LOANWORDS AND JAPANESE IDENTITY: Inundating or Absorbed? | By Naoko Hosokawa

This book surveys and interprets the debate over loanwords (gairaigo) in Japanese. Author Naoko Hosokawa makes many insightful and valuable points about the debate’s details, including the positions taken, the rationales participants give for them, and the shifts that have occurred over the last thirty years. Even more interesting, however, is Hosokawa’s identification of the assumptions commentators share regardless of their attitude towards loanwords. The book ably supports its core contention: that the loanwords debate is really about Japanese identity and its “on-going (re)negotiation” (7).

A central element of the book’s analytical framework and contribution is its identification of the complexities and conflations that shape the use of the debate’s key terms. Gairaigo, literally “words that come from outside” (2), enter Japanese mainly from Western languages. They are usually written in katakana rather than kanji (Chinese characters) or hiragana, and are thus often called katakanago. Gairaigo make up one of Japanese’s three main vocabulary groups, alongside wago/yamatokotoba (“Japanese native vocabulary”) and kango (Sino-Japanese loanwords). The distinctions between these groups are not straightforward, however, and there is also a blurry boundary between gairaigo and gaikokugo, “non-assimilated foreign words” (23). Relatedly, most statements about gairaigo in the debate refer (implicitly) not to the whole group but just to newly “arrived,” unassimilated words (188). New gairaigo emerge in diverse contexts in Japanese—from political, bureaucratic and business discourse to health care to youth culture—and many are, at least initially, opaque to most Japanese. The words rokkudaun (lockdown, from the COVID response), gendā (gender), and paburikku imborubumento (public involvement) give some sense of the flavour of recent arrivals.

Crucially, too, Hosokawa points out that the go in gairaigo can mean a word, a category of words, or a language. Nihongo (“Japanese”) also ends in go. These shared endings encourage assumptions about a contrast or conflict between gairaigo and nihongo; they help, for instance, to make sense of the idea that gairaigo can or should be rephrased in or translated into Japanese even though they are themselves Japanese words. Hosokawa puts the “illogical dualism” (21) created between these un-like categories at the book’s heart by arguing that gairaigo’s role in debates over Japanese language is analogous to that played by minority populations in other aspects of debates over Japanese identity. Gairaigo serve as the “internal Other” against which the features of Japanese, and hence Japaneseness, are delineated.

These points both inform and emerge from Hosokawa’s empirical study of the folk linguistics of gairaigo. The book is grounded in an analysis of 2450 texts (articles, editorials, letters to the editor, etc.) mentioning gairaigo published in Japan’s two largest newspapers between 1991 and 2020. Hosokawa identifies 18 verbs used recurrently in these texts in connection with gairaigo and systematically works through their subjects and objects and the recurrent arguments, metaphors, assumptions and adjectives associated with them. This approach reveals a catalogue of dichotomies between gairaigo and nihongo that underpin the debate’s arguments and that are, again, often conflated with one another. Hosokawa finds, for instance, that for critics of gairaigo, “the easy, familiar, precise, traditional, and beautiful Japanese language is threatened by the presence of difficult, unfamiliar, ambiguous, lazy, and superficial loanwords” (117). After two chapters devoted to the 18 verbs, the book works through the debate’s history and its key inflection points, and then compares France’s debate over loanwords to Japan’s.

Loanwords and Japanese Identity thus documents “the common perceptual structure held by both critics and defenders of loanwords” (9). Key assumptions about the gairaigo-nihongo dichotomy are shared both by those who see gairaigo as a threat and those who argue that “the vigorous, flexible, and rich Japanese language is enriched by loanwords that are new, convenient, and unproblematically assimilated” (117). The frequency of water/liquid metaphors (include the verbs “to inundate,” “to overflow,” “to permeate,” “to flow in,” “to absorb,” and “to surge”) is one important finding, and Hosokawa emphasizes not just that gairaigo are seen as fluid and dynamic, but the more implicit framing of Japanese as “something solid and static” (45). Hosokawa also finds metaphorical associations of gairaigo with invasive species (gairaishu) and illegal migrants. The comparison with France turns up some fascinating absences in the Japanese debate. While French commentators are preoccupied with the global hegemony of English and the United States, actual countries and even languages are rarely mentioned in a Japanese debate that homogenizes foreignness and the west. French commentators also frequently use verbs related to political aggression like “to colonize” and “to invade” that are rare in Japan.

Hosokawa’s lucid prose accessibly presents the book’s approach and the issues at stake. Readers may balk at being asked to work through two chapter-length, verb-by-verb analyses of the debate’s language, but should persevere; the approach turns up far more intriguing nuggets of information and mini-arguments than can be covered here. The book might have said more about how the newspaper analysis was actually carried out—it is not clear, for instance, how the 18 verbs were chosen or whether others might have made the cut. It may be too that the use of “loanword” as a straightforward Enlish equivalent for gairaigo does not always effectively represent the Japanese debate. There seem to be no analogues to the (rather odd) English conceptions of words being “loaned” or “borrowed” between languages in the Japanese discourse, and “loanword” obscures gairaigo’s inside/outside distinction. Hosokawa, for instance, translates a question from a Japanese government public opinion survey as “How do you feel about the use of loanwords?” (15), but “How do you feel about the use of words that arrived from outside?” while more awkward, might convey the question’s meaning more accurately and viscerally. These are minor quibbles. Anyone with an interest in Japan and/or in debates over language and national identity will learn a great deal from this book.

 Derek Hall

Wilfred Laurier University, Waterloo