Tongues‐Tied: The Making of a “National Language” and the Discovery of Dialects in Meiji Japan

要旨

The time is 1874, the place Tokyo. Nangō Seinosuke, an official at the newly formed Ministry of Education, has been ordered by the education minister, Tanaka Fujimaro, to create a new common spoken language—a “nationally unified speech”—to be used throughout Japan. He returns to his home in Kōjimachi, hoping to find inspiration in his own household. What he gets instead is linguistic anarchy. Seinosuke himself was born and raised in Chōshū domain, and naturally speaks the Chōshū dialect. But he has married into a Satsuma family, and his wife and father-in-law speak the Satsuma dialect. Their five-year-old son is prone to an odd mix of both, and is precocious enough to use Chōshū speech to cajole his father and Satsuma speech to please his grandfather. The Nangōs' maids are Edo locals, but the head maid speaks with a gentle uptown grace, while the younger maids chatter away in the rough-and-tumble downtown colloquial. The driver's Tōno accent is certainly confounding, although not nearly as much as the male servant's Tsugaru tongue, which is practically incomprehensible to the rest of the household. The one person who can best deal with the chaos is a live-in university student from Nagoya who must often serve as the family interpreter. As it turns out, Seinosuke's challenge lies in his home as much as his office. One day, a thief breaks into the Nangō residence. Having been caught in the act, he is surrounded by the entire household. Undaunted, the thief proudly announces himself, waves his sword, and repeatedly demands “jeneko.” But the household mills around, confused as to what the intruder is saying; it takes everyone a while to guess that “jeneko” must be some dialect for “valuables.” The thief, who turns out to be a fallen samurai from Aizu domain named Wakabayashi Torasaburō, can only slink away empty-handed, thwarted less by the Nangōs' vigilance than by his own provincial tongue. This linguistic melting pot was cooked up by the dramatist Inoue Hisashi in his 1985 play Kokugo gannen (Year One of Our National Language).1 The story is not historical fact, of course, but neither is it sheer fiction, for Inoue simply compressed and dramatized the sort of speech plurality that pervaded Meiji Japan (1868–1912). At the time, there were more than a few Torasaburōs who struggled to make their local speech understood, just as there were more than a few Seinosukes who hoped to devise a solution. The Nangō household, in which there are far too many ways to say even simple words such as “loincloth”—tsuidana, hadamaki, shitaobi, shi-tanomono, heko, hekoshi, mawashi, or fundosu?—is a tongue-in-cheek microcosm of Meiji Japan. In Inoue's play, speech diversity serves a comedic effect, but to those who saw it as a threat to their nascent national life, this was no laughing matter. Scholars and officials in Tokyo were certainly not amused to find that a myriad of dialects split the Japanese archipelago “like squares on a checkerboard.”2 Although Meiji Japan shared what could fairly be considered a single language in Japanese, that language, in daily practice, had long been spoken in countless local variations, some mutually intelligible, others far less so.3 “Even after the Restoration,” one leading linguist bemoaned in 1898, “the national language is not yet unified, and dialects still maintain their influence upon each region.”4 Thirty years had already passed since the dawn of modern times, yet Meiji Japan seemed doomed to never quite sound the way a modern nation-state should. Local educators such as those in the Aizu region, now the western part of Fukushima prefecture in northeast Japan, often echoed such concerns. Aizu speech, which had been used for generations as a matter of course, was suddenly viewed as being “wrong.” When schoolteachers in the central Aizu town of Kitakata produced a local gazetteer in 1911, they included a table of the area's vocabulary as many gazetteers had customarily done in the past. This time, however,

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