Lost In Translation

Behind The Paper Screen: Hinkaku

Sawa Kurotani examines the "hinkaku" boom going on in Japan at the moment in her column for The Daily Yomiuri:

Hinkaku, the "nobility or dignity that is felt in a person or a thing" (my translation of the definition in the Daijisen Japanese Dictionary), has become a buzzword in Japan in the past couple of years. Although the dictionary definition sounds straightforward enough, hinkaku is a slippery concept.

First of all, hinkaku is socially relative. That is, actions and characteristics that are considered "noble," "classy" or "respectable" differ according to one's station and what is expected of that particular social position. Furthermore, the definition of classiness widely varies from culture to culture and one historical era to another. Therefore there is no one universal model of hinkaku that applies to everyone.

Secondly, hinkaku is all about the perception of others who observe and pass judgment. These "others" are usually not an identifiable group of people, but something more generalized and harder to pinpoint, often recognized as "public opinion" or "common sense." This perception of hinkaku may, furthermore, be manipulated. For example, a person can increase their hinkaku by wearing items of clothing that are considered "classy" or by joining an organization with a good reputation. In turn, an organization can raise its respectability by recruiting members with recognized hinkaku. Advertisements frequently associate their products with celebrities to generate a sense of classiness.

The recent barrage of hinkaku puts forward different standards of hinkaku for nations and corporations, women and men, children, company presidents, sumo champions and so on. However, there is one critical commonality among them: the reference to the idealized past at the core of hinkaku.

David Sedaris on Smoking In Japan

Here's Sedaris on the Daily Show.

Yakuza: Big In Japan

There was an interesting article about the yakuza in The Washington Post supplement of today's Daily Yomiuri:

I have spent most of the past 15 years in the dark side of the rising sun. Until three years ago, I was a crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's largest newspaper, and covered a roster of characters that included serial killers who doubled as pet breeders, child pornographers who abducted junior high-school girls, and the John Gotti of Japan.

28 Minutes In Hell

The Odakyu line is jam packed to over 100% capacity every morning, and twice a week I have to suffer all the way to Shinjuku...28 minutes with a briefcase lodged in your ass, as you sample body odor, bad breath, and stifling heat. It could be worse...an hour...

Please Do It At Home

Tautology: Culture Is Culture

This week Kate Elwood tackles culture specific tautologies in her Cultural Conundrums column in The Daily Yomiuri:

Tautologies such as "steak is steak" are present in many cultures and, because they assume the speaker and the listener share a common understanding of the integral nature of what is being referred to, they do not always work in cross-cultural situations. Of course, contextual clues often provide more information, as with Jessica's follow-up comment about authority and the general conversation topic, as it developed, of the difficulty of creating dazzling, knock-your-socks-off vegetarian feasts. Even without these tip-offs, in the United States, certainly it is still possible to access the notion that steak is something that many people recognize as an expensive food item and hence impressive, but different cultures have their own "steaks." In Japan, the food for celebratory occasions is sea bream, or tai. A proverb, kusatte mo tai, ("even if it's spoiled it's sea bream") corresponds well to Jessica's steak observation because the Japanese saying means that sea bream is sea bream, always special.

To make tautological matters even more complicated, the "A is A" formation is often used to mean that each thing in a certain category is the same as the others in the same category. So "steak is steak" could also be used by someone trying to persuade another to buy steak at a discount butcher rather than a gourmet food shop, implying that no matter where you buy it it's essentially the same. This second use of tautologies to emphasize fundamental sameness is easier, in a way, for those out of the cultural loop since all that the listener really needs to grasp is that one type is no better than another type. For example, I can get a handle on the meaning of "motor oil is motor oil," the title of a paper on English tautologies by applied linguist Bruce Fraser, even though I know very little about cars. But I was nonetheless at a loss several years ago when a Japanese acquaintance said, rakkyo wa rakkyo. Pickled shallots are pickled shallots? And by this I am supposed to infer...what exactly? I felt a distinct lack of cultural knowledge regarding the precise "rakkyo-osity" of rakkyo.

