![[No-sword]](http://no-sword.jp/images/site/no-sword_banner.jpg)
Christ, what an
Election! Let's get political just one time, and take a trip down Painful Memory Lane before the LDP fade away for good. Soon-to-be-ex-Prime Minister Asō Tarō (I wrote this on Saturday night) has been famous for his shitsugen 失言 ("mistaken speech", i.e. verbal goofs, usually insulting or offensive) ever since an early speech in 1979 when he addressed his supporters as "little people" (下々のみなさん). Here are a few of his more recent hits.
One of his most recent blunders was at a Town Hall-style meeting with a bunch of university students. One of them asked if he didn't think that Japan's droopy economy had contributed to the population problem by discouraging people from getting married. Well, duh, agreed Asō: "If you haven't got any money, you're better off not getting married" (金がねえで結婚はしねえ方がええ — note beranmē-style accent, flattening /ai/ and /i:/ into /e:/).
No doubt realizing that people weren't going to take this well, Asō then explained that he himself had always had plenty of money, and yet he hadn't gotten married until 43! So it isn't like money = marriage or anything, right? (Seems Asō is not aware of the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions.) He then dug the hole yet deeper by explaining that marriage-readiness was really about respect, best earned by finding a steady job. You know, like the ones which have become much rarer as a result of the economic decline over which his party has presided.
As J-Cast points out, this incident wasn't as bad as it was widely reported: many stories were simplified to "PM TO POOR SINGLES: DROP DEAD" levels. Still, the tone-deafness alone makes it worthy of this list.
Another classic Asō moment was his August 2008 campaign speech in Ehime after torrential rains (豪雨) had devastated the prefecture. In front of Nagoya station, Asō mused on the mysteries of fate: "In Okazaki, there was 140 mm of rain in one hour. Fortunately this was in Anjō and Okazaki, but if the same thing happened in Nagoya, this whole area would be flooded" (岡崎の豪雨は1時間に140ミリだった。安城や岡崎だったからいいけど、名古屋で同じことが起きたら、この辺全部洪水よ). You can imagine how Anjō and Okazaki took that.
Or there was the time in 2005 when Asō attended the opening of the Kyushu National Museum and pronounced Japan "the only country" with "one culture, one civilization, one people, and one language" (一文化、一文明、一民族、一言語). This was a mistake on many levels. There's the huge cultural and linguistic variation even within the population that identifies as unambiguously Japanese. There's the wider variation found in communities who were citizenified more recently — your Ryukyu Kingdom, your Ainu. And, of course, there's the fact that the museum's maiden exhibition was all about... Japan's historical ties with the rest of Asia, and the intrajaponic multiculturalism that had arisen as a result.
And of course, there are the kanji goofs. It's not really worth detailing these — there's a Wikipedia section, and if you read Japanese, a quick Googling of 麻生太郎 漢字 will get you what you need.
These errors are often attributed to low intelligence and/or the decadent effects of reading too many comics (which Asō is known to love). I understand why people were prone to assume the worst — constantly spouting off like an arrogant, callous, bigoted toff doesn't make you a sympathetic figure — but I don't buy the simple "kanji error = mental defect" argument.
Take, for example, his two well-known mispronunciations of 有 as /yu:/ instead of /u/ in the words 有無 umu and 未曾有 mizou. The thing is, /yu:/ is a much more common pronunciation of 有 than /u/. Asō's mistake is the kanji equivalent of saying "goed" instead of "went." It indicates ignorance of the exception, not the rule.
Thus, I would argue that Asō's problem is insufficient practice connecting kanji with the spoken Japanese language (or dyslexia preventing improvement despite practice), not insufficient g. And in any case, jeering at kanji pronunciation errors is a stone that my glass homeowner's insurance won't allow me to throw.
Charles:
Native speakers' problems reading and pronouncing kanji is never a cause for jeering. On the contrary, it should be a cause for celebration. I will never forget my first time in Japan as a lowly 3rd year student, I was at a meeting when a young woman read a newspaper article out loud. Sitting right next to her, an older woman kept going "..psst.." and nudging her, then whispering a corrected reading in her ear. I felt instantly liberated, I thought, "hey, nihonjin have trouble reading kanji too, this stuff really IS hard, and not just for Japanese second language learners, it's hard for natives too."