockier kanji and katakana was considered more masculine.

Kata the mechanical kana

As Japan opened up and began industrializing in the mid 1800s, the relative simplicity and efficiency of katakana gained it many new applications, most notably in semaphore, where the flag positions represent the shapes of katakana strokes (requiring 1, 2, or 3 positions per character); and in telegraphy, where Japan’s Wabun kana-based Morse code was far more efficient than China’s character-based code, even though it requires twice as many dot-dash combinations as Oubun ‘European’ Morse code. The two superscript dots in Japanese kana that indicate voicing (dakuten) are efficiently coded by an extra dot-dot, but the superscript circle that turned h into p (handakuten) is coded far less efficiently by an extra dot-dot-dash-dash-dot! In both semaphore and telegraphy, the receiver transcribed the message in katakana and telegrams were delivered in katakana.

As a result, military communications were overwhelmingly rendered in katakana. Bill Gordon’s very impressive website, Kamikaze Images, even includes a replica of a kamikaze pilot’s final letter to his children written almost entirely in katakana. And former RAAF wireless operator A. Jack Brown, who spent World War II transcribing Japanese military broadcasts, even titled his recently published memoir Katakana Man.

Instead of a flying career, Jack found himself in top secret RAAF wireless units. There he worked to intercept radio transmissions sent in the Japanese katakana code, which were then analysed to produce the highly reliable intelligence that helped General MacArthur in devising his strategy for the allied campaign in the South-West Pacific.

(Also see the U.S. Naval War College Review article about American code-breakers in the Pacific.)

In some ways, katakana also played a role similar to that of the Courier typeface that was the official standard for U.S. government and diplomatic documents for decades until 1 February 2004. Government reports were often published in kanji and katakana, rather than kanji and hiragana as would be customary today. So was Japanese imperial propaganda (translated here). Ease of carving also made katakana much more common in official seals and on woodblock prints than it is today.

I suspect the wholesale abandonment after Japan’s defeat of so much katakana usage was partly motivated by Japan’s attempt to wash away the stains of its military and imperial legacy.

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Filed under Europe, Japan, language, publishing, war

by Joel | 28 June 2007 · 10:23 pm

Korea’s Cultural Renaissance, 1920s

At least for Korea’s middle-class intellectuals, the early 1920s marked a time of hope and renewed cultural and political activity…. Renaissance is an apt description of the outpouring of essays, commentary, literature, and political analyses that fueled the reemergence of a Korea press after 1920….

The magnitude of the 1920s publishing boom was enormous in relative terms. The Japanese had issued permits for only forty magazines and journals during the entire 1910–1920 period, but in 1920 alone, they granted permits to 409 different magazines and journals, not to mention the coveted “current events” (sisa) permits to two daily newspapers, the East Asia Daily and the Korea Daily (Chosŏn ilbo), and almost half a dozen politically oriented journals. In 1910 the combined circulation of Korean daily papers and important journals probably did not exceed 15,000; by 1929 the circulation of the two Korean newspapers alone had increased tenfold to 103,027. The sisa permit allowed discussion not only of current events, but also of political and social commentary. Moreover, no cumbersome change in the legal system that governed publishing had been necessary. Suddenly permits that for the most part had been denied Koreans for a decade were forthcoming. There was no lag between policy and practice, and given the youth and energy of the new publishers—the founder of the East Asia Daily, Kim Sŏngsu, was only thirty and his reporters were in their twenties—new publications hit the streets weekly in the early years of the 1920s.

In the early 1920s the new publications were poorly financed; there was plenty of patriotic enthusiasm but little business sense. With journals it did not matter; the goal was to get ideas and plans into the open for discussion. Many of the political journals were supported by donations, and they almost always lost money. The newspapers did not make money for several years, but they were sustained by investors’ patriotic fervor. By the mid-1920s, however, increasing advertising revenues (ironically from Japanese commercial sources) brought them into the black, and by the early 1930s each was publishing successful entertainment monthlies aimed at segmented audiences such as youth, women, sports fans, and children. Publishing was becoming a profitable business that competed with other enterprises for a share of the expanding market for entertainment. This called forth lamentations from political activists, who decried the commercialization of the press and the corresponding enervation of its political commitment….

