Category Archives: language

Ashikaga was once an important center for Japanese textile manufacturing, dating back to the days of silkworm-raising. In the early days of Japan’s industrial revolution, there were waterwheels (水車 mizuguruma) all over this piedmont town. Nowadays, the textile industry has left town, leaving behind a legacy of handicraft artisans, fine textile shops, and a few working pieces of machinery in a “play-learn” emporium (遊学館 yuugakkan), where you can learn how to weave a coaster on a small floor loom. (It costs ¥400 and usually takes 30-45 minutes.) Last week, while my visiting in-laws were trying their hands at weaving, I stood around translating, looking up words in my electronic dictionary, and listening to the two old timers who were demonstrating a braiding machine and a spinning machine that was plying thread from bobbins onto reels (clockwise on one side, counterclockwise on the other). They were excited to have an interested audience for a change.

One of the best things about doing fieldwork in a second language is that you often learn new things in the process, and also get a better command of vocabulary in your primary language. I learned a lot of English fish names a couple of decades ago when I elicited the local names for several hundred fish in a coastal language of New Guinea. Here are a few items of useful vocabulary from my 遊学館 experience.

機 hata, loom – The Chinese character with which Japanese hata is written also indicates all manner of new-fangled machinery, such as 洗濯機 sentakki ‘washing machine’, 飛行機 hikouki ‘flying machine (= airplane)’, and the Japanese ‘machine man’ superhero Kikaida. So now ‘loom’ can also be rendered as 織機 shokki ‘weaving machine’, and ‘power loom’ as 機械機 kikaibata (lit. ‘machine loom’). Worse yet, the same character also occurs in the famous Sinitic compound meaning ‘crisis’: 危機 kiki, danger + something not quite equal to opportunity—more like ‘wit, resource, device’.

杼 hi, shuttle – In sharp contrast to 機 ‘loom’, the character for ‘shuttle’ is rare enough that my electronic dictionary ranks it last among the ten kanji pronounced hi and Microsoft’s Japanese-language input system doesn’t even offer it among its 42 ways to write the syllable hi. I had to go copy the character from unicode.org. In any case, most Japanese are quite familiar with the word adapted from English: シャトル shatoru, as in shatoru basu and supeesu shatoru.

縦糸 tateito, warp thread; 横糸 yokoito, weft thread – The terms that translate ‘warp’ and ‘weft’ render a whole range of similar oppositions: 縦引き鋸 tatebiki nokogiri ‘ripsaw‘ vs. 横切り yokogiri ‘cross-cut saw‘; 縦波 tatenami ‘longitudinal wave’ vs. 横波 yokonami ‘broadside wave, cross sea’; 縦揺れ tateyure ‘pitch (of a ship)’ vs. 横揺れ yokoyure ‘roll (or a ship)’; 縦書き tategaki ‘vertical writing’ vs. 横書き yokogaki ‘horizontal writing’. Finally, the highest rank in sumo is the 横綱 yokozuna (lit. ‘horizontal rope’), who is entitled to wear the ceremonial rope (綱 tsuna) across his waist.

Postscript: Weave : Weft :: Heave : Heft :: Leave : Left :: Bereave : Bereft. Can you think of any more English words that follow this pattern? Aha! Language Hat adds Cleave : Cleft.

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.

What particular plant did Henry Reed intend to refer to in this poem? (I remember reading it in an English lit class during my freshman year at the University of Richmond in the spring of 1968—before I dropped out of ROTC, and then out of college altogether, ending up in the Army anyway.) I’m guessing either camellia or Japanese quince, both of which bloom in the spring.

My Canon Wordtank edition of Reader’s English–Japanese Dictionary lists three Japanese entries for English japonica, each telling its own story: ツバキ (camellia), ボケ (Japanese quince), and サルスベリ (crape myrtle).

椿 tsubaki, Camellia japonica – The cherry blossoms are getting all the attention in the Kanto (Greater Tokyo) area these days as they reach their peak, but the light pink to dark crimson camellias have been in full flower for a few weeks already. A great variety of cultivars of Camellia japonica are all over the place, often in hedges.

木瓜 boke, Chaenomeles speciosa – Japanese quince is also known as Chaenomeles japonica. The normal Sino-Japanese reading for the name of the plant should be mokka (< moku ‘tree’ + ka ‘melon’), the name owing something to its melonlike fruit. Another name for a flowering tree formed on the same pattern is 木蓮 or 木蘭 mokuren (lit. ‘tree lotus’ or ‘tree orchid’), Magnolia liliflora or lily magnolia. A slightly different variety of Magnolia, Magnolia kobus—from its Japanese name 辛夷 kobushi—is in full, brilliant white bloom these days.

百日紅 sarusuberi (lit. ‘monkey slide’), Lagerstroemina indica – The native Japanese name for crape myrtle describes its smooth (guavalike) trunk and stems, while the Chinese characters describe the flowers, but the two names bear no relation to each other beyond referring to the same plant. You can pronounce the name of the plant according to the characters as hyakunichikou (lit. ‘hundred day red’), but I’m not sure how many Japanese speakers would recognize it by that name on first hearing it. (I would have spelled the name in English as crepe myrtle, but the spelling crape myrtle generates a much larger number of hits on google.co.jp.)

