Abstract
This chapter documents emergence of the concepts of “mother-tongue” in the early modern Japanese cultural discourses, especially, in philology. The chapter first analyzes the linguistic theories of Ueda Mannen, who was the most important linguist in the formation of the standard national language in Meiji Japan. The queer absence of “mother-tongue” in Ueda’s theory will be pointed out (in contrast to its importance in the German philology). The feeble development of the notion of “nature” in Japanese lexicography and the lack of Virgin Mary worship, which in Europe largely influenced the establishment of an image of a nursing mother who also partook in the instruction of a native language, will be proposed as a possible explanation of this absence in Japan.
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Notes
- 1.
The essentialism implicit in my writing: “mother-tongue is essentially a linguistic term,” perhaps should have been avoided. In Chapter 1 we discussed three “synonyms,” or closely related terms: “mother-tongue ,” “native language ,” and “first language .” Obviously, “first language ” is linguistic jargon, used only by professionals. “Native language ” is more popular (Japanese would speak of “ne[i]tivu supîka [native speaker ]”). The “mother-tongue ” is the least scientific and the most popular term, with “ideological” implications (not that the other terms are ideology-free).
- 2.
The second definition that the dictionary gives is in the linguistic sense of “a language from which another language originates” (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary), but for now we are not particularly concerned with “mother-tongue ” in this sense. Shinozawa prefers to reduce bo-go to this meaning alone in his aspiration to retain the term bokoku-go for his nationalis tic agenda.
- 3.
Obviously, Shinozawa implies the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan.
- 4.
I cannot confirm the validity of this story. Whatever the case, Shinozawa is an ideologue who attempts to restore the use of the term bokoku-go together with its ideologies. Furthermore, Shinozawa claims that the word bo-go in linguistics denotes “parent language” and, therefore, it may not be used in the sense of “mother-tongue .” Linguists today, however, use the term so-go 祖語 for “parent language .”
- 5.
Hepburn’s dictionary does list hongoku and renders it as “native country.”
- 6.
Futabatei Shimei was born in the upper mansion of Owari clan in Ichigaya, Tokyo, three years earlier (1864). Whether they met then or had some association because of this connection is unknown. Ueda’s first name, 万年, is to be pronounced Kazutoshi officially, but another rendering of the Chinese characters, Mannen, was also used by Ueda himself. Kaneko Tôru, on the basis of archival research, states that Ueda registered himself at Berlin as Ueda Mannen (5). Throughout the book, I will be adhering to this version.
- 7.
The texts in English is in Japanese in the original. The translation is mine. Emphases are in the original.
- 8.
It appears, however, that Shimmura failed to write down “auch nicht unsre [sic] Muttersprache (neither is our mother-tongue )” (von der Gabelentz 61), which was, probably, mentioned during Ueda’s lecture after “no language is born to us.” This can cause a misunderstanding in the following reference to “Muttersprache ” as “a language one hears constantly since childhood.” Readers might think that, in contrast to other languages which have to be learned, one is born with his/her mother-tongue . The omission of the remark, “neither is our mother-tongue [born to us],” may reflect Shimmura’s (or even Ueda’s ) unconscious inclination to see mother-tongue as innate, not learned.
- 9.
An even earlier version of this phenomenon is observed in The English Reader (Egirisu bunten) of 1867, which renders the sentence “What is language?” as “nande aruka kuni-kotoba wa” (qtd. in Yamamoto 83), although here the word koku in the compound, koku-go, receives the Japanese pronunciation kuni- and -go is replaced with kotoba (that is to say, koku-go is rendered as kuni-kotoba, though in each case, the Chinese characters are identical: 国語). Given that “language” was occasionally translated as koku-go in the late Tokugawa to the early Meiji period, one should be aware of the possibility that the term bokoku-go (the language of one’s motherland) may, actually, have originally meant bo-kokugo (mother-language). In fact, the term bokoku (motherland) also appears to be a translated neologism, created fairly late. The first occurrence of this word in the Meiji dictionaries is, to the best of my knowledge, as late as Shimpen kango jirin of 1904, edited by Yamada Bimyô .
