The year before Kaempfer’s account appeared, Japan was mentioned for the first time in a work of Western fiction. Jonathan Swift was impressed by what he learnt from Scheuchzer’s translation of Kaempfer, which had circulated in manuscript among his well-connected friends within the Royal Society. Right at the end of the third section of Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver arrives in a port he identifies as Xamoschi, where he passes himself off as a Dutch merchant, and from there he proceeds to Nagasaki. His stay is not long, and he concludes, ‘Nothing happened worth mentioning in this Voyage,’ but this is deliberately disingenuous of Swift, for the language machine devised by one of the scholars whom Gulliver meets at Lagado is modelled on a contraption described by Kaempfer, and, in a moment of pointed satire, the civilized and ceremonial Japanese are sharply contrasted with the jabbering Dutch. Swift suggests that the European traders, rather than being superior to the foreigners with whom they trafficked, were actually the less dignified of the two parties. Simultaneously, he hints at the elusive mystery of this faraway, little-known land.
It would remain mysterious for more than another hundred years; only in the summer of 1853 was Japan coerced into reopening. An American naval detachment under Commodore Matthew Perry dropped anchor off the coast of Tokyo (then called Edo) and refused to budge until the Japanese signed treaties to safeguard American victims of shipwreck and facilitate trade. The arrival of Perry’s black-hulled frigates was unwelcome, but Perry had sixty-one guns at his command: resistance would have been suicidal. The menace of the black ships led to the Treaty of Kanagawa, which ended Japan’s deliberate slumber. The short-term rewards included a breeding pair of Japanese Chins, which were given to Queen Victoria. In the longer term, the Americans’ arrival forced Japan into the modern world – with political and later industrial consequences that Congress could never have anticipated when they appointed Commodore Perry to lead the expedition.
Of the words to make the journey back, the most eagerly embraced was tycoon. The Americans had employed the honorific taikun when addressing the shogun, and John Hay, then a clerk in the Interior Department, picked up on this term, using it of Abraham Lincoln.3 In Britain the word was emblazoned on the spine of a new book aimed at readers interested in digging a little deeper into Japanese culture, Sir Rutherford Alcock’s The Capital of the Tycoon: A Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in Japan (1863). Alcock had from 1858 been the head of the fledgling British diplomatic mission in Japan, and his two volumes exposed the workings of Japanese diplomacy, manners, government and religion, though they also earned him a parliamentary rebuke for insensitivity to Japanese religious feeling.
The overthrow of the last of the Tokugawa shoguns in 1868 ushered in a new period of political turbulence, to which outsiders were largely indifferent. More excitingly, the new Meiji government promised a programme of ‘Civilization and Enlightenment’. European ideas were slowly absorbed, and traces of Japanese culture percolated westward. To the decade following Alcock’s book we can date the first references to a futon, shiitake mushrooms, ju-jitsu and the Japanese masked drama called Noh. Since then there has been a fairly steady flow of words from Japanese. Geisha first appears in 1887; sushi, which we are likely to associate with late-twentieth-century sophistication, as far back as 1893; and tsunami, which literally meant ‘harbour waves’, in 1897. Bonsai became known around the turn of the century, and the dwarf trees were first exhibited in London in 1909. To the same period we can date the adoption of pillow book, a calque that captures the sense of the Japanese makura no soshi (literally, ‘narrative scroll of the pillow’). This was the title of a translation of a celebrated work by Sei Shonagon, a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court in the tenth century. Previous translations had appeared under the less compelling titles Pillow Miscellany and Pillow Sketches. This notebook of intimate thoughts, composed at night, comprised opinions, details of happenings at court, and scrupulous records of things found agreeable and disagreeable. It also blossomed with lists. To many modern observers, the pillow book seems quintessentially Japanese – artful and formal even in its own privacy, yet touchingly personal in its anecdotes and erotic phrases.
