Asian Ethnicities (2c)—Japan ("Yamato")

A year ago on Round and Square (13 July 2011)—Seinfeld Ethnography: High Stakes Betting

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Asian Ethnicities" 

Click here for other posts dealing with East Asian ethnic majorities:  

China 1       China 2       China 3       Japan 1       Japan 2       Japan 3       Korea 1       Korea 2       Korea 3

[a] Expression RF

The first three entries (each in several segments) for the Round and Square series "Asian Ethnicities" deal with the majority ethnic groups in China, Japan, and Korea. We are starting with these groups precisely because they permeate all of the nooks and crannies of their respective histories. Indeed, the history of China is often taught (and this is especially true in Chinese schools) as the history of the Han ethnicity. As we shall see, this is particularly problematic in China, since the history of China can better—this is my opinion—be taught as a constant set of interactions with ethnic groups to the west, south, and especially north. It is no less important in Japan and Korea, however. The relative homgeneity of those populations exacerbate the problems, and engagement with various ethnic groups tends to be even further marginalized. I hope to give, in these introductory posts, a way of thinking about majority ethnicity in China, Japan, and Korea. These are by no means my last word on the subject(s). As you can see from the introduction to this series, these are works in process and are meant to be essays in every sense of the term. 

[b] Marked RF

Cultural Life

Social life has changed markedly in Japan since the Meiji Era (1868-1912) and the end of World War II (1945), and Japan has long been considered one of the world’s most productive societies. Even with a falling birth rate and an economy that has not recovered from its peaks in the 1970s and 1980s, Japan remains a central player on the world stage. Japan’s ethnic homogeneity has figured in international politics during this time, and it is not infrequently heard in private conversations that Japan’s “strengths” is due in large part to that very homogeneity. Such a view is troubling to many in Japan, but it remains a significant theme in Japanese expressions of national identity. This is by no means an historical issue, either.

In 1986, Japanese prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone made a statement that received world-wide attention.

       So high is the level of education in our country that Japan is an intelligent 
       society. Our average score is much higher than those of countries like the U.S. 
       There are many [minorities] in America. In consequence the average score 
       over there is exceedingly low.

Attempting to clarify these remarks when the situation proved challenging diplomatically, Nakasone continued:

       But there are things the Americans have not been able to do because of 
       multiple nationalities there…On the contrary, things are easier in Japan 
       because we are a monoracial society.

[c] Pedigree RF

This view, while certainly not universal, is common in Japan, and is clearly an outgrowth of the dominance of “Yamato” ethnicity on the main island of Honshu and throughout Japanese history. Yet only the Japanese royal family could make anything resembling a coherent argument for a kind of Yamato pedigree. Royal alliances have been so carefully negotiated for the past 1,500 years that such a notion might be considered plausible. Its weakness is that of all arguments for ethnic authenticity. The notion of a “pure” line is flawed from its start, because it assumes an impossible fiction—the fiction of a primal ethnic grouping.

Beyond the imperial line, the history of Japan–much like that of Korea or China—shows an interplay between and among groups. That such assimilation or intermarriage is less common than in, say, China, is indisputable. On the other hand, intermarriage with Chinese and Koreans was so common during the period in which the Japanese state was solidified that, by the early Heian period (c.1000), it was said that a third of all aristocratic families had foreign ancestors. As we have seen, it is far easier to define an ongoing and resilient Yamato culture that has spanned the centuries than to pinpoint anything resembling a pure Yamato ethnicity.

[d] Ongoing RF

Despite expressions of ethnic superiority in some circles, such attitudes are by no means universal, and intermarriage is more common today than at any time in the documented past. This is especially relevant to the two largest indigenous ethnic groups in Japanese society—the Ainu to the north, on the island of Hokkaido, and the Ryukyuan people in Okinawa prefecture. In both cases, assimilation and intermarriage has led to remarkable changes in the cultural makeup of the groups. These have not by any means been seamless or without conflict, and anti-Japanese resentment has been common among both groups.

Perhaps the most difficult ongoing situation of this nature in Japan today has occurred with a group that is not, strictly speaking, ethnically distinct. The Buraku people (Burakumin) have been stigmatized for centuries. They were originally perceived as an employment group that was considered to be outcaste because members worked in ritually “impure” occupations ranging from tanners and butchers to undertakers. Although the caste system was abolished in the early years of the Meiji era, discrimination has remained in employment, marriage, and even—although far less commonly today—real estate purchases.

