Japanese Communication: Language and Thought in Context

12 Nonagent Orientation: The World as “Becoming”

175 12 Nonagent Orientation: The World as “Becoming” Closely related to the Japanese sense of “scene” is the Japanese language’s preference for using verbs equivalent to English “be” and “become.” While English prefers to express an agent, Japanese has several strategies for suppressing the notion of agency. One strategy privileges locative expressions over agents. Verbs like aru ‘there is/are’ and naru ‘become’ are preferred. Observe the following expressions. [1] Sano-san ni wa musuko ga futari aru. Mr. Sano at T son S two there are (lit., There are two sons at Mr. Sano’s.) Mr. Sano has two sons. [2] Watashitachi wa kono tabi kekkonsuru koto ni narimashita. we T this time marry fact to become (It has become that) we will be getting married soon. In Japanese sentences a locative expression or a topic appears where the agent would be in English; “Mr. Sano” and “we” specify agents in the English translation, but in Japanese they do not. Accordingly, Ikegami (1981, 1988) typologically identifies Japanese as “Be-language ” versus English “Have-language” as well as Japanese “Become-language” versus English “Do-language.” In Japanese “Be-” and “Become-” language, reality is interpreted in a way quite different from English. The agent becomes less prominent and more diffused, and the context in which the agent appears assumes greater significance. 176 Japanese Thought in Context Look for a moment at how the English language encourages its users to perceive and describe events. Heinz Werner and Bernard Kaplan’s characterization of Indo-European languages is relevant here. Werner and Kaplan explore the relationship between (linguistic ) symbol and reference. They suggest that correspondence, “a mutual process of convergence,” must occur between the meaning and the form of representation. Maintaining that language uses certain models to that end, they state: “In Indo-European languages, the model used for connoting states of affairs and articulating them linguistically is the human action model. A total event is basically articulated into agent, action, and object; the relationships between these are portrayed in sentences in which the vehicles for the referents are related to each other through a ‘syntax of action’” (1963, 57). The power of this Indo-European action model with the human-as-agent becomes evident when one considers its broadbased application. Two of Werner and Kaplan’s English examples are: (1) we say “X kills a dog” as well as “X feels pain,” as if the state of feeling is an action and pain an object acted upon; (2) we say “X has dark skin” or “A equals B” to express attributes and conceptual relations in terms of this action model. In contrast, Japanese tends to frame the event as (1) something existing rather than someone possessing something, and (2) something becoming or happening, often beyond the agent’s control, and not as something that an agent who has full control “initiates and causes to happen.” The Japanese are more likely to interpret an event as a situation that becomes and comes to be on its own, while Americans tend to perceive an event resulting from an agent doing something and causing things to happen. Incorporating the concept of the centrality of scene, we can conclude that one of the ways the Japanese are characteristically encouraged to see things is as the scene becoming, whereas from the American perspective it is the agent doing. The world that becomes is also a world where elements are held in balance, located in mutual interrelation. Here, instead of recognizing an agent acting on an object, multiple elements constructing the entire scene find themselves in a relational balance. The nonagent orientation of the Japanese language is also clear from the discussion of Japanese passives, nominalization, and nominal predicates. I caution the reader that Japanese discourse does not completely lack humans as agents, nor is it devoid of the human ele- Nonagent Orientation 177 ment. Although the person as agent plays a smaller grammatical role in Japanese than in English, the human element certainly appears in Japanese expressions. The human factor in English is a person who is the agent of an action, whereas in Japanese it is a person who responds to an event as a whole and who describes the scene with his or her personal view, including a marked preference for seeing a scene that becomes. ...