Why I Love Kanji

Tagged as: language, memories

Before you read this, please make sure these Japan­ese let­ters 文字化け appear. If they don’t, then let me know because in that case this sto­ry will just be gibberish.

During the cher­ry blos­som sea­son of 1998, I moved to Japan. I had received a schol­ar­ship from Mon­busho, the Japan­ese Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion, and was secure in the knowl­edge that it is the absolute best way to tap into a cul­ture that even a dozen years lat­er remains some­what imper­vi­ous to West­ern­ers. With all expens­es paid and a gen­er­ous salary to boot, all I had to wor­ry my 22 year old head with for the first six months was mak­ing friends and learn­ing the language.

The first task proved easy enough and even­tu­al­ly helped with the sec­ond. For while the Japan­ese peo­ple are noto­ri­ous­ly shy and weary of mak­ing mis­takes (and hence reluc­tant to speak for­eign lan­guages), they’re also extreme­ly curi­ous. And since I was (by Mon­busho’s count) one of only about 60 Lebanese in the entire coun­try, I must have seemed exot­ic (or odd) enough to young Japan­ese for them to want me as a friend. Soon enough, I was able to tell sham­poo from laun­dry deter­gent (all labels are in Japan­ese) and so by my sec­ond week my hair stopped turn­ing green and my plates stopped smelling of chamomile. And thanks to my friends, I acquired a decent com­mand of spo­ken Japan­ese in a month.

Writ­ten Japan­ese, how­ev­er, was anoth­er mat­ter alto­geth­er. You see, their gram­mar is Verb-Object-Sub­ject (which means that you would say “Love you I.” How­ev­er, it’s actu­al­ly much sim­pler than Eng­lish (or indeed Ara­bic) to pick up because there’s almost no such thing as verb con­ju­ga­tion or even tense (“Today I love you, before last month only you love me, we both would have love tomor­row.”), no plur­al (“one boy, two boy, one mil­lion boy”), and no gen­der (“boy love girl love boy same same.”) — all of which make speak­ing the lan­guage a breeze. How­ev­er, when it comes to writ­ing, there’s a major stum­bling block called: Kanji.

The Japan­ese lan­guage uses three types of letters:

1. Hira­gana (used for sim­ple words like pro­nouns), and looks like this: あいうえお
2. Katakana (for words and names of for­eign ori­gin like Inter­net, ham­burg­er, Oba­ma), and is a lit­tle more angu­lar: アイウエオ
3. Kan­ji (used for the vast major­i­ty of words), and looks like (yikes!): 原宿

Now it does­n’t take much to see that kan­ji is much scari­er than the oth­er two. Well, wait till you hear this: While the first two sys­tems each con­sist of around two dozen let­ters, there are more than 10,000 kan­ji in exis­tence. Yes, that’s 10 with three zeroes after it.

Luck­i­ly, though, the Japan­ese Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion (yes Mon­busho again) has lim­it­ed the num­ber of kan­ji rec­om­mend­ed for dai­ly use (i.e. taught at schools, and used in news­pa­pers and oth­er non-spe­cial­ized pub­li­ca­tions) to around 2,000. That still is quite a steep learn­ing curve for a for­eign­er who must cov­er in a few months what Japan­ese chil­dren are taught over the span of their entire school edu­ca­tion. Since back then I was a mere 22 and very hot-head­ed, that’s where I drew the line. While my Japan­ese flu­en­cy was increas­ing almost by the hour, I stub­born­ly refused to do my kan­ji home­work. And in the kan­ji sec­tions of my exams, I’d just draw smi­leys and oth­er doo­dles in the blanks where the let­ters were sup­posed to go.

How­ev­er, all that changed when I dis­cov­ered the secret.

Our text­books (and most Japan­ese teach­ers I know) refer to kan­ji as pic­tographs: let­ters that resem­ble the objects they describe. For exam­ple, the kan­ji for tree looks like a tree: 木. Fair enough. But what they don’t tell us is that the def­i­n­i­tion only applies to the most basic kan­ji. Actu­al­ly, each of those com­plex-look­ing char­ac­ters is real­ly more than a sim­ple pic­to­graph; it is an ideogram: a nugget of mean­ing — no, no, much more than that: an entire sto­ry encap­su­lat­ed in a sin­gle let­ter. Every kan­ji con­tains with­in it a his­to­ry, an anec­dote, a fact about Japan­ese cul­ture. Once I real­ized that, I fell in love!

As you may know, cher­ry blos­som sea­son is a very brief and spe­cial time in Japan. For the three days that the flow­ers are in bloom, men and women dress up in their best clothes, leave work ear­ly and go to the park to drink and be mer­ry under the trees as they watch the pink petals blos­som and then fall off. It is a sto­ry told in a sin­gle let­ter: saku­ra 桜.