All of these groups have higher profiles within and beyond Japan than they have had in the past. Each one has also been defined to a very large extent by its interactions over the decades and even centuries with Japan’s “Yamato” culture. This is equally true of other groups in Japan today, many of which are larger. These include significant numbers from China (including the Republic of China on Taiwan), Korea (mostly South Korea), Brazil, and the Philippines. Even so, the total foreign population does not exceed two percent, and all ethnic politics takes place under assumptions of overwhelmingly numerical superiority.

[e] Overwhelming RF

Click here for other posts dealing with East Asian ethnic majorities:  

China 1       China 2       China 3       Japan 1       Japan 2       Japan 3       Korea 1       Korea 2       Korea 3

Asian Ethnicities (2b)—Japan ("Yamato")

A year ago on Round and Square (12 July 2011)—Baseball Middles: The All Star Game

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Asian Ethnicities" 

Click here for other posts dealing with East Asian ethnic majorities:  

China 1       China 2       China 3       Japan 1       Japan 2       Japan 3       Korea 1       Korea 2       Korea 3

[a] Nature RF

The first three entries (each in several segments) for the Round and Square series "Asian Ethnicities" deal with the majority ethnic groups in China, Japan, and Korea. We are starting with these groups precisely because they permeate all of the nooks and crannies of their respective histories. Indeed, the history of China is often taught (and this is especially true in Chinese schools) as the history of the Han ethnicity. As we shall see, this is particularly problematic in China, since the history of China can better—this is my opinion—be taught as a constant set of interactions with ethnic groups to the west, south, and especially north. It is no less important in Japan and Korea, however. The relative homgeneity of those populations exacerbate the problems, and engagement with various ethnic groups tends to be even further marginalized. I hope to give, in these introductory posts, a way of thinking about majority ethnicity in China, Japan, and Korea. These are by no means my last word on the subject(s). As you can see from the introduction to this series, these are works in process and are meant to be essays in every sense of the term.

[b] Flourishing RF

Social and Economic Life 

By the tenth century, a distinct way of life had emerged on the islands of Japan. It represented a blending of institutions and cultural patterns from abroad, combined with a distinctly indigenous way of speaking and living. This can be seen even today in the Japanese language. There are "Chinese" (on) pronunciations and "Japanese" (kun) ones. It is not unusual for a single character to have three, four, five, or more "readings" that merge all sorts of earlier patterns, many of which have connections to Japan’s early history, with roots in the uji and Shinto religious practices of the early Common Era. 

The political changes that took place over the next millennium were formidable, but the key point for our purposes is that virtually all of the drama was played out between families and clans with Yamato ancestry. The major periods that followed the dramatic state building of the first millennium CE showed a continuing give-and-take between powers of the capital region and the strengths of the provinces further afield. Class distinctions were changing in profound ways, even as ethnicity hardly created a blip of difference beyond fervent borrowing from China.

The Heian (794-1185) saw both the flourishing of Japanese literary culture (the period was made famous by the Tale of Genji and other masterworks) and the centrality of the capital city in political matters. Behind the scenes, however, an overwhelming transition was taking place. The economic fuel that powered this ostensibly capital-centered political system was provided by the growing “estates” (shoen) that began dotting the countryside on the main island of Honshu since almost the time of Prince Shotoku. On the surface, then, the state seemed to be centralizing. The longer-term process would not be apparent for many years, but by the twelfth century it was clear that power had shifted decidedly to the periphery, along with a social structure that would dominate Japanese life until the nineteenth century.

[c] Dominance RF

Territorial strongmen and a kind of warrior that came to be known as bushi or samurai gained dominance, and the artificial but significant rankings of samurai, farmer, artisan, and merchant (in descending order) became cemented in the Japanese consciousness. This social order so profoundly dominated Japanese life in the second millennium CE that all future political and military strategies until the 1860s would require a balancing of regional warlords and central authority. While Chinese society during the same period would see a constant negotiation and renegotiation of ethnicity— as “foreign” powers vied for ascendancy and Han Chinese occupied regions to the south and west—the Japanese historical dynamic played out almost exclusively within a singular ethnic group. In short, occupation dominated social thought far more than ethnicity in Japanese history; it was as though everyone was on the same large “team,” and the prizes were garnered by making distinctions within the in-group rather than in competition with outsiders. Like a Republican primary in Utah (or a Democratic one in Chicago), the real competition was within the dominant team.