None of these words was quickly adopted into everyday speech. But in the past sixty years borrowing from Japanese has grown, and so has acceptance of words first noted in the nineteenth century, in step with Japan’s emergence as the world’s second largest economic power. More recent imports from Japanese have tended to be concentrated in the spheres of food and drink, martial arts and pop culture. Teriyaki, aikido and karaoke (literally ‘empty orchestra’) are conspicuous examples. The art of origami, dating at least from the twelfth century, was popularized in the 1950s and ‘60s, notably in Britain by Robert Harbin, whose Paper Magic, with illustrations by the entertainer Rolf Harris, appeared in 1956. The Japanese skill in consumer electronics has been influential (think, for example, of Nintendo and Tamagotchi), and the cult status of Japanese cartoons and comics, which has given us both manga and anime, promises in the near future to introduce new terms. Ninja, literally ‘one skilled in stealth’, seems to have been borrowed in 1964, the year Tokyo staged the Olympics – a fitting moment, since the word, once sinister, has increasingly approached a sort of endearing cuteness, and the Olympics allowed Japan, after the disgrace of defeat in the Second World War, to show the world its economic revival. Out had gone the alleged ‘feudalism’ of Japanese culture, and in had come a new spirit of demokurashii.
This last word, instantly recognizable as democracy, is a symptom of the Japanese adoption, since the war, of many foreign items. These have mainly come from English (there may be as many as 50,000), and those that are not from English have been treated as if they are. For instance, the source of arubaito, which means ‘part-time job’, is the German Arbeit, but a Japanese speaker of English may well say ‘I have an arbeit.’ Words taken from English include kurisumasu (Christmas), moningusabisu (‘morning service’, i.e. a set breakfast), engejiringu (engagement ring) and depato (department store).4 One of the features of these words is that they cluster consonants less closely than English does, as the Japanese find clusters of consonants hard to articulate. Thus in baseball the term strike becomes sutoraiku. English technology has become tekunorojii and from there has been clipped down to size as teku. The embrace of such terminology shows that the Japanese, while not especially confident in their use of English, have become obviously Westernized. Meanwhile, the once ubiquitous pokemon, the name of the toy devised by Satoshi Tajiri in the mid-1990s, is an example of a word that has its source in English (‘pocket monster’) but was borrowed back into English.
Japanese technological mastery and the nation’s distinctive fashions mean that borrowing from this source is likely to continue apace. Of late we have quickly embraced sudoku – a sign of its acceptance is the emergence of the noun sudokist to denote one of its enthusiasts. Maybe another puzzle, kakuro, will supplant it: in 2005 the Guardian became the first British newspaper to feature this numerical equivalent of the common crossword, reflecting an understandable appetite for second-guessing which Japanese fad will be the next to go global.
Other borrowings from Japanese remain to a large degree localized. In Hawaii, where there is a considerable Japanese population, one may hear flip-flops called zori, or the word bocha used of taking a bath. These terms will probably be meaningless to a native of San Francisco, let alone to an English-speaker in Manchester or Mumbai. Some of the localization has to do with taste rather than geography. Connoisseurs of pornography and sex games may be familiar with the practice known as bukkake, but to most people the word is as baffling as the thing it signifies. Perhaps the next Japanese word to achieve critical mass in our increasingly atomized society will be hikikomori, which denotes a phenomenon in which teenagers and young adults deliberately withdraw from everyday life and isolate themselves. Japan does not have a monopoly on such oddities, but still, to a majority of English-speakers, its culture and language appear to convey an air of b
oth the eagerly modern and the austerely antique.
9. Onslaught
A fierce or destructive attack; a flood or deluge; a large quantity of people or things that proves difficult to cope with
From the old Dutch word aanslag, which in modern Dutch usage has the specific sense ‘assassination attempt’. It is related to the Old High German anaslaht, ‘a rain shower’.
