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De Gozaru

Rurouni Kenshin:

Fun with Archaic Japanese and Politeness Levels

Disclaimer: I know it's scary when an essay starts out with a disclaimer, but I've made mistakes

often enough in Japanese to know that one's needed. I would like to say that as far as I know,

the things I write here are correct, and I try to confirm them as well as I can with the Japanese

people around me, but I don't have an authoritive textbook on the matter and mistakes and

errors are always a distinct possibility. If you find an error, please let me know, and I will correct

it as soon as possible. I cannot guarantee that everything in here will be completely correct, but

I can guarantee it will be as correct as I can make it!

History

As anyone remotely familiar with Rurouni Kenshin must know, history is intricately entwined in

the series. This also applies to the language used by the characters. The Japanese language and

its history actually figures quite strongly in the plot surrounding Kenshin.

The story of Rurouni Kenshin takes place ten years into the Meiji Era, but Kenshin himself is a

product of the Tokugawa Bafuku (Shogunate), and his speech patterns are a relic from that

time. Respect today is a very large part of the Japanese language, and any translator must

struggle with how to represent the intricacies and connotations inherent in Japanese that don't

exist at all in English. As I mentioned in passing in "Names, Suffixes, and Methods of Address",referring to oneself or others is fraught with layers of meaning that never exist for the English

speaker. Modern Japanese, despite these difficulties, is very simple compared to the Japanese

of the Tokugawa Bafuku. The rulers of Japan during the Meiji Restoration abolished most of the

respect speech in Japanese in their attempt to get rid of the remnants of Japanese aristocracy

and the old social order. Kenshin, however, has kept a lot of these speech patterns during his

ten years of wandering, though his companions in the series speak relatively modern Japanese,

with fewer levels of respect.

Structure of Japanese

Politeness Levels

First I'll give you a crash course in Japanese politeness levels. There are two distict ways you can

be polite. The first way has to do with how well aquainted you are with someone. If you've just

met them you will be formal, while if you've known each other for a long time, you will tend to

be more informal. For Americans, the time between formal and informal speech is usually one

five minute conversation. The Japanese take a little longer to become informal, though the

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younger generation has a more western attitude to that sort of thing. The second, distinct type

of politeness has to do with social status and in-group/out-group. If you are on a lower social

level than the person you are talking to, you will be more polite, using in-group/out-group

language carefully. This means that when you are referring to your in-group, you will use

humble language. When you are talking about the out-group, you will use honorific language. In

this area of politeness there is also neutral polite language, which is polite to the person beingspoken to, but it is not humbling to the speaker.

In-Group / Out-Group

The in-group in a conversation depends on who is speaking to whom, and what sort of situation

they're in. If a secretary is talking to a visitor about her boss, she and her boss are grouped

together in the in-group because they both work for the same company, while the visitor is in

the out-group. Thus, when she refers to her superior in a conversation with the guest, she will

use humble words to refer not only to herself, but also to her superior. If two classmates are

talking about a girl at another school, they can think of themselves as the in-group and the

other girl as the out-group. At the very minimum, the speaker is his/her own minimal in-group.

Changes in Japanese

The Meiji government abolished all the different politeness levels and suffixes of Japanese in an

attempt to erase old feudal loyalties from the minds of the people. The essense of the Meiji

Restoration was destroying the very rigid class structure of the Tokugawa Bafuku, and replacing

it with a much simpler, but still strict, heirarchy. They got rid of the shogun, daimyo, and

samurai, and gave the emperor central importance in the hearts and minds of the people.

Because of the simpler class structure, there was no need for most of the Japanese respect

language, and much of it fell into disuse. The rest was discouraged by the government.