Through it all, one further force of ethnic and national identity flowed as a cultural constant—the imperial family that was linked to the Sun Goddess from the earliest decades of the Yamato state. To this day, the Japanese imperial line is spoken of as an unbroken succession of 125 emperors, all of whom—in a secret ritual last carried out in 1989—“merged” with the Sun Goddess to achieve a kind of imperial immortality that has been used for purposes both peaceful and profoundly warlike over the centuries. Although the Showa Emperor renounced the divinity of the emperorship in 1945, it is significant that the ceremony was still carried out for the succession of his son in 1989. It is another small glimpse into early Yamato images of legitimacy and centrality in the political life of a formidable modern democracy.

[d] Identity RF

Click here for other posts dealing with East Asian ethnic majorities:  

China 1       China 2       China 3       Japan 1       Japan 2       Japan 3       Korea 1       Korea 2       Korea 3

Asian Ethnicities (2a)—Japan ("Yamato")

A year ago on Round and Square (11 July 2011)—Baseball MIddles: Catcher in the Fire

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Asian Ethnicities" 

Click here for other posts dealing with East Asian ethnic majorities:  

China 1       China 2       China 3       Japan 1       Japan 2       Japan 3       Korea 1       Korea 2       Korea 3 

[a] Heartland RF

The first three entries (each in several segments) for the Round and Square series "Asian Ethnicities" deal with the majority ethnic groups in China, Japan, and Korea. We are starting with these groups precisely because they permeate all of the nooks and crannies of their respective histories. Indeed, the history of China is often taught (and this is especially true in Chinese schools) as the history of the Han ethnicity. As we shall see, this is particularly problematic in China, since the history of China can better—this is my opinion—be taught as a constant set of interactions with ethnic groups to the west, south, and especially north. It is no less important in Japan and Korea, however. The relative homgeneity of those populations exacerbate the problems, and engagement with various ethnic groups tends to be even further marginalized. I hope to give, in these introductory posts, a way of thinking about majority ethnicity in China, Japan, and Korea. These are by no means my last word on the subject(s). As you can see from the introduction to this series, these are works in process and are meant to be essays in every sense of the term.

Yamato 大和 

The people of Yamato dominate Japanese history, as well as almost all Japanese discussions of ethnicity. Using this term in the history of the dominant ethnic group in Japan is not without peril, especially since the concept of a kind of racial purity developed in the late-nineteenth century, distinguishing “Japanese” or “Yamato” from other ethnic groups on surrounding islands (the Ainu to the north, the Ryukuans to the south) and several others who made up the Japanese overseas empire during the Meiji (1865-1912) and later periods, up to the end of World War II. The term has been used both as a kind of self-identification for in-group as well as a sometimes fierce expression of disdain for those who were not its members. This negative strain has been shown in Japanese perceptions of Koreans and Taiwanese during Japan’s imperial period (1895-1945) and can be seen today with regard to treatment of Burakumin and other minority groups in Japan.

[b] Background RF

Although many ethnic groups have strong senses of identity that often contrast the in-group quite markedly with outer groups, there are historical and cultural reasons that this kind of sentiment has remained powerful throughout Japan’s history. Japan’s distinctive island setting and consistent interpretations of its cultural history have provided some of the background for these perceptions. 

The chief reason for the distinctive role of Japan in early East Asian history is its location—an island complex distant from Korea by over one hundred miles, and with even exploration of adjoining islands and ethnic groups occurring late recently in Japanese history. Unlike its East Asian neighbors, Korea and Vietnam, Japan was never invaded by Chinese armies. Chinese influences penetrated Japan more conspicuously than they did in Korea. They did not seep across a shared border but came rather came by ship. Political thinkers, writers, and religious figures consciously drew on Chinese tradition in a way that would have been impossible were the influence less obvious. As a major scholar, Edwin Reischauer, has noted:

       Early in their history the Japanese developed the habit of cataloguing foreign 
       influences and contrasting them with native characteristics. One result has 
       been a frequent emphasis in Japanese history on supposedly "native" 
       Japanese traits.

