The Infinite Silences of Japan

"And the virtues of when I got to Japan, finding that I was essentially an illiterate. I can't read — I can't — to this day, I can't read or write Japanese."

http://www.dailygood.org/story/1092/the-art-of-stillness-pic...

"He’s a big proponent of his own ignorance, saying he doesn’t choose to learn more than a smattering of Japanese because he needs mystery and “a sense of open space in life, something to offset the sense of the familiar.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/books/review/pico-iyer-au...

Which makes him exceptionally unqualified to spout bullshit like this:

A single verb in Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country is translated in 29 different ways because what we would render as “I think” can in Japan mean “I remember,” “I long for” or 27 other things.

No, おもう means two things, and they're written differently so you can tell them apart:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%8A%E3%82%82%E3%81%86#J...

The author presents several examples from their reflections and observations in Japan, themed around "Japanese silence"; unfortunately, they speak more to the author's commitment to their colored perception than to any genuinely universal "Japanese silence".

> More important than learning to speak Japanese when you come to Japan is learning to speak silence. My neighbors seem most at home with nonverbal cues, with pauses and the exchange of formulae.

This is a point about Japanese culture. Presumably this refers to acknowledging neighbors when they meet each other without any further interaction. Regardless, I don't know enough about what the author is alluding to with this, but one can be just as surprised that one's current neighbors (while living in Japan) actually communicate or acknowledge each other if one comes from a place where neighbors don't know each other, something quite common in big cities.

> A typical sentence in India—or from my friend from Mexico—begins, “No, but . . .” Every other Japanese sentence begins, “So, so, so, so,” or “Yes, yes, yes, yes.”

This is a point about Japanese pragmatics. I don't see how this is meant to reflect silence. A recent BBC article speculates why French say "no" so much http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190804-why-the-french-love... . It writes:

> Because often, there is hope. “Contrary to popular opinion, the French do listen, and well, but this usually happens after they say no a couple of times. It takes a certain amount of faith, and sometimes a lot of talking, but you can almost always find the yes hiding behind a French no, if it’s there,” write Barlow and Nadeau.

This sounds very much like how business writers observe that Japanese business err on saying yes, and sometimes after a lot of talking, you can find the no hiding behind a Japanese yes.

> Countries like the US and Australia are low-context cultures where people generally say what they mean and mean what they say. However, France, like Russia and Japan, tends to be a high-context culture, where “good communication is sophisticated, nuanced and layered. Messages are both spoken and read between the lines,” she writes.

There's more I guess I might speculate on this subject, but I don't see its connection to silence. The author presents it as an unqualified agreement "yes, yes, yes, yes". But you'd likely hear a "sore de", or "tokoro de", or "desu ga" immedately after ("so what about this..." / "however...") if there were disagreements that followed.

> Seventy percent of Japanese sentences, by one count, lack a subject, and 50 percent of all spoken sentences do, too.

This is a technical point about the Japanese language. For that matter, most Romance languages do not specify a subject when it is obvious, beyond inflecting the verb to (under)specify whether the subject is the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd. On the other hand, in many situations, you would use a person's name to refer to them in Japanese (J) where in Indo-European (IE) languages (English (E) and Romance (R) languages are some IE languages) you would underspecify with a pronoun.

> Japan’s foundational novel, The Tale of Genji, is notoriously hard to translate, because proper names are sometimes avoided, the subject of a sentence changes halfway through and speakers are seldom indicated.

That Genji is not easily translatable is not necessarily reflective of some quality in J. Rather you can attribute the difficulty to three things: 1. The language Murakami uses is not modern Japanese with little extant literature in the same literary form. 2. The literary novel was literally novel, so the author may have failed to be able to develop it to communicate (even to a contemporary audience) by the text alone, without oral commentatory. 3. The problem of editing, with the original(s) no longer extant.

With proper names for one, it is reflective of that milieu, since one referred to each other in polite society primarily by their title or occupation. In that respect, it is not reflective if some tendency toward vagueness since using personal names would be the unnatural and less informative choice.

The Economist writes: "Murasaki's language was already archaic and impenetrable a century after it was written, so the Japanese have been reading annotated, abridged, simplified and illustrated versions of the book since as early as the 12th century."

https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2008/12/18/playboy-...

> Even those sentences that do have clear beginnings in Japan generally trail off, like pen-and-ink drawings that leave most of the page open for a viewer to complete. In England, I learned to start sentences by saying, “I’m not exactly sure . . .” but in Japan the studied vagueness is not just about diffidence but about allowing room for someone else to turn an opening note into a duet.

This is a point about Japanese grammar or pragmatics. I'm not too sure what exactly the author is referring to, but it's likely a technique for people to avoid committing to expressing something e.g. "sore wa na..." ("well, about that..."), that the author noticed.

> Speech is dangerous in Japan, precisely because so many unspoken rules hover around it.

On the other hand, the average Japanese fails to grasp the many unspoken rules of E, and finds it difficult to be understood in English. For example, to a non-native is not obvious why it is more natural to "put in" effort and "take out" the trash (like you take out food?) rather than the less colloquial "give effort" or "dispose trash". The difference is that most rightly chalk it up to the limits of language education and lack of interest in E, and not to E being ineffably sublime.