| “KAN” SOUND. | “GO” SOUND. | JAPANESE SOUND. | MEANING. |
| Sei | Jo | Koe | Voice |
| Nen | Zen | Toshi | Year |
| Jinkan | Ningen | Hito no aida | Human being. |
As to which of the first two methods of pronunciation had chronological precedence, the weight of opinion is that the kan came later than the go. Evidently this triplication of sounds had many disadvantages, but, on the other hand, the whole Chinese language may be said to have been grafted on the Japanese. Chinese has the widest capacity of any tongue ever invented. It consists of thousands of monosyllabic roots, each having a definite meaning. These monosyllables may be used singly or combined, two, three or four at a time, so that the resulting combinations convey almost any conceivable shades of meaning. Take, for example, the word “electricity.” The very idea conveyed was wholly novel in Japan. But scholars were immediately able to construct the following:—
| Lightning. | Den. | |
| Exhalation. | Ki. | |
| Electricity. | Denki. | |
| Telegram. | Dempō. | Hō = tidings. |
| Electric light. | Dentō. | Tō = lamp. |
| Negative electricity. | Indenki. | In = the negative principle. |
| Positive electricity. | Yodenki. | Yo = the positive principle. |
| Thermo-electricity. | Netsudenki. | Netsu = heat. |
| Dynamic-electricity. | Ryūdo-denki. | Ryūdo = fluid. |
| Telephone. | Denwa. | Wa= conversation. |
Every branch of learning can thus be equipped with a vocabulary. Potent, however, as such a vehicle is for expressing thought, its ideographic script constitutes a great obstacle to general acquisition, and the Japanese soon applied themselves to minimizing the difficulty by substituting a phonetic system. Analysis showed that all the required sounds could be conveyed with 47 syllables, and having selected the ideographs that corresponded to those sounds, they reduced them, first, to forms called hiragana, and, secondly, to still more simplified forms called katakana.
Such, in brief, is the story of the Japanese language. When we come to dissect it, we find several striking characteristics. First, the construction is unlike that of any European tongue: all qualifiers precede the words they qualify, except prepositions which become postpositions. Thus instead of saying “the house of Mr Smith is in that street,” a Japanese says “Smith Mr of house that street in is.” Then there is no relative pronoun, and the resulting complication seems great to an English-speaking person, as the following illustration will show:—
| Japanese. | English. |
| Zenaku wo saiban suru tame no Virtue vice-judging sake of mochiitaru yūitsu no hyojun wa used unique standard jiai no kōi tada benevolence of conduct only kore nomi. this alone. | The unique standard which is used for judging virtue or vice is benevolent conduct solely. |
It will be observed that in the above sentence there are two untranslated words, wo and wa. These belong to a group of four auxiliary particles called te ni wo ha (or wa), which serve to mark the cases of nouns, te (or de) being the sign of the instrumental ablative; ni that of the dative; wo that of the objective, and wa that of the nominative. These exist in the Korean language also, but not in any other tongue. There are also polite and ordinary forms of expression, often so different as to constitute distinct languages; and there are a number of honorifics which frequently discharge the duty of pronouns. Another marked peculiarity is that active agency is never attributed to neuter nouns. A Japanese does not say “the poison killed him” but “he died on account of the poison;” nor does he say “the war has caused commodities to appreciate,” but “commodities have appreciated in consequence of the war.” That the language loses much force owing to this limitation cannot be denied: metaphor and allegory are almost completely banished.
The difficulties that confront an Occidental who attempts to learn Japanese are enormous. There are three languages to be acquired: first, the ordinary colloquial; second, the polite colloquial; and, third, the written. The ordinary colloquial differs materially from its polite form, and both are as unlike the written form as modern Italian is unlike ancient Latin. “Add to this,” writes Professor B. H. Chamberlain, “the necessity of committing to memory two syllabaries, one of which has many variant forms, and at least two or three thousand Chinese ideographs, in forms standard and cursive—ideographs, too, most of which are susceptible of three or four different readings according to circumstance,—add, further, that all these kinds of written symbols are apt to be encountered pell mell on the same page, and the task of mastering Japanese becomes almost Herculean.” In view of all this there is a strong movement in favour of romanizing the Japanese script: that is to say, abolishing the ideograph and adopting in its place the Roman alphabet. But while every one appreciates the magnitude of the relief that would thus be afforded, there has as yet been little substantial progress. A language which has been adapted from its infancy to ideographic transmission cannot easily be fitted to phonetic uses.
