Hidden Japanese Contributions to the English Lexicon

Nicholas W. WARREN

ABSTRACT
This paper presents and discusses a particular collection of words and phrases that have entered the English language from Japanese, not directlyas in the case of karate or sushi, for example but clandestinely, so to speak, without betraying Japanese , involvement in their origin or transmission. They include, principally, terms which owe their existence either to the Japanese languageas direct loan translations of non-Japanspecific terms or to Japanese authorship as coinages made up in English, or as , transliterations of terms coined in Japanese or in a third language The main body of . the paper presents a small corpus of such hidden Japanese contributions in three , separate categories, along with discussion of the evidence for their Japanese provenance. Keywords: English language studies , Japanese language studies , comparative lexicology , loan translation , loanword .

INTRODUCTION
This study aims to include not only the English reflexes of words or phrases coined in Japanese from European elements, but also words or phrases initially coined by Japanese neologistsprimarily scientists and manufacturersin Englishor in another language to be specific, German from which they have entered Englishthat is to ; say, items which have not, strictly speaking, been borrowed from the Japanese language at all. Indeed, after coinage in English, such words are commonly borrowed into Japanese as loanwords in katakana transliteration. It also aims to cover words or phrases loan-translated literally from Japanese, so long as they are not otherwise evidently Japanese-related. It could be said to serve as an unofficial, specialized supplement to The Japanese Contributions to the English LanguageCannon & Warren, In fact, a few of the . items in that dictionary would also qualify for inclusion hereseeCriteria for , Inclusion/Exclusion below Of these, the best candidates would be camcorder , . , functional food , mechatronics, mitomycin, parametron, protoanemonin, silentearth quake, sketch-phone, softnomics, T ransformer, and VHS . However, to avoid duplication, they are Anyone either omitted from the present study or given only brief treatment. mentioned work.

interested in examining their credentials is recommended to consult the above-

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The question of origin in this particular area of research is complicated by the fact that the lexical source material from which many modern Japanese coinages are created is itself drawn from English, or from the same Graeco-Latin elements which English and other European languages commonly use to form new words, especially in the domain of science. The editors of the Merriam-Webster dictionaries label such Indeed, this common quarry items ISV forInternational Scientific Vocabulary or NLforNew Latin, often without attempting to probe further into their etymology. of vocabulary has become such an international resource that a scientific word coined in Japanese may be first conceived by the Japanese coiner in its Englishor Neo-Latin form, then rendered into Japanese syllabic scriptkatakana and finally spelt out in , English too, so that when the paper containing the neologism is first published in a Japanese journal, both the Japanese form and its English equivalentin the English title or abstract, or in the body of the text itself will appear simultaneously. Shortly afterwards, as scientists take up the term, it will be transliterated effortlessly into its predictable equivalents in German, French, Spanish, Russian, etc., and the particular circumstances of its birth will be lost to all except those who take on the challenge of investigating lexical origins. The word hidden in the title of this paper is not, of course, intended to imply that anyone has deliberately hidden the Japanese origins of such words, but rather that, because they seem to be regular products of English word formation, their connections to a Japanese source are not immediately apparent, and can only be detected by careful lexicographical research. way linked to Japan. They are, in effect, generally unrecognized as being in any

Criteria for Inclusion/Exclusion

Essentially, if the term under consideration looks English i.e., is formed from English or Common European elements it can be includedprovided, of course, that , Japanese involvement in its emergence or transmission can be demonstratedbut if it ; looks Japanese i.e., is obviously formed from Japanese or Sino-Japanese elements, e.g. tsunami, kaizen or has obvious Japanese associationse.g. black belt, a loan translation , of kuroobi; or cherryblossom-viewing, based on hanami; or just-in-time, recruited to name the originally Japanese kanban manufacturing system it will have to be , be excluded. Where loan translations and anglicized transliterations from Japanese are involved, there must be positive proof that the Japanese form is found earlier than its English counterpart, to guard against the possibility that the word or phrase actually originated in English and was only later borrowed into Japaneseas in the case of homestay, for example . The key word here is hidden if an educated native speaker of English or Japanese cannot be expected to guess the item underlying Japanese identity or s