Kenshin's Language

Gozaru

Just about anyone remotely familiar with Japanese will probably know the phrase "arigato

gozaimasu". The "gozaimasu" is a "neutral polite, formal" way of saying the English verb

"be"...kind of. Gozaru is the informal form of gozaimasu, and it is never used in modern

Japanese anymore. Kenshin, however, uses "de gozaru" constantly (They even made a slight

joke of it when the young child keeps calling Kenshin "Gozaru"). I was studying Japanese inuniversity the first time I watched Kenshin, and my professor got understandably frustrated

when I would burst out in the middle of a normal class with a "de gozaru" instead of "desu" (the

common polite form of "be" in modern Japanese). It was probably like having a person with

broken English suddenly start using "thee" and "thou"!!

Kenshin's constant use of "de gozaru" is very polite. There is no direct translation into English.

He is being polite to everyone when he uses "de gozaru", yet he is not being "distant". The

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"gozaru" form is more informal, more direct and friendly, than "de gozaimasu" would be. So

he's polite, but he's still being friendly.

There are some situations where "de gozaimasu" will appear in modern Japanese, especially at

official occasions where guests are being welcomed or the schedule for an event is being

announced, but I have only heard "de gozaru" in other Japanese historical dramas.

-dono

I cannot give much exact information on this suffix because it doesn't appear in my

Japanese/English dictionary and my Japanese friends are unable to explain it much. I have seen

in some tranlations of Inuyasha that -tono is a suffix referring to someone who has some claim

to nobility, but I'm not sure if -tono is related to -dono or not ("t" often changes to "d" in

Japanese when placed after different words). I do know that Kenshin uses it to refer to all

women and to children he doesn't know well. He doesn't use "-dono" with Yahiko, who he feels

very close to, or Sanosuke, who is a friend, but he does use it with the young rich boy Yahiko

has constant fights with. I'm quite sure it's more polite than -san, but seems to have the same

sort of meaning and applications.

Seissha

This is an especially important word in Kenshin's vocabulary. Watsuki-san used it to symbolize

the rurouni. Evidently (again, this word is no longer in much use and I can't find it in my

dictionary) this is a very humble form of the word "I", and Kenshin always uses it to refer to

himself when he's rurouni. Whenever he starts to become the Battousai he uses "ore" instead,

which is not so humble or polite. In Kenshin's fight with Saitoh this became a major translation

issue. When Kenshin is still in Battousai mode he starts talking to the government official, buthe stops suddenly when he realizes that he's saying "ore" instead of "seissha". He punches

himself in the face, then starts his sentence over, replacing the "ore" with "seissha". Kaoru

hears this and realizes that Kenshin's pushed the Battousai back once again. In the Shinsen

Gumi's subtitle they did a skillful workaround, making Kenshin say "I", punch himself in the

face, and then replace it with "we". It gets some of the same feeling across to an English reader,

so I think this translation was amazingly effective, but it's not exactly right, and it's yet another

reason I find Japanese and anime so fascinating, and Rurouni Kenshin the most fascinating

series in particular. The entirely different structure of the Japanese language is frustrating to

learn, but intensely interesting all the same.

The Other Characters' Bad Language

In the subtitled version (I have yet to see the "official" releases) I was disappointed by all the

swearing in the subtitles. I wanted to show this series to my younger brother, but was

prevented by the language. I've heard others complain about it to, so it's worth addressing.

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I'm pretty sure that the foul language of the other characters is an attempt by the translators to

distinguish the politeness of Kenshin's speech from everyone else's. Since there is no way in

English to represent the extreme courtesy of Kenshin, they distinguish him by making everyone

else foul-mouthed. This is unfortunate for would-be younger fans, and it gets a little ridiculous

when Yahiko seems to be swearing like a sailor, but it was simply because of the difficulty of

translating between such completely different languages. I would be very interested to find outhow the official translation deals with this and other problems in switching between English

and Japanese. I don't have particularly high hopes, however, since the English title "Samurai X"

seems pretty stupid to me. If the title's bad, I don't hold out much hope for the rest...

Fanfic Japanese Dictionary

Romaji Pronunciation

How romaji is derived from the Japanese alphabets

Japanese Names and Suffixes

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