Chapter IV

One need not go to the records of her patent-office to confirm the wide-spread impression that the Japanese mainly imitate. Merely to skim through one of the phrase-books so carefully compiled to give the casual traveler all the words and phrases except those he will really need is to unearth ample evidence on this score. Philologically speaking, if one may convict on such slight testimony, the Japanese language is visibly a hodgepodge, a _potpourri_, an _ollo podrida_; in other words, a mess. I cannot carry the curious reader back to their gleanings from the Malaysian fields from which perhaps they sprang, from the Yemishi, or “hairy Ainu,” whose place in the sun they usurped, nor yet do more than repeat the common knowledge that they fish new words from the Chinese classics far more freely than we of the West help ourselves to a needed tidbit of Latin or Greek. But their later history can be sketched with a handful of words chosen almost at random from one of these simple vocabularies-for-travelers, words which bring back to mind the days when the Portuguese, the Dutch, then the English-speaking races, and finally, in restricted fields, the Germans and the French spread out linguistic displays for their choosing.

Could, for example, a fat volume on “Japanese Cleanliness through the Ages” say more than does the fact that their word for “soap” is “_shabon_”? The Portuguese brought it, of course, and they did not “discover” Japan for the Western world until exactly half a century after Columbus sighted the West Indies. To this day “_pan_” remains the Japanese word for “bread”—or for the horrible dough-balls which their semi-Europeanized cooks occasionally perpetrate. If the Lusitanians brought them the Western substitute for rice, they were repaid by carrying back tea, which in the Portuguese tongue is to this day known by the Japanese—or Chinese—word “_cha_.” Reminders of the two and a half centuries during which a dozen Dutch traders, imprisoned on a little swampy island in their westernmost port, were the only white men permitted to come into contact with the Nipponese are still scattered through the speech of the masses. The children of Nagasaki still call Europeans indiscriminately “Orando-san” (Mr. Hollander); it would probably be unearthing no scandal to conclude that the _tabako_ and _beeru_ so generously stocked throughout the island empire came from the same source. At length came the Americans, and the English, with their ships and railways, and all the complicated paraphernalia of modern civilization—and one inquires one’s way to the _suteishon_, perhaps to ask the uniformed coolie who is lighting a _rampu_ there for a _matchi_ with which to incinerate one of the miserable _maki-tabako_ inflicted upon its people by the Japanese Imperial Government Tobacco Monopoly.

It is a rare Japanese even to-day who uses a _hankechi_ in place of a wad of soft native paper; and though _aisukuriimu_ now and then offers to minister to a parched and dusty throat, it may be better on the whole to await one’s return to Philadelphia. The letter _l_ is for the Japanese tongue the greatest stumbling-block in Western speech; hence one is warned that predatory mosquitos may cause _marariya_, that the train is about to enter a _tunneru_, that there is not a _hoteru_ in town, but only Japanese inns. Newboys occasionally announce their ability to supply the “Mairu” as well as the “Taimusu”; in the first- and second-class waiting-room of important stations may be found, in a cover with large embossed gold letters, the “REGURATIONS” of the Imperial Government Railways.

German, say those who should know, is sometimes heard in barracks and on drill-field, localities with no welcoming smile for the foreigner, and here and there it has left its impress upon the schoolroom; but the casual traveler will be more likely to run across it in the realms of physicians and druggists, should misfortune turn his attention thither. In a land where virtually all others interested in attracting a foreign clientele announce themselves in what purports at least to be English, the native leech with the excuse for his presumption of a visit to Germany, or of a Berlin correspondent, calls himself a “Praktische Artz” and his establishment an “AugenundohrenheilAnstalt.”

When the desk-man of a Japanese inn comes to obliterate his legs and bow his head on the more or less spotless matting of the room assigned you and discovers to his horror that you cannot write—in the crippled hieroglyphics with which he is familiar—the information demanded by the ever-inquisitive police, he still declines to believe that the printed questions on the tissue-paper register in his hand are worse than Greek to you. Many a time I have had a hotel “boy” give up hope of making me understand some verbal remark, only to see him triumphantly jot it down for me in his irrational ideographs, or invisibly write it with a finger on his open palm. A Chinese or Korean would no more catch the meaning of his spoken word than I, but they would almost certainly recognize its conventionalized picture; therefore why should not also this other _gwai-koku-jin_, or “outside-country man”? A roughly drawn square means a mouth or opening, an entrance or an exit, to all three races, though their respective verbal terms for it may be utterly devoid of similarity—merely to mention one example among thousands.