Hidden Japanese Contributions to the English Lexicon

paternity, then it passes the main test of admission to this mini-corpus. Terms which are made up of recognizably English elementsincluding, of course, Graeco-Latinate roots and affixesare prime candidates for inclusion, unless they are already clearly associated with Japan in some specific wayi.e., denoting features of Japanese culture, history, geography, industry, technology, cuisine, flora, fauna, etc. . Thus the well-known word salaryman white-collar salary-earning company employee, though transcribed into its original English formative components from Japanese sarariiman, is ruled out because it is conspicuously Japanese; and Walkman, though coined by Akio Morita as an internationally comprehensible English name, fails the present test because it is common knowledge that the product so named is a Japanese invention. Conversely, terms which are composed of elements that are not recognizably Englishin the broadest senseare liable to be excluded. There are also at least a dozen true loanwordsas opposed to loan translationsfrom Japanese which have become so camouflaged by alteration of spelling that their origin cannot easily be recognized. They could be called Japanese in disguise Prime . examples include: aucuba, bonze, fatsia, ginkgo, honchosometimes mistakenly believed to be from Mexican Spanish mebos, moxa, napa cabbage ramanas rose rumaki, , , , sasanqua, soy or soya, and tycoon. However, the shapes of words such as these remain conspicuously, exotically un-English, and betray them asaliensin the English lexicon, so they hardly qualify as hidden If further information on their meaning and . etymology is sought, they are all to be found in The Japanese Contributions. English words and phrases which merely translate their Japanese equivalents, without any demonstrable connection to Japanese lexical morphologye.g. winter cherry, pressed into service as a translation of or hozuki, etymologicallycheek sticker, are entirely excluded as are also, of course, all noun phrases beginning with Japanese or Japan. terms to English. Neither the Japanese language nor a Japanese human agent unless the translator is definitely Japanesecan be credited with contributing such

HIDDEN JAPANESE CONTRIBUTIONS

1. Loan Translations
It could reasonably be argued that of all modern authors writing in English, the one who has made the most powerful impact on the language is George Orwell. neologisms. In particular, his great dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is rich in influential Among them are normally included the sinister compounds thoughtcrime Though hardly everyday words, they are widely known and often Here is a and Thought Police.

invoked in warning against authoritarian tendencies in modern society. typical recent example from a British newspaper:

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2007 Yasmin ALIBHAI-BROWN in The IndependentLondon Dec. / A -year-old British Muslim saleswoman, Samina Malik, was convicted last month .. after downloading some jihadi material and for writing miserable and murderous poems .. I find what she did repellent, but hers were thought crimes, which should not lead to prosecution in any democracy worth the name.

It is commonly assumed that Orwell coined these two terms himself, and this is even stated as fact in standard dictionariese.g. NSOED , s.v. thoughtcrime: orig. in George Orwell novelEncarta , s.v. thought police: Coined by George OrwellThe s ; ; Oxford Dictionary of Catchphrases , s.v. Big Brother is watching you: words coined by Orwell in this novel, such as .. thought police. But did he really coin them? In fact, the chronology of the lexical evidence points unmistakably in a very different direction: towards Japan. Thought Police Orwell first had the idea for Nineteen Eighty-Four in , and it was finally published in June . Significantly before these dates, Thought Police is documented as an English nickname for Japan Special Higher Police s T okubetsu Koto Keisatsu, or T for short, established in okko and abolished in October . OED2, s.v. thought, has a sub-entry thought police which it defines thus: in a totalitarian state, a police force established to suppress freedom of thought; spec[ifically] in pre-war Japan, the Special Higher PoliceT okubetsu Koto Keisatsu or T . Its okko earliest citational evidence is this:
1945 SunBaltimore Oct. It is an order imposing freedom of speech, thought, religion and assembly on the / Japanese people, and requiring the immediate liberation of those imprisoned for political offenses by the so-calledthought police .

Note that the name is prefaced byso-calledand appears in quotation marks indicating either that it is an informal usage, or that it is a knowing rendition of a corresponding Japanese nickname. Orwell own use of the name in his novel for a s police force playing a role broadly similar to that of the Japanese force is featured only in the second quotation of the OED2 entry. Antedating OED2 earliest example by several years is the following: s
1939 The New RepublicUSA Vol. LXXXVIII, No. ,March / It is evident that, despite the loud claims of Japan SpecialThoughtPolice, all s Communist and Socialist activities have not been wiped out, that the whole nation is not marching firmly behind the army.