It is important to consider these matters from several perspectives that have ebbed and flowed throughout Japanese history. They are intertwined to the point of contradiction, but they go far toward understanding Japanese ethnic identity throughout history and even today. 
            [1] A tendency in Japan to see its history only in terms of native traits,

            and casting aside most everything borrowed as mere "icing." 

            [2] The opposite tendency, mostly by outsiders, to characterize Japan

            merely as a nation of borrowers who take from other countries and

            have few ideas of their own. 

[c] Groupings RF

Geography and History 
The Japan that emerged slowly into the Common Era was essentially a tribal society, very much like that of early Korea. It was divided into a great number of family groups called uji, each under a hereditary chief and worshipping an uji god, commonly thought of as its ancestor. Subordinate to these aristocratic uji were occupational groupings known as be, organized as agricultural communities or performing other services such as fishing, weaving, pottery making, and divining.

The Yamato state was probably in origin an uji with connections to the Sun Goddess, which would become a pivotal figure in Japanese history and identity over the next fifteen centuries. By the fifth century the Yamato had won a vague supremacy over the other uji groupings—classifying them as either "country vassals" or "attendant vassals," but preserving the idea that all were meant to serve the "main" line linked to the Sun Goddess.

By the sixth century the "Sun line" as many have called it, was expanding its own wealth and power at the expense of the local uji and subordinate be units. The growth of this ethnic group and the consolidation of a Japanese state were interwoven in large and small ways.

[d] Pattern RF

The growing strength and institutional complexity of the Yamato state were in part the result of continuing contacts with the continent, particularly Korea. There was a steady flow of people from Korea to Japan that lasted up until the early ninth century that tends to get downplayed when talk turns (as it inevitably must) to cultural influence from China. To underline the Korean influence, more than a third of aristocratic families listed in the early ninth century claimed Korean ancestry.

Among the many elements of continental civilization that came to Japan by way of Korea was Buddhism. Although its was assimilated gradually, its official introduction is dated to 552, when the Korean state of Paekche presented an image and scriptures to the Yamato court. The new religion was opposed by conservative groups, but was embraced by the Soga uji, which was to emerge victorious over its rivals in a great succession war in 587. Following this, the Soga firmly established Buddhism at court.

Yamato influence was cemented in the late-sixth and early-seventh centuries with several state-building measures meant to solidify their control. The victory of the Soga clan in 587 made them supreme at the Yamato court. Their chief put his niece on the throne and appointed her nephew, Prince Shotoku (574–622), regent. Shotoku and the Soga elders proceeded to carry out a series of innovations that were to shape Japanese society and government quite consciously on the pattern of China.

In 604 Shotoku issued a set of precepts known as the "Seventeen Article Constitution,” which advocated—in heavily Confucian rhetoric mixed with Buddhist strains—such ideas as the complete supremacy of the ruler, the centralization of government, and a bureaucracy staffed by a merit-selected group of officials. That same year Shotoku adopted the Chinese calendar. A few decades later the fascination with the Chinese calendar sparked an interest in a process of counting in cycles of sixty years, which Yamato thinkers used to solidify their argument for rule. They traced the cycle back twenty-one times for a total of 1,260 years, and selected the date of 660 BCE for the founding of the Japanese state and the first emperor, Jimmu.

[e] Transition RF

Perhaps most significantly, in 603 Shotoku adopted a major aspect of Chinese centralized bureaucratic rule—the system of personal court ranks for officials, assigned in accordance with the posts they held. These gradually replaced the uji ranks as the major designations of status. Although not nearly as large in scale as the Chinese system from which it was drawn, these markers gradually replaced the hereditary uji ranks as the major designations of status. This transition did as much to solidify Yamato influence in the Japanese state—with an influence that lasted many centuries—as any other.

After Shotoku's death, the Soga alienated the other court families by their despotic rule and were eventually crushed in 645 in a coup engineered by a prince, the future Emperor Tenchi (r. 668-671) and a supporter, who was rewarded with a new family name that was to resound in later ages—Fujiwara. As Fujiwara no Kamatari (614–669), he became the leader of a family that was to dominate the Japanese court for nearly five hundred years. Tenchi and Kamatari embarked on a second great wave of reforms based on the Chinese model of centralized government. Taika, meaning "Great Change," was borrowed from the Chinese predilection for reign titles, and the reforms that commenced in 645 and were carried out over the next several years.

