2011: Kizuna

The association of the word kizuna with the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami feels so natural now that it comes as no surprise to see 絆, the kanji spelling of kizuna, acclaimed as 2011′s kanji of the year. The negative expression of the same year-view, 災 wazawai, had less than half as many votes, so where did the association for kizuna come from, and how did it become so meaningful to so many?

One of the earliest high-profile promoters of the “kizuna” concept was Watanabe Ken and Koyama Kundō’s kizuna311 site, launched less than a week after the earthquake with an English statement introducing the word to the world:

In the past few days, the media has brought attention to the world of earthquake and devastation, much foreign press has warmly applauded our orderliness and solidarity under the catastrophic circumstances, and has encouraged us to recuperate from the calamity.

And from reading these reports, we have come to realize that we have great assets. We Japanese can take pride in our kizuna, the solidarity that binds us.

To overcome this painful catastrophe, we must find a way to unite and find our kizuna among people.

By April 11 Prime Minister Kan used “kizuna – the bonds of friendship” as the title for his letter of thanks to the international community (note that the English phrasing appears in the Japanese version of the letter) without referring to or explaining the concept in the text at all.

Simple, powerful, and easy to pronounce worldwide, the word “kizuna” became a sort of anti-brand: an explicitly inclusive and community-oriented identity open to anyone. Everything from charity drives for orphans to Nadeshiko Japan‘s World Cup victory was celebrated as an expression of “kizuna.” The word itself will no doubt fade back into obscurity in time, but, in retrospect, it may turn out to have been the banner under which another facet of Japanese identity was polished up and turned to face the world.

Matt TREYVAUD
December 21, 2011

Matt Treyvaud is a writer and translator living near Kamakura. He is Néojaponisme's Literature/Language editor and the proprietor of No-sword.

The Accidental Confederate

Secession T-shirt

A few weeks ago, I was taking some visiting friends around Asakusa. This was unfortunately the day of the Sumidagawa fireworks, and we were trying to get out of the area in the late afternoon, before the crowds got too insane. Being 5pm, however, the yukata-clad girls and their plain-clothes boyfriends were already filing in, and we had to fight the crowds to get on and off of trains.

As we were transferring against the rush of oncoming people, I spotted a relatively average Japanese twenty-something in a white T-shirt with a huge red-and-blue Confederate flag and the catchy slogan:

If at first you don’t secede….

Try, try again.

I literally stopped in my tracks and turned to my companions to tell them to check the shirt out, but all that came out of my mouth was something less intelligible than “T-t-t-t-t-shirt.” Then a North American, a few steps behind the Japanese guy saw my look of bewilderment and said to me with a knowing smile, “You like his T-shirt, right?” I silently nodded. (Sadly, no pictures. The image above is our artist’s abstract recreation.)

For a long time, my favorite incongruous Japanese youth fashion moment was a hipster Harajuku girl wearing a “Rush is Right” hat. This guy, however, may take the cake. With the Rush hat, there was really no way the girl — even if her English was decent — could have had any idea that Rush referred to right-wing American talk radio host Rush Limbaugh. She probably was just really into 2112. Actually, as we will see, I doubt she even considered the text at all.

Now, as someone originally from the American South, I find modern day secession fetishism to be odious — at worst, thinly-masked bigotry, and at best, a desperate identity politics born from a certain population segment’s growing isolation from the 21st century economy. It takes a real mean asshole to have thoughts like, “The South should leave the United States!” and an even meaner asshole to wear a T-shirt with that message in public.

The T-shirts, of course, were produced in the United States for people who hold this ideological belief and want to exclaim it to the rest of the world (or more accurately, to like-minded members of their local community). This is what T-shirts do: they convey messages. Almost without exception, American T-shirt culture is about statements: favorite bands, conspicuous consumption logos, jokes, affiliations, artistic expression, and political statements. Nonsense or non-obvious English on a T-shirt would either be a joke in itself or meant to suggest a mood. But either way, the person viewing the T-shirt would certainly try to decode meaning from ambiguous statements.