Travelers in at least as good a position as I to know have reported the Japanese excellent linguists. My own brief experience implies quite the contrary. The study of English is obligatory in the higher schools, yet I have rarely found even a square-capped, beskirted university student capable of understanding three consecutive words of my native tongue, or of comprehensively pronouncing half a dozen nouns. I looked in vain for any improvement in this respect since I first wandered through Japan a score of years ago. If there is any, it is among the higher officials of those government departments or large industrial enterprises where it is indispensable, and with whom the average traveler rarely comes in contact. Among the rank and file, even of the educated, with mild exceptions in favor of what were once treaty-ports, there are now and then unexpected oases of comprehension, but almost never anything dependable. I am quite ready to admit myself in error, but I carried away the impression that the average American school-boy retains more French or German from a two-year course than does the newly graduated Japanese youth from his five or six years of English.

The comparison is, I hasten to admit, not entirely fair. An Oriental language is far more widely separated from our own than is any of the important tongues of Europe. If the Japanese student struggling with English finds his way beset with as great difficulties as I found mine in attempting to piece together a minimum vocabulary of Japanese, it is small wonder if he loses heart. Probably he is as much dismayed by the incredible brevity of our tongue as we are by the redundant elaboration of his. To be informed that our brief “I” becomes in Japanese _watakushiwa_ is likely to be even more disheartening than the mere necessity of turning one’s thinking topsyturvy and attempting to assert that “Watakushi no tsuma wa hoteru no Shimonoseki ni des-ka”—“Me of dishonorable wife in the nominative case hotel of Shimonoseki in is question mark.” For like some other Orientals the Japanese have the charming custom of pronouncing their grammatical distinctions and quotation-marks along with the rest of the sentence.

It is partly their policy of “Japan for the Japanese” that makes them so backward in speaking a tongue which they strive so assiduously to teach themselves, for though they constantly emphasize the necessity of knowing the most wide-spread Occidental language they refuse to hire more than a handful of foreign teachers. The teaching of English is, with almost negligible exceptions, left to natives who could not, though starvation stared them in the face, make themselves understood in a New York quick lunchroom. For one thing English or American teachers demand several times the pittance paid Japanese pedagogues—Lafcadio Hearn is not the only man to learn that the granting of Japanese citizenship reduces the beneficiary to the Japanese scale of salaries—with the army and navy eating the lion’s share of the national revenues. Strange as it may seem, too, bashfulness is a noticeable Japanese characteristic, though in groups and in predicaments where no one speaks English the difficulty is made several times worse by many thinking they can.

However, I must admit that I wandered over all Japan, from the primeval forests of the thinly inhabited north island to the southernmost town of Formosa, on nothing but a faulty phrase-book, more than once passing a full week without meeting a fellow-Caucasian, yet saw and procured all there was to see or procure which was worth a little persistence. But it was not always a simple task. The Japanese lack completely that quickness of comprehension under difficulties which flowers best perhaps in Spanish-speaking peoples. Pronounce the commonest of his words a score of times, and if your pronunciation is in the slightest degree faulty he will stare blankly at you until doomsday. His own speech being utterly devoid of gestures, those simple motions which carry the tongue-tied traveler far in many another country convey to him no meaning whatever. Pick up an egg and a frying-pan, pretend to break the former into the latter, light a match under it, and make the elsewhere universal sign for eating by feigning mastication, and you will unquestionably succeed in gathering the entire village as an amazed and intently amused audience to your strange outlandish antics, but under no circumstances will a single bystander guess that you harbor an innate desire to partake of a pair of fried eggs. This characteristic is so ingrained that all the pointing in the world will never call the attention of your auditor to the near-by object you are attempting to indicate, though it may cause him and the throng which quickly gathers behind him to examine with meticulous care your outstretched finger. The kingpin of all possible misunderstandings in attempting to wrestle with this more than alien tongue, however, is the difficulty of distinguishing “yes” from “no.” Ask your waiter, “Is there no bread?”—or shall I play upon the popularity of the day and say “bananas”?—and his violent nodding of the head, accompanied by a very positive “Hai!” which the phrase-book translates as “Yes,” may cause you to wait long in vain before you discover that what he really meant was, “Yes, you are perfectly right; there is no bread.”