
The Infinite Silences of Japan - acsillag
https://lithub.com/pico-iyer-on-the-infinite-silences-of-japan/
======
9nGQluzmnq3M
When reading any of Pico Iyer's drivel about Japan, remember that he can't
read or speak the language:

 _" And the virtues of when I got to Japan, finding that I was essentially an
illiterate. I can't read — I can't — to this day, I can't read or write
Japanese."_

[http://www.dailygood.org/story/1092/the-art-of-stillness-
pic...](http://www.dailygood.org/story/1092/the-art-of-stillness-pico-iyer/)

 _" He’s a big proponent of his own ignorance, saying he doesn’t choose to
learn more than a smattering of Japanese because he needs mystery and “a sense
of open space in life, something to offset the sense of the familiar.”_

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/books/review/pico-iyer-
au...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/books/review/pico-iyer-autumn-light-
memoir-japan.html)

Which makes him exceptionally unqualified to spout bullshit like this:

 _A single verb in Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country is translated
in 29 different ways because what we would render as “I think” can in Japan
mean “I remember,” “I long for” or 27 other things._

No, おもう means two things, and they're written differently so you can tell them
apart:

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%8A%E3%82%82%E3%81%86#J...](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%8A%E3%82%82%E3%81%86#Japanese)

~~~
lgessler
> _A single verb in Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country is translated
> in 29 different ways because what we would render as “I think” can in Japan
> mean “I remember,” “I long for” or 27 other things._

Ugh. That might be correct in the sense that a translator could defend their
choice in using a certain English word or another, but that's also correct for
most words in literally every language spoken on Earth.

~~~
0x8BADF00D
The problem is that English doesn’t have a subjunctive tense that maps cleanly
to other languages. It is implicit and masked. Expressing doubt is even
culturally looked down upon as incompetence. Hence the confusion by native
English speakers.

~~~
lgessler
I'm not sure what the particulars are in this article, but if the suggestion
is that Japanese is unusually expressive and English is unusually
impoverished, that probably isn't true. In general, Language A and Language B,
unless they're very closely related, will always lack some grammatical
categories in common that will make translation from one to the other
difficult.

Eastern Pomo, for instance, requires any well-formed verb to inflect based on
how the speaker learned the information being reported, with four possible
values: direct, reported, inferred, or non-visually sensed (smelled, felt,
etc.) knowledge. Retaining this information would be awkward in English, and
encoding it in an Eastern Pomo translation would often be impossible (in the
context of translating a book).

Hindi lacks articles, while English has at least _a_ and _the_ , which encode
(roughly) how identifiable the noun it is attached to is in the present
situation. The rules governing when to use _the_ , _a_ , or neither are
incredibly subtle and complex (I'm sure you've heard second language speakers
getting it wrong but not in a way you could readily explain). Going from
English to Hindi, the articles can mostly be safely disregarded, but going
from Hindi to English, you need to think hard about how identifiable each noun
is in discourse.

I'm probably taking all this a bit too seriously, but it's frustrating to see
well-intentioned but wide-eyed writers like Iyer trying to evoke a sense of
wonder propped up by pseudolinguistic claims.

------
dunstad
I read this from my chair in an office in Tokyo, and found it to be pretty
dramatic and kind of silly. There are definitely cultural differences, but I
don't feel like this article does a good job of representing them. Some of the
linguistic points are a bit misleading too.

~~~
tmm84
Since I moved to Japan I have always looked back at pieces like this and get a
good laugh.

------
Nimitz14
In contrast to the other commentators here, I enjoyed that! Thanks

------
jhanschoo
9nGQluzmnq3M gave some reasons why we shouldn't trust the article based on the
author's history, I'll give some reasons by comparing English, Japanese, and
some other languages.

The author presents several examples from their reflections and observations
in Japan, themed around "Japanese silence"; unfortunately, they speak more to
the author's commitment to their colored perception than to any genuinely
universal "Japanese silence".

> More important than learning to speak Japanese when you come to Japan is
> learning to speak silence. My neighbors seem most at home with nonverbal
> cues, with pauses and the exchange of formulae.

This is a point about Japanese culture. Presumably this refers to
acknowledging neighbors when they meet each other without any further
interaction. Regardless, I don't know enough about what the author is alluding
to with this, but one can be just as surprised that one's current neighbors
(while living in Japan) actually communicate or acknowledge each other if one
comes from a place where neighbors don't know each other, something quite
common in big cities.

> A typical sentence in India—or from my friend from Mexico—begins, “No, but .
> . .” Every other Japanese sentence begins, “So, so, so, so,” or “Yes, yes,
> yes, yes.”

This is a point about Japanese pragmatics. I don't see how this is meant to
reflect silence. A recent BBC article speculates why French say "no" so much
[http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190804-why-the-french-
love...](http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190804-why-the-french-love-to-say-
no) . It writes:

> Because often, there is hope. “Contrary to popular opinion, the French do
> listen, and well, but this usually happens after they say no a couple of
> times. It takes a certain amount of faith, and sometimes a lot of talking,
> but you can almost always find the yes hiding behind a French no, if it’s
> there,” write Barlow and Nadeau.

This sounds very much like how business writers observe that Japanese business
err on saying yes, and sometimes after a lot of talking, you can find the no
hiding behind a Japanese yes.

> Countries like the US and Australia are low-context cultures where people
> generally say what they mean and mean what they say. However, France, like
> Russia and Japan, tends to be a high-context culture, where “good
> communication is sophisticated, nuanced and layered. Messages are both
> spoken and read between the lines,” she writes.

There's more I guess I might speculate on this subject, but I don't see its
connection to silence. The author presents it as an unqualified agreement
"yes, yes, yes, yes". But you'd likely hear a "sore de", or "tokoro de", or
"desu ga" immedately after ("so what about this..." / "however...") if there
were disagreements that followed.

