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Japanese on the Mariana Islands
Happy (solar) new year! After the traditional unannounced No-sword holiday, it's a bit late for special new-year content (let alone year's-end content), so I'm going to write about a book I read last week called Mariana Shotō ni zanzon suru Nihongo マリアナ諸島に残存する日本語 ("The Japanese [language] that has survived on the Mariana Islands"), by Daniel Long and Arai Masato 新井正人.
The book begins with a quick overview of the period between WWI and WWII when Japan had control of the islands (as "mandate territories" previously part of the German Protectorate of New Guinea). The islands were soon home to thousands of Japanese immigrants, mostly from Okinawa and western Japan (but with a sizeable minority of Tokyoites), and by 1938 the population was more than 50% Japanese. This meant Japanese neighbors, Japanese bosses, and Japanese schooling.
The specifics of how Japanese was taught and used at the time are the focus of the next part of the book, an oral history based on interviews conducted in 2004-2006 with informants who experienced the interwar educational system. The schools the islanders generally attended (as opposed to the separate schools for Japanese children) were called 公学校, a word meaning something like "public schools" or "general schools". Some informants who attended these public schools report teachers who spoke in local languages, but on the whole it seems that classes were conducted by Japanese teachers in Japanese, with other languages forbidden, and reading/writing meant kana and kanji. The general Japanocentricity of the curriculum is illustrated by the fact that one informant was still able to recite the opening of the Imperial Rescript on Education, but top-down imposition wasn't the only way that knowledge of Japanese spread; apparently it wasn't uncommon for children to already know some Japanese when they began school, having picked it up playing with Japanese children living in their neighborhood.
This oral history makes great reading, and some parts are very affecting.
R: 負けたけどね、ま、勝てないね、戦争。要するに、アメリカか日本が来て、戦争、戦争したでしょう、ね。 [うん] それで戦争して、もう、われわれんとこ、island、we didn't invite them to come to our island ね to fight, came to our island、戦争してさ、家ぶっこわしてさ。ばあっと帰るでしょ。 [うん] われわれ「どうするんだろう？」。「知らない」日本人は「アメリカ人だから」。アメリカ行ったら「知らない。日本人だったから」。
R: We lost, you know. Well, we can't win, not a war. It's like, America or Japan turns up and fights, fights a war, right? [Interviewer: Mm.] They fight a war, but our, our island, we didn't invite them to come to our island, you know? To fight, [they] came to our island, they fought a war, destroyed our houses. Then they clear out. [Interviewer: Mm.] We asked "What should we do?" "Don't ask us." The Japanese said: "That's for the Americans [to handle]." We go to the Americans, [they say] "Don't ask us. That was the Japanese."
"You can not do anything, because us, you have no power, no identification," says the same informant later (in English). "Just a bunch of dog みたいなね。 I love you people, I love American, I love Japanese ね、but, since ね、あったからな [It happened, you know?]"
The final part of the book examines a few interesting characteristics of the actual Japanese spoken by the islanders. Good reading, but not great blog post material: relative percentages of various types of errors and so on. There's also a list of Japanese loanwords in Carolinian, culled from a dictionary and confirmed (or not) with an informant. As you might expect, this looks a lot like Joel at Far Outliers' lists of Japanese loanwords in Pohnpeian and Palauan. Here are a few interesting items not on Joel's list:
- ambwooli - -li is apparently a suffix deriving verbs from nouns, and this verb means "to carry someone on one's back," so it is presumably derived from (a loaned version of) the Japanese word ombu (piggyback).
- zanbara - From chambara, specifically the sense of kids staging pretend sword-fights and other battles
- ne - The Japanese sentence-ending particle, adopted as-is into Carolinian.
Great book, and available at a non-ridiculous price! It's actually part of a series on Japanese outside Japan; the first book was about Taiwan, and the next about Sakhalin.
Paul D.:
I visited Saipan on a cheap HIS travel package (from Japan) a few years ago. I found that I could use Japanese nearly as much as English in the shops and restaurants.