Dictionaries.—F. Brinkley, An Unabridged Japanese-English Dictionary (Tōkyō, 1896); Y. Shimada, English-Japanese Dictionary, (Tōkyō, 1897); Webster’s Dictionary, trans. into Japanese, (Tōkyō, 1899); J. H. Gubbins, Dictionary of Chinese-Japanese Words (3 vols., London, 1889); J. C. Hepburn, Japanese-English and English-Japanese Dictionary (London, 1903); E. M. Satow and I. Masakata, English-Japanese Dictionary (London, 1904).
Literature.—From the neighbouring continent the Japanese derived the art of transmitting ideas to paper. But as to the date of that acquisition there is doubt. An authenticated work compiled A.D. 720 speaks of historiographers having been appointed to collect local records for the first time in 403, from which it is to be inferred that such officials had already existed at the court. There is also a tradition that some kind of general history was compiled in 620 but destroyed by fire in 645. At all events, the earliest book now extant dates from 712. Its origin is described in its preface. When the emperor Temmu (673-686) ascended the throne, he found that there did not exist any revised collection of the fragmentary annals of the chief families. He therefore caused these annals to be collated. There happened to be among the court ladies one Hiyeda no Are, who was gifted with an extraordinary memory. Measures were taken to instruct her in the genuine traditions and the old language of former ages, the intention being to have the whole ultimately dictated to a competent scribe. But the emperor died before the project could be consummated, and for twenty-five years Are’s memory remained the sole depository of the collected annals. Then, under the auspices of the empress Gemmyō, the original plan was carried out in 712, Yasumaro being the scribe. The work that resulted is known as the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters). It has been accurately translated by Professor B. H. Chamberlain (Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, vol. x.), who, in a preface justly regarded by students of Japan as an exegetical classic, makes the pertinent comment: “Taking the word Altaïc in its usual acceptation, viz. as the generic name of all the languages belonging to the Manchu, Mongolian, Turkish and Finnish groups, not only the archaic, but the classical, literature of Japan carries us back several centuries beyond the earliest extant documents of any other Altaïc tongue.” By the term “archaic” is to be understood the pure Japanese language of earliest times, and by the term “classical” the quasi-Chinese language which came into use for literary purposes when Japan appropriated the civilization of her great neighbours. The Kojiki is written in the archaic form: that is to say, the language is the language of old Japan, the script, although ideographic, is used phonetically only, and the case-indicators are represented by Chinese characters having the same sounds. It is a species of saga, setting forth not only the heavenly beginnings of the Japanese race, but also the story of creation, the succession of the various sovereigns and the salient events of their reigns, the whole interspersed with songs, many of which may be attributed to the 6th century, while some doubtless date from the fourth or even the third. This Kojiki marks the parting of the ways. Already by the time of its compilation the influence of Chinese civilization and Chinese literature had prevailed so greatly in Japan that the next authentic work, composed only eight years later, was completely Chinese in style and embodied Chinese traditions and Chinese philosophical doctrines, not distinguishing them from their Japanese context. This volume was called the Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan). It may be said to have wholly supplanted its predecessor in popular favour, for the classic style—that is to say, the Chinese—had now come to be regarded as the only erudite script. The Chronicles re-traversed much of the ground already gone over by the Record, preserving many of the songs in occasionally changed form, omitting some portions, supplementing others, and imparting to the whole such an exotic character as almost to disqualify the work for a place in Japanese literature. Yet this was the style which thenceforth prevailed among the litterati of Japan. “Standard Chinese soon became easier to understand than archaic Japanese, as the former alone was taught in the schools, and the native language changed rapidly during the century or two that followed the diffusion of the foreign tongue and civilization” (Chamberlain). The neglect into which the Kojiki fell lasted until the 17th