A few years ago, I kept bugging my Japanese friends about the origin of the phrase mīhā (ミーハー) — which is used to identify young people who are overly starstruck towards celebrities, weak-kneed to anything popular, and too sensitive to trends. “Superficial” would be the simplest translation. One theory was that it was a Japanese pronunciation of “me her” but this basically makes no sense.

Who needs friends when you’ve got Wikipedia?

“Mīhā” is a pejorative term targeted towards superficial women who are engrossed in low-culture like celebrities, sports, astrology, ghosts, and blood-types and who show no real interest in education or culture.

The term began to be used around the same time that Ohya Souichi [famed post-war journalist and critic] came up with his idea of 「一億総白痴化」 [literally, The Dumbing Down of One Hundred Million — a comment on the mass media's vulgarization of culture] in the mid-’50s as television began to diffuse into society.

The term mīhā was born at the beginning of the Showa Era as an abbreviation of “Mii-chan” and “Haa-chan” (these words are said to come from the names “Miyo-chan/Hana-chan” which were common women’s names at the time.) These women were also called the “Mīhā Tribe” [ミーハー族]. At the present, the word can also be used for men…The term is often used incorrectly these days to mean “Those who only become interested in something after it has become the talk of the public sphere (and picked up in the media, etc.)”

Over time, the word has retained its pejorative edge, but seems to have adapted to changes in the nature of elitism. At first, mīhā was meant to disparage women who found too much interest in low culture and the mass media. The sex specificity is important here: the educated male elites no doubt saw the roots of this problem with mass culture in some deficient aspect of femininity. Or they rejected interest in the common culture as an improper fit with traditional female roles.

Over the last several decades, however, the term has become sex-neutral. The problem implied in mīhā has shifted from a general problematic interest in low culture to the callousness of being interested in a specific pop culture item solely because it is popular. In other words, consumer culture itself is no longer a problem: The offense stems from a lack of personal judgment about the value of the item in question. There is now an “elite” way to consume that is one-step ahead of the public and a “mass” unsophisticated way to consume that puts the social participation aspects of consumerism/fandom ahead of the personal definition aspects of consumerism/fandom.

(Update: This site has “me her” as a possible derivation, but it’s less convincing than Mii-chan/Haa-chan)

Shukan Gendai has an article this week called “(Super-popular 21st Century Agnes Lum Has a Surprising Secret) Leah Dizon is Actually Fluent in Japanese!?” (人気沸騰“２１世紀のアグネス・ラム”に意外なヒミツ■リア・ディゾン　実は日本語ペラペラ!?)

At first I wanted to write about this as an example of the weekly magazines being a totally unreliable vehicle for news (Leah Dizon is fluent? Yeah, right), but in classic shukanshi style, the headline kind of oversells the actual meat of the article. The writer never claims that Dizon is “fluent” fluent, but does point out a disparity between her on-air Japanese — described as “カタコト” (stilted, talking like a baby) — and her off-the-job Japanese, which apparently is not so bad. In other words, Leah Dizon is intentionally being pushed (by her management?) to bring down her Japanese level in public.

The writer implies there is a need to appear adorable for her legion of otaku fans, and she appeases them through saying things like “オナカスイタ！” (Very, very liberally, “Oh, me so hungry.”)

Ever since foreigners starting showing up in Japan, many Japanese have been fascinated with the idea of non-Japanese Japanese speakers. Apparently, Tokugawa Ieyasu got a big kick out of making British wash-up William Adams repeat Japanese phrases. Even when the barbarians put in an effort, the locals did not always respond positively. John Nathan claims in his book Japan Unbound that in the early ’60s he would speak to people on the street in relatively fluent Japanese and they would ask for a translator.

These days, society seems more accepting and comfortable with foreign speakers of the language, and Leah Dizon’s allegedly-fake katakoto seems less to be about the threat of fluent foreigners and more about constructing an infantile linguistic image to go along with her cleaned-up visual package. This is very similar to Bobby Ologun whose ridiculously-complicated, fake “dumb mistakes” help paint him as the big, jolly African oaf. This latest charge about Dizon fits with this strangely-progressive 21st century conspiracy theme: The media forces foreigners (who are not white men) to speak mangled Japanese for the delight of the public. The underlying criticism seems to suggest that a certain sector wants a naturalization in feelings about foreign speakers of the language. Or maybe it’s just a larger extension of the paranoia about TV constantly lying to us (i.e., yarase).