Earlier still, the name is foreshadowed in a slightly expanded paraphrase:

Hidden Japanese Contributions to the English Lexicon

1934 Upton CLOSE Challenge: Behind the Face of Japan Ch. VI An entire picnic party of intellectuals was taken up on the beach by dangerous thoughts-police skulking in the bushes, and their sandwiches were the last nonprison food they had for a long time.

Yet does the collocation Thought Police actually correspond word for word to a Japanese original, or does it exist only as an English nickname? In other words, is it really ahidden Japanese contributionto English, or an English coinage, independently made up to describe the Special Higher Police? The answer is that an exact equivalent did indeed exist in Japanese. SNKD2 has the entry shiso keisatsu, However, the online library catalogue, but provides no citational evidence for it.

NACSIS Webcat, lists a work titled without irony Shiso keisatsu gairon, literallyAn Introduction to the Thought Police for the year . This leads to the , conclusion that the English phrase is indeed a loan translation from Japanese, rather than merely a nickname invented by English-speaking foreigners in Japan. thoughtcrime As for thoughtcrime, OED2 defines it thus: in George Orwell novel Nineteen Eightys Four, the offence of failing in absolute loyalty to the ruling power; hence in any totalitarian system, unorthodox thinking considered as a criminal offenceand the first ; quotation is this:
1949G. ORWELLNineteen Eighty-Four I. He had committed .. the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it.

Anyone consulting this entry would thus naturally assume that the term is Orwell s own original coinage. original. However, once again, the term can be traced back to a Japanese SNKD2 has the entry shiso-han with a first citation dated . This

term can be used in Japanese to mean boththought crimeandthought criminal ; and Orwell, incidentally, also uses the word thought-criminal(s) six times in the course of the novel. shiso-han is short for shiso-hanzai, which is attested even earlier in NACSIS Webcat , . Yet can an English loan translation of shiso-hanzai be found earlier than in Orwell s novel? In fact, it can. Well before the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and in an easily accessible source, we find:
1945 TIMEelectronic archive September Arrogant Japanizers tarred the Koreans traditional white clothes, jailed them for thought crime,poisoned their sovereign Yi Hyeung, deposed his dynasty.

Many years earlier still, the phrase appears, underextraordinary expenditure in a ,

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translated summary of Japan national budget for s :

1934 The Japan Y Book 1934 Chapter VIII ear Department of Justice .. / Item Special institution for the prevention of thought crime V

yen ,

and it reappears annually in the corresponding chapter of The Japan Y ear Book as thought-crimes or thought crimes until , after which it is replaced by special crimes. Evidently, both thought crime and Thought Police were in circulation with specific reference to Japan, in print and probably also on the radio, and thus available to Orwell for later use in his novel. The fact that he knew no Japanese is thus no impediment to his having acquired them from Japanese via loan translations already in existence. It might be objected that Orwell could have arrived at these thought terms spontaneously, or under the influence of European totalitarian terminology, in which case they are not necessarily connected with the earlier Japanese equivalents. However, it is hardly credible that anyone could hit upon such idiosyncratic collocations independently. They are peculiarly characteristic of the pre- Japanese regime, and are not replicated word for word in the terminology of Italian Fascism, German Nazism, or Soviet Russian Communismalthough the corresponding thought-control methods of these systems did undoubtedly influence the genesis of Nineteen Eighty-Four It seems . highly unlikely that Orwell could have reinvented exactly the same key terms by sheer coincidence. Furthermore, shiso thoughtin these collocations stands for kiken shiso , literallydangerous thought code forleftist ideologyin Japan from s,
. onwardscf. Close sdangerous-thoughts-police quoted above Its use in this sense ,

was thus a local Japanese development.

Reflecting this, the English loan translation

dangerous thought(s) is found again and again in news reports on Japan and in books about Japan throughout the s and soften evidently deployed for comic effect, despite the deadly seriousness of its source as used by the Japanese authorities In . , its naturalization became complete when the English academic, Lancelot Hogben, used it as the title of a book about radical suggestions for Britain future, rather than s Japan Orwell himself invoked the phrase as alien in his essayThe English People s. written in May Deviations and dangerous thoughts do not seem very : important to themsc. the English peopleOrwell Vol. . What is more, it : features twice in Nineteen Eighty-Four as a key component in the concept of thoughtcrime. These hidden Japanese influences here reinforce each other. It would be beyond the scope of this study to enter into a detailed investigation as to the likeliest routes via which these originally Japanese terms might have become known to Orwell. Suffice it to say that they had already penetrated the fringes of the It is perfectly English lexicon prior to the period when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four.

