THE INTERACTION OF JAPANESE LANGUAGE CULTURE AND SOCIETY IN HAWAII

Shozo Kurokawa and Evangelos A. Afendras

There has been in recent years a great upsurge of interest in the Japanese language in Hawaii. In the academic community the expression of this interest centers, by and large, around a group of Japanese scholars most of whom reside on the Hawaiian islands and are active in the language sciences at the University. This interest has in fact culminated in courses on Hawaiian Japanese taught in either the Department of East Asian Languages or Ethnic Studies in which the scholarly interests of the faculty and the practical interests of the students are fruitfully wed.1

A number of articles have also resulted on various aspects of the topic, mostly of a generally socio­linguistic nature. While no attempt has been made to define Hawaiian Japanese, implicit statements to that purpose often present a simplified and occasionally misleading picture. We will expore the definition of Hawaiian Japanese here, by considering the overall pattern of communication of the Hawaiian Japanese community which in fact emerges with fascinating complexity. As an example of Hawaiian Japanese speech patterns we will examine the use of terms of self-reference during conditions which closely approximate normal family interaction.

The extralinguistic history of Hawaiian Japanese naturally helps us understand the present state and functioning of local Japanese speech itself.

Origins and History of Japanese in Hawaii: Reflection on Loanwords

At first, the plantation workers arrive with a variety of Japanese dialects, in basically four groups : (a) East (Tohoku: Fukushima-Niigata) 8(lo, (b) West (Chugoku: Hiroshima-Yamaguchi) 45•1:.,, (c) Kyushu: Kumamoto-Fukuoka 21% and (d) Okinawa 13%.

Basically of rural origin, we find the issei in a new milieu interacting in their different roles as plantation worker, friend, spouse, parent, neighbor, faithful (of Buddhism, Shintoism or Christianity) Japanese immigrant. These different roles enacted in different spheres of activity are also enacted in

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different patterns of speech, depending primarily on the identity of the interlocutors : pidgin English, for instance, becomes the verbal link between plantation workers and their lunas (foremen) . Japanese is used with co-workers and friends where these are Japanese. The realities of the new environment, both cultural and physical , the new foods, the new activities, the new artifacts, the new or redefined social relations, come to be reflected in the language, and are expressed in English or Hawaiian. The link to the Island community at large is effected either directly through pidgin or through those Japanese individuals who master English and even Hawaiian . Inevitably, some of the lexical items from the work, professions, and social relations field are eventually transferred to Hawaiian Japanese. But this leaves many Japanese equivalent words intact and sometimes usage fluctuates :

From Hawaiian From English /una (foreman) foomen / hooman (foreman hana (work; to work) booshi (bosst hcmo (to remove) kachiken, katsuken (to cut cane) h;ippa, ko (to carry canet dichimen (ditchman) k.iukau (eating; to eat) dakura/ dokuta (doctor) m.ikure (old; old manl minisura (minister) wahine (woman; wifel wachi•meka (watchmaker) a,kane (friendl furen/ furendo (friend)

Some of the words retained from Japanese we have noticed in the data are daikusan (carpenter), junsa (policeman), sensei (teacher), and kango­fusan (nurse}.

Some loan blends also appear, such as denkimen (electrician), shigotomen, hatarakimen (worker) supported by both the dichimen and the daikusan type.

Terms of address and reference, pronouns, linguistic routines such as greetings or request­thanking formulas, so important for minimal verbal transaction within and across groups also appear, and through necessity and frequent use work their way into local Japanese : ai (I) and mi (i) (me; I) appear alongside ore, washi, watashi, watakushi; yu(u) (you) next to omae, anra and anata. The

loanwords are totally integrated as is indicated by the frequent use of the pluralized forms miira, yuura and their use with particles as in mii wa.

As fa mi lies are formed around the issei, and these families, in turn, are embedded into the island's social system (both the adults and the children), kinship terms and family terms of reference are introduced from English : hazuben (in all its variant forms), misesu, misutaa, gyooru, boi. dedi alongside the Japanese terms (o)shujin, (o)toosan, (o)kaasan, kodomo, etc.

