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1Regional Differences

What are the characteristics of the Japanese language? Although we simply call it “Japanese,” it is in reality a complex of a great many languages. English, German, Dutch, Danish, and the like are called Germanic languages as a group. The whole of the Japanese language is equal to the whole Germanic language group, as it were.

Japanese is often said to be complicated anddifficult. One of the causes can be found in its nature as a language group. Herein also lies the reason why Japanese is said to be in a state of disorder. Formerly, people of Kysh generally lived in Kysh and people of u lived their whole lives in u. But now we hear dialects of other areas everywhere. Moreover, in former days each person’s use of language depended, to a large extent, on his or her social position and trade. Now that we are becoming socially homogeneous, speech differences according to sex and situation are also growing less distinct. It is no wonder that Japanese is said to be in disorder.

Differences in dialects

Russia is a large country. Consequently, Russian is spoken over an area extending 2,000 miles from north to south and 1,500 miles from east to west. Dialects there differ very little. The daily conversations of the fishermen on the northern seacoast can be understood, it is said, by the farmers in the Ukraine, the southernmost area. This is natural, since people who speak Russian can understand Polish, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian, as mentioned above. It is as if a person in Siska, in the former Japanese domain of Sakhalin, and a person in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, could understand one another, each talking in his own native tongue.

The differences among dialects in Japan, however, are conspicuous. A place like Kagoshima is an entirely different world. The everyday conversations of people of Kagoshima prefecture cannot be understood even by the people of the neighboring prefecture of Kumamoto, not to mention those on Honsh and Shikoku. In the Kagoshima dialect sounds like ki, ku, gi, gu, chi, tsu, bi, bu all become a stop sound at the middle or end of a word. Thus, the sentences Kuki ga aru (There is a stem), Kuchi ga aru (There is a job), Kutsu ga aru (There are shoes), Kugi ga aru (There is a nail), and Kubi ga aru (There is a head) all become Kugga ai. Such sentences as Kut no kug ga dete itte naran and Kut ba kirareta node atarashii kut ba sagaite oru become, in standard Japanese: Kutsu no kugi ga dete itakute tamaranai (The nails of my shoes poked through and are hurting me so much) and Kubi o kirareta node atarashii kuchi o sagashite iru (I was fired, so I am looking for a new job). It is no wonder that this dialect cannot be understood in other districts. A popular story relates that during the feudal ages the Satsuma clan purposely made the speech of its domain unintelligible to outsiders in order to guard against spies from the shogunate. At any rate, the Kagoshima dialect is so extraordinary that such a story does not seem unlikely. But there is an even more peculiar place, a fishing port called Makurazaki at the southern end of Satsuma peninsula in Kagoshima prefecture. Although I visited this port in winter, I saw irises and evening primroses already in bloom on the roadside and felt quite strange. This district is said to possess an especially peculiar dialect even within Kagoshima, the speech of a pure native being incomprehensible to people in other parts of the prefecture. A school teacher living there said that in former days when a person from Edo (Tky) had to speak with a person of Makurazaki two interpreters were needed, one who could interpret both Edo and Kagoshima dialects and another who could speak the Makurazaki and Kagoshima dialects. To use a Chinese classical expression, it was a place which “necessitated a threefold interpretation.”

A case like the above can be seen even within Tky prefecture. The language of the residents of the island called Hachijjima, south of Tky, is altogether unintelligible to Tky people. It cannot be understood even by those residing on islands of the same Izu island group. Moreover, on a tiny island called Kojima right near Hachijjima, there is a village called Utsuki with only seventy-four people. It is perhaps the smallest village in all Japan. How strange it is that the dialect spoken on this island cannot be understood in nearby Hachijjima!

Differences existing among Japanese dialects can be seen best in the accents of words. It is well-known that the accent of words like aka meaning “red” and “dirt,” and hashi meaning “chopsticks” and “bridge” are quite the reverse in Tky and in the Kyto-saka district, Aka (red) and aKA (dirt) in the former, aKA and Aka in the latter. The dialects of Mito, Sendai, and Kumamoto and Kurume of Kysh make no distinctions at all in accents. In these places aka meaning “red” and “dirt” and hashi meaning “chopsticks” and “bridge” are all accented alike. That there are places like Tky and Kytosaka districts where accents are distinguishable and that there are also districts with no distinguishable accents whatever shows how varied Japanese is.

The origin of dialects

Thus, marked differences exist among Japanese dialects. Why? The Basque language, which I have mentioned, is famous for its varied dialects. Les Langues du monde states that the results of investigations by a Lord Bonaparte showed that the Basque language was divided into three dialect groups and fifty dialects, and under them twenty-five subdivisions which again had fifty varieties and more than ten minor divisions.¹ We cannot tell how many dialects there were in all. In the East, reports have come frequently about one small island in the Pacific with many dialects which differ greatly from each other. Although Guadalcanal island, the scene of heavy fighting in World War II, is only about eighty by twenty-five miles in area, twenty Melanesian dialects are spoken there.² There is likewise a certain area in Australia with only a few thousand people but more than two hundred dialects.³

Generally speaking, divergences in dialects are conspicuous among primitive tribes which are small, closed societies. Even in Japan, when we watch children who are not yet attending school, we find that there is one society in every tiny block, and children living in one block cast menacing glances at the children from the next block as they pass by. This is a microcosm of primitive society. Thus, it is natural that differences arise among dialects.