Perhaps even more startling than the outpouring of publishing after the Cultural Policy thaw was the mushrooming of organizations of all types. In 1920 there 985 organizations of all types registered with the Colonial Police. These were local youth groups, religious organizations, educational and academic societies, and social clubs. Two years later this number had swelled to almost 6,000. These included occupational groups, tenant and labor associations, savings and purchasing cooperatives, temperance unions, health and recreational clubs, and groups clustered by Japanese statisticians into a vague category called “self-improvement.” The Cultural Policy clearly set loose an enormous pent-up demand for associational life in the colony. And while most groups restricted their activities to politically innocuous social, enlightenment, or self-help projects, even a cursory glance at their charters reveals that many linked their goals to national self-strengthening. There were, however, many groups who forsook nationalism altogether in order to promote social reform among Koreans themselves, most notably, early feminist groups and the movement to eliminate discrimination against the traditionally low-status paekchŏng [comparable to Japan’s outcaste burakumin]. In the short term the Japanese chose to ignore the potential for nationalist mischief that these organizations represented, but they were very keen to monitor and selectively suppress what they saw as class-based—and therefore more dangerous—tenant and labor organizations….

Another important feature of the organizational boom was the increasing participation of women in public life. Women’s clubs and educational associations had appeared on the heels of the Independence Club’s activities in the late 1890s. Thereafter aristocratic and middle-class women took the lead to establish schools for women and to reform oppressive customs such as child-marriages and the prohibition of widow remarriage (some of these customs had been outlawed already by the Kabo social legislation of 1894–1895). Before annexation, women in the Christian churches had formed groups around a number of social reform issues. Soon the number of patriotic women’s associations (aeguk puinhoe) burgeoned, and they played an important role in the largest private campaign mounted in Korea before annexation—the National Debt Repayment Movement. After March First [1919] the term “new woman” (sinyŏsŏng) became standard usage in the press to describe modern, educated women who had become a very visible part of public life. By the 1920s more radical demands for a true liberation of women emerged in Korea’s first avowedly feminist journals, Kim Wŏnju’s New Woman (Sin yŏsŏng) and Na Hyesŏk’s Women’s World (Yŏjagye). In these publications women’s issues were not justified by merging them with the agenda of national self-strengthening. Instead, for the first time, Na and Kim directly confronted the inequity and oppression of Korean patriarchy. Radical feminism, however, was ultimately marginalized, while the less confrontational agenda of Christian-dominated, reformist women’s groups found favor within the male-led nationalist movement.

SOURCE: Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History, by Michael E. Robinson (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2007), pp. 56-61

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by Joel | 11 May 2007 · 5:37 pm

Northeast Asian Maritime Trade Networks, 800-1000

Maritime trade in East Asia began to flourish in the seventh and eighth centuries C.E. It was jump-started by Persian and Arab merchants, who traveled to and settled in ports as far from home as Guangzhou (Canton) in southern China. Later, commerce spread eastward and northward along the coast to Quanzhou, Fuzhou, Mingzhou (Ningbo), and finally Hangzhou, where merchants could gain access to the Chinese interior via the Grand Canal. Foreign trade thus became integrated to a certain extent with China’s domestic economy. Although pioneered by Arabs and Persians, this route soon fell under the domination of ethnic Chinese. Meanwhile, Korean merchants established their own trade networks connecting the west coast of Silla with Laizhou, Haizhou, and other ports in north China and entering the canal system through the mouth of the Huai River. In the early ninth century, semiautonomous communities of Korean traders were scattered along much of the north China littoral.

These northern routes were further extended to Japan under the direction of the Korean tycoon Chang Pogo. Chang himself is said to have visited Kyushu in 824 and met with the governor of Chikuzen, although the validity of this account has been questioned. In any case Chang, acting by authorization of the king of Silla, was in charge of maritime defenses at the Ch’ŏnghae garrison on Wan Island by the late 820s or early 830s. It is probably no coincidence that the first Japanese record of “Silla merchants” in Hakata dates from 831.

However, Korean domination of the Hakata trade was short-lived, to say the least. Merchants from Tang make their first known appearance in Hakata in 842, and soon thereafter they completely replace their counterparts from Silla. Chinese merchants bypassed the Korean coastal route entirely, traveling directly across the East China Sea from locations such as Fuzhou and Mingzhou. These same ports continued to supply the bulk of foreign merchants visiting Japan after the demise of Tang (in 907), when they fell under the control, respectively, of the Wu Yue kingdom and then (after 978) the Song empire.

SOURCE: Gateway to Japan: Hakata in War and Peace, 500–1300, by Bruce L. Batten (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 111-112

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by Joel | 7 May 2007 · 10:22 pm

Japanese Loanwords in Pohnpeian

During the period of Japanese rule (1914–1945) the islands of the Marianas, Palau/Belau and Ponape/Pohnpei were the most intensely colonized areas of Micronesia. By 1938, about nine out of ten people in the Marianas were Japanese colonists (many of them from Okinawa or Korea), and the same was true for about two out of three in Palau and about one out of three in Ponape. As a result, Pohnpeian adopted many words from Japanese, some of which are have fallen out of use or been replaced by words from English as the prewar and wartime generation passes from the scene.