I think that if Leah Dizon gradually starts getting better at the language before our very eyes, that probably wouldn’t necessarily damage her persona, but for whatever reason, her handlers are erring on the side of feigned incompetency. Is this some strange form of orientalization — where the (otaku) Japanese male desires the subservient American female who is sexily mute due to language inadequacy? Or do the handlers still think her audience fears the fluent alien? You would think that she would be better at connecting with fans through able use of the local language, but for whatever reason, they are making her play out a different role using a more limited script.

One of the enduring mysteries of Japan is the origin of the language. Besides the clearly-related Ryukyuan languages (not dialects) spoken in Okinawa and the other islands stretching from south of Kyushu to Taiwan, no other contemporary language resembles Japanese enough to easily claim a genetic relationship or common origin. Some familiar with both Japanese and Korean may balk at this, since the contemporary forms of the two languages share much vocabulary and a similar grammar, but the lexical resemblance is due to an enormous number of Chinese loan words, and the grammatically similarities are typological attributes, which alone cannot be used to prove a common origin. Also oddly, when you compare Old Japanese and Old Korean, there is almost nothing in common.

Many have been eager to call the quest off and cast Japanese as a language isolate — a classification that syncs well with larger ideas of the “uniqueness” of the people and nation.¹ The Japanese, however, must have come from somewhere on the Asian continent, seeing that scientists and archaeologists now agree that the “Japanese” culture is more related to the Yayoi race who came to Japan in 400 B.C. rather than the Jomon culture existent in Japan from 10,000 B.C. (The aboriginal Ainu, on the other hand, are probably related to the Jomon, at least its northern expansion.)

Over the last century, linguists have set out expeditions in many areas of our rich global linguistic diversity to find Japan a a proper brother or cousin. The most accepted theory of recent years points towards a connection to Korean and the inclusion of both languages in the Altaic family of languages: Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic (Manchu). For a while, Japanese theoreticians preferred the “Southern Theory” which posits Japan as a Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian) language (due to some simple sound similarity and a love of word-duplication), but this has fallen out of favor due to an almost complete lack of hard evidence. Some believe in a “mixed language” between the Altaic and Austronesian strains, but very few types of these languages are accounted for on the globe. And out on the extremes of possibility, the venerable Ono Susumu of Tokyo University started seriously pursuing a connection between Japanese and the Dravidian languages in India. Right.

Although a general lack of hard evidence makes all speculation equally suspect, the current theories have enormous problems or place the genetic relationship between the two languages so far back as not to really matter much. For example, scholar Hattori Shiro puts the Japanese-Korean split back at least 4,700 years. The Altaic theory sounds plausible in principle, but there is very little connecting Japanese to Korean, let alone Korean to Tungusic or Turkish to Mongolian. Besides the much-vaunted “vowel harmony” and “agglutinative grammar,” there are only a few known lexical similarities, and these may be from borrowing rather than genetic divergence.

Indiana University-Bloomington linguistics professor Christopher Beckwith‘s relatively new tome Koguryo: The Language of Japan’s Continental Relatives offers a fascinating and plausible solution to the enduring origin puzzle. From around 100 B.C. to the 7th century A.D., modern day Korea was divided into three kingdoms: Koguryo, Shilla, and Paekche. The three states were eventually unified under Shilla in 668, and the modern Korean language originates from the language spoken in Shilla. Koguryo and Paekche, however, had different languages which are posited to be related to each other. Scholars thus make two groupings of Korean peninsula languages: the Han² languages — spoken in Shilla and among the subjugated class in Paekche — and the Puyo-Koguryoic languages of Koguryo, Puyo (another Northern Korea state), and Paekche’s ruling class. The latter family is now totally extinct and probably made a minor impact on modern Korean. The lack of written records and remaining vocabulary items from these languages make it difficult to learn much about the nature of the “Koguryoic” family.