possible that he consciously noted them at some point in the course of his extensive

Hidden Japanese Contributions to the English Lexicon

reading of books, news reports, and magazine articles, or after conversation with former residents in Japanat least two of whom worked next door to him in the BBC studios in the early s and earmarked them for use in his novel, with their Japanese , totalitarian connotations in mind. Alternatively, having read or heard them somewhere, he perhaps later unconsciously reproduced them, oblivious of their Japanese connections. In either case, he used them to brilliantly chilling effect, and guaranteed them a permanent place in the political lexicon not only of English but also of the dozens of languages into which his novel has been translated. thought control What of the now well-known term thought control , which would seem to underlie the concept of thought crime?Orwell uses the phrase reality control three times in Nineteen Eighty-Four OED2 only citational source for the phrase as an equivalent of s doublethink, though doublethink comprises much else as wellbut, somewhat ; surprisingly, he does not use thought control anywhere in the novel. The very first OED2 quotation illustrating the term again refers to Japan:
1935 U. CLOSE Behind Face of Japan xxviii Thought controlin Japan is strictly constitutional.

Incidentally, it should be noted that the first edition of this book was published in the USA in , not , and that the sentence quoted here appears on p. of that edition, not p. .OED2 does not give a Japanese loan-translation source for the sscarequotation marks no doubt show that it term in question. However, Close represents a self-conscious translation of an existing Japanese compound: namely, shiso-tosei. Unaccountably, SNKD2 has no entry for it; but it was certainly in use by , as seen in the title of a semi-official publicationfirst issued on December of st that year dealing with the problems of regulating ideological thought from the government point of view see Mitchell : . Its English calque, used s attributively, appears again in one of the world most widely read US magazines: s
1936 TIMEelectronic archive Oct. The Imperial Japanese Government, acting upon a bill passed by the Japanese Diet, announced that next week it will establish Thought Control Offices in such leading Japanese cities as Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Hiroshima, Sendai, Sapporo and Fukuoka, with Thought Control Substations in other cities.

However, caution is called for, as there are clearly two quite different uses of the term thought control . An earlier use of the phrase in English refers to a sort of individual exercise in mental self-discipline, not mass suppression of freedom of thought by an authoritarian regimethe sense applicable to the above loan translations from

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Japaneseas the following book titlesretrieved via NACSIS Webcatillustrate: ,

1920 D. GRENSIDE Concentration and character building: a practical course in concentration, thought control and character building 1928 J. ALEXANDER Thoughtcontrol in everyday life

In a future OED entry for this term, it would be desirable to add this earlier sense clearly differentiated to the definition, whichas in OED2, s.v. thoughtcurrently reads: the control of a person thoughts; esp. the attempt by a government to restrict s ideas and impose opinions by such means as censorship and the control of curricula essentially the dominant, Japanese-derived sense. thoughtography This word has nothing to do with thought crime, Thought Police, or thought control . is an admittedly rather rare word, restricted to the world of occult practices. It OED2

defines it asThe production of a visible, usu. photographic, imagesupposedlyby pure mental means The first attestation for it is in the title of a book, Clairvoyance . and thoughtography by T. Fukurai. The same book also contains the first evidence for thoughtograph. This turns out to be the English translation of a Japanese original, T shi to nensha , by the same author, Tomokichi Fukurai, a o professor of psychology at the University of Tokyo, who was an avid experimenter in paranormal phenomena such as mind-reading. The English word thoughtography is thus a loan translation of , now , nenshafrom nen-idea, thoughtand -sha as in shashinphotograph; photography. Few users of the word today can be aware that it originates in Japanese.