A capital with Chinese–style buildings was erected at Naniwa (near present–day Osaka) at the eastern end of the Inland Sea; central government ministries were set up and efforts were made to establish uniform rule over the provinces and to institute the centralized Chinese system of taxation. A census was carried out toward this end in 670, and law codes of a Chinese type were drawn up. The reforms that took shape represented a set of pragmatic compromises between the new court, existing institutions, and the various uji that retained some power. Slowly the Japanese state—and the descendants of Yamato—began to be reshaped in the image of Tang China.

This adaptation is the key point in Yamato dominance in the Chinese state. They mastered the transition from small uji and be groups until—with one clan or another in the ascendant until modern times, and an unbroken line of “Sun-Goddess” emperors—the transition was made to a Chinese-style centralized state.

[f] Sun Godliness RF

Click here for other posts dealing with East Asian ethnic majorities:  

China 1       China 2       China 3       Japan 1       Japan 2       Japan 3       Korea 1       Korea 2       Korea 3

Kanji Mastery—Introduction

Click here for the Kanji Mastery Resource Center (all posts available)

[a] Path to Mastery   RF

This introduction is meant for a general audience, although most "general readers" will find it a challenge to "hang on" through some of the language terms. As I wrote in the introduction to Katakana Culture, though, it is worth your while, and I hope that you will stay. Just grasping a little bit of how the languages "work" can be a cultural experience in its own right, and worth any number of books written "about" China, Japan, or Korea. From this point onward, the going may be difficult, but be sure to give the various "Kanji Mastery" posts a try when you see them. You may well enjoy learning to notice how some of the "radicals" as they are called, appear in many different characters (all it takes is desire to "learn visually"), and all of the posts will have pictures. It is hard to go wrong there.

***  ***

This series of posts is about one overarching goal shared by many students of East Asian languages—Kanji (漢字) Mastery.

These posts are meant to be a hands-on primer for the written script used in China, Japan, and Korea. It is mostly geared toward students of Japanese, however, because they seem to struggle the most with the sheer volume of characters in the language. This has always puzzled me. The student of Chinese has, on the face of it at least, the much rougher job. She has only characters—there is no other game in town. Nothing but what some people call ideographs and should properly be called logographs. One of my fellow graduate students many years ago—a Japanese literature specialist taking classical Chinese because all students of Japanese history and culture need to know it—flung his arms in exasperation, and said:

I can't take it anymore. It's all just rows and rows of kanji marching down the page!

He has a point. Take a look at two texts—one Chinese and one Japanese. The Japanese text has the characters "smoothed" (a kind of respite is one way to look at it) by "softer" graphs from the hiragana and katakana syllabaries. The Chinese text is, well, just rows and rows of characters "marching" relentlessly down the page.

[b] Chinese

[c] Japanese

The Chinese text on the left contains another interesting feature of early East Asian writing—there is no punctuation. This accentuates the appearance of "rows and rows of kanji marching down the page." Without even the brief rest provided by a comma or a full stop, the literary labor goes far beyond just handling meaning and syntax. It is up to the reader to interpret how each thought begins and ends on top of it all.

What about Japanese? Consider the Japanese text on the right. I am writing this for both students of Japanese and non-specialists, so bear with me, language scholars. Do you see a difference? My friend in graduate school certainly did. He adamantly maintained that Japanese was "softer," "friendlier," and "more inviting."

Anyone who has every studied fine points of Japanese grammar might beg to differ with the last two words, but that is another story for another time.

Let's get back to kanji. There is a great deal of misinformation out there, and even students of East Asian languages often don't know much about "how many" characters a person "needs" to know. Just a quick skim over a few web pages give numbers ranging from "about a thousand" (this is ridiculously low, and not even near a bare-literacy rate) to "over fifty thousand" (which is so ludicrously high as to contain almost every character that was ever used for anything...in three thousand years of prolific writing, document compilation, and esoterica).