There are, however, two sets of Chinese records that list words from the Koguryo language. Beckwith identifies thirteen words (“Archaic Koguryo”) contained in a 3rd century Chinese record about the language of the Koguryo people. The second record is the Samsuk Sagi, the “Three Kingdoms of Korea” work that includes a record of a king in 755 changing all the place names in Korea into Chinese. The older toponyms in the Koguryoic areas do not resemble modern day Korean, and despite some controversy of whether the names were given by the Koguryo people or by other peoples populating the area before their arrival, Beckwith shows that a match between these and the Archaic Koguryo lexical items strongly suggest that the toponyms are from the “Old Koguryo” language. For many of these Koguryo place names, the record shows a Chinese transcription of the word’s pronunciation as well as a meaning for the word. Beckwith identifies around 130 distinct Old Koguryo words from this document.

Scholars have known about these Koguryo lexical items for almost a century now, but the main problem has been reconstructing the proper Chinese pronunciation of the era in which the words were transcribed. There have been many improvements upon this knowledge in recent years, and Beckwith employs this new understanding of old Chinese to reconstructing many of these Koguryo words with more accuracy than before.

For examples of the close relation of some Koguryo words and Old Japanese, download this 2-page PDF. Almost all scholars agree that the language contained in this “Koguryo” set looks much like Old Japanese. Roy Andrew Miller — who is famously convinced that Japanese is an Altaic language — believed these words to be Proto-Japanese from Wa people who were living on the peninsula. There, however, is no evidence of a Proto-Japanese/Wa conquest in Korea that could have caused a change in place names. An important side note, which Beckwith emphasizes in the paper, Korean words look absolutely nothing like the Koguryo vocabulary, and the weakness of this connection puts the Japanese-Korean relation theory in doubt.

If the Japanese (Wa/Yayoi) and Koguryo/Paekche peoples are truly related, how in the world did they get all the way through the Korean peninsula and down to Japan which there is no record of happening? They didn’t. Based on the work of Gisaburo N. Kiyose, Beckwith proposes a somewhat radical immigration narrative for the Wa. He puts the original Koguryoic homeland in Liao-Hsi (present day Liaoning) on the coast of Northeast China. Once the Chinese put pressure on this racial group, the more nomadic and warlike Puyo-Koguryo peoples (who had already split from the Wa at this point) made their way up to Korea and Manchuria. The Wa — who were mostly fishermen and farmers — left by boat to Korea, Kyushu, and the Ryukyuan islands at the same time. Archaeologists have artifacts that show a connection between the Yayoi culture and the culture of that period on the peninsula, and Beckwith suggests that this does not necessarily mean a voyage from settlements in Korea to Japan but a simultaneous settlement of both areas. He also re-emphasizes that no traces of this farming culture can be found in Manchuria or North Korea — which would be critical to proving Japanese came from Northeast Asia as the Altaic family theory would suggest.

Is there evidence for the proto-Japanese presence in China? First of all, Beckwith identifies a set of “native” Japanese words clearly derived from Chinese — with ume (plum) and uma (horse) being the most obvious. (Plums and horses are not even native to the Japanese archipelago.) Furthermore, the Mongolic Hsien-pei captured “people from Wa” in 178 A.D. near the present day Lao-ha River in China, meaning the Proto-Japanese still lived in China during the Yayoi period. In the original accepted theory that continental Koreans came to Japan to spread Yayoi culture, they came by boat. Why could the Wa have not originally come to Korea, Japan, and the Ryukyu islands by boat from somewhere other than the Korean peninsula?

Surely trained linguists and archaeologists will be able to find holes in Beckwith’s theory that I do not see (here’s one criticism), but the closer resemblance of Japanese to Koguryo than Shilla-based Korean puts a serious dent into the basic idea that the Japanese and Korean peoples are “related.” For example, in Jared Diamond’s essay on the roots of the Japanese people, he comes to the conclusion that:

As reluctant as Japanese and Koreans are to admit it, they are like twin brothers who shared their formative years. The political future of East Asia depends in large part on their success in rediscovering those ancient bonds between them.