2. Terms Coined in English by Japanese Authors

In some cases, the relevant evidence resides in the OED etymology, in which coinage is attributed to a Japanese authorprimarily identifiable as an author with a Japanese surname In other cases, the evidence depends, albeit less reliably, on first attestation . in a publication authored by a person with a Japanese name. In yet others, citational or other documentary evidence can be drawn upon to establish Japanese authorship. Where an organization is involved, the person actually responsible for coining the word or name may of course be of any nationality; but if the organization is Japanese, coinage will be attributed to Japan for the purposes of this study. Here, certain caveats must be borne in mind. First, possession of a Japanese surname does not necessarily entail Japanese nationalitynor does Japanese nationality automatically entail Japanese ethnicity This is admittedly problematic when it comes . to determining whether a genuinely Japanese contribution is involved. Second, there are certain Japanese surnamese.g. Mori, Sadawhich are spelt the same as non-

Hidden Japanese Contributions to the English Lexicon

Japanese surnames, so only further investigation can clearly ascertain whether the author is Japanese or not. doubt will remain. adrenalin The name for thefight or flighthormone, also spelt adrenaline, must surely be the star exhibit in this particular lexical collection. Not only is it a key word in biology, but also, as a result of its widespread popularization, it has come to be used very frequently in everyday colloquial English, in utterances such asGoing on stage gave me a real adrenalin rush i.e., it excited and exhilarated me greatly No one would normally . suspect that it owes its origin to Japanese authorship; but there is strong evidence that indeed it does. Credit for isolating and naming adrenalin is generally attributed to the Japanese biochemist Jokichi Takamine who, incidentally, also invented the digestive, Taka-Diastase. The Biographical Dictionary of Japanese History states: :
At this timesc. circa scientists throughout the world were attempting to obtain a crystalline extract of the hormone known as Nebennierenmarkhormon. In Takamine succeeded in doing so, giving the extract the name Adrenalin. This was the first hormone to be extracted in pure form.

Inevitably, in a few cases where documentation is sparse,

Evidently, Takamine formed the word from the English equivalent of German Nebenniere, i.e. adrenal gland, in which the adjective adrenal is based on Latin adnext to, near German nebenand Latin reneskidneys German Niere The first . OED2 citation for the word adrenalin reads:
1901 Amer. Jrnl . Physiol . V. The most important contribution to our knowledge of the active principle of the suprarenal gland .. is from Dr. Jokichi Takamine who has isolated the blood-pressureraising principle of the gland in a stable and pure crystalline form... To this body .. he has given the nameAdrenalin .

Also, the second citation refers toTakamine adrenalin However, a special s . note in the entry cautiously voices doubt as to who exactly coined the word:
See quot. for the discovery of the substance and the invention of the name, which have, however, been claimed also for Dr. Norton L. Wilson.

Yet the fact remains that Takamine applied for a US patent for his discovery on November , and was granted the right to useAdrenalinas a US trademark on April . I have found no evidence to support discovery or coinage by Wilson. It is of incidental interest to note that this word has duly entered Japanese as

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adorenarin but only in its strictly scientific sense. bubble-jet This compound denotesa system of ink-jet printing in which the ink is heated, producing bubbles which force droplets of ink on to the paper OED Online, Draft Additions December It is most often found in the noun phrase bubble-jet printer. . The first quotation is dated , from PC Week, where it is stated thatThe newest of these technologies is sometimes called bubble-jet, after the Canon printer in which it is incorporated As Canon is a Japanese company, and the well-known term bubble-jet is . not generally thought of as a Japanese coinage, this item qualifies as ahidden Japanese contributionalthough it is not clear whether its actual coiner was Japanese. , leopon This blend of English leopard and lion, first attested in , denotes a cross-species hybrid between a leopard and a lioncf. the older tigon , tigron , ligeralso and tiglon The actual coiner of leopon has apparently not been , . identified, but the evidence strongly indicates that the word was coined in Japan alongside its Japanese reflex, reopon In , two leopon cubs the . world first were born at Koshien Zoo in Nishinomiya Citybetween Osaka and s . Kobe, in Hyogo Prefecture The word leopon was thus called into being to fill a very specific lexical need. However, in , the last surviving specimen died, and the word was duly consigned to the zoological history books. microburst The meteorological phenomenon now known as a microburst was discovered and named by Tetsuya Fujita a native of Kitakyushu City in Fukuoka , Prefecture, Japan:
1998 Daily Yomiuri November Fujita, known as Mr. Tornado, .. discovered Microbursts sudden, severe / downdrafts that can result inkph winds on or near the ground after studying the starburst patterns of trees uprooted by tornadoes. He blamed microbursts for the Eastern Airlines Flight crash at New York Kennedy Airport. The discovery, s controversial for years before it became accepted among meteorologists, led to installation of Doppler radar at airports to improve safety.