The relative lack of a continuous child group before the nisei from whom the young-nisei could learn at least part of the forms appropriate to their age may have contributed to the developmental differences from their contemporaries in Japan.2 This is common to many immigrant communities and has been expertly analyzed in the case of Israel by Bar Adon (1972). Again, this must be reflected in the progressive mastery of the Japanese pronominal system. Boku, kimi, etc. are largely absent in local usage. (However, this may also reflect the dialect origins of Hawaiian Japanese.)

Our preliminary findings show that contrary to claims such as "the Japanese kinship terms are no longer used in Hawaiian Japanese" (Higa 1970:135), the Japanese address-reference-kinship system, though not intact, still thrives in its Hawaiian context. In our few hours of recordings in a family-l ike context, we have encountered practically every term used in Japan itself, in addition to the set of loans. Moreover, the ratio of tokens is about five Japanese terms to one English loanword. The accompanying table of self-re ference terms from a total of thirteen issei (nine female and four male) and three nisei speakers is representative of what we have for the entire address-reference-kinship system. But beyond the straight tabulation we encounter further evidence of issei "competence" in the above system: instances of third-party quotation within the narratives illustrate forms never used by (or even inappropriate to) the speakers themselves, as when a female issei quotes a worker who uses "ore." Our findings on the percentage of speakers using a given form are fairly compatible with the results of a (self­report) survey of first-person pronoun use among Japanese faculty at the University of Hawaii, Department of East Asian Languages (Kurokawa , 1972), and with what Passin (1966) and Fischer (1964) report for intra-familial usage in Japan. One of the main differences is the frequent use of washi in our corpus: it ranks second among all tokens

(17.2";,) and is used by one-half of the male and one-third of the female speakers. Peng (1973:39) says that it "may be used by a man in his fift ies or older, who holds an executive position" and by sumo wrestlers. Jt appears in Shibata (1972) with very low frequency from a survey of Ishikawa-ken. Its use is much more common and more generalized in our sample, and this may be a dialectal feature.

Further immigration from Japan is stopped in 1924, and the community evolves for all practical purposes in isolation from the Motherland. We have indications of the language acquisition context of the Hawaiian-Japanese children, the nisei, in the study by M. Smith (1939) for the period just before the war. We see that already quite a lot of English is used at home. Interestingly, the pronouns I, me and you occupy ranks 1, 5 and 2 among the commonest 100 English words spoken by children of non-American ancestry in Hawaii (Smith 1939: table 49).

By the time of the end of the immigration, the Japanese begin to enjoy better professional opportunities and many have already broken out of the plantations. The U.S. census of 1930 indicates substantial percentages in trade, the professions, manufacturing etc. These new opportunities bring new contacts with the non-Japanese population, new pressures for the mastery of English, and its use in ever new domains of activity. The infiltration into the Japanese vocabulary advances. Unfortunately, we have no records for the late 1800's and the first half of this century to help us establish in detail the history of lexical acculturation .

We have, then, up to the Second World War a situation in which the repertoire of speech varieties spoken by the Hawaiian Japanese community is gradually transformed: at first, the range of Japanese dialects; soon after arrival, Pidgin English, English, and Hawaiian are added, although the last two are probably of limited distribution; subsequently, standard Japanese is reinforced through the opening of the schools (1890), and the work of the ethnic press; with the coming of the first nisei, Japanese, Pidgin and English are now acquired in childhood, sometimes all at once (see Smith, 1939), sometimes singularly. Who learns what as a child must, without doubt, depend on parents' age, date of. arrival, profession, English or Japanese education, make up of the immediate neighborhood (solidly ethnic or mixed), location of the home (urban or rural), sex of the child (Smith, 1939) etc. With the learning of pidgin by the nisei,

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SELF REFERENCE TERMS IN HAWAIIAN JAPANESE

Fema1e lssei (:9) Male lssei (:4) Nisei (:3) Totals

tokens types• tokens types tokens N % rank s.d. % N % rank s.d. % N % N % rank % s.d.