In previous years, this author and many of the readers had engaged in the debate about Japanese punk kids brandishing Nazi swastikas. (I have seen less of this in recent years, mostly because there are less kids into “classic” punk and most other imported Western subcultures) In the case of this makeshift Harajuku SS, the issue was that they were confusing the swastika for a punk symbol, almost exclusively due to Sid Vicious. The principle here is that within Japanese fashion, whether swastikas, a gorilla head from The Planet of the Apes, or Gucci pattern, logos are an important shorthand, carrying strong meanings from one person to another. For a small minority of Japanese kids, the sign of Hitler’s genocidal regime unfortunately got filed away under modern day re-enactments of ’70s rebelliousness.

But coming back to our guy in the Confederate battle flag, he likely had no intention at all to convey the symbolism of the flag. His embrace of the Rebel flag was pure accident or abstracted aesthetic choice — an old bulk-imported T-shirt chosen out of thousands at some anonymous vintage store across Japan. Some worldly buyer likely scoured every Salvation Army in backwater Tennessee towns circa 1997, and a decade later, a kid purchased one shirt from that original haul for ¥1000. And now the guy’s wearing it out to Asakusa because it was the only thing clean in his closet. Thank you, Japanese obsession with American vintage clothing.

What is interesting to me about this case, however, is how easy it would have been for the wearer to uncover the shirt’s meaning. The entire Japanese population is familiar with the roman script. We are not talking about trying to figure out ’90s pro-Serbian T-shirts in Cyrillic or an “Eradicate Tibetan Feudalism” written in Chinese. Also, had this been 1984, trying to decode the flag and the accompanying English joke would have required long trips to the National Diet Library and a few consultations with a local professor of American history. But now we have this thing called the Internet, and our Jefferson Davis could have easily googled the phrase and in about 15 minutes come up with a pretty good idea of what the shirt was talking about. There’s even a very detailed Japanese Wikipedia page on the Confederate flags, including details on the modern day controversy still surrounding it.

But I suspect that this guy did not do the research, nor would he even think to do the research. Between this case and hundreds of others compounded into my understanding of Japanese fashion, the very idea that the English on a T-shirt could mean something may be an Anglophone concept we project onto our readings of other countries. Japanese shirt designers often use nonsensical English phrases — yes, the ones that fuel the Engrish industry — and consumers make the unconscious assumption that they do not have to actually consider the content of their T-shirt messaging before deciding to purchase. Again, logos and symbols mean a lot, but T-shirt messaging is understood to be relatively content-free. A Dinosaur Jr. T-shirt is just a fashion accessory, not an indication of liking Dinosaur Jr. — a guitar-oriented rock band with alienating vocals. So if the basic idea of T-shirt text is opposite of the American one — T-shirts convey no messages other than brand logos and the most basic graphical, aesthetic elements — then no one is likely to consider the idea that strange English expressions need decoding.

We should likely refrain from normative judgments, but this general disposition towards T-shirt text does not bode well for English in Japan being something other than a diagnostic code meant for educational testing — like, maybe, a language used as communication. I can’t believe that an engaged student of French would not make a cursory attempt to understand any French language message on his/her on shirt. We English speakers can enjoy the irony of a Japanese kid unintentionally supporting white supremacy, but we are in fact laughing at a slightly depressing provincialism. That is to say, secessionist shirts in Japan may be a “random” quirk of globalized markets but they are not completely accidental. The whole episode requires a pretty significant linguistic obliviousness on the part of the wearer. Brian Austin Green’s terrible “midori” (みどり) tattoo on his chest is nothing to celebrate, but at least the 90210 star comes down on the side that foreign languages are meant to carry meanings. I never understood how radical that idea was.

W. David MARX
August 16, 2010

W. David Marx (Marxy) — Tokyo-based writer and musician — is the founder and chief editor of Néojaponisme.

Enryo

Enryo

Enryo (遠慮) is one of the most quintessential Japanese concepts. Japanese dictionary Kōjien provides the definition “restraining speech/actions towards people” (「人に対して言語・行動を控え目にすること」). Enryo is central to the image of Japan as a passive society, where people work to avoid conflict through self-restraint. Enryo means not using your mobile phone on the train, not throwing out all of your trash in one big bag, and recently, not lighting up that cigarette wherever you want.

