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Author’s Preface

Nippongo (The Japanese Language), my earlier book, has been translated and is about to make its appearance before the English-reading public, thanks to the endeavor of Miss Umeyo Hirano. I feel happy about this, perhaps to the point of mild embarrassment, but at the same time I have a vague apprehension as I look back through my original Nippongo and find points that I should have revised or wonder if there may be other defects here and there which escaped my notice.

I have looked over Miss Hirano’s translation and found that it is a painstaking work, for in my original, especially, there are several places that could easily have been misinterpreted. Up to the present, the Japanese people have not been so strict about errors in their own literary works, but with translations of Western writings into Japanese there has been a disposition that does not allow even a tiny error. I can see now that we should be more broadminded in the future, for not all translators can possibly bring to their works the care and tenacity that is exhibited in this volume.

What Miss Hirano has taken special pains about is the clarification of the notes for each of the sources of material I quoted from other people’s works. In my original Nippongo, notes were removed one after another at the request of the publisher, who said they made the book hard to read. Some of these notes involved quotations from the lesser magazines, and I cannot begin to imagine how troublesome the search for their exact sources must have been. Indeed, without such diligent labor this translation would perhaps have been completed earlier.

One thing I noticed when I saw this translation was the system of roman letters used to transcribe Japanese words. It is the romanization developed by James Hepburn, who came to Japan in the early Meiji period, and has been used in this book because it is the system most generally used in Japan and abroad. Of course, since it cannot conform exactly to the phonemics of Japanese, there are in Part III, which deals with pronunciation, some descriptions that inevitably deviate somewhat from what I call the orthodox pronunciation. It should be pointed out, too, that though passages from Japanese classics have been romanized according to the same Hepburn system, these readings represent those used by contemporary Japanese when reading such works. The pronunciation prevailing at the time the various classical works were actually written was, of course, different.

There are also places in my original which, if translated simply as they are, would not be easily understood by people unfamiliar with Japanese. At Miss Hirano’s request I have either rewritten such places or given fuller explanations.

I would finally like to express my heartfelt thanks to Miss Hirano, who has exerted untiring efforts in translating my book, and also to the people of the Charles E. Tuttle Company, who made it possible for this book to see the light of day.

—HARUHIKO KINDAICHI

Tokyo, Japan