In Chinese, a person who knows two thousand characters well (we will get back to what "well" means later) can make her way through a few texts with a reasonable range of comprehension. If she gets up to three thousand, she will have fewer of those head-scratching moments when reading. Approaching five thousand, a reader has probably developed a few useful skills even beyond recognizing (and being able to pronounce with probable accuracy) almost all characters on most text pages. She has quite likely also developed something far more important than those extra few thousand characters (which got her up into the five thousand range). She has most likely learned tens, if not hundreds, of character combinations for the most basic (foundational) two or three thousand. Although we'll tackle this subject later on in our Kanji Mastery posts, remember that it is one of the keys to the whole kingdom. Character combinations.

[d] Watch Out for 蟹   RF

Beyond five thousand characters, the student of Chinese has stopped counting—probably long ago. When people estimate character knowledge on the part of skilled readers (advanced students, scholars, and so forth) they tend to end up somewhere in the seven or eight thousand character range. No one at these levels (native speaker or foreign reader) seems very interested in the "how many?" question anymore, and that should be a clarion call to those of you who are still "counting characters." On top of that, even someone who—let's use an improbable example—knew and fairly regularly used ten thousand characters in her work would still be leaving at least 40,000 characters untapped, sitting in the Kangxi Emperor's dictionary (and other large tomes).

Now let's take a look at Japan and the challenges confronting the student of Japanese writing. If this were, say, 1711 or 1811, I would have one thing to say: you need to know all of the characters that the Chinese readers know. There would be no distinction whatsoever, and that is a point too often lost on today's students of Japanese. The skilled reader in Japanese history could read all of the Japanese tradition and all of the Chinese. Period (except when they didn't have them).

It is a little bit different today, now that the language reforms have taken root in Japan. Now we have a little thing called the joyo kanji (常用漢字) list. It was meant to make things easier, but that is a matter of definition. It seems easier, on the face of it. There a few more than two thousand characters that are meant to be for "everyday use" after the 2010 language updates. Two thousand! We could just memorize those as 2,000 little sets of chicken scratches and we'd be all right, wouldn't we?

Wouldn't we?

Nope. It sure doesn't seem that way. This is a difficult question for me, because I started with Chinese and those rows and rows of marching kanji. I also have spent a fair amount of time studying the etymology of the characters, so it seems fairly straightforward. There is a very real problem here, though. Many, many Japanese language students of very great skill "hit the wall" at a thousand or so of them. This is not even halfway to a modest goal. What is wrong?

Let me start by stating in the clearest terms possible (and this is not meant just to make y'all feel good): it is not a problem of intellect. Students of Japanese come in all abilities, but no one has ever claimed that they lack intelligence or drive. No, something else is at work, and it is not likely to make students feel any better. You see, for every "radical" that a very good reader of Chinese (five thousand or more characters) knows, a Japanese reader needs to recognize far fewer combinations. That sounds good, but it most definitely is not.

Let's take a look at radical #159, "cart." The Chinese and Japanese reader both see the common graphs with the "radical" in them. The student of Japanese who has learned the entire joyo kanji list recognizes twelve of them.

"Cart" Radical Characters Appearing in the Japanese "Everyday Use" List
車 䡄 軒 軟 転 軸 軽 較 輪 輸 轄 輩

The Chinese reader, in order to get into the five to seven thousand character range, also needs to be able to recognize the radical and its combinations. At the bottom end of the range, there are forty-one; at the upper end there are close to eighty. Let's stay with the bottom end here, but let's not lose the larger point, either. The "repeats" come thick and fast once you get "up there" in character recognition. Forty more combinations (double the list below) of the same stuff appear as you move from about five thousand characters to the college-graduate level of about seven thousand. In short, Chinese just keeps going over the same territory and combining things in slightly different ways.

"Cart" Radical Characters Appearing in "everyday" writing for Chinese readers (approximately 5,000 characters)
車 軋 軍 軌 軒 軔 軟 軛 軸 軻 輩 較 載 輒 輔 輕 輓 輝 輥 輛 輦 輪 輜 輻 輵 輳 輸 輯 輾 轄 轂 輿 轅 轉 轇 轍 轎 轕 轕 轟 轡 轤

And this is the situation for the vast majority of the 214 traditional radicals.

This may seem to be a boon for the student of Japanese, but it has turned out instead to be a terrible curse. You see, native speakers know a whole bunch of words, and, at some point, it doesn't really matter to them whether those words are expressed in characters or kana. The foreign learner inevitably has far less depth, not the least because she did not grow up with the language. This causes enormous problems for the Japanese learner just as things start getting easier for the Chinese learner. While the native Japanese reader "knows" the words associated with the "Chinese" list above, the foreign student almost always does not. This creates more and more problems...the further one gets into the study of the language.

