JAPANESE ETHOS (1)
Japanese Love for Not Saying
Japanese silence is notorious globally, hence an ethnic joke, “It’s hard to make Japanese speak and silence Indians and Italians in an international conference”. Why do the Japanese prefer to zip their lips? Don’t they have anything to say? Or are they just too shy to speak?
Searching for a hint, I’ll quote from the book entitled “Japanese Verbal Expression” (Nihon-jin no Gengo Hyogen) written by the Japanese linguist named Haruhiko Kindaichi.
“One of the most notable characteristics of Japanese use of their language is the spirit of non-speaking and non-writing.”
In other words, they believe that non-verbalization is a virtue. To support this, here’s a haiku made by Matsuo Basho, a famous haikuist in the Edo Period (1603 - 1867).
Uttering—
Lips are cold
Autumn wind
(Mono ieba / Kuchibiru samushi / Aki no kaze)
Just like this haiku implies, a carefree talk lacks sophistication and, therefore, should be admonished. Basho was not the only one who believed that. It’s a long-held belief that a wise person would think deep and choose when, where, and what to speak. Therefore, uttering a few but powerful words at the opportune occasion has been a virtuous deed. The listener, too, should be bright enough to understand the message without a lengthy explanation. The result is little attention to the public speaking education at school, and the whole population growing up to be speech-shy, perplexed people in front of a large audience.
Their hard-wired reluctance to speak may be attributed to fear. Japanese also have the counterpart of the English proverb, “Fields have eyes, and woods have ears”. Except “fields” are shoji (washi paper-lined sliding door) while “woods” are the walls in the Japanese version. That’s why a ninja is listening behind the walls or spying through a shoji slit in samurai dramas. Considering traditional Japanese rooms divided only by lightweight sliding doors, people must have been extra careful in sharing secrets, even in their own house.
Such fear of being overheard may have culminated in the Edo Period, where commoners were subjected to the harsh governance system named Gonin-gumi (Five-Households-as-One) based on mutual surveillance and joint liability linked to severe punishment. Under such a merciless system, it’s pretty natural that people become less eloquent and more conforming to what others do for the sake of their own safety and security.
However, their fear of speech may not be so young. In ancient times when people believed that deities dwelled in all things, each word had a spirit called “Kotodama” (the soul of the word). To them, pronouncing a word means invoking its spirit, materializing whatever connoted there. Therefore, for fear of negative consequences provoked by utterance, it was always not encouraging to speak more than necessary. We still see a vestige of this belief in wedding party speeches, where speakers are extra careful not to use words suggesting divorce or remarriage (e.g. cut, separate, break, again).
These cultural and historical factors (and probably others not mentioned here), all in all, may relate to the Japanese tendency of minimum and modest speech.
Since March 2006. Last update July 26, 2021. Copyright (C) Tuben. All rights reserved.
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