Anna Wierzbicka, another applied linguist, has created a taxonomy of English tautologies, noting types related to: 1. realism in human affairs (for example, "war is war"), 2. tolerance for human nature (ex. "Boys are boys"), 3. tolerance at special times (ex. "A holiday is a holiday"), 4. limits of tolerance (ex. "Enough is enough"), 5. seeing through superficial differences (ex. "A man is a man"), 6. recognizing an irreducible difference (ex. "East is East and West is West"), 7. tautologies of value (ex. "A party is a party"), and 8. tautologies of obligation (ex. "A promise is a promise"). With all of these varying functions, the task of assigning meaning can be tricky without a firm grasp of other contextual clues.

Clearly, tautologies of value are likely to prove problematic cross-culturally, but other types may also pose difficulty. Wierzbicka notes that "boys are boys" or the more common "boys will be boys" is not understandable in French, German or Russian. I gave it a try with some Japanese acquaintances in both English and in various Japanese versions and they similarly did not twig the meaning that boys are naturally unruly and therefore we must be tolerant of their rowdy disruption. Interestingly, every Japanese person I asked guessed that the tautology implied that boys should strive to be manly. Apparently the pretty tight English associative connection between boys and boisterousness is more culture-bound than one might expect.

Wierzbicka further notes a few kinds of Japanese tautologies that don't really exist in English, including tautologies that show that what seems to be impossible is really possible and tautologies of a matter of course. A common example of the first type is the often stated Okoru toki wa okoru. ("When he/she etc. gets angry he/she gets angry.") Wierzbicka observes that most English speakers imagine this to mean that when the person in question gets angry they really fly into a rage. Yet in Japanese it simply means that even if a person seems to be the type to never get angry, when anger is warranted it is duly--but not unduly--displayed.

Tautologies of matter of course are followed by da kara ("so...") and use "ga" rather than "wa." This type of tautology is very prevalent in Japanese and generally implies that something is undesirable, adverse, or challenging without coming right out and saying it. The applied linguist Shigeko Okamoto observes, for example, that Otenki ga otenki da kara (The weather is the weather, so...) is only used to when the weather is bad. In the same way, Oya ga oya da kara ("The parent is the parent, so...) is said when a child misbehaves to insinuate something along the lines of "With a parent like that, what do you expect?" and never to suggest that a child has excelled in some way, for example by winning a piano competition, and that their triumph might be due to their parents (who might also be talented musically or whatever). On the other hand, according to Okamoto, if someone says Oya wa oya da kara, using wa rather than ga, the meaning changes completely, signifying that the parent (good or bad) is the parent and not the child and should therefore be considered separately.

Japan: A Brief Cultural Survey

Here's some commentary about Japan from The Onion AV Club:

Japan: land of the rising sun. The ancient empire we nearly blew off the map in World War II. Home to high-quality electronics, bizarre game shows, and vending machines that dispense beer and used girls’ panties (not together…yet). The country teeming with room-clearing avant-garde noise experimentalists and garage-rock revisionists. The Simpsons went there in one episode, and in another, Homer’s likeness appeared on a box of Japanese detergent called Mr. Sparkle.

Until a couple weeks ago, that was basically the sum total of my knowledge of Japan, and at least one of those tenets proved to be untrue. (In a crackdown on sleaze, Tokyo’s mayor banned the vending machines that hawked used undies. Rest assured, though, that the city still has sleaze in spades.) On April 11, my wife and I undertook a fact-finding mission to Tokyo and Kyoto (hey, you can’t write it off if it’s a “vacation”) and returned with an inordinate amount of food for Taste Test, a few words of Japanese, severe Mexican-food withdrawal, and these notes on the nation’s pop culture.

Japanese Customs:Why The Peace Sign?

