The Infinite Silences of Japan

https://lithub.com/pico-iyer-on-the-infinite-silences-of-japan/

by acsillag • 7 years ago

47 34 7 years ago

dunstad• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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

daly• 7 years ago

......

9nGQluzmnq3M3• 7 years ago

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...

"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...

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...

antiterra2• 7 years ago

The breathless retelling struck me as unreliable as well, but I can concede that 思う has slightly different meanings based on context— just like any English word with a thesaurus entry or used in idiom.

思う/Omou is interesting because my brain shuffled it into the same spot as the Spanish creer (to believe) and both have a counterpart that is (roughly) more about thought process: kangaeru(JP)/pensar(ES)

The similarity meant 思う actually grounded me instead of sending me into linguistic mysticism like it apparently did to Iyer.

9nGQluzmnq3M3• 7 years ago

"Believe", in a faith without proof sense, is shinjiru 信じる in Japanese. As in English, this is a lot stronger than mere thinking.

Omou is used a lot in Japanese as a politeness marker of sorts: instead of stating flat out that the moon is green cheese (tsuki ha guriin chiizu desu), you soften the statement a bit saying that you think it's green cheese (tsuki ha guriin chiizu da to omoimasu). When translating to English, you'd often drop it entirely or at least find other ways to express it, because in English it's not natural to tack "I think" to everything you say.

xelxebar5• 7 years ago

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

君のことを思っている You're on my mind.

思うどおりにはいかなかった It didn't go how she had hoped.

面倒だと思ったことがないよ I've not really ever felt it to be a hassle.

Context matters.

Which makes him exceptionally unqualified to...

He's waxing poetically about his personal experience. Not sure who else would be more qualified to do that.

Excuse me a bit of a meta-comment. Why such a vicious response? A priori, the article stands on its own. It sounds to me like you're bringing in a lot of personal expectations and imposing them on someone that never asked. Bad day, perhaps? If you need a beer or a listening ear, feel free to PM me.

9nGQluzmnq3M3• 7 years ago

Not a bad day, just a pet peeve: I find the "Japanese is so exotic and mysterious and different" trope in general and Pico Iyer's writing about the topic in particular insufferable. I mean, if you're going to pontificate about Japanese literature on the world stage, is it really too much to ask that you read some of it?

Languages are complicated, translation between two languages is even more complicated. Does Japanese have "weird" features compared to English? Sure, adjectives having past and conditional tenses still does my head in. But claiming that omou has 29 radically different meanings is wrong, and using this to draw the conclusion that "Speech is dangerous in Japan" is just silly.

lgessler2• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

fenomas2• 7 years ago

Indeed. One wonders what the author would make of the reverse case, where someone counted up all the ways "think" can be translated into Japanese. One suspects he'd draw the exact same conclusion - how marvelously exotic that this language has so many subtly nuanced ways to express one boring old English word!

Camillo• 7 years ago

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

A nitpick, but you could tell them apart even if they weren't written differently (such as when speaking).

asutekku• 7 years ago

Context. Japan has a lot of homonyms and the people speaking it tend to not use the words pronounced the same in a sentence thus the meaning can be infered from the context.

musicale• 7 years ago

In English, think can mean lots of things, probably 27 at least.

I think about my exes a lot even though I don't think much of them. I think I'll go now. I'm thinking of a number. I'm thinking of changing careers. I'm thinking dinner at 8. I think a lot, I think. I think not. You think? Thinking of you. Think again. Etc..

Though my favorite productive English verb is still 'to get.'

agota• 7 years ago

It's pretty crazy to write an essay like that when you don't know the language.

I know I wouldn't be impressed if someone who doesn't speak Lithuanian wrote an essay like that on Lithuanian culture/language/literature.

Nimitz14• 7 years ago

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

jhanschoo4• 7 years ago

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... . 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-...

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.

jhanschoo4• 7 years ago

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 .

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 , 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 False friends are a perpetual source of embarassment, and is no way exceptionally fatal in Japan.

jhanschoo4• 7 years ago

In Japan, I never forget that a great conversationalist is one who listens.

This is true everywhere, and not exceptionally more true in Japan than anywhere else. Perhaps Japanese are raised in a way that they have more good listeners.

A couple that got married in Nagasaki soon after the bomb was dropped on the city, Susan Southard reports, would mention the transfiguring event once, and then never again.

I think this refers to a specific couple from this book? (https://www.amazon.com/Nagasaki-Life-After-Nuclear-War/dp/01...) It's a stretch to say that this is indicative of a general attitude toward silence.

“If you think, ‘I breathe,’ ” said Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen teacher, “the ‘I’ is extra.”

Zen is just about as reflective of Japan in general as the Amish are of the US.

Perhaps the most celebrated poem in Japan is Basho’s gasp of delight at seeing the island of Matsushima.

The author overstates its high-brow-ness. It's just fun to quote. There are a lot of haiku that are primarily funny.

====

I can go on, but it's more of the same. All these observations are isolated from various contexts and loosely tied together into a theme of Japanese silence. It's fun and doing something like this helps organize things into something readable, but for the theme to reflect something innately Japanese and more than an ad-hoc organization of prima facie similar thoughts would require a proper argument.

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One sign that Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a Japanese movie is the fact that the audience never hears its last, and presumably most important, sentence.

Surely this is satire?

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A Beginner’s Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer is now available from Knopf. Featured with permission of the publisher, Knopf. Copyright © 2019 by Pico Iyer.

Presumably this article consists of excerpts from the book. In terms of literary form, it's very fun, reminding of epigrams and Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. But the person who picks up this book based on its title expecting some nuanced reflection on Japan would find the author's dogmatic ignorance most discernible in it, and nothing remotely hinting at the wisdom behind Meditations. Note that I find that Meditations suffers similarly; the observations do not exhibit blinding ignorance as some do here, but they are terribly lacking in context for many to be more universally useful than just "notes to oneself".

glandium• 7 years ago

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.

The Infinite Silences of Japan

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