Between Script and Pictures in Japan

要旨

ABSTRACT Starting with the brush as the common instrument for rendering both word and picture, the paper outlines various visual characteristics of script. It also demonstrates how combinations of words and pictures have been used interchangeably and occupied the same space in every form of creative production-from story writing to advertising. These characteristics are shown to have encouraged leading novelists to think graphically and artists to think textually. Finally, reflects on this condition to question the commonly held view that there is a clear divide between script and picture. (ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) Japanese culture is primarily visual, not verbal. - Masso Mtyoshi (1974, p. xv) EVER SINCE SAUSSURE AND THE RISE OF MODERN LINGUISTICS, research in the field has emphasized the spoken over the written aspect of language. Viewed mostly as a means of Transcribing speech (and therefore as a secondary form of language) the main concerns about writing have been phonological. This approach to language may be the natural outcome of a discipline that arose from within the confines of the Indo-European family of languages -and particularly from within the confines of alphabetic transcription. It seems far less appropriate to apply this view to those Eastern languages that have shared Chinese characters of pictographic and ideographic origins-kanji to the Japanese. In these languages the phonological representation is neither the only, nor primary, function. It is only apart of the language and the other aspect, visual representation, is also a key component. This is reflected in the ways that the territories of writing and pictures have overlapped in the China-influenced Eastern cultures, having been most pronounced in Japan. Indeed, one might say that word and picture are simply part of a continuum where there are no distinct boundaries. It would be unfair however to point only to the twentieth century and, even more misleading, to Saussure when commenting on the West's phonocentric bias. It is the view of Hasumi Shigehiko (1980, 138-142) that phonocentricism is but a reflection of a system of thought that has governed Western theological and theoretical history for at least two millennia; and is in linguistics where this is most apparent. Indeed, for both Plato and Aristotle, writing was just a representation of speech: 'written words are the signs of words spoken' wrote Aristotle (Harris, 1986, 26). In Japan however, writing and speech enjoyed considerable autonomy until the late nineteenth century almost to the extent of there being two distinct stages of linguistic development (Miyoshi, 1974, viii). In such a situation, the idea of writing as being a mere shadow of the spoken word is not applicable. Put simply, people did not write as they spoke. Miyoshi (1974, 10) speculates that written documents were meant primarily to be read silently, not read aloud or heard. Further, he linked this to the visual nature of Chinese ideograms as a writing system: for is quite possible for the speaker of to recognize the rough meaning of a given ideogram without knowing for certain how to pronounce it (Miyoshi, 1974, 23). Characters speak to the eye without articulation of sound, similar to pictures. Indeed character recognition precipitates right hemisphere brain activity in the manner of pictures. In contrast, words and pictures have occupied different territories in the West since antiquity. According to the Bible (Deuteronomy) a man would be cursed if he engraved an image of the Lord, but was able to engrave words ad infinitum. Until Modem times the only significant Western incursion of the picture into writing was in the Early Christian illuminated manuscripts but. as the name implies, was a mostly a case of pictorial elements illuminating or decorating words. That is, was more a matter of pictures beautifying the Word than one of words and pictures occupying the very same space on

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