Hold the Mayora, Please

They slide under doors, through windows and past airport immigration unnoticed. The Internet is a veritable breeding ground, as are locker rooms and fashion runways. Seemingly harmless in small doses, their wholesale import now threatens Japan’s very identity, say critics.

A new computer virus? An insidious North Korean spy plot or some new breed of walking catfish? For many Japanese, the biggest invasion fear is the flood of foreign words infecting their vocabulary, with English heading the charge.

“It’s becoming incomprehensible,” says Yoko Fujimura, a 60-year-old Tokyo restaurant worker. “Sometimes I feel like I need a translator to understand my own language.”

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi recently chided his ministers for overusing “loan words.” A government-funded institute has a hotline to interpret and document bad usage. Echoing France, there’s even a committee to find replacement words for the foreign gate-crashers.

Countries around the globe are wringing their hands over the rapid spread of American English, with Coca-Cola among the most recognized terms on Earth. However, Japan’s unique writing system arguably makes the problem here worse.

In most countries, foreign words are assimilated relatively quickly -- making it difficult, for example, to remember that “smorgasbord,” “maitre d’ ” and “hamburger” came to America from abroad. Japan, however, writes all imported utterances other than those from Chinese in a different script called katakana, the only country to maintain such a distinction.

Thus, terms such as “word processor,” “managed health care” and “baby-sitter” remain “foreign,” presumably for centuries, creating a linguistic moat between intruders and more blue blood Japanese terms.

Katakana also takes far more space to write than kanji, the core pictograph characters that the Japanese borrowed from China 1,500 years ago. And it stands out, given its other function as a way to emphasize meaning, akin to using italics or exclamation points. Readers complain that sentences packed with foreign words start to resemble extended strings of strobe lights.

As if that weren’t enough, katakana terms tend to morph at border crossings, like complex names at Ellis Island. “Digital camera” debuted as degitaru kamera, then became the more ear-pleasing digi kamey. But kamey is also the Japanese word for “turtle.”

“It’s very frustrating not knowing what young people are talking about,” says Minoru Shiratori, a 53-year-old municipal employee. “Sometimes I can’t tell if they’re discussing cameras or turtles.”

Similarly, the loan word for “dot-com” also means “suddenly crowded,” which inspired the winning entry in a recent haiku-like poetry contest:

‘Dotsuto comu’

What’s so crowded?

My boss asks.

Japan’s fast-paced word blender, more often than not deftly operated by teenagers, also can leave foreigners reeling. Many Japanese believe they’re speaking English when they describe mayonnaise as mayora; lovers of the Chanel brand as shannera; a convenience store as a combeeni and the high-five gesture of a sports hero as a gattsu posu, or gutsy pose.

“I support efforts to limit katakana words because too many of them damage the beauty and dignity of our language,” says retired financier Yukio Komatsuzaki, 60. “If you want to learn English, that’s great. Or speak proper Japanese. But keep them separate.”

Even more daunting are foreign words left in the Western alphabet, or romanji. Toshiko Uno, a 63-year-old housewife, found herself in desperate straits recently looking for a toilet in a Tokyo train station before noticing a door marked “powder room.”

“Powder room?” she says. “Why put on such airs?”

Foreign-based katakana terms account for 10% of some dictionaries. “The spread has been just phenomenal,” says Yasuko Hio, a social linguist with Shikoku Gakuin University.

A survey by national broadcaster NHK found half of all respondents unhappy with the foreign flood, with people in their 60s most concerned and those in their 20s largely unfazed.

In a bid to temper the torrent of katakana -- a system developed by 9th century Buddhist monks to remember Chinese pronunciation, then the only foreign language invading Japan -- the government has tapped a Foreign Words Committee to find suitable Japanese replacements.

The committee is quick to distance itself from French-style language police, given that Japanese history makes the hint of force, even against words, potentially controversial. A largely ineffective law in France bars advertising in English.

Rather, committee members and traditionalists here hope a sustained campaign of persuasion, gentle reproach and leadership by example can turn the tide. Intelligibility, not purity, is their goal, they say.

“There’s less feeling the government should control it,” says Minoru Shibata, who monitors linguistic change at NHK’s research institute.

The National Institute for Japanese Language hopes to craft 100 Japanese replacement terms every six months. The group admits it’s understaffed but is seeking a $1.7-million budget increase for more wordsmiths. “We want to tackle this aggressively,” says Mitsuro Kai, the institute’s president.