watashi 30 25.4 1 6.21 66.7 28 40.0 2 7.44 75.0 13 86.7 71 34.8 1 75.0 5.52 washi 5 4.2 9 .88 33.3 30 42.8 1 12.65 50.0 35 17.2 2 31.2 6.23 obaachan 28 23.7 2 10.55 55.5 26 14.0 3 31.2 5.05 jibun 11 9.3 4 1.30 66.7 2 2.8 6 1.00 25.0 2 13.3 15 7.5 4 50.0 1.12 atashi 11 9.3 5 2.99 22.2 11 5.5 6 12.5 2.27 watakushi 8 6.7 6 2.67 11.1 8 4.0 8 6.2 2.00 uchi 5 4.2 8 1.13 22.2 5 2.5 9 12.5 0.86 ore (a)t 2 2.8 4 .57 50.0 3 .5 10 12.5 0.40 boku 2 2.8 s 1.00 25.0 2 1.0 11 6.2 0.49 guranpa/ma 14 11.8 3 4.31 22.2 1 1.4 7 .49 25.0 15 7.5 s 18.7 3.23 mi 6 5.1 7 1.40 22.2 4 5.6 3 2.00 25.0 10 5.0 7 18.7 1.41 ai 1 1.4 B .49 25.0 1 .5 12 6.2 0.24 watashira 9 52.9 1 2.29 33.3 2 40.0 2 1.00 25.0 11 50.0 1 25.0 1.78 washira 1 5.9 4 .33 11.1 3 60.0 1 1.50 25.0 4 18.2 2 12.5 0.77 atashira 4 23.5 2 1.33 11.1 4 18.2 3 6.2 0.99 watashitachi 2 11.B 3 .66 11.1 2 9.1 4 6.2 0.50 mira 1 5.9 5 .33 11.1 1 4.5 5 6.2 0.24

•Types 'X, column, represents the',. , of speakers who used that type. t (a) The type ore was used by this female speaker in a quota/ion of a male speaker; ii i~ only counted in the overall total:1

whether from their playmates or from their parents, this variety is gradually creolized.

Change in Values and Functions oi the Japanese Language in Hawaii

We can say that until this time, the value of Japanese within the community is primarily symbolic. It has served to keep the Hawaiian Japanese together and such is also the function of the Japanese language schools which transmit the Japanese cultural insignia, among them moral values and the language.

Sugiyama-Lebra (1972) has proposed a process by which the particular cultural dynamics of the nisei aid their acculturation, her proposal is interesting though one would have to elucidate its pertinence to linguistic assimilation. But whatever other forces were at work undermining the position of Japanese in the verbal repertoire, there is no doubt that World War II dealt it a sudden blow. It attacked, in fact, the dominant

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value of Japanese, its symbolic value, bringing up the question of loyalty to America. The Japanese language sch'ool system suffered directly, the use of the language in whatever domain must have suffered much, and we can assume that at this point English must have surged ahead in its use as a home language by the Hawaiian Japanese. We even see that for both the symbolic and instrumental functions Pidgin came ahead at some point although the use of Japanese among the 100th Batallion and the 442nd (lapanese-American Combat Team) in the European theater is reported.

The period since the war has been one of steady decline in the vitality of Japanese in Hawaii. This negative trend has been counteracted by three distinct counter trends, however, which would contribute to Japanese language tenacity: (1) The resumption of immigration from Japan since the mid-forties, including war brides; (2) The increased availability of Standard Japanese through

important and effective forms of mass communi­cation (primarily TV, radio and cinema), and (2) The awakening of ethnic consciousness among the younger generation in the U.S. which has affected the young sansei (the third generation) and yonsei (the fourth generation) in Hawaii as well. The implications of these three countercurrents for the Japanese speaking community in Hawaii are very important.

Japanese Language in Hawaii: What the Present Holds for the Future

The post-war issei have brought with them sources of Standard Japanese, though through contact with English both here and at home in Japan, a large English lexical element may be common to their variety and to Hawaiian Japanese.1 Variants in the forms of the loanwords between Hawaiian Japanese and Standard Japanese or Standard Hawaiian Japanese (see Higa, Kusanagi) do not really present any problems: parallel lexica for the different speech levels are not unknown to Japanese or even English for that matter. We can easily have dokutaa in a formal context and dakta in an informal one.4

The increased availability of the mass media also has reinforced the presence of Standard Japanese, and, although no definite work has been done in sociolinguistics linking language learning (or second dialect learning) and television, for instance, we suspect that such an effect does exist in Hawaii. On the other hand, as with immigrant mass media throughout the USA even if in a purged and standardized form, the immigrant speech variety (Hawaiian Japanese) does get coverage especially in the locally produced programs and the "talk back shows" on radio (moshi-moshi time). Lexical borrowing from English is quite extensive in some such programs.