- 10.
Neither bo-go nor bokoku-go is included even in the Revised Edition of The Great Japanese Dictionary (1952) that Ueda co-edited.
- 11.
“Nazism was an ideological coalition, and one of the fundamental elements in that coalition was the defense of mother-tongue rights. Nazism was a language-rights movement. Pan-Germanism, as much as pan-Turkism or pan-Slavism, was a consequence of ideas ultimately derived from linguistics” (Hutton 4).
- 12.
Twine’s (inaccurate) assertion that Ueda was calling for the refinement of mother-tongue (Japanese) in the above quote must derive from this statement of Ueda’s.
- 13.
Mencius ’s mother and her son moved three times: from the neighborhood of a cemetery via that of a market to that of a school, when the mother came to realize that the last location was the best for education. This edificatory story clearly suggests the idea that mothers may be instrumental in providing necessary conditions for proper schooling, but they are not engaged in education itself. They merely familiarize the children with schools. We will return below to the issue of mothers’ (women’s) function as educators.
- 14.
Yasuda Toshiaki criticizes I Yonsuku (Lee Yeounsuk) in that she unduly separates Ueda from the pre-modern, Confucian conceptions, explicating Ueda’s notion of “national language ” simply as an outcome of the modern European linguistic theories (41). Obviously, Ueda’s theory arose neither from Confucianism alone nor from the modern Western conceptions. It was the product of the negotiation of the two.
- 15.
Kannon is “the Japanese form of the immensely popular bodhisattva (‘Buddha-to-be’) of compassion and mercy who originated in India as Avalokiteśvara. The name is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese Kuanyin” (Encyclopedia Britannica). Encyclopedia further notes that some confusion exists about Kannon ’s gender (see below).
- 16.
Raymond Williams writes: “There is, first, the very early and surprisingly persistent personification of singular Nature : Nature the goddess, ‘nature herself.’… ‘Nature herself’ is at one extreme a literal goddess, a universal directing power, and at another extreme (very difficult to distinguish from some non-religious singular uses) an amorphous but still all-powerful creative and shaping force. The associated ‘Mother Nature ’ is at this end of the religious and mythical spectrum” (221). The concept of “Mother Nature” : appears to be ancient in the European cultural history. Curtius finds it in Virgil, who “foreknew that he would have to be profitable to all readers. Hence he mingled in this work all the kinds of eloquence, and indeed ‘non mortali, sed divino ingenio [by the invention of not mortals but God].’ In doing this he followed the universal mother Nature [matrem naturam]” (444). According to Curtius, Diderot also appeals to it when he recommends a proper means of sexuality of which “mother nature , in her bounty, offers to satisfy the urge” (580). I am tempted to see the Holy Mother also in this tradition of “persistent personification of nature ,” but at this point I do not have enough evidence to justify this conjecture.
- 17.
Obviously, the breast-feeding period varies from culture to culture. Swiss mothers are known to breast-feed till fairly late. I was unable to find statistical data for the age at which infants are weaned in various cultures. According to a standard guidebook for mothers What To Expect the First Year, “there’s been absolutely no evidence to back such theories up [that continuing to breastfeed into the toddler and even the preschool years may limit a child’s social and emotional development]” and that “[the American Academy of Pediatrics] recommends that breastfeeding continue—ideally—for at least a full year, and then for as long as baby and mother both want to keep it up” (Murkoff and Mazel 437). The authors do mention that “most of the babies are more readily weanable around the first birthday… they have less need for sucking, resist being held or sitting still for feedings” (439). One year, apparently, is considered as a sort of “norm.”
- 18.
“It is in the course of the second year that an indisputably linguistic activity is constituted” (Ducrot and Todorov, Encyclopediac Dictionary of the Sciences of Language 156). Of course, we are to believe that the children are learning the language already in the first year before “the indisputably linguistic activity is constituted.” The roadmap of the first language acquisition envisioned by Eric Lenneberg starts at the age of 12 months, which is signaled by “markedly less crying than at 8 weeks; when talked to and nodded at, [the infant] smiles, followed by squealing-gurgling sounds usually called cooing, which is vowel-like in character and pitch-modulated” (106). In his chart, the first vocalization of words is ascribed to 12 months. Whereas the linguistic process of the first language acquisition at the very first stage remains largely enigmatic, undoubtedly lactation begins and ends significantly earlier than that.