The following lists are presented in my rendition of the current standard Pohnpeian spelling. My linguistic source cites the same forms in a phonemic transcription, but I want to give my readers a feel for the workings of one of the most successful orthographies in Micronesia.

Standard Pohnpeian distinguishes 7 vowels, but only 5 are needed for the Japanese loans, and vowel length is indicated by a trailing h. (The language has no glottal consonants, neither h nor glottal stop.) Palatal glides are written with i, but labiovelar glides are written with w. Pohnpeian makes no distinction between voiced and voiceless obstruents, which are written p, d, t, s, k. Note that d is a dental stop and t is a laminal stop (which sounds a bit like ty to me).

Domestic articles

aisara ‘ashtray’
asi ‘chopsticks’
dama ‘lightbulb’
dawasi ‘Japanese brush’
dompwuri ‘bowl’
kadorsingko ‘mosquito coil’
kama ‘sickle’ or ‘pot’
manaida ‘cutting board’
parikang ‘hair clipper’
samusi ‘rice paddle’
sarasi ‘bleach’

Food items

aiskehki ‘popsicle’
ansu ‘star fruit tree’
dakuwang ‘pickled radish’
kasuwo ‘skipjack tuna’
kiarameru ‘caramel’
kiuhri ‘cucumber’
pihru ‘beer’
ramen ‘noodle soup’
ramwune ‘marble’
samma ‘mackeral’
sasimi ‘sashimi’
saida ‘soda’
soiu ‘soy sauce’
sukiaki ‘sukiyaki’

Game/Sports terms

anaire ‘marble game’ (sometimes araine)
apadopi ‘long jump’
damaski ‘pool, billiards’
deng ‘score’
iakiu ‘baseball’
iakumehda ‘hundred meter dash’
iohidong ‘ready, set, go’
iranai ‘to pass in a card game’
kesso ‘to run or swim the final lap in a race’
kurop ‘baseball glove’
lepdo ‘left field’
masuku ‘catcher’s mask’
pahsdo ‘first base’
rensuh ‘to practice for an athletic event’
sahdo ‘third base’
sakura ‘hanafuda card game’
sandangdopi ‘hop-skip-jump’
sansing ‘to strike out [in baseball]’
sensuh ‘athlete’
suhdo ‘judo’

Personal articles

angkasi ‘handkerchief’
asmaki ‘headband’
kamidome ‘barrette’
kapang ‘bag’
pwundosi ‘loincloth’
sarmada ‘underwear’ (now women’s vs. pirihp ‘men’s underwear’)
sohri ‘thongs’ [‘rubber slippers’]
depwukuro ‘gloves’

Others

aikiu ‘to ration’
amimono ‘knitted object’
anapi ‘fire cracker’
apwunai ‘watch out!’
adasi ‘to go barefoot’
iddai, eddai, edai ‘ouch!’
daidowa ‘World War II, old times’
dekking ‘concrete reinforcing bar’
dempoh ‘telegram’
dengki ‘electricity, light’
denso ‘ceiling’
dendenmwosi ‘large land snail’
dopas ‘quickly, fast, speedy’
kairu ‘frog’
kakko ‘showing off’
kampio ‘to care for an invalid in the hospital’
kasdo ‘movie’
kenkang ‘porch’
kisingai ‘crazy, mad’
koiasi ‘fertilizer’
kona ‘toothpaste’
kukusuh ‘air gun’
kuruma ‘cart’
makunai ‘unskillful, not tasty’
mangnga ‘cartoon, character’
mai ‘skillful, good’
mwohso ‘appendicitis’
ompwu ‘to be carried on another’s back’
pariki ‘to go fast’
paiking ‘infection’
pangku ‘flat tire, broken slipper’
pampei ‘security guard’
pwohsdo ‘post office’
pwuhseng ‘balloon’
pwuraia ‘pliers’
rakudai ‘failure’
sahpis ‘service’
sidohsa ‘automobile’
sirangkawe ‘to ignore’
sohko ‘warehouse’
suhmwong ‘to order’

Archaic terms

dampwo ‘rice paddy’
dane ‘seed’
dengwa ‘telephone’
deriuhdang ‘hand grenade’
impiokai ‘agricultural fair’
kansohpa ‘copra drying shed’
kikansu ‘machine gun’
kinsipakudang ‘atomic bomb’
osime ‘diaper’
passai ‘to cut grass’
pwohkungko ‘air-raid shelter’
sendohki ‘fighter plane’
simpung ‘newspaper’
skohso ‘airport’
windeng ‘to drive’

SOURCES: Kimi Miyagi. 2000. Japanese loanwords in Pohnpeian: Adaptation and attrition. Japanese Linguistics 7:114–132. Mark R. Peattie. 1988. Nan’yō: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885–1945. Pacific Islands Monograph Series, No. 4. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

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by Joel | 3 May 2007 · 8:55 pm

Hakata: Japan’s First International Border, 663

The war of 663—known in Japanese as Hakusuki-no-e-no-tatakai [白村の江の戦い ‘Battle of the White Village River’] or the “Battle of the Paekchon River,” after the old name for the Kŭm River—has long attracted the attention of historians and laymen alike in Japan….

