Sato isn’t the only politician with language issues. Recently, Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi called himself a “bokya-hin,” or a person lacking vocabulary. It seems he’s governing a nation of such people. Last May a group of university deans announced the results of a survey showing that a majority of Japanese college students have difficulty expressing themselves fully and clearly in their own language. Throughout Japan, linguistic skills have been in a downward spiral for at least a decade. Young people who read less and watch more TV than ever before regularly stumble over old proverbs, miss the subtleties of polite expressions and even mistake one written character for another.
Japanese is considered one of the world’s most difficult languages. Grammar is complicated, and the meanings of words are multifaceted. There are also three different kinds of written characters–ancient Chinese characters known as kanji, Japanese letters called hiragana and katakana, the characters used for foreign words. Many young people struggle with kanji, which are often used to express more sophisticated ideas. The language troubles may be a symptom of broader learning defecits: young people also lack familiarity with Western classics well known to their educated elders. One popular weekly TV show recently gave passers-by a fill-in-the-blanks quiz, in Japanese, on Caesar’s famous last words. A 25-year-old woman completed the phrase as “You are cheerful, Brutus.” A high-school boy wrote, “You are Brutus, right?” “The results are alarming,” says Fumihiko Ono, the show’s producer. “I’m shocked by how little they know.”
Every school year, 67-year-old veteran high-school teacher Keigo Yoshizumi likes to give students a quiz of his own. He asks each class whether the proverb “Nasake wa hitono tamenarazu” means to give charity or not. The literal translation of the phrase is “charity is a good investment.” But the old proverb contains a pun–pay close attention to the words, and it’s “charity is not for the good of people.” This spring, only a quarter of Yoshizumi’s class answered correctly. Ten years ago, he says, at least half the class would have understood the answer.
Things are no better at prestigious Tokyo University. There, students often miss a stroke in the character for “green” and end up writing “relation” instead, or confuse the characters for “admirable” and “concern,” which sound the same but look completely different. To a Japanese ear, tuned to elaborate rules of politeness in language, such mistakes can be funny–or pathetic. Takashi Tachibana, Japan’s most famous journalist, was asked several years ago to check the writing of 126 Tokyo University students. He says the results were abysmal. “I asked myself, ‘What’s this?’ Besides a poor knowledge of Chinese characters, they simply couldn’t compose.”
Many teachers blame videogames and television for language problems. Others say that word processors are at fault. To use them, Japanese have to type in Roman letters, then select from a menu of written Japanese and Chinese characters. Since users aren’t actually writing the words themselves, experts say it’s easy to forget them. But technology is only part of the problem. Yasuhiro Nakamura, a high-school teacher in Hokkaido, says the real issue is an isolated generation. Young people nowadays, says Nakamura, “don’t seem to have conversations with elders who understand the language better.”
While Japanese educators haven’t yet come up with a solution to the language problem, the public does seem ready to take action. For months, the No. 1 book on the Japanese best-seller list has been “Nihongo Renshu-cho,” or Japanese Exercise Book. It was written by Susumu Ohno, a well-known language scholar who argues that his fellow countrymen need to be more sensitive to their own language. Sales have already topped 1.2 million copies, suggesting that many readers would like to express their polite agreement–in proper Japanese.