A reader asks why the peace sign is so prevalent in photos with Japanese people in the Ask The AV Club section:

Give Peace A Chance

It seems to have subsided in recent years, however, I often wonder why Japanese people flash the "peace" sign during photographs so much. I have noticed these in photos online (not that I'm into cosplay or anything… ummm, yeah) and personally when I was in Ireland, touring various IRA/Catholic monuments where a Japanese tourist group was on the same route as me. I first thought it could be considered a commentary on the subject matter of the monuments; however, the tourists flashed the peace sign in every picture they took, regardless of the background—standing in front of a tourist shop, sitting on a bus, etc. Could this be traced to something in Japanese pop culture, much like suburban white kids throwing gang signs because of all those Tupac videos?

Paddy

Genevieve Koski says "konnichiwa," and offers this:

There are a bunch of theories as to the origin of the V sign—either a peace sign or a Winston Churchill-style victory symbol, depending on which story you go with—in Japanese culture, many of which can be found on the Wikipedia page on the subject. The most widely disseminated seems to be that when U.S. figure skater Janet Lynn fell during the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, she kept smiling and flashed the peace sign even while ass-down on the ice, making her an overnight sensation in Japan. Copycats followed her lead.

There's a lot of pedantic reasoning floating around rationalizing the sign's popularity in photographs—it allows expressiveness in a notoriously reserved culture; it serves as a non-verbal "cheese," indicating readiness to be photographed; and, most oddly, that it draws attention away from the subjects' small eyes—but there seems to be a general consensus on one thing: It's deeply ingrained in the culture. Japan Today asked young Japanese people why they make the V sign, and one respondent said, "I make the peace sign but I don't know why I do it, who invented it and when we started doing this. I think I've been doing it since I was born. The peace sign gesture must have been programmed in my DNA, or foreigners mind-controlled Japanese to make the peace sign subconsciously when we pose for a photo to keep the peace after the war."

Mind control may be a bit of a stretch, but it's worth noting that the sign is extremely present in anime/manga and commercial television, no doubt aiding in its popularity among school kids. The symbol's association with these have no doubt helped link it to the concept of "kawaii," or cuteness, a prominent aspect of modern Japanese pop culture and fashion (think Hello Kitty, sailor uniforms, and pigtails)...

Interesting Facts & Cultural Awkwardness

Kate Elwood presents some interesting tidbits about the origins of some useful office equipment and a discussion about how Japanese and Americans deal with awkward situations in her latest Cultural Conundrums column in The Daily Yomiuri:

Around 1896 a man named Eli Hubbell Hotchkiss created a new type of paper fastener that, like earlier versions, drove a piece of metal through sheets of paper to secure them together.

What was new about Hotchkiss' gadget was that the staples were connected together along the top so that strips of them could be fed into the stapler instead of requiring reloading each time, a most welcome improvement to all who were eager to do lots of paper attaching at one go.

Then, around 1910, Hotchkiss sent a shipload of his nifty devices to Japan, which paid him the honor of forever after calling staplers of any make "hotchkiss" well after Eli's company had stopped making staplers and the cross-cultural entrepreneur was long forgotten by the general public in his home country.

I knew nothing of this enterprising manufacturer until I came to this marvelous country and learned, like all new students of Japanese, the words for a variety of office supplies, and much later I investigated who this intriguing Mr. Hotchkiss had been, along with Tokuji Hayakawa, founder of Sharp Corp., who invented a mechanical pencil he called "Ever Sharp" in 1915, the reason these writing implements are called "sharp pencils" in Japanese. When I first came to Japan so many years ago, however, I had no time to dabble in these interesting histories. I did, however, need to get hold of the items themselves which led me to a small stationery store in Mitaka, Tokyo, in search of office supplies.