century. Almost simultaneously with its appearance in type (1644) and its consequent accessibility, there arose a galaxy of scholars under whose influence the archaic style and the ancient Japanese traditions entered a period of renaissance. The story of this period and of its products has been admirably told by Sir Ernest Satow (“Revival of Pure Shintō,” Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Japan, vol. iii.), whose essay, together with Professor Chamberlain’s Kojiki, the same author’s introduction to The Classical Poetry of the Japanese, and Mr W. G. Aston’s Nihongi, are essential to every student of Japanese literature. To understand this 17th century renaissance, knowledge of one fact is necessary, namely, that about the year A. D. 810, a celebrated Buddhist priest, Kūkai, who had spent several years studying in China, compounded out of Buddhism, Confucianism and Shintō a system of doctrine called Ryōbu Shintō (Dual Shintō), the prominent tenet of which was that the Shintō deities were merely transmigrations of Buddhist divinities. By this device Japanese conservatism was effectually conciliated, and Buddhism became in fact the creed of the nation, its positive and practical precepts entirely eclipsing the agnostic intuitionalism of Shintō. Against this hybrid faith several Japanese scholars arrayed themselves in the 17th and 18th centuries, the greatest of them being Mabuchi and Motoori. The latter’s magnum opus, Kojikiden (Exposition of the Record of Ancient Matters), declared by Chamberlain to be “perhaps the most admirable work of which Japanese erudition can boast,” consists of 44 large volumes, devoted to elucidating the Kojiki and resuscitating the Shintō cult as it existed in the earliest days. This great work of reconstruction was only one feature of the literary activity which marked the 17th and 18th centuries, when, under Tokugawa rule, the blessing of long-unknown peace came to the nation. Iyeyasu himself devoted the last years of his life to collecting ancient manuscripts. In his country retreat at Shizuoka he formed one of the richest libraries ever brought together in Japan, and by will he bequeathed the Japanese section of it to his eighth son, the feudal chief of Owari, and the Chinese section to his ninth son, the prince of Kishū, with the result that under the former feudatory’s auspices two works of considerable merit were produced treating of ancient ceremonials and supplementing the Nihongi. Much more memorable, however, was a library formed by Iyeyasu’s grandson the feudal chief of Mito (1662-1700), who not only collected a vast quantity of books hitherto scattered among Shintō and Buddhist monasteries and private houses, but also employed a number of scholars to compile a history unprecedented in magnitude, the Dai-Nihon-shi. It consisted of 240 volumes, and it became at once the standard in its own branch of literature. Still more comprehensive was a book emanating from the same source and treating of court ceremonials. It ran to more than 500 volumes, and the emperor honoured the work by bestowing on it the title Reigi Ruiten (Rules of Ceremonials). These compilations together with the Nihon Gwaishi (History of Japan Outside the Court), written by Rai Sanyo and published in 1827, constituted the chief sources of historical knowledge before the Meiji era. Rai Sanyo devoted twenty years to the preparation of his 22 volumes and took his materials from 259 Japanese and Chinese works. But neither he nor his predecessors recognized in history anything more than a vehicle for recording the mere sequence of events and their relations, together with some account of the personages concerned. Their volumes make profoundly dry reading. Vicarious interest, however, attaches to the productions of the Mito School on account of the political influence they exercised in rehabilitating the nation’s respect for the throne by unveiling the picture of an epoch prior to the usurpations of military feudalism. The struggles of the great rival clans, replete with episodes of the most tragic and stirring character, inspired quasi-historical narrations of a more popular character, which often took the form of illuminated scrolls. But it was not until the Meiji era that history, in the modern sense of the term, began to be written. During recent times many students have turned their attention to this branch of literature. Works of wide scope and clear insight have been produced, and the Historiographers’ section in the Imperial University of Tōkyō has been for several years engaged in collecting and collating materials for a history which will probably rank with anything of the kind in existence.