- 19.
Raymond Williams mentions, as one of the multi-layered meanings of “nature ”: “the special sense of a quality of birth,” quoting from Shakespeare (222). This slippage into nativity (in the order of nature ) appears to be a highly attractive lure even for a linguist. For instance, Tanaka Katsuhiko explains mother-tongue as “a speech that one learns naturally (shizen-ni) from one’s mother or other figures from birth (umare nagara ni) (Beyond the National Language 46, emphasis added).
- 20.
We know that “nature ” will then yield place to “nation ” as a ground for mother-tongue . This is the mechanism of Nazi linguistics.
- 21.
Correlate to this meaning is another meaning of “native,” denoting: “belonging to, or natural to, one by reason of the place or country of one’s birth, or of the nation to which one belongs.” This may correspond to the definition of “native language ” in early English-Japanese dictionaries that we have seen earlier in this chapter: hongoku (no) kotoba (a language of one’s land of origin [the land where one was born]).
- 22.
As we saw in Chapter 1, Dante ’s view was deconstructive in that, although he was speaking of “materna locutio” (14), he evoked wet nurses, not (suckling) mothers.
- 23.
As I am merely citing Anglo-American historical documents (excluding other areas in Europe) in this section, my perspective is clearly rather restricted. The reference to the “West” has to be qualified.
- 24.
Raymond Williams also touches on the connection between the two: “Most of the early uses of native as an adjective were of a kind we would still recognize: innate, natural, or of a place in which one is born (cf. the related nation )” (215).
- 25.
The theoretical opposition between Weisgerber and Spitzer mostly concerned their view on the origin of the concept of mother-tongue : Weisgerber sought it in the medieval Germanic World, Spitzer , in the Romance cultures. This distinction is not of importance to my argument here.
- 26.
In a later chapter (II a. 3.) of the book, Weisgerber asks whether such a speech community should be identified with a people (Volk), a nation , or a state. His answer is: a people, not a nation, and in this he departs from the Nazi linguistics.
- 27.
In fact, as if to faithfully endorse Raymond Williams’ definition which I will quote in the next footnote, kuni (country) was reserved for “state” whereas “nation ” was properly translated as jinmin (people) or kunitami (countrymen) in the 1866 popular Satsuma Dictionary . In it, a native language was translated as hongoku kotoba (the language of the country of one’s origin) and, hence, its connection with “nation ” or “nativity” was quite vague. Inoue Tetsujirô lists “nation” as an entry and translates it both as kuni (country) and kokumin (nation as people) in his Dictionary of Philosophical Terms (1881). The nation was, thus, beginning to be recognized as a nation-state (kuni as a geographical entity), rather than an ethnic group. In the 1912 multi-lingual edition of the Dictionary, Inoue even adds etymological notes to it: “Lat. nation , from natus, a being born, nassci, to be born.” Therefore, some philosophers were well aware of the connection of “nation ” and nativity (which points to the sense of “nation ” as group of people, not a locale).
- 28.
“ Nation (from fw nation, F, nationem, I., — breed, race) has been in common use in English from lC13 [the last third of the 13th century], originally with a primary sense of a racial group rather than a politically organized grouping” (Williams 213).
- 29.
According to Homma Hisao’s historical research, Fake Diamond (Nise daiamondo) was never completed and, hence, not published. The Introduction was found among Yamada ’s posthumous manuscripts (Yamamoto 528).
- 30.
I conjecture that Herbert Spencer ’s book Tsubouchi quotes from is Philosophy of Style, widely read in the Meiji period and translated as well by Masaoka Shiki. I, however, have not been able to locate the part of the book that Tsubouchi cites.
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Yokota-Murakami, T. (2018). “Mother-Tongue” and the Formulation of the National Language in Meiji Linguistics. In: Mother-Tongue in Modern Japanese Literature and Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8512-3_2
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