On yams and being Japanese...

It's not all just Japanese round here at Cadwell Heights these days. I do try and squeeze in other reading besides my poxy textbooks.
Right now, I'm enjoying a book called Cultural Anthropology. It sounds heavy, but it's very accessible and full of lots of interesting case studies and anecdotes from cultures all over the world (many of which are disappearing as I type).
I'm especially interested in the parts where the author (Roger M. Keesing) talks about how 'world view is encoded in a language'.
He refers to a famous case study of the Trobriand Islanders of the Southwest Pacific (certain Australians who may be reading this will know way more about the topic than yours truly!)
One of the anthropologists who have worked on the data from this island people is Dorothy Lee.
She writes in one passage, 'If I were to go with a Trobriander to a garden where the taytu, a species of yam, had just been harvested, I would come back and tell you: "There are good taytu there; just the right degree of ripeness, large and perfectly shaped; not a blight to be seen, not one rotten spot..." The Trobriander would come back and say "Taytu"; and he would have said all that I did and more... '(Lee 1949:402)
Now, if I didn’t live in Japan and if I had never studied Japanese, I don’t think her words would have meant anything to me.
But as it is, I totally get what she’s talking about.
In Japan, by saying one word or phrase, I can convey what would take me ten words or even a whole page of writing in English. Japanese is beautifully and excruciatingly brief and ambiguous at times. Saying words like ‘おいしい oishii: delicious’, ‘大丈夫 daijobu: OK’ or ‘よろしくyoroshiku: well’ can communicate deep layers of meaning in certain situations that I’m only now starting to fathom.
But similarly, there are times when to translate one word from English, for example ‘you’, I need to choose whole sentences in Japanese. The simple act of addressing another person can force me to consider register, politeness, ranking, humility, and respect. It can be mind-boggling.
Another quick illustration: You know those old fashioned LED screens you see in train stations, airports and the like? The ones that give public announcements or the weather or stock market information? Well I never understood their usefulness until I could read Japanese.
I remember trying to read these boards in English and standing there mouthing out the words as they slowly passed along the screen. The……8.15……train……will……depart……from……platform……14. It all seemed so slow and inconvenient. I often thought an old piece of paper would have worked way more efficiently.
But now I realise these screens were developed here in Japan. As ‘we’ Japanese read in pictures, you can fit whole, complicated sentences in just one screen flash. It’s brilliant. They work great in a Japanese context.
Language, culture and worldview are intimately entwined. Are Japanese people ambiguous, flexible, compromising and accommodating because their language is so? Or is it the other way around and the people have turned out that way because of the language they use?
It has been suggested that the Japanese should simplify their language. Why not adopt a roman script instead of the Chinese characters and two main kana syllabaries used at present? But this idea has always been quickly shot down. To fully express what being Japanese means, the full language, in all its eccentricity and complication, is necessary.
Please note that I only started saying ‘we’ Japanese when my language ability developed beyond a few survival phrases. In fact, it coincided with starting to be able to read and write.
It prompts the question what does being Japanese really mean. If I lived 20 years in America or Australia or Canada, other people might start calling me American. But if I live twenty years in Japan and learn to speak the language fluently, will I ever be called Japanese? People of Korean or Chinese ancestries who speak Japanese like a native are regularly called Japanese (sometimes to their chagrin). Will the day ever come when a person of Irish ancestry will be treated in the same way?
Sorry if this entry ended up coming out like half-baked dissertation proposal. I just thought the whole topic was really interesting. You can all wake up now.