However, the entry microburst in OED OnlineDraft Entry December includes no reference to Fujita an omission that calls for correction. According to Sanseido s.v. daunbasuto downburst, Fujita also coined the related term downburst. There is no OED entry for this word, but it appears in the definition of microburstsense , glosseddownward gust of wind and ,

Hidden Japanese Contributions to the English Lexicon

also in the first quotation immediately following:

1981 Monthly Weather Rev. The nature of the windstorms was confirmed to be downbursts and microbursts characterized by multiple scales of airflows with their horizontal dimensions extending tens of meters to hundreds of kilometers.

W10 does have an entry for downburst, and gives as the date of first attestation. Cf. macroburstnot yet in OED Online also said to have been coined in English by , Fujitasee e.g. <http : //answers.com>likewise, mesocyclone and mesolow, listed at the ; end of this section. nanotechnology This is surely one of the main scientific keywords of the modern age, and it has also achieved a great deal of popularity in and through its use in science fiction. mean part of th , , , and technology. It is derived from nano-based on Greek nanosdwarf used in scientific compounds to , OED OnlineDraft Entry June defines it asThe branch of technology that deals with dimensions and tolerances of to nanometres, or, generally, with the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules Its first citation reads as follows: .
1974 N. TANIGUCHI in Proc. Internat. Conf. Production Engin. ii. / The usual precision finishing technology has aimed to get the preciseness and fineness of i.e. m in length, hence it saysmicro-technology m, , not so accurate in meaning. Consequently, in contrast, the finishing technology aimed to get the preciseness and fineness of nm would be calledNano-technology .

Evidently, the author is hereby coining the word; and it may be safe to assume that he is Japanese rather than e.g. Japanese American or Japanese Canadianjudging by his un-native locutionit saysmicro-technology . A quick background check via <http : //www.oknano.com/nanofacts.html> confirms that he full name: Norio Taniguchiis indeed Japanese, and at the time of his ground-breaking paper, he was a professor at Tokyo Science University. the following partial definition of the term :
Nano-technologymainly consists of the processing of, separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or by one molecule.

In the same paper cited above, he gives

This word is certainly a major Japanese contribution to the English language albeit made up of readily available lexical parts. Indeed, precisely because its wordThe same formation is perfectly normal and transparent, its Japanese authorship goes unrecognized by the vast majority of people who encounter it and use it.

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surely applies to its Japanese equivalent, nanotekunorojii, which we can confidently assume is considered by most Japanese to be yet another import of an English-authored word. MISCELLANEOUS The following scientific terms were first coined in English by Japanese or Japan-based authors. In studies published in Japan, some appear more or less simultaneously in English and in Japanese transliteration: e.g. gibberellin in the English abstract, alongside jibererin in the Japanese text; while in others, the author is not named, so may be either Japanese or a foreigner resident in Japan. They are presented here in order of earliest OED attestationthe first date given is that of the first OED Online quotation, unless another source is named Their chronology reflects Japanese . scientists gradual historical shift in first choice of foreign language, from Germanup to World War : cf. the list in sectionbelowto English. aftershock fromSeismolog. Jrnl. Japanauthor not named : ; seismic wave H. Nagaoka; incidentally, Elastic Constants in Nagaoka title : s antedates in OED2 for the latter term Saturnian system H. Nagaoka, describing a model of the nuclear atom; see : OED2 s.v. Saturnian a. and sb., c. mareogram from a report published in Japan; author not named : leptospira H. Noguchi : the name Leptospira is suggested protoanemonin ; OED2 etymology statesCoined in Japanese as purotoanemonin Asahina & Fujita .. tryptophanase K. Kurono et al. in OED2 etymology, s.v. tryptophan; : tryptophanase is erroneously cited as the Japanese form, which should in fact be a transliteration of its katakana form, i.e. toriputofanaze; or perhaps it should have been cited as the German form gibberellin Yabuta & Hayashi < Gibberella fujikuroi a mould discovered in : by Eiichi Kurosawa: see Sanseido globoside Yamakawa & Suzuki : agarose C. Araki : unipotent T. Tamura : mitomycin T. Hata et al.; OED2 etymology states that mito- isnot explained : by the Japanese authors of the name Other Japanese-coined names of . antibiotics, not found in OED2, include: sarkomycin coined in Japan in as zarukomaishin < German Sarkomsarcoma English mycin: see Sanseido ; chromomycin = kuromomaishin: ib. parametron OED2 etymology statescoined in Japanese by E. Goto ; pathotype Okabe & Goto :