塩盛り shiomori ‘salt pile’ – The other night, as we were leaving our favorite local fish restaurant in Ashikaga, my recently arrived Minnesota in-laws noticed what looked like a small pile of snow beside the door as we left. It turned out to be salt, and there was a matching salt pile on the other side of the entranceway, so I went back in and asked the very friendly and talkative sushi chef (who trained 3 years in San Francisco and 1 on Maui) what the story was. There were no customers at the sushi bar at that moment, so he came outside in the chilly wind and told us the story. The salt has two functions. The most commonly recognized one is to purify the premises by keeping evil spirits out. But the more interesting one is to attract customers in. The latter function apparently goes back to the days when goods traveled by oxcart. The idea was to tempt the oxen to stop and lick the salt, whereupon the traveler might also decide to stop for food or rest. The salt piles were called 塩盛り shiomori ‘salt helpings’, a term which is otherwise chiefly found in restaurant menus for assorted salty dishes.

義母 gibo ‘mother-in-law’ – Earlier that same evening, I had introduced my visiting in-laws to the waitress in that same fish restaurant. Both she and the sushi chef are always happy to assuage my curiosity about obscure readings (obscure to me, anyway), especially of fish names and sake brands. After I had introduced my mother-in-law as my 義理の母 giri no haha, she referred to her by a shorter version, 義母 gibo. So I asked her what the shorter version is for younger sister-in-law, 義理の妹 giri no imouto. In comprehensive kanji dictionaries, you can find 義妹 gimai, but she had never heard that term. The only such shorter term she had heard was 義兄 gikei ‘elder brother-in-law’. The longer version is 義理の兄 giri no ani, and my New Nelson’s kanji dictionary lists the full range for siblings-in-law: including the combining terms 義姉妹 gishimai ‘elder and younger sisters-in-law’ and 義兄弟 gikyoudai ‘elder and younger brothers-in-law’. (The 義理 giri here is the same one used to mean ‘duty, honor, debt of gratitude’; and the shorter prefix 義 gi is also used to indicate artificial human components, as in 義歯 gishi ‘artificial tooth’ or 義眼 gigan ‘artificial eyeball’.)

紅き羹 akaki atsumono ‘vermilion broth’ – one of our two favorite coffee shops in Ashikaga is Café de Furukawa, an elegant place whose 12-page menu and guide to coffee history and brewing is titled 紅き羹 akaki atsumono, a purposely archaic and obscure phrase that I’ve translated ‘vermilion broth’. Both elements tell a story. The reading aka for 紅 is archaic in Japanese, and the pronunciation akaki for akai ‘red’ is both archaic and regional, I believe. Nowadays, akai ‘red’ in Japanese is written 赤, while 紅 is normally read beni ‘crimson, rouge, vermilion, lipstick’, as in 紅生姜 beni shouga ‘red pickled ginger’, 紅染め benizome ‘red-dyed cloth’, or 紅鮭 benizake ‘red salmon’. Chinese 紅 hong still means ‘red’ (and shows up in many given names of people born during China’s Cultural Revolution). Its Japanese rendition kou- shows up in many compounds such as 紅茶 koucha ‘red tea’ (= ‘black tea’ in English), 紅海 Koukai ‘Red Sea’, and 紅灯 koutou ‘red lantern, red light (district)’. The much rarer character 羹 atsumono ‘hot soup, broth’ (literally ‘hot stuff’) has a much shorter story. It shows up in a Japanese proverb that matches English “Once bitten, twice shy”: 羹に懲りて膾を吹く Atsumono ni korite namasu o fuku ‘Learning from hot broth, you blow on cold pickles’.

UPDATE: Thanks to Language Hat reader Matt for catching a grammar error in my rendition of the coffee-shop title. I originally wrote 紅きの羹 for what is actually 紅き羹. I’ve made the correction in the text above. Another Language Hat commenter turns up a different explanation for the doorway 塩盛り in a fun Youtube video guide to eating sushi.

Ask Japanese speakers on the street today if they know what keigo is, and the answer will be a resounding yes. A hundred years ago, the response is more likely to have been no, or at the very least, “What?” The word “keigo” was invented by Meiji scholars to describe something that presumably already existed but had never been named. Along with that naming came keigo ideology. In some sense keigo is a modern construct that serves an important ideological function. Its contemporary identity is a product of historical processes that begin in what I call the “Big Bang” of keigo ideology: kokugo seisaku ‘language policy’, which began with the Kokugo Chôsa Iinkai of 1902.

If keigo ideology did not exist before Meiji, how did it come to exist today? What was the cloud of raw materials out of which it formed? What stages has it passed through? How is its contemporary shape different from the primordial mass from which it emanated? And how did it happen that the primordial mass has passed from a timeless state of perfection to a state of decline?

If one presses modern Japanese speakers to talk a little more about keigo, they will probably indicate that it is an important component of what it means to function as an adult in society, that they wish they could use it more skillfully, or that they wish the younger generation could use it more skillfully–that keigo today is midarete iru ‘in a state of disarray’. They will talk about keigo in terms of the social fabric within which it functions. Their views are echoed and elaborated in a self-help, “how-to” genre. Keigo how-to takes its place alongside other kinds of Japanese how-to, and makes use of the same images, the same constructs, and the same view of the Japanese cultural landscape as do other kinds of how-to in Japan.

SOURCE: Keigo in Modern Japan: Polite Language from Meiji to the Present, by Patricia J. Wetzel (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2004), pp. 1-2