Beckwith’s theory pretty much puts the Japanese and Koreans as distant relatives — cousins at best and definitely not the “brothers” as Diamond would like them to be. Even if Koguryo and Paekche peoples were subsumed into the “Korean people,” they did not add much to the linguistic tradition. Beckwith talks about the fact that Koguryo may have been going extinct even before the fall of the kingdom since so many of the inhabitants spoke a Han Korean language. Once T’ang China took over Koguryo, they exiled many of the Koguryo people to the middle of China to die off there.³ At best, the modern day Koreans have a minority strain of Koguryo in their DNA and language. The means that the Japanese people’s cousins — Koguryo and Paekche peoples — happened to be the uncle in a big Korean family mostly made up of Han peoples. The Wa, therefore, have no blood relations to the Shilla side of the family and were never themselves “continental Koreans.” Before and after the fall of Paekche in 660, many Paekche elites fled to Japan. In fact, one-third of the nobility in Nara (in the Nara period) was “foreign” — which I assume to mean Paekche Koreans. Although this complicates the “racial purity” of the Japanese today, this still does not make the Japanese people directly related to the majority ancestor of Koreans.

Beckwith’s theory may not be the definitive account, but it gets closer to placing the Japanese people’s origin in the correct zone of the East Asian continent and helps break the age-old myth of the “isolated language.” The theory, however, creates greater historical questions regarding the link between the Japanese and Korean people. The Japanese are only “Korean” in a broad sense (related to peoples of the Korean kingdoms), but almost totally unrelated the primary ancestors of the modern Korean people. Since the “brother” argument may now fail in our attempts to pressure the two countries to take up better relations, I guess we should just ask them to get along for the 1,000 other legitimate reasons.

Continued »

Japan is a visually-oriented culture.

That makes sense. Why so?

Because of kanji of course.

I don’t follow.

Let me quote from Donald Richie’s book The Image Factory: Fads and Fashions in Japan (2003):

Some reasons have been suggested for Japan’s extreme affinity with this image-making process. One of these maintains that the nature of the written language predicates this disposition, that the kanji, the Chinese ideographs, are in themselves images and are so used by the Japanese, Vietnamese, and South Koreans (kanji are no longer used in North Korea) as well as the Chinese.

Each kanji character symbolizes a single idea. They are logographs in that one character sometime represents both the meaning and the sound of an entire word. In other languages (those constructed in the manner of an alphabet) a repertoire of images is neither required nor possible. Here a certain combination creates a formula — d—o—g = dog, a ‘translated’ image of the animal name. The same thing occurs in kanji, except that there is no middle step; 犬　at once becomes quan (chu’uan) in Chinese, ken or inu in Japanese. No ‘translation’ is necessary.

Or, as Frederick Schodt has put it, in discussing manga cartoons, ‘the Japanese are predisposed to more visual forms of communication owning to their writing system. Calligraphy… might be said to fuse drawing and writing. The individual ideograph… is a simple picture that represents a tangible object or an abstraction concept, emotion, or action.. in fact, a form of cartooning.

That ends that.

Let me get my head around this: the character for a dog 犬 looks like a dog, so it’s like looking at a cartoon for a dog?

Apparently, I can’t read Japanese myself.

What about 経常利益？ Does that look like “ordinary profit” to you?

I don’t know. It could, I guess. I don’t know much about the financial world.

When I write the word “dog” do you slowly spell it out d-o-g or do you instantly see the shapes contained in the word “dog” to mean dog and call up the concept in your head immediately?

Yes, but you are missing the point. When the Japanese have to actually write out these kanji, they become cartoonists in a sense. Or at least more sensitive to the visual image.

So in having to write out 慶應 rather than “Keio,” I gain visual sensitivity.

Yes.

What if I write out the word in script けいおうinstead, does the lack of ideographs reduce my eye for visuals?

I am not sure what you are getting at. Remember: I am just italicized construct in an argument, rather than an actual person.

Forget that for a second. Japanese has both “cartoon” kanji and script—like kana. But China has only kanji. The Chinese are all kanji all the time. By this deductive logic, should China not be the world’s leading visual culture and the world’s most important market for comic books?

I think Chinese people like Japanese comics.

So do Americans, even though they were raised on an alphabet — which clearly lacks the amazingly visual properties of an ideograph system. What I am getting at is, how can we actually test the following deductive logic

A: Japanese uses ideographs
B: Ideographs are more visually-oriented than alphabets
———————————————————————————— Therefore,
C: The Japanese are visually-oriented

in an inductive manner. Is there a lot of linguistic experimentation backing up this idea?