The nation took similar steps during its late 19th century modernization drive as scholars and bureaucrats created Japanese words for “democracy,” “chemistry” and other new concepts. But life was a bit slower then, and the channels for imports better controlled. Society could afford to wait a decade or more while elites found a proper Japanese word that might stand in for a foreign term.

Adding to the committee’s many challenges is the fact that katakana terms tend to evoke novelty and excitement, a reflection of the writing system’s centuries-old role as a beachhead for cutting-edge concepts.

The committee is also up against some pretty aggressive opponents in the vocabulary wars, including high-tech industries, the fashion world, advertising, sports and the media.

Advertisers have embraced katakana with all the subtlety of an anaconda, even tossing in Japanese words to make their soapsuds and soy sauce sound dynamic.

“Sometimes we get calls because people can’t recognize Japanese words in katakana,” says Sadao Yamada, chief researcher at the language institute, who is in charge of the group’s hotline.

Politicians and bureaucrats who hope to sound more sophisticated and worldly aren’t far behind. Economics Minister Heizo Takenaka is accused of using so many English financial terms that his sentences are almost incomprehensible.

“Politicians should be banned from using it,” says Kentaro Miyazaki, a 54-year-old janitor. “When I hear them speaking gibberish, I just tune them out.”

Language purists argue that perfectly good Japanese words are available if people just tried a little harder -- for instance, using jyugyoin to describe a company worker rather than staffu.

Fair enough, counter younger Japanese, but there are nuances. Companies advertising for staffu are seen as progressive, flexible and more equitable toward women, they say. A competitor’s search for jyugyoin evokes respectability, security and -- to some -- mind-numbing boredom.

“I’d much rather have a staffu job than be a jyugyoin,” says Minako Yoshinaga, a 24-year-old cafe worker.

Real estate agents add that hanging your clothes in a walku-in-kurozeto sounds much more luxurious than the more musty-sounding oshiire.

Bureaucrats have another reason for using katakana. While Japanese terms have precise, well-understood meanings, fuzzier foreign terms provide more latitude to do what bureaucrats do everywhere: skirt responsibility.

Take BSE, short for bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The foreign scientific term for “mad cow” disease gained widespread use last year after a health scare in part because the Japanese term -- kyogyu-byo -- is graphically descriptive of the illness and tends to underscore how officials failed to safeguard the nation’s food supply.

“Katakana terms make it more difficult to pin them down,” says Seizaburo Ofuchi, in the terminology office of Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper. “These 60-year-old politicians moan about all the katakana, but they often make ample use of it for their own purposes.”

As if all that weren’t enough, katakana suffers a standardization problem as alternate spellings proliferate for the same word. “It’s quite sloppy,” says Toshio Kaminishi, an editor with Sanseido Publishers, which puts out a katakana dictionary that has doubled in size over the last 30 years. “Actually, it’s out of control.”

For many older Japanese who struggled to rebuild their country after World War II, only to watch it stumble in recent years, katakana’s spread symbolizes the perils of globalization, eroding discipline and the loss of traditional values.

These fears are unfounded, counter others. Foreign words may enter Japan wholesale, but many fade.

“Once they lose their freshness, they’re tossed,” says Toyama University social linguist Shigehiro Kato.

Nor is the social and cultural torch that’s been handed to the younger generation exactly flawless, some add. Japan can’t afford to remain as protected as it has for much of its history, with language an important barometer of change.

“Older people get slower and slower at adapting, while the speed of life gets ever faster,” says cafe worker Yoshinaga. “I think this whole anti-katakana movement is a control issue, a bid to cling to the old Japanese identity. They feel in crisis because everything’s falling apart, and their instinct is to blame younger Japanese who are trying to bring new things into the country.”

With words pouring in hourly, the effort to hold them back strikes some people as quixotic and a throwback to another age when bureaucrats and elites had far greater control over society.

“I seriously doubt the government’s campaign will be effective,” says Osamu Mizutani, a professor at the Nagoya Foreign Language University and a member of the foreign words committee. “Language is a living, changing thing.”

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Hisako Ueno in The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.

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‘Loan words’

Some of the English phrases Japan has assimilated:

digi kamey...digital camera

dotsuto comu...dot-com

mayora...mayonnaise

shannera...Chanel fans

combeeni...convenience store

walku-in-kurozeto...walk-in closet