The third trend, the awakening of ethnic consciousness, has particular implications, in our view, for the successful maintenance of the Japanese language in Hawaii. It is evident in the rapid growth of attendance in Japanese language classes at the University of Hawaii, the significant numbers of students who major in Japanese, as well as the parallel development and growth of a Japanese component in the ethnic studies program which in turn has increased interest in the language. One should mention here the growing interest of ethnic studies students in Hawaiian Japanese both for its intrinsic value as their own speech variety but also for a practical purpose: to better their preparation

for the recording, analysis and study of the dwindling population of prewar issei.

This trend shifts the whole acquisition context of the Japanese language in Hawaii. Where it was once based in the family and the Japanese language school (elementary) as an added scholastic activity, often in the midst of negative attitudes from the larger community and not necessarily with the acquiescence of the pupils themselves (Kurokawa, 1973), it now represents the voluntary subject of study of an adolescent or young adult population. Community-wide attitudes are probably neutral, but may not matter in any case. To the symbolic value of learning Japanese held by this group of youths should be added an important instrumental value: The importance of commercial relations with Japan and the prominence of the Japanese tourist flow into the Islands make the knowledge of Japanese a "highly marketable linguistic commodity" (Jernudd, 1971:196). Conversely, the proximity of Japan makes ii available to travelling sansei and yonsei and many young nikkeijin (Americans of Japanese ancestry) study and learn the Japanese language for this reason .

Finally, in a note contrary to the pessimistic chorus heard on the future of Japanese in Hawaii in most writings on the subject, we can expect, or al least hope, that the rising motivation for its study among college students will spread to their age groups next in line. And we can at least expect that some of the students presently pursuing their University training in the Japanese language will eventually turn to teaching the language in the Islands, and with renewed enthusiasm and understanding will succeed in pulling the Japanese language school out of its present " baby-sitting" function, a current focus of complaints by teachers, students and the community at large.

Notes

Much of the dilta on which we base rhe following discussion was collected m the context of these courses {as well ilS courses in the sociology of language and bilingualism, Department of English as a Second language) under the direction of S. Kurokawa, E. Smith, and E. Afendras. The data was collected during loosely structured interviews of /ssei and nisei by their nisei, sanser, or yonsei friends or relatives and some by visiting Japanese students. II is also noted that some of the data collected under the Intramural Research Support Grant #2167402SF 727 B224 from the University of Hawaii Research Council granted 10 S. Kurokawa for 1973-1974 academic year was also used in our analysis.

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2 In 1894 of 25,000 lapanese on the ls .ands. about 500 were school-age children (Lowry, 1973a).

1 The integration of recent immigrants (or tram1ents l frnm lapan in Hawa11an society and its implications to thl.' IJnguage scene has been investigated in a pilot study by Lowry (1973b).

• In fact we have also the form dakutaa in one of our transcripts which 1s 1n a seme intermediate. It occurs in ;1

narrative context, the speaker is an ,~ser, female. and displ,1y~ J fascinating capacity for both style-shifting within Japanese and code-switching to English .

References Bar-Adon, A. Child bilingualism in an immigrant m ciety:

implicatrons of borrowing in the Hebrew "lani,;uage of Games." Conference on Child Language, Preprint.\. Quebec. Centre International de Recherches sur le Bilingu k me, (ERIC ED 061 809), 1971, 264-317.

Fisher, J.l. Words for self and others in some Japanese fJmilies. American Anthropologist, 1964, 66.6.2, 115· 126.

Fishman, J. A. Planned reinforcement of language mainten;tnce in the U.S.: suggestions for the conservation of a neglected national resource. Reprinted in language in Socrocullura/ Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1972 {1966). 16-47.

Fishman, J. A. Varieties of ethnicity and varieties of language consciousness. Reprinted in Language in Sociocultural Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1972 (1965), 179-190

Hagino, C. H. Pronoun-switching in the speech of an is~ei. Term paper for ESL 660, Honolulu, University of Hawaii.