I will Google that and get back to you.

If someone had asked you 50 years ago if the Japanese would fall in love with hamburgers, you would have probably said no, right?

Their culture is based on fish and vegetables.

Exactly. But hamburgers are now huge in Japan.

It’s a shame. But so what?

There was obviously some kind of historical development that happened in between Japanese “not eating beef and bread” to Japanese happily devouring them together with cheese on top.

And if that’s the case…

Is the brief pause in your discussion there supposed to indicate at a new paragraph?

Let me finish.

If that’s the case with hamburgers, how can we assume that the line between “kanji creating visual sensitivity” and manga/Japanese design culture was a straight path? Should we not look more closely at the specific development of the art form in a broader, reality-based method? Manga is a consumer item, a form of media. How did it become so popular? How was it distributed? How was it purchased? What were its alternatives and substitutes?

Yeah, but I’d rather just build theories around semi-deductive analysis of general Japanese traits I assume to be permanent and unbending.

God, it’s like I am putting the exact words I want to hear you say directly into your mouth.

Although you never hear much about it, Murakami Haruki clearly comes from money. Grandson of a Buddhist priest on one side and an Osaka merchant on the other, he was raised in the upscale Ashiya-shi region of Kobe, took seven years to finish private university Waseda, and while still a student, married and started his own jazz bar in West Tokyo’s Kokubunji. Sometime in the ’70s, Murakami decided he wanted to be a writer, and eventually debuted with the short novel Hear the Wind Sing from Kodansha — Japan’s most prestigious publishing house. His 1987 Norwegian Wood made him into a superstar — accompanied by (possibly) apocryphal stories of college girls coordinating their daily outfits to match the red and green covers of the novel’s first and second volumes.

Although now accepted as “literature,” it’s important realize that Murakami was first and foremost a pop writer. Old-style intellectuals like Oe Kenzaburo never cared for him. Even Jay Rubin — English translator of Murakami’s most important works — took a long time to consider him a serious writer: “In 1989, I read Haruki Murakami. I had only been vaguely aware of his existence — as some kind of pop writer, mounds of whose stuff were to be seen filling up the front counters in the bookstores, but I hadn’t deigned to read what was sure to be silly fluff about teenagers getting drunk and hopping into bed.” After a while, scholars on both sides of the Pacific finally broke through the Beatles references and unaffected language to find a deep philosophical core to Murakami’s work, but for all intents and purposes, the writer started off as a greater influence to Japanese pop culture than to the “high-art” world of Japanese literature.

We should find no coincidence, however, in Murakami’s high-standing social background and his success in “low” pop culture. He fits a very specific archetype in the history of Japanese popular culture: the young wealthy son freely and effortlessly producing debut works that become a leading trend within the youth culture.

Another example of this archetype would be Tanaka Yasuo — writer and reformist ex-governor of Nagano Prefecture. While a student at prestigious Hitotsubashi University, he casually wrote out his first novel Nantonaku, Kurisutaru, which not only enjoyed explosive sales in its 1980 first pressing, but was rewarded with the prestigious Bungei Award. Tanaka’s first novel, however, does not approach anywhere near literature. The book — about a wealthy female Aoyama Gakuin university student and part-time model — sold as a trendy pop piece, but moreover, as a consumer guide. Each time a store, brand, product, food, club, piece of clothing, university, or other proper noun is used in the narrative, Tanaka (as the narrator, not as the protagonist) supplies a footnote on the left-hand page to introduce/explain the item to the uninitiated. Here was a well-to-do, stylish young man giving away all the secrets to the Tokyo culture game in footnote form, and readers snapped it up as a practical trend guide.

Then in the early ’90s, Oyamada Keigo and Ozawa Kenji from Flipper’s Guitar pulled the same game: Wealthy young men from private high schools instantly winning record contracts and fame right out of high school. Just as Nantonaku, Kurisutaru had a decade before, the two KOs from FG supplied young fans with references to the latest trend — this time in musical form, rather than in fiction.