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plastocyanin Katoh & Takamiya : mesocyclone T. Fujita; in this quotation, Fujita also mentions amesolow but : , there is no entry for the latter in OED Online; cf. also his above-mentioned coinages microburst, downdraft actinin S. & F. Ebashi : adrenodoxin Kimura & Suzuki : cytokinin E. Maeda : breomycin H. Umezawa et al.; unexplained alteration of phreomycin< ? : ponasterone K. Nakanishi; < po- + na-, first syllables of Podocarpus nakaii, a : Taiwanese species of podocarp, named in by B. Hayata, after T. Nakai The element na- is thus, strictly speaking, Japanese; but it is very well . hidden. troponin Ebashi & Kodama : phytoecdysone OED2 etymologys.v. phyto-statesprobably first formed in ; Japanesebut no documentation is presented , silent quake also as silent earthquake, Hiroo Kanamori, in Barnhart : ; not found in OED Onlineadvanced search terpolymerization H. Sawadain OED2 s.v. ter- : mechatronics in the English subtitle, Mechatronics Design News, of a Japanese : journal, Mekatoronikusu; Takashi Kenjo recalls using the Japanese form colloquially in < Japanese meka, short for mekanikku mechanics erekutoronikusu electronicsMecha-tronics and mekatoronikusu were submitted as trademarks in ; Japan in and registered in . softnomics OED Online definition states A term coined in Japan Cf. ; . Japanese sofuto, the usual form of sofutouea < software Here we come to a twenty-five-year gap in the record, between and the present. This hiatuswhich roughly coincides with the lapse of time since the completion of OED2represents a time lag between scientific coinage and eventual lexicographical documentation. for this study. There are also bound to be some newhidden Japanese contributions already included in OED Online which have been overlooked while collecting material

3. Anglicization of Coinages by Japanese Authors in a Third Language

Thanks to the meticulous documentation of the OED , a small number of words can be shown to have been coined by Japanese authors in a third language and subsequently to have been transliterated into Englishwith due adjustment to the historical norms of English orthography Because of the dominant role of German . scientific research in Japan during the Meiji, Taisho and early Showa periods, all the examples so far discovered in this category are scientific coinages in research papers

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written and published in German, between and , by Japanese researchers working mainly in Germany. The evidence is to be found in the OED etymology, Of which attributes the term to an author with an unmistakably Japanese name.

course, in some such cases it may be possible that German scientists suggested the neologisms to their Japanese colleagues; but in the absence of evidence for this, it seems preferable to give the Japanese authors the benefit of the doubt, and credit them with coining the names for their own discoveries. On the other hand, words for which joint Japanese and non-JapaneseGermanauthorship is indicated have been omitted, since in such cases attribution of the coinage to the Japanese author would be much more doubtful. Though most are no doubt rarely encountered except by specialists in the given field or by dictionary browsers, these words nevertheless stand as testimony to Japanese researchers contributions not only to the English lexicon, but also to scientific endeavour on a worldwide scale. Here, then, is a list of these Japanese-coined, German-mediated English adoptions, in chronological order of the year of their first OED attestation in Englishin square brackets : karyosome < German KaryosomaM. Ogata ephedrine < German EphedrinS. Nagai ; OED omits German form phytase < German PhytaseU. Suzuki et al. tetrodotoxin < German T etrodotoxinY. Tahara batyl alcohol < German Batyl-alkoholM. Tsujimoto & Y. Toyama selachyl < German SelachylTsujimoto & Toyama pristane < German PristanY. Toyama chimyl alcohol < German ChimylalkoholY. Toyama allopolyploidy < German AllopolyploidieKihara & Ono octopine < German OktopinK. Morizawa kynurenine < German KynureninKotake & Iwao struma lymphomatosa coined in German H. Hashimoto phosphodiesterase < German PhosphodiesteraseS. Uzawa phosphomonoasterase < German PhosphomonoasteraseS. Uzawa depsidone < German DepsidonY. Asahina diosgenin < German DiosgeninTsukamoto & Ueno phospholipase < German PhospholipaseH. Udagawa Of the seventeen items in the above list, perhaps worthy of particular note is ephedrine, the name of an alkaloid drug used to relieve asthma, of which the shrub ephedraEphedra sinica, called mao in Japaneseis the source. Although familiar to very few people other than specialists, the word tetrodotoxin

