Kate Elwood takes on the differences regarding irony in America and Japan in her Daily Yomiuri column. I've often suggested to my friends back home that I'm suffering from "irony deficiency" since it is seldom employed in the manner that my wise-crackin friends from home do:
Nonetheless, over the years I've witnessed several occasions on which Americans and other English speakers have attempted ironic utterances when speaking to Japanese people only to find that their ironic intentions are met with incomprehension and blank stares or puzzled grins leading some to claim that Japanese people have no sense of irony. Which somehow seems, well, ironic, given the subtlety of the Japanese language and culture.
Of course, what these doubters really mean is that the Japanese sense and expression of irony, usually translated as hiniku, is not precisely the same as in the United States or some other countries. One common type of English ironic expression that falls flat is Japan involves expressing a reverse opinion about a subject when it is expected that the listener will be able to figure out that the speaker is not serious based on shared knowledge. Thus, for example, I heard an American student I'll call Greg emerge from a lecture hall after a long and rather pedantic talk and say to his Japanese companion, "Well, that was a barrel of laughs." Greg's friend looked flabbergasted, unable to imagine why on earth Greg would have found such a dull 90 minutes amusing.
When it's clear the irony is being lost on the listener, a speaker may make the choice to lay it on thick, adding layer after layer until his or her interlocutor is compelled to realize that the statement is not to be taken at face value. I once heard a Japanese woman who lived in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, complain that her house had no air-conditioning. "Oh, that must be tough living in Kamakura and all," said an American I'll call Adam, hamming up the display of commiseration so that it sounded like "Ohhhhh, that must be TOUGH living in KaMAkura." When prosodic cues failed to alert the woman to Adam's sardonic intention, he went further saying, "Yep, it must be so hard, living by the beach, having to cool off by going surfing. Boy, you have my sympathy." She got the point.
In Japan, another ironic nonstarter is the use of reversals in imperatives to lightly--or not so lightly--suggest that another person's action or behavior is inappropriate and indirectly request the opposite behavior. For example, someone who is crowding in too close to another person might be told, "Why don't you draw a little nearer?" Similarly, a wry "Thanks a lot" when jostled into spilling a cup of coffee doesn't make much sense in Japanese.
I conducted an informal survey among Japanese acquaintances about hiniku and found that most equated it with sarcastic criticism of the listener. A case in point was a mother visiting her grown daughter's messy home and exclaiming over how clean and well-organized it was. A father upon seeing a new handbag his daughter, a middle school student, had bought, commented that she must be very rich, implying that she should not have spent so much money. At the same time, one colleague whom I'll call Professor Matsuda noted that while she was frequently ironic with her students, the students often did not notice. For example, she had told a student who had handed in an exceedingly short homework assignment that she expected the next essay to be twice as long. When the student subsequently turned in a paper that was only slightly longer than the earlier one, Prof. Matsuda said dryly, "I'm glad to see such substantial improvement." To her surprise the student beamed at her and said happily, "Thanks!"
Moreover, unlike the English-language speakers I consulted about irony, who generally saw it as often humorous and a useful way to indirectly make a negative evaluation, every Japanese person I spoke to viewed hiniku unfavorably, with one woman observing that she would not like to be thought of as an ironic woman, and a man saying that while he spoke ironically sometimes reproached himself for it afterward. Shinichiro Okamoto, a social psychologist who has studied Japanese irony from several perspectives, found that the more utterances were perceived as ironic, the more they were also perceived as offensive.
Okamoto further found that the use of honorific language in negative evaluations increased the perception of irony. For example, in a situation in which a friend was 30 minutes late, respondents found the utterance with honorific language Zuibun osoku o-ide ni narimashita wa ne- more ironic (and offensive) than the non-honorific Zuibun osokatta ne-, both of which would translate into English as "You have arrived so late."
Recent Comments