Svientek, Cody

3/4/2015

ANTH 308

Midterm

(1) The Japanese language is a difficult and unique language in that it uses a countless

amount of onomatopeia and memetic expression in their daily conversational use, that for

an outsider with little experience in the language would have a difficult time

comprehending these common expressions. To begin, the official websters dictionary

defines Onomatopeia as "the creation of words that imitate natural sounds" and Memetic

Expression as "relating to, characterized by, or exhibiting mimicry". Secondly, the

Japanese are a fairly homogenous society and have had language scholars collaborate on

a official definition of common onomatopeic expressions to avoid confusion amongst

themselves, official government documents, and the common masses and to remove

conflict on what one could classify and name a sound, action, or idea since most people

would agree that a dog would go "" or a knock on the door being "".

Gender wise, the Japanese women are more notorious for using onomatopoeia to

effeminate themselves more amongst their male colleagues, while men are generally

more likely to be more verbose to show intellect.

The roots of these memtic expressions could be traced back to the early development of

Japanese language and how court officials used to write poetry often in their daily lives

and these abstract expressions of feelings and phenomena were written down (

for heart beating and expression of love, for hot surfaces and burning passion)
and the common masses adopted it from there, or the other way around and the

uneducated peasants simply used a pronounced way to describe something going around

them like rainfall being categorized by intensity " for pouring rain while

is a drizzle".

The Japanese like using these expressions because they feel culturally it is important to

them since they coined these terms and it's deeply rooted in their culture, and it's simple

to classify everything since everyone generally agrees with them on what sounds like

what. English however is not like Japanese because historically our language is based off

a large array of Latin, Anglo-Saxon, danish, Swedish, Germanic, and French words. So

we prefer using a broad range of synonyms in our dictionary to describe onomatopoeia

and phenomena, while Japan for the most part was isolated and borrowed from ancient

Chinese and had to invent these descriptions on their own. Plus, we Americans don't like

using onomatopoetic because we do not have any official dictionary published by

scholars and it's hard to come to a consensus because English is a much more diverse

language from cultures around the world. However, we in the west usually agree on

common terms like "buzzing" for bees, "woofs" or "barks" for dogs, "bangs" for

explosions and "ha ha ha/he he he" for laughter. We also consider it absurd to give a name

for the sound of pouring rain, when in english we can use a very broad range of words to

describe something, so using a verbose expression of " the pouring rain" will deliver the

same message to the listener.

(3) Japan for it's history was for a long while sealed off from the outside world due to it

being an island out in the pacific and it's only ties with China. This changed however
during the early modern period of Europe and it's expansionism and discovery

elementally led it to Japan, and brought with it new ideas, words, technology, etc. Japan

embraced the new idea of western-ism because it brought forth a era of technological

advancement and prosperity. The Japanese Government, Merchants, Samurai, Artisans,

and peasants viewed the west as something to admire for it's glories and sophistication

and incorporated their ideas into their language, because it was classy and something for

a cultured person to use in their daily language, and gave them new words to describe and

express new ideas from the west like industry, capitalism, democracy, monotheism,

skyscrapers, television, tobacco, and so on. Japan mostly embraces English (ex. ,

, , etc) and Portuguese ( ex. , , ) loanwords because

Portugal provided guns and technology for the Daimyo in the warring states, while later

after World War 2 the American occupation force built the modern Japanese government

and influenced the nation with a large chunk of American culture, business practices, and

words onto them. While minor European influences such as German (,

) , Russian, and some French loanwords. Japan however avoids Korean and

Chinese loanwords because of it's military history with the two neighbors and other

controversial matters regarding imperialism and racism.

Interestingly, while Japan is now very open to western influences, it still has issues

actually using loanwords correctly to the full extent, whether if it is wanting to take a spin

on the word for it's own cultural reasons , a Japanese misunderstanding some words

because of the complexity of the English language to a native Japanese speaker, and even

using different loanwords to differentiate different objects even though they would

classify as the same object (an example would be vs , even though both
are cup it depends on if the mug has a handle or not).

While it would seem that adopting these words would be easy for a foreigner to

understand, they tend to simplify some words or use old outdated words like

, which would be confusing since the English translation would be business man or

white collar worker. Another example are and which are a slanged term

for Home platform (train station) and Mass Communication, but would be confusing

since masu komi and homu are shortened and are not very helpful for foreigners to read.

Finally are the use of curse words used in Japan and America, while Americans would

consider it taboo to say such words, the Japanese actually have little understanding of the

severity of the curse word simply because western media makes these words sound cool

and many Japanese youth adopt it into their daily language with improper

usage/misunderstanding, or using it in public which would be considered a shameful act,

one humorous example was a hostess wearing a shirt for a PG rated NHK gardening tv

show "" that says "Protect me from your bullshit". She was reprimended

after the episode because of her poor choice of fashion, and that there were many english

speakers watching her show at the time.

(4) The fact that whether or not the Japanese female population has accepted the idea of

western feminism is a controversial one indeed. Throughout Japanese culture the woman

has always been a ruler of the house, open to the ideas of homosexual relationships, the

praising of Geisha and goddesses in Shintoism, the fact that women were some of the

most famous authors in Japanese poetry like Genji Monogatari and the Hiragana writing

system, their system of inheritance is strictly matriarchal, and now with the rise of
western ideals comes the fact that Japanese women have been more and more

independent now than ever to go out and peruse a career, get a formal education, get into

politics, vote, own property, have the court favor in the woman's side, and so one. This

would allow them to have the freedom to follow their own dreams and avoid following

the old traditions of being a mother and housekeeper. So one could argue that feminism is

already present in Japan, however with Japan's strict traditionalism and homogenized

society, it still favors men in government fields, shames women who have been sexually

assaulted, office inequality as most women work as assistants, censorship of the female

genitalia, specific gender dialect for women, mannerisms and a need to beautify

themselves to compete against one another for affection would make it seem that Japan

has quite some work to go with.

The problem lies that Japan is stuck between staying to it's old cultural roots and keeping

a homogenized society to avoid conflict and keep their honor, identity, and tradition, or

embrace western ideas and give women more freedoms. Those that argue against western

feminism say that Japan already has given women plenty of rights and the government

currently needs more mothers as it's population shrinks and grows older, so the need for a

caretaker for children and the elderly is desperatly needed for the prosperity of future

Japan, and the need to keep it's culture and language intact and keep the social harmony,

since Japan has a strict enforcement of how women and men should talk and act to avoid

dishonoring the family. This is because in asian cultures, they value the group's interest

over the individual's interests and those that are viewed dishonorable are considered

lowly than someone who is filial. With due time, the younger and more open generations
should slowly flex Japanese feminist standards of a woman more and mirror that of their

western feminist counterparts.