Hidden Japanese Contributions to the English Lexicon

names a poisonous bacterial substance found mainly in the liver and ovaries of the fugu pufferfish or globefish This fish is a dangerous delicacy in Japanese cuisine, so it is . quite fitting that its poison was discovered and named by a Japanese researcher. Octopus is also a time-honoured Japanese delicacy, and the amino acid octopine was so named because the compound was first found in octopus muscle by yet another unsung Japanese contributor to the English lexicon. Last word The last item in this collection should perhaps be a hacker code symbol fora s giggle or chuckle listed in the New Hacker s DictionaryRaymond : . It is , written / slash. / / , i.e. with three consecutive sequences of a forward and a backward No pronunciation or origin is indicated in the dictionary, but it will be

immediately obvious to anyone who has ever learnt the katakana syllabary that this must represent Japanese Ha ha ha !

Notes
As stated in a letter to his publisher, F.J. Warburg, dated October ; in Orwell : Vol. : . See Rubin : . I am very grateful to David Griffiths for drawing my attention to this reference, and to Shinji Fukuda for providing me with a copy of Rubinbook. s John Morrisin Tokyo from to and William Empsonin Tokyo from to were both colleagues of Orwellin the BBC Eastern Service. See Coppard and Crick : and s , respectively. The entire novel, as well as other works by and on Orwell, can now be electronically searched, free of charge, at http: //www.netcharles.com/orwell/, with the result that one can state with certainty that, for example, reality control occurs three times in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and thought control not even once. A number of terms first attested in Japan were definitely penned by non-Japanese writerse.g. the British seismologist J. Milne, author of the first quotation for tromometric Such terms . have been omitted from this study.

References
Barnhart, Robert K., et al. . Third Barnhart Dictionary of New English. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company. Biographical Dictionary of Japanese History. . Translated by Burton Watson, supervised by Seiichi Iwao. Tokyo: Kodansha International. Cannon, Garland, & Nicholas Warrenassociate ed. The Japanese Contributions to the English . . Language. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Close, Upton. . Challenge: Behind the Face of Japan. New York: Farrar & Rinehart Incorporated. Coppard, Audrey, & Bernard Crick. . Orwell Remembered . London: Ariel BooksBBC . Encarta = Encarta World English Dictionary. . Kathy Rooneyed. in chief London: Bloomsbury . Publishing Plc. Honna, Nobuyuki. . Ch. East Asian Englishes pp. in The Handbook of World Englishes

Bulletin of Fukuoka Womens Junior College

No

Braj B. Kachru et al., eds. London: Blackwell Publishing. . Japan Y Book 1934, The. . K. Inaharaed. Tokyo: The Kenkyusha Press. ear . Kojien . ; electronic version, . Fifth Edition. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Mitchell, Richard H. . Thought Control in Prewar Japan. London: Cornell University Press Ltd. Motwani, Prem. . A Dictionary of Abbreviations and T runcations. Tokyo: Maruzen Co., Ltd. NACSIS Webcat = National Center for Science Information SystemsJapan web-based catalogue. , English version: <http : //webcat.nii.ac.jp/webcat_eng.html>. NODE = The New Oxford Dictionary of English. . Judy Pearsalled. Oxford: Clarendon Press. . NSOED = The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. . Lesley Brown ed. Oxford: Oxford . University Press. OED2 The Oxford English Dictionary. . Second Edition. John A. Simpson & Edmund S.C. Weinereds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . OED Online = The Oxford English Dictionary, Online Edition. Since March ; updated every quarter. John A. Simpsoned. in chief Oxford: Oxford University Press, via <http : //dictionary. . oed.com>. Orwell, George. . Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg. Orwell, George. . The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume As I Please, : 1943-1945; Volume In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus eds. : . Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Oxford Dictionary of Catchphrases. . Compiled by Anna Farkas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raymond, Eric S. . The New HackerDictionary. Second Edition. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. s Rubin, Jay. . Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Sanseido Sanseidos Concise Dictionary of Katakana Words. . Hirofumi Ishino et al.eds. Tokyo: Sanseido Co., Ltd. . SNKD2 Shogakukan Nihon Kokugo Daijiten. Second Edition. . Tokyo: Shogakukan Inc. W10 Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary. . Tenth Edition. Frederick C. Mished. in chief . Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, Inc.