Hagino, C.H. Some interesting features in code-switching. Term paper for ESL 660, Honolulu, University of Hawaii.

Haugen, E. Bilingualism, language contact, and immigrant languages m the 1,J.S.: A research report 1956-1970. In Curren! Trends in Linguistics, T.A. Sebeok (ed ,I vol, 10, The Hague, Mouton, 1970.

Higa, M. The sociolinguistic significance of borrowed words in the Japanese spoken in Hawaii. 1970, Working Papen in linguistics, !University of Hawaii), 2.9, 125-140.

Jernudd, B. and J. Das Gupta. Toward a theory of language planning. In I, Rubin and B. lernudd jeds.). Can Language Be Planned? Honolulu, East-West Center Press, 1971.

Kurokawa, S. Japanese language education in Hawaii: Attitudes and values of students and teachers. Presented at the ASPAC meeting, Vancouver, June 1973.

Kurokawa, S. Japanese terms of address; some usages of the first and second-person pronouns. Papers in Japanese Linguistics, (University of California, Berkeley), 1972. 1.2. 228-238.

Kusanagi, Y. Some features of language in the bilingual situation: linguistic, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic aspects of Japanese spoken in Hawaii . Paper presented at the 18th Annual Conference on linguistics of the International Linguistic Association, Arequipu, Peru , March 1973.

Lowry, J. Hawaiian lapanese: changing attitudes toward the Japanese language schools- an outline. Term paper for EALA 470, Honolulu, University of Hawaii, 1973 (a).

Lowry, J. The new wave of lapanese in Hawaii : a sociolinguistic study. Term paper for ESL 660, Honolulu, University of Hawaii, 1973 (b).

Passin, H. Intra-familial linguistic usage in Japan. Monumenta Nipponica (Studies in Japanese Culture), 1966, 21.1-2, 97-113.

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Peng, F.C.C. La parole al Japanese pronouns. In language Science}, Indiana University, p . 36· 39, 1973

Shibata. T. Japanese ego term~ in social relations . Mimeo handout from a presentation at the Round Table Seminar, Department of East Asian Languages, Honolulu, University of H.iwaii, 1972.

Sm11h. M. E. Some light on the problem of bilingualism as found from a study of the progress m mastery of English among preschool children of non-American ancestry in Hawaii. Genetrc Psychology Monographs, 1939, 21.2, 119-284.

Sugiyama-Lebra, T. Acculturation dilemma : the function of moral values for Americanization. Council on Anthropology and Education Newslerter, 1972, 3.1, 6-13.

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Shozo Kurokawa is Assistant Professor of Japanese in rhe Department of East Asian Languages, the University of Hawari. Receiving his B.A. in English from Waseda University. Tokyo, Japan and M.A. in linguistics from the University of Hawaii, he has prevrously taught and coordinated the Foreign language Program al the University of Maryland, Far East Division (1963,64 and 1967-69). He also directed the Junior Year Program ,n Tokyo sponsored by the East-West Center. Honolulu and conducted by the University of Maryland during the summer of 1968. A recipient of a Fulbright travel grant lo the University of Hawaii for his teaching of Japanese for 1964-67, he is currently teac:/1ing such courses as 'Topics in language and culture of Japan' (lapane~e Sociolinguistics), Advanced Japanese Courses wrth the Department of Easr Asian Languages and 'Hawaiian Japanese' with the Department of Ethnic Studies.

Evangelos A. Afendras is Assislanl Professor in the Department of English as a Second Language and the Pacific and Asian Linguistics Institute. He received his B.A. (1965), M.A. (1966), and Ph.D. (1968) degrees in linguistics from the Johns Hopkins University, where he taught General and Comparative Linguistics (1966-1968); and a Diploma in Russian Studies from the University of Oklahoma Russian Studies Center in Munich (1968), where he taught Slavic Linguistics. From 1969 to 1970 he was Associate Director of Research at the International Cenrer for Research on Bilingualism, Universite Laval, Quebec, Canada, where he also taught courses on Linguistics and Bilingualism. He then joined the University of Hawaii after a year al the East-West Center's Culture Learning lnstiture as a Senior Fellow Affiliate (1970-1971). He is at present Secretary of the Sociolinguistics Research Commillee, International Sociological Association (elected 1970).