In Kyushu … the effects of the war were immense and long lasting…. It is no exaggeration to say that the events of the 660s and early 670s created an international boundary where none existed before. Prior to the war, there was no clear line between “us” and “them,” and traffic between the Korean Peninsula and Kyushu was relatively free (although never tremendously frequent, given the dangers and the distances involved). Within a decade after Japan’s defeat, such a line had come into existence (in the Korea Strait between Tsushima and Silla), and Japan had a fortified border with a single designated gateway. The gateway was Hakata, and the gatekeeper was Dazaifu, the command center south of the bay.

Of course, Yamato had long had a significant interest in northern Kyushu, and in particular Hakata, because of the area’s strategic location. The most sensible way to get from Yamato to the Korean Peninsula was to go down the Inland Sea, follow the northwest Kyushu coast to Hakata, and then cut across the Genkai Sea via the islands of Iki and Tsushima. To control Hakata was thus to control access to the continent—the key to hegemony in early Japan. This is why the Iwai “rebellion” posed such a threat in the 520s, and why the court moved so swiftly to put it down. After Iwai was killed, his son offered territory near Hakata to the court (in order, according to the chronicles, to save his own skin). Soon afterward, in 536, Yamato established a line of granaries (miyake, probably best understood as supply depots) up and down the Inland Sea. Much of Fukuoka Plain was also converted into a granary at this time. In 1984, remains of sixth-century storehouses and office buildings, presumably part of this “Nanotsu Miyake,” were uncovered by archaeologists working on a salvage operation near Japan Railways’ Hakata Station in Fukuoka.

SOURCE: Gateway to Japan: Hakata in War and Peace, 500–1300, by Bruce L. Batten (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 23-25

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by Joel | 2 May 2007 · 6:01 pm

The Tang Chinese Predecessors of Matthew C. Perry, 664

Once upon a time, residents of a fishing village in Japan watched with trepidation as a fleet of foreign warships appeared in the offing beyond their own little harbor. The main concern was their lives. What knew what strange creatures might be on board or what nefarious plans had brought them to Japan?…

The year was 1853 and the place was Uraga, situated near the tip of the Miura Peninsula at the mouth of Edo (now Tokyo) Bay.The foreign vessels were under the command of Matthew Calbraith Perry, an American naval officer charged by President Millard Fillmore to induce Japan to establish trade and diplomatic relations with the United States. (Not incidentally, Fillmore wanted Japan to open its ports to American whaling vessels, whaling being one of the great American industries of the era.)…

What few people realize is that Perry’s arrival was not the first time that such a scenario had played out upon Japanese soil. The events of 1853 were a close replay of an equally momentous occasion some twelve hundred years earlier. The year was 664, and the location was Tsushima, a mountainous isle (actually, two isles separated by a narrow strait) about 50 kilometers south of the Korean port of Pusan and 150 kilometers west of Hakata on the Kyushu mainland.

On that earlier occasion, the visitors had been Chinese, not American. Their large junks, bearing flags of the Tang empire, had first been sighted on an early summer’s day in the fourth month of the Japanese lunar calendar. The ships were slowly approaching Tsushima across the Korea Strait from the general direction of Paekche, a kingdom on the west side of the Korean Peninsula. They seemed to be making directly for the village—or more precisely, for the small harbor below, where the villagers’ fishing ships lay at anchor. Those watching the approach were worried—and with good reason….

Only the previous year—663 by the Western calendar …—a vast fleet had come from Hakata on its way to “rescue Paekche,” so they said. Woe be to them! Not long afterward, some of the tattered remnants of Yamato’s once-proud navy limped back to Tsushima. Few of the war veterans tarried long; they seemed afraid of who might follow in their wake. The same was true of the many refugees from Paekche—some of them members of the royal family—who accompanied the Japanese survivors. Before long, almost all the new arrivals had departed for the Kyushu mainland, or for Yamato.

SOURCE: Gateway to Japan: Hakata in War and Peace, 500–1300, by Bruce L. Batten (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 11-14

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