Though modest in size, the store was jam-packed with all the usual stuff, like paper, tape, glue and pens, as well as things I did not recognize like the shitajiki sheets of stiff plastic used to put under notebook pages in order to write on a firm surface--not only was I unfamiliar with the item itself, I was also unaware of the need it addressed, perfectly happy with the oh-so-slightly soft "give" as I wrote on pages in notebooks resting on the pages below them. Next to the shitajiki were yo-yos, recognizable yet a bit surreal in the surroundings. But...no staplers that I could spot anywhere.

Here, she gets to the point of the column:

What exactly this discomfiture is and how we cope with it may vary depending on culture. Communication researchers Todd Imahori and William Cupach examined how Americans and Japanese cope with embarrassing predicaments. First they asked respondents to describe a situation in which they had committed a social faux pas resulting in feelings of awkwardness, embarrassment, loss of face, or shame. They then classified these situations as 1) accidents, like tripping; 2) mistakes, like walking into the wrong room; 3) inept performances, like doing less well than expected; and 4) rule violations, like being overheard insulting someone.

The researchers further categorized the experiences based on whether the situation took place among "in-group" people, such as family, friends, classmates or coworkers; or "out-group" people, for example, passing acquaintances or strangers; or a mixture of both types of relationships. On top of this, the way each respondent dealt with the social scrape was slotted as apology, account, humor, remediation and avoidance. Finally, the ensuing emotions were sorted as awkward, embarrassed, stupid, ashamed, guilty, uncertain, scared, regretful, shocked and impatient.

Imahori and Cupach found that Japanese respondents were more likely to describe predicaments involving mistakes. Americans, on the other hand, more frequently reported accidents and rule violations. Moreover, the Japanese recounted more in-group situations as opposed to the out-group experiences detailed by the Americans. In addition, the Japanese used remediation much more often than the Americans who for their part were more apt to use humor as a coping strategy. As far as emotions go, the Japanese tended to feel ashamed, guilty, uncertain, regretful or shocked more than the Americans, who felt embarrassed or stupid.

If I apply Imahori and Cupach's classifications, my hotchkiss fiasco was a mistake among out-group spectators, and feeling absolutely and positively stupid and embarrassed I fled the scene, which the researchers note is an extreme form of avoidance. Of course, each predicament has its own particular constraints. Apology was not possible because the woman had, perhaps similarly ill at ease and self-conscious at having to handle the case of mistaken identity on the part of a non-Japanese, had already vacated the premises tout de suite. Humor, quite obviously, was well beyond my linguistic means.

More Japanese Cowardice

It's rare to see brave Japanese step up and take a long look at themselves and their history, instead we get fear, cowardice and ethnocentric moves like this:

TOKYO — A Tokyo cinema decided against showing a controversial documentary film by a Chinese director on the war-related Yasukuni Shrine, citing the potential "inconvenience" it may cause to other tenants in the same building, an official of movie theater operator T-Joy Co. said Tuesday.

"The film is talked about so much that it may create trouble and we don't want to cause inconvenience to building tenants," a T-Joy official was quoted as telling Argo Pictures, a distributor of "Yasukuni" by resident Chinese director Li Ying.

Wald9 Cinema in Shinjuku Ward, operated by T-Joy, was among four cinemas in Tokyo scheduled to premier the documentary on April 12, along with a few other cinemas in Osaka and Fukuoka.

The film tells the stories of people involved with Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo who have varied feelings about the war and the shrine, and focuses in particular on a swordsmith who manufactures "Yasukuni Swords."
Some Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers called for an unprecedented preview of the film, questioning if it was appropriate to grant a 7.5 million yen from state coffers to fund the production of the documentary that they said appeared to be anti-Japan. A preview was given March 12 by Argo Pictures on condition that it was open to all lawmakers.

Constitutional scholar Yasuhiro Okudaira of the University of Tokyo criticized the theater's decision, saying a cinema that decides against showing the documentary "consequently is endorsing the idea of those people opposed to its release and is depriving the director of freedom of expression."