Is, then, the large number of greatly differing Japanese dialects due to the primitive state of Japanese society? Perhaps, but there are also other, more cogent reasons. One of these is the antiquity of Japanese history which stretches back at least to the time of Christ, if not before. It was in the later half of the 15th century that the Russians overthrew the Kipchak-khan and established the Russian Empire. It was in the second half of the 18th century that the ancestors of the Americans established the United States on the American continent. Compared with Japanese history it seems that all this took place only a short time ago. And only thereafter did Russian and American English spread throughout the two countries. Thus, there was not enough time for these languages to split into different dialects.

Yet another cause for the appearance of so many different dialects in Japanese is the difference in the way of living in each locality. Coupled with the complexity of geographical features and the diversity in climate, there was great variety in the mode of living. In his account of travels in the United States, Yoshikawa Kjir, a scholar in Chinese literature, states that in his train journeys through the continent the yellow wheat fields stretched on endlessly, and when he entered a forest there was nothing but a dark forest no matter how far the train went. He was astonished by the immensity. Russia must also be the same. What a contrast, then, to the Japanese Ministry of Education’s railroad song, Ima wa yamanaka ima wa hama . . . (Now we are in the mountains, now along the shore . . .), a description of scenes viewed from a train window. In Japan one finds, in rapid succession, farm villages, fishing villages, industrial cities, and mining towns, where people separate into even smaller groups in the course of making a living. Since speech is controlled by the mode of living, it is natural that different dialects should develop.

An investigation of Izu peninsula dialects revealed that the contrast between northern and southern or eastern and western Izu dialects was not so great as the contrast between the dialects spoken in fishing villages and farm villages. When Umegaki Minoru made a survey from the northern part of Wakayama prefecture to the Shima district of Mie prefecture, passing through the Kumanonada coast districts, he discovered that even in such widely scattered districts as Saigazaki of Wakayama city, shima island across from Kushimoto, and the southern coast of Shima, there was a remarkable similarity in the speech of the fishing villages.

The standard language and the common language

Thus, one of the chief characteristics of Japanese is the great divergence among dialects. This brings about various inconveniences in the social life of the people. There are many dialectical expressions which cause misunderstandings among people of different districts, which the kygen (a N comedy) “Irumagawa” well illustrates. A Tky man traveled to Saga on Kysh. Wanting to buy some cigarettes, he asked an old shop woman, “Do you have Shin-sei?” She answered, “Nai (i.e., “there isn’t any” in Tky).” “Then how about Hikari?” the man said. “Nai,” said the woman again. He gave up and returned to his lodgings, where he was told that nai meant “yes” in the local dialect. A person from the Kansai district made the mistake of arranging to meet a person from Chiba prefecture on shiasatte. In Kansai, shiasatte generally means the day after asatte (asatte is the day after tomorrow), but in Chiba, Saitama, and Gumma prefectures, it means two days after asatte.

Japanese are not insensitive to the divergences between dialects. They devised a polished version of the Tky dialect and made this the standard language to be taught at schools. The diffusion of this speech throughout Japan has met with great success. People who speak the standard language or the Tky language exclusively are few, of course, but almost all the people of Japan can speak this common language with which they are able to make themselves understood by people of other districts. According to a survey made by Shibata Takeshi, even the Hachijjima islanders, who formerly spoke such a strange dialect, could carry on conversations with people from Tky, with the exception of one old woman.

This has not happened on small islands of the Pacific like Guadalcanal. When the German orientalist Gabelentz and the anthropologist Meyer traveled around the coast of Maclay in northeastern New Guinea, almost every village had its own dialect, and the people of villages six or eight miles apart could hardly understand one another. So it is said that they needed two to three interpreters on a single day’s trip.⁴

Before World War II there was a school in Kanda, Tky, for the Chinese residents in Japan called Nikka Gakuin. One day while I was teaching there, I saw two students talking in faltering English in the hallway during a break. I learned that one was from Hubei province and the other from Fujian province. If they had spoken to each other in their own dialects they could not have understood each other, and since the two had no command of their country’s standard language, they had to use English. It seems then that the spread of the standard language in Japan is a matter to be proud of.

The degree of difference in the Japanese dialects is probably equal to the differences between such European languages as English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. It is not so surprising, therefore, to hear of a European being able to use English, German, and Dutch. Most people along the borders of linguistic regions in Japan have long been accomplishing similar linguistic feats. That the Japanese have succeeded in establishing a modern state in the short period of time since the Meiji period illustrates the intelligence of the Japanese. The spread of the common language, too, is perhaps one of its manifestations.