[e] Decisions   RF

One more thing needs to be mentioned before we end the misery, and it is an even bigger reason why students of Japanese have a harder time getting to the meager goal of two thousand characters than students of Chinese have getting to five thousand. It is precisely because the student of Chinese (who has to learn five thousand characters to be able to read) recognizes many more ways of combining elements of characters than the frustrated Japanese student who, in many ways, is faced with learning two thousand almost arbitrary sets of squiggles.

Let's take one more look at an element of characters that some of the early Jesuit scholars called "phonetics." There are over eight hundred of these, and they combine with "radicals" to form the vast majority of characters.  Compare one phonetic that Japanese speakers would confront in learning the list of joyo kanji with the number the Chinese speaker would face in reaching an "equivalent" level of fluency. It is an important element in East Asian etymology, and appears in many dictionary combinations. It's basic meaning is "How?" or "Why," but it is used as a pronunciation key more than anything. The Jesuits list it as phonetic # 443.

"How" Element Appearing in the Japanese "Everyday Use" List 
渇　喝　褐　掲

"How" Element Appearing in "everyday" writing for Chinese readers (approximately 5,000 characters)

曷 喝 褐 鞨 鶡 蝎 猲 歇 謁 暍 竭 揭 碣 愒 楬 羯 葛 渴 遏 堨 餲

What makes it so hard to learn just two thousand characters? Precisely the fact that there is so little overlap. As one works up the scale in Chinese, everything becomes easier, like mixing and matching shirts and ties (radicals and phonetics) in a large wardrobe. In Japanese (the joyo list is like a suitcase), there are few enough combinations to begin (just take another look at the list above), and then they're gone...like a sad country song. The words that native speakers know are still there to torment you, but the characters have been eaten by the joyo list.

***  ***

In these posts, I hope to give you some of the tools that you will need to tackle these "character problems." I have been teaching a course called Kanji Mastery for five years now, and am planning to put some of my materials together here. Included in that will be a twelve-point plan for gaining mastery. We will tackle those topics in large and small chunks as we proceed in the coming months.

And that brings us, finally, to the very concept of mastery. What might I mean by such a phrase? Let's just paint an image and call it a day. There will be plenty of room in the various posts in the coming months for the discussion of details. Just close your eyes and relax. Envision kanji mastery.

It is a day in the not-too-distant future when, reading along in, let us say, in 雪国 you turn page after page as the story unfolds, and you are mesmerized by the tale itself. Your mind briefly wanders to a time when you never could have done this. Enjoying a challenging novel without misery was beyond your dreams back then, until you braced yourself for serious study toward kanji mastery.

[f] Reading  RF

Now, as the afternoon sun shines through the picture window onto your dictionary. It is in the other room, sitting on a table, unused. It is not that you look down on dictionaries. Far from it—now you read them the way other people read magazines. Now you know how to use a dictionary, and know that you won't need it while enjoying your novel—not in a state of kanji mastery.

You smile, and are about to feel even a bit full of yourself when, by chance, on the middle of page 189 you see something you haven't seen for some time. What is this? Could it be...? Yes, you think so. One of the characters beyond the joyo kanji list has crept in. But this one is even far beyond that, because you have known for a long time that you need to double the joyo list to be a truly excellent reader. No problem. You are on the path to kanji mastery.

There are only a few things left to attain true mastery, and they are within your grasp.

You look at the character, and then at the dictionary. You keep reading, because the story is pulling you along, and you already have rich context for its probable meaning. It can wait.

You are on the very verge of mastery. There is but one more thing. How do you feel?

You turn back to your book, and feel a tingle of exhilaration mixed with joy as you continue to read, for you know that at some point—later tonight, and perhaps over a nice cup of cocoa—you will open your dictionary and ponder your new friend, the new kanji you have never seen before.

You will admire it from all sides—its packaging (as it were), its shape, and its nuances. You will ponder it slowly, treasuring its aesthetic and its substance, and it will cross your mind that only for one other thing do you show such care, such joy, such reverence.

It will be just like opening a package—fresh from Sapporo—of Hokkaido white chocolates.

[g] 白い恋人   AD

 Then you'll know.