ABSTRACT
Firstly, the problem of language: most of the events I shall discuss took place in Japan, and most of the thoughts I shall analyse first found expression in the Japanese language. Thus my use here of the English language creates a methodological difficulty. I have a hypothesis that in the majority of cases English-speaking Japanese are unreliable. This hypothesis tends to discredit whatever I might say in English about Japan. In the years since Japan’s defeat in 1945, the English language has so infiltrated Japanese that words of English origin now flood everyday life, so that, for example, in a newspaper advertisement we might come across an expression like ‘Chic na Dress no Fashion Show’, which contains only two words-‘na’ and ‘no’—of Japanese origin. To quote another instance, an American scholar, who had studied the Japanese language for years, came to Japan and found in a scholarly journal a phrase which he could not decipher even with the help of a dictionary. He appealed to a Japanese colleague of the same discipline, sociology, and the phrase turned out to be ‘hitto ando ran’ (hit and run). But it seems to me that my old hypothesis still preserves its validity, for the borrowing of European words does not necessarily mean the Europeanization of thought processes. By borrowing so many words in such a short time, the Japanese are in fact becoming incomprehensible even to themselves, because they have lost the means to grasp their own thought processes.