> Seventy percent of Japanese sentences, by one count, lack a subject, and 50
> percent of all spoken sentences do, too.

This is a technical point about the Japanese language. For that matter, most
Romance languages do not specify a subject when it is obvious, beyond
inflecting the verb to (under)specify whether the subject is the 1st, 2nd, or
3rd. On the other hand, in many situations, you would use a person's name to
refer to them in Japanese (J) where in Indo-European (IE) languages (English
(E) and Romance (R) languages are some IE languages) you would underspecify
with a pronoun.

> Japan’s foundational novel, The Tale of Genji, is notoriously hard to
> translate, because proper names are sometimes avoided, the subject of a
> sentence changes halfway through and speakers are seldom indicated.

That Genji is not easily translatable is not necessarily reflective of some
quality in J. Rather you can attribute the difficulty to three things: 1. The
language Murakami uses is not modern Japanese with little extant literature in
the same literary form. 2. The literary novel was literally novel, so the
author may have failed to be able to develop it to communicate (even to a
contemporary audience) by the text alone, without oral commentatory. 3. The
problem of editing, with the original(s) no longer extant.

With proper names for one, it is reflective of that milieu, since one referred
to each other in polite society primarily by their title or occupation. In
that respect, it is not reflective if some tendency toward vagueness since
using personal names would be the unnatural and less informative choice.

The Economist writes: "Murasaki's language was already archaic and
impenetrable a century after it was written, so the Japanese have been reading
annotated, abridged, simplified and illustrated versions of the book since as
early as the 12th century."

[https://www.economist.com/books-and-
arts/2008/12/18/playboy-...](https://www.economist.com/books-and-
arts/2008/12/18/playboy-of-the-eastern-world)

> Even those sentences that do have clear beginnings in Japan generally trail
> off, like pen-and-ink drawings that leave most of the page open for a viewer
> to complete. In England, I learned to start sentences by saying, “I’m not
> exactly sure . . .” but in Japan the studied vagueness is not just about
> diffidence but about allowing room for someone else to turn an opening note
> into a duet.

This is a point about Japanese grammar or pragmatics. I'm not too sure what
exactly the author is referring to, but it's likely a technique for people to
avoid committing to expressing something e.g. "sore wa na..." ("well, about
that..."), that the author noticed.

> Speech is dangerous in Japan, precisely because so many unspoken rules hover
> around it.

On the other hand, the average Japanese fails to grasp the many unspoken rules
of E, and finds it difficult to be understood in English. For example, to a
non-native is not obvious why it is more natural to "put in" effort and "take
out" the trash (like you take out food?) rather than the less colloquial "give
effort" or "dispose trash". The difference is that most rightly chalk it up to
the limits of language education and lack of interest in E, and not to E being
ineffably sublime.

~~~
jhanschoo
> It’s generally a bad idea to use the word “you”—too intrusive—and there are
> said to be 20 ways of saying “I.”

See formal "you" and informal "you" in European languages for a related
phenomenon. It's ironic that English "thou", the informal, singular "you",
became so impolite that it fell out of general use.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou) .

> Women are expected to refer to themselves in the third person, men not.

It is interesting that J has women's language and men's language, but that
does not make it exceptional in its uniqueness.

> A single verb in Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country is translated
> in 29 different ways because what we would render as “I think” can in Japan
> mean “I remember,” “I long for” or 27 other things.

For comparison, I present the E verb whose Proto-IE ancestor has had the most
success in surviving among its daughter languages
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bear#Verb_2](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bear#Verb_2)
, and all the shades of meaning in E that it has acquired in its storied
history.

> One prince in Genji has never been allowed to speak with his own sister
> except through curtains or behind a screen. Yet men in Genji’s world think
> nothing of going to bed with women with whom they’ve never exchanged a word.

Rather than reflecting on some essential role of silence in Japanese culture,
it reflects primarily the court customs and the religious significance of the
Japanese royalty. There may be an argument that this is reflective of silence
and that this role of silence survives in some form in contemporary Japan, but
it needs a more comprehensive argument with more evidence.

> You can tell a Japanese restaurant in the Sixth Arrondissement of Paris, my
> wife points out, by the fact that (unlike the places run by Koreans or
> Chinese) it never says “Japanese” at the entrance.

On the other hand, many Japanese restaurants advertise that they serve
ramen/udon/sushi out front. In Japan, many restaurants have a greeter actively
soliciting customers that you won't find in the West.

> In Japan, more than anywhere, nothing is more fatal than thinking you know
> what’s being said. The English word “hip” in Japan refers to the buttocks,
> and “smart” means slender. “Naïve” is a good word in Japan, and so is
> “tension.” A “mansion” refers to a thick-walled, modern and often small
> apartment.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend)
False friends are a perpetual source of embarassment, and is no way
exceptionally fatal in Japan.

~~~
glandium
> It’s generally a bad idea to use the word “you”—too intrusive—and there are
> said to be 20 ways of saying “I.”

There may be 20 ways of saying "I" but a lot of them are archaic.

There are also plenty of ways to say "you" too, depending on the person and
context, and I'm sure if you count them all, including the archaic ones,
there's about the same number.

It is often said that it's impolite to say "you" in Japanese, and while that
might have a little truth, there are very many perfectly fine uses of some
forms of "you" in Japanese.

~~~
jhanschoo
I found this handout an interesting analysis of the contexts in which the
different Japanese pronouns are being used. It explicated some of the
tendencies in which they are being used.

[https://people.umass.edu/partee/MGU_2009/papers/Ponamareva.p...](https://people.umass.edu/partee/MGU_2009/papers/Ponamareva.pdf)

------
daly
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