What is the beautiful 'dissociation' of Japanese, as explained by a foreigner who has lived in Japan for over 10 years?



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Marco Giancotti , who has lived in Japan for over 10 years, says that when he tells people overseas about this, they are met with a mixture of respect and confusion. This is because Japanese is considered mysterious and learning it is an unavoidable ordeal when living in Japan. However, Giancotti says that this is what makes the country so attractive, and in a blog post titled 'The Beautiful Dissociation of the Japanese Language,' he explains the unique characteristics of the Japanese language from the perspective of a multilingual speaker.

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Japanese is often said to be unique in that it uses kanji characters and has many words that cannot be translated into other languages, such as 'otsukaresama' (thank you for the hard work) and 'mottainai' (wastefulness). However, these are not the essence of what Giancotti considers to be the uniqueness of the Japanese language.

This is because China uses many more Chinese characters than Japan, and every language has words that cannot be translated into other languages.



Giancotti points out that what makes Japanese unique is its historical background. When importing Chinese characters, a completely different language from Japanese, the Japanese created hiragana and katakana through

the Man'yōgana , and decided to use them in conjunction with kanji. The borrowing of kanji was also done in Korea and Vietnam, but Japanese is unique in that it has maintained its writing system to this day.

This diverse range of expressions made possible by the simultaneous use of phonetic and ideographic characters, and the distinction between spoken and written language, is a characteristic of the Japanese language that Giancotti describes as 'dissociation.'

Mr. Giancotti explained the dissociation of the Japanese language in six parts.

◆1: One kanji has many different readings
For example, the kanji character '生' (life) has about 15 different readings, including 'sei,' 'shou,' 'i (kiru),' and 'i (keru).' Most kanji characters have multiple pronunciations. This characteristic is a source of trouble for Japanese students and Japanese language learners, but because even Japanese people sometimes don't know how to read place names and words that aren't often used in daily life, furigana has come to be used in Japanese.



The presence of this furigana leads to 'creative dissociation' which will be explained later.

◆2: There are multiple ways to write one name
Giancotti said he was being creative because, in everyday conversation, people sometimes have to explain which kanji they're talking about because there are multiple readings, especially when it comes to names.

A scene from the manga 'Death Note' that is well known to foreigners as a scene that illustrates the difficulty of explaining the kanji for one's name is one in which a demonic notebook called 'Death Note' appears, in which anyone whose name is written in it will die, and knowing how to write one's name is of great importance.



◆3: The existence of 'furigana' that is not bound by convention
As a general rule, kanji characters and their readings correspond to each other, but this is no longer the case when it comes to compound words such as 'otona' (adult), which are given a

kun reading.

What's frustrating is that there are even words, such as 'mozu' (nightingale), which have more kanji characters than syllables.

◆4: Words related to wearing a trench coat
The freedom of the Japanese language to give kanji alternative readings leads to another expression that particularly intrigued Giancotti: the combination of multiple words into one, like the combination of 'kokoro' (heart) and 'sute' (point) to make 'aspire' (aspire), or the combination of 'miru' (see) and 'tomeru' (hold) to make 'renounce' (recognize).



Giancotti believes that these words were originally separate words, but that their combined use was so common that new kanji characters were assigned to them to create a single word.

Since there was no formal academic name for this form of speech, Mr. Giancotti named these words 'words in trench coats' in reference to the English term 'Two Kids in a Trenchcoat,' which refers to two children who wear trench coats on the shoulders of one another and disguise themselves as adults.


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Two Kids In A Trenchcoat | Know Your Meme

In addition to 'aspire' and 'recognize,' 'tsukasadoru,' which is a combination of 'tsukasa' (official), which means an authoritative position, and 'tsukasadoru' (to take), is also given as an example of a word that refers to wearing a trench coat.

◆5: Write the same words differently
Giancotti points out that spoken Japanese has a limited vocabulary and is often unclear in meaning, whereas written Japanese, which makes full use of kanji characters, can reduce ambiguity and increase the precision of nuance.

For example, the same kanji character 'toru' (toru) can be written in different ways, such as 'toru,' 'toru,' 'toru,' 'toru,' 'toru,' 'toru,' and 'toru,' narrowing down the meaning to one.

Giancotti's favorite is 'cousin' (cousin), which can specify the gender and relationship by using different kanji. As an aside, this 'cousin' is also a compound kanji.



◆6: Dissociation as a canvas
The culmination of this dissociation in the Japanese language is '

gikun, ' a word game in which kanji characters are given arbitrary readings.

Yoshimune is often used in manga. Japanese with Anime, a Japanese language learning blog for people who want to enjoy manga and anime in Japanese, explains the following scene from the manga 'My Hero Academia' as follows: 'Shoto Todoroki has both cold and heat abilities, and emits cold from his right and heat from his left. In this scene, he declares that he will not use his heat ability by saying that he will not use his left in battle.'



Yoshikun is also used when incorporating the sound of a foreign language into a work. The mechanical prosthetic limb 'automail' that appears in the manga 'Fullmetal Alchemist' is a coined word, and since there is a possibility that readers will not understand its meaning if it is written in katakana, the kanji for 'mechanical armor' is used.



Some novelists have also used dissociation for artistic effect. 'Horror and mystery writer Kyogoku Natsuhiko likes to create a Japanese Gothic atmosphere, and in his brick-thick novels he often uses archaic kanji characters, many of which the average Japanese reader will never have seen before, but which they can read without any trouble thanks to the correct reading,' Giancotti said.

According to Giancotti, Natsuhiko Kyogoku 'goes a bit too far,' but Haruki Murakami is cited as an author who uses it more sparingly. For example, in the following page from Haruki Murakami's novel '

Norwegian Wood,' the furigana 'limbo' is added to the word 'hendo,' which means a place far from the city.



By deliberately avoiding the use of the Christian term limbo , Murakami managed to avoid any religious overtones while still giving the work a mystical ring, highlighting the metaphor of a hidden realm within the self. Giancotti commented, 'Murakami did a lot with this simple choice of words.'

This sentence was particularly refreshing to Giancotti, who had just started reading in Japanese. He recalled his impression at the time: 'It was like reading a book in stereo. Sometimes the same message comes through two different channels in two different forms, and sometimes the two messages blend together to create something new.'

At the end of the blog post, Giancotti wrote, 'Japanese has a unique dissociation between the way it is written and the way it is pronounced that makes it not only difficult to learn, but also flexible and rich in a way that no other language can match. This dissociation is both an extra dimension of the language and a happy historical accident.'

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