In everyday language, enryo is often used to avoid an unpleasant linguistic phenomenon — the dreaded negative form. Japanese verbs come in four basic varieties: present/future, past, present/future negative, and past negative. Here’s a quick example how this works with the verb taberu, “eat”:

Present/future taberu
Past tabeta
Present/future negative tabenai
Past negative tabenakatta

Those bolded endings on the negative verbs are the offenders: nai, nakatta, and their more polite distal cousins masen and masen deshita. Shiver when you hear them, for they mean no. Not only are they negative in meaning, they also tend to have negative connotations, especially when combined with directness and applied to a topic brought up by the other speaker.

But then, how do the Japanese talk about avoiding things? Are they constantly accepting invitations to boring events? (“Yes, I’ll go see a Noh play with you, darling.”) Eating things they don’t want to eat? (“Yes, raw horse sounds lovely.”) And drinking things they don’t want to drink? (“There is a venomous snake in that distilled liquor? Fantastic.”)

No, in fact, they have very little difficulty in refusing to do these things, and it’s all thanks to enryo. Through enryo, they are restraining themselves from doing something else (i.e. not doing it). Enryo shimasu is the ultimate refusal: it allows the speaker to admire the offer as a tempting one while regretfully declining it for the sake of some implicit greater good, all without any negativity whatsoever. For this reason, it also works great as sarcasm: “Will you sing ‘Country Roads’ for us at karaoke?” Enryo shimasu.

Similarly, go-enryo kudasai (“Please enryo”) is the polite way to keep people in line. Rather than telling them not to do something, which would involve mucking around with nai (e.g. Tabako wo suwanaide kudasai, “Please don’t smoke”), you can appeal to their higher nature and ask them to proactively refrain from it (e.g. Kitsuen wa goenryo kudasai, “Please refrain from smoking”).

This concept is not totally foreign to the English language. Rather than saying “I can’t,” people (often very annoying people in service positions) use “I am unable to,” and “please refrain from” is a useful alternative to the negative imperative. The ultimate example comes from Pirates of the Caribbean, where Captain Barbossa denies Elizabeth Swann’s request for parlay with “I am disinclined to acquiesce to your request.” Very much like enryo shimasu: “IT MEANS NO!”

Daniel MORALES
January 15, 2009

Daniel Morales lives in Tokyo and blogs at howtojaponese.com.

Moji Salvage 10

和英文字レタリング

The first in a series of visual excerpts from the out-of-print book 和英文字レタリング (Japanese and English Lettering) by Tsunetoshi Hurusawa (古沢恒敏), a collection of assorted lettering styles culled from history.

Originally published in 1978, the book is a great study of the types of lettering used by typical “fancy”/ファンシー businesses (many cafes, snacks, cake shops, and assorted post-WWII through pre-1990s service-oriented businesses). A number of the lettering styles within are the blueprints for these types of businesses’ lettering.

和英文字レタリング helps explain much of the Tokyo letterscape of recent history.

Ian LYNAM
January 13, 2009

Ian Lynam is a graphic designer living in Tokyo and the art director of Neojaponisme. His website is located at ianlynam.com. His new book, Parallel Strokes, on the intersection of graffiti and typography is available now.

2008: Baby names

Baby Names

Benesse has published the results of their annual baby-name survey. Yui and Yūto are the top names for girls and boys respectively, just as last year, but since there are so many ways to spell both names, they do not actually top the “name + kanji combination” chart. That honor goes to Hiroto (大翔) and Aoi (葵), the latter most likely thanks to actress Miyazaki Aoi — inescapable star of Atsu-hime.

2ch nerds are basically OK with the kanji for Hiroto 大翔, although they don’t like the pronunciation to for 翔. For the record, however, it comes from tobu, “fly, soar”, and it dates back to a poem about Mt Fuji in the Man’yōshū: 飛鳥母毛不上 → tobu tori mo/ tobi mo noborazu → “Even the soaring of birds in flight does not reach [its peak]“. Suck it, haters.

And now the news for Kingdom Hearts fans. Sora as a boy’s name has risen in popularity for the fifth year running, up to #5. Meanwhile, Riku peaked at #4 in 2006 and has been falling since, and no-one ever liked Kairi.

Oh… and Saaya has also enjoyed a huge jump in popularity, from #141 to #76. I know someone who’s going to love that.

Matt TREYVAUD
December 27, 2008

Matt Treyvaud is a writer and translator living near Kamakura. He is Néojaponisme's Literature/Language editor and the proprietor of No-sword.