The native languages of America and Japan were, for those adventurous English who encountered them in the seventeenth century, realms of wonder. I have spoken about language as an affront to the senses – the Vikings’ ‘acoustic onslaught’ – but when we travel it is possible to experience something different: to be pleasantly enveloped in the unfamiliar sounds that hover all around. Roland Barthes has written about this, specifically with Japan in mind: ‘Here I am protected against stupidity, vulgarity, vanity, worldliness, nationality, normality. The unknown language, of which I nonetheless grasp the respiration, the emotive aeration, in a word the pure significance, forms around me, as I move, a faint vertigo.’1 Vertigo: a turning or whirling around, a feeling of giddiness. It is a Renaissance borrowing into English, from Latin – perfect for summing up the feelings of a stranger in a strange land, a Richard Cocks or a Thomas Harriot. But even on terra firma this feeling was possible. For many seventeenth-century speakers of English, their own language was an object of infatuation. Studies of language proliferated. To most writers of the period, modern languages seemed unstable, and contemporary works of commentary and analysis tended to convey an unhappy image of English. Their mission was to prune the language or endow it with new logic, to create what we might now label a ‘science of rhetoric’.
Examples of this scientific tendency include John Wilkins’s reformist proposal for ‘a philosophical language’, John Locke’s examination of the relationship between language and thought (central to which was the recognition that the connection between words and the things they denote is arbitrary), John Dryden’s theory of the nature of literary language, and the stylistic prescriptions of Thomas Sprat. In private, and often in obscurity, countless others distilled the essence of their lives’ experiences as teachers or readers. The books they wrote were sometimes ponderous, sometimes sophisticated, and often a little mad. Their names are mostly forgotten. Who now remembers Cave Beck, an Ipswich schoolmaster, whose The Universal Character (1657) attempted to use numerals to make language more systematic? (‘Honour thy father and mother’ became, in Beck’s scheme, ‘leb2314 p2477 and pf2477.’) Who, for that matter, knows much of Owen Price, author of The Vocal Organ (1665), which proposed a physiology of sound that has its modern counterpart in phonics, an effective yet controversial method of teaching people to read? Schemes of this kind were mocked by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels: in the grand academy at Lagado, projects to trim language were pursued, because ‘every word we speak is, in some degree, a diminution of our lung by corrosion, and, consequently, contributes to the shortening of our lives.’
The period’s anxieties were manifold, and shuddered right across Europe. In England, they would eventually bear rich fruit: the land of Newton, Milton, Hobbes and Locke would become the first great imperial power to be buttressed by industrial achievement and governed by a representative political assembly. But first there were convulsions, and everyone felt them. The subject is explored deftly by Owen Barfield in his classic History in English Words. It is in this period that a new language of doubt begins to emerge: words like dubiousness and sceptical, along with the more recondite dubitable and scepticity. There is, too, a special vocabulary of religious doubt – of scepticism, that is, about others’ religious values or inclinations. Thus popery and libertine, reprobate and monkish. Furthermore, a new language of self-scrutiny is apparent in a growing list of words such as self-confidence, self-esteem, self-knowledge and self-pity. John Locke stamps the word self-consciousness with what we now regard as its usual meaning in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).2
Locke’s influence on the century that followed his Essay was immense. His terminology was widely adopted. To Locke we owe the notion that the mind is a blank slate or a dark chamber. We also owe to him some of the enduring implications of words such as property and conception, and our uncomfortable addiction to that little word idea. Moreover, Locke’s emphasis on the need to use judgement to supplement our knowledge has influenced the English-speaker’s striking habit of very frequently using, almost as though in parentheses, ‘epistemic’ verbal phrases – ‘I think’, ‘I gather’, ‘I guess’, ‘I take it’, ‘I suppose’.3
The background of Locke’s philosophy was the Civil War. Out of its pressures came insight into not just rights, liberties and government, but also the boundaries of knowledge. As the historian Jonathan Scott has pointed out, ‘England’s was the first experience of Europe’s religious troubles to be accompanied by a highly developed culture of the vernacular printed word,’ yet the nation’s culture remained chiefly oral.4 Performance was central to the politics of the period, but there was a persistent sense that the words did not exist to do justice to either the extremes of political violence or the extremes of religious experience. As political and religious institutions tottered, the imagination and intellect had startling opportunities for inventive expression. More about this in a moment: for now, my focus is the turmoil out of which the philosophical and investigative genius of the later seventeenth century – most clearly embodied in the works of Locke and Isaac Newton – at first tentatively and then impressively emerged.