In all three of these cases, privilege does more than provide idle time and an escape from the compromising chains of fiduciary worries. Wealth and education in post-war Japan meant access to information — especially news beaming out from the West. Both Murakami and Ozawa Kenji mastered English at a young age, which no doubt allowed them to master their command of Western music. Moreover, these four all came from “old money” and not flashy wealth, and in a Bourdieuian sense of cultural capital, they used cultural reference as a way to distinguish themselves from the madding crowds. Whether wealth allowed greater access to information or not, wealth situated these young men in a certain social ranking that motivated them to protect their position through artistic achievement in fashionably new modes of craft. In the cases of Murakami and Flipper’s Guitar, they wrote in intentionally Western styles to differentiate themselves from the baser “Japanese” standards, and the world interpreted this as being more trendy than their common competitors.

In turn, the work of these men was consumed first as fashion and second as art. Their existence lead to “booms” (a consumer phenomenon) rather than “movements” (an artistic one). This basically freaked them out — at least in the long-term. Murakami did not like being a “trendy writer” so much and fled to Europe, then to American universities. Ozawa disappeared to NY after cashing-out as a Jpop idol. Cornelius went meta, then “guitar artiste.” Tanaka went into anti-establishment politics.

What is frustrating to many Japanese about their stories is the total ease and grace in which they made a huge splash upon the common culture. No struggling, half-compromises of hack jobs, years of toil at candle-lit typewriters.

Sure, there are artists who fit this archetype in other countries and cultures, but US/UK pop culture has a strong obsession with the underdog/underclass achiever — the Working Class Hero. Elvis, the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson. What may be the difference between Japan and the U.S. is the sources of cultural creation: In the U.S., low status African—Americans were responsible for the jazz, rock, and hip-hop that formed the foundations of the pop culture cycle in the 20th century. This was clearly a bottom-up process — even if the media at the top eventually disseminated/cleaned-up the message. Authenticity originated in the street or in the swamp or in the Delta.

In post-war Japan, meanwhile, style and fashion originated so strongly from overseas (mainly American) sources that authenticity — in the case of orthopraxic Japan, something more like high-speed adoption or knowledge of new information rather than an abstract faith-based “being real” — lay squarely with those at the top, since they had either the best education with which to find/translate the American pop culture message or access to the message/materials from trips abroad/connections.

As a defeated culture with a sense of inferiority to the American cultural overlords, pop culture in Japan could not be “bottom-up,” and therefore, the wealthy in Japan became the most obvious messengers/idols in a shadowy way. Once Japan regained its cultural confidence, “bottom-up” became more widespread. The Murakami-Tanaka-Oyamada-Ozawa Rich Kid model may no longer be as important today, when someone like DJ Ozma or Koda Kumi appears more authentically bound to their respective subcultures.

To tie this into bigger streams we often deal with here, the capitalization of the whole gyaru/yankii working-class stream — which in the past was seen as deviation from the mediated “cool” consumer stream — has totally outmoded our former archetypes. Cool is no longer monolithic nor solely imported — which no longer gives the wealthy an automatic advantage. Sticking to a deep sense of orthopraxy, culture in Japan generally remains an empty vessel to plaster “fashion” upon — rather than individual works of artistic meaning — but it is used now for a class-based subcultural affiliation rather than for placement in a top-down trend hierarchy. The bottom is proud to be at the bottom — or at least, having fun with the para para.

From an American perspective, the end of elitism should sound like a great development, but practically speaking, most of the bottom-up culture is less than interesting. We may dislike elitism in principle, but the elitist stream in Japan is responsible for most of the country’s greatest cultural hits (I want to say this is a Western-bias, but Murakami is huge in Japan). Old money was silent in the past, but now it’s dead. The growing nouveau riche is more interested in amassing stuff than showing off the giant logos than flashing the subtle use of expensive silk in their sleeves. (As I write this, the exclusive import sports car shop across the street is loading in a red Ferrari that plays the theme to the Godfather as its horn. No joke.)

My lament about the breakdown of Japanese culture may be a specific eulogy to the elitist causes for cultural creation, but face the facts: The names that light up the concise histories of Japanese pop culture not only enjoyed the beautiful bliss of old money, but prospered specifically because of it. Sure, Nosaka Akiyuki may have had a crazy life of pain and suffering (see Grave of the Fireflies), but he was still the son of the sub-governor of Niigata.

¹ Quote from this really interesting correspondence series.