Religious tensions were high. Under Charles I, who succeeded his father, James, in 1625, religion was an instrument of government. But there were plenty whose faith did not fortify the policies of the king and his ministers. His marriage that year to Henriette-Marie of France precipitated a wave of conversion back to Catholicism. His vision of a ‘high’ Anglican Church with a new emphasis on ceremony was inspired and then effected by William Laud, whom we have already met as a promoter of Arabic scholarship. Laud’s reforms antagonized Puritans. For a decade Charles tried to rule the country without a parliament, and when a new one was established in 1640 it passed laws that undermined his authority. Conflict was inevitable. The civil wars that began in 1642 culminated in victory for the bourgeoisie: Charles was beheaded, and Oliver Cromwell, the so-called Lord Protector, wielded power pragmatically and with scant respect for democracy. Cromwell stamped out once and for all the Crown’s interference in the economy; he established that foreign policy was a matter for Parliament; he curbed the rule of the Church and the religious intolerance that arose from it; and, less appealingly but no less importantly, he raised to an art form the exploitation of English colonial outposts. His achievements sharpened the consciousness of being a nation, enhancing ordinary people’s awareness of their common national identity. Testimony to his influence is the assortment of words bearing his name, usually found in historical and political writings, all of them reeking of fear and awe: Cromwellian, Cromwellite, Cromwellism, Cromwellized and even, later, Cromwelliad. In his lifetime Cromwell was presented as prince, pilot and physician: after the Restoration his corpse was dug up and burnt, save for his head, which was put on public display. The busy conversion of his name into other nouns as well as adjectives and verbs is symptomatic of the period’s edgy verbal inventiveness.
Even while Thomas Hobbes can write of the spontaneous quality of ‘voluntary actions’, coining a new word for man’s natural impulses, we can see a wider cautiousness and nervousness of disposition, a habit of self-flagellating introspection. Confessional writing abounds, and so does the kind of literature that, even at its most combative, seems to apologize for its own existence. Hobbes identifies as one of the laws of nature that a man ‘strive to accommodate himselfe to the rest’, and he calls such behaviour compleasance (which we now spell complaisance and associate with a kind of obliging conduct that is rather more uncomfortable than its debonair name suggests). To be complaisant is to be yielding, to comply in the interest
s of self-preservation or saving face. Charles Barber makes the point that in the seventeenth century the meaning of honour alters: ‘there is an increase … in usages which are defensive in attitude (“good name”) at the expense of ones which are expansive in attitude (“glory”): negative reputation becomes more important than positive reputation. ’5 Rationality, all the while, was fighting down occult and obscure beliefs; dissenters, partisans and ‘enthusiasts’ were in thick supply, and the vocabulary of right-mindedness tended to extremes of either floridly repudiative classicism or prosaic modesty.
Matters of fact began at this time to be distinguished from matters of opinion. Hence the rise of the expression a matter of fact, sometimes found in the plural. The distinction suggests not certainty, but rather a culture where dispute is the norm and areas immune from it – or apparently immune from it – need to be marked off, as if with a groundsman’s white lines. Contemporary styles of argument differ greatly, but all feel combative. On the one hand we find the crude and even hysterical rhetoric of the radical preacher Abiezer Coppe; on the other the ruthless clear-sightedness of Thomas Hobbes, whose arguments proceed with geometric precision. Especially active in this domain were the reformist Puritans, who objected to the ornate language of the elite. Pompous phrases and abstruse vocabulary alienated ordinary people. Puritans were distinguished, it was believed, by a language replete with terms like discipline and abomination. Another word they favoured was godly. Godliness was made manifest through zeal. They used the word saint to signify the elect, and had their own scathing language to express their disgust for the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist and the whole idolatrous business of the Mass – the priest with his rosary was a beadmaster, for instance, and the bread that denoted the body of Christ was nothing more to them than a breaden god.
The Secret Life of Words Page 21