How many words in People’s Republic of China (中华人民共和国) come from Japanese invented Chinese writing? Surprisingly, all of the individual words stem from the Chinese character (汉字 Hanzi in Chinese or 漢字 Kanji in Japanese), but the grouping of words that denotes a certain meaning was invented by the Japanese. Such Japan made words are called Wasei Kango (和製漢語, Japan-made Chinese words).
Except the word China (中华), other words such as People’s Republic were all invented by Japan. How did China come to let the Japanese invent new words based on their writing system? In order to answer this question, we need to go back to the Meiji Restoration, the era of rapid modernization and industrialization in 1868 Japan.
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The Meiji Emperor, who led the Japanese government from 1868, successfully transformed Japan into a modern state
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The success of the Meiji Restoration and modernization of Japan in 1868 is attributable to several factors: mass mobilization of population into manufacturing and building infrastructure by competent Meiji leadership; decline of the feudal system and change of the social structure; efficient national tax system; and growth of commerce and merchants that paved the way for full-fledged capitalism, to name a few well-known factors.
However, there is a lesser well-known linguistic factor that aided rapid modernization process of the Meiji period in Japan: its Kanji writing system.
The biggest challenge faced by the Meiji government was to translate Western completely new concepts that were virtually non-existent in the Japanese society before 1868. Words like contract (契約) and philosophy (哲学) were totally new, and Japanese people must have had no idea what they meant.
However, one of the Meiji government goals was to learn from the Western countries and establish Japan as one of the likes. In order to do so, the Japanese government was ready to adopt whatever ideas and institutions they felt were best for Japan, such as having a postal and saving system based on the British and military army based on the German.
Such need for translation of English into Japanese, rather than adopting English as the lingua-franca of Japan, is evident in the following quote. “If it was believed that new academic knowledge and understanding of culture and its institutions should only be left to a select class, and therefore education belonged only to a small handful of the elite, there would have been absolutely no need to improve or develop Japanese.
However, if it was believed that science, technology, philosophy, and all things cultural should be shared by all in Japan and that as many citizens as possible should have the chance to receive a high level of education, Japanese had to be improved.” (Thoughts on the Meiji Era, Kodansha, 1977).
Such decision to improve translation rather than adopt English as its primary language by the Meiji government at the time provided nation-wide education opportunities for all Japanese, and ultimately laid the foundation for well- educated workforce that contributed to economic development. Japanese translation of English still remains very fast and of high-quality to this day.
Source: https://www.babel.edu/en/the-professional-translator/mission42/
.jpg "Meiji Restoration and Role of Chinese Writing") |
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Fukuzawa Yukichi was a leading scholar and translator during the Meiji Era, and is featured in 10,000 yen note
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Moreover, some of famous Japanese scholars at the time, like Fukuzawa Yukichi and Nishi Amane, actively translated Western books and words into Japanese. In 1860, Fukuzawa traveled to San Francisco as a jûboku 従僕 (personal attendant) in the entourage of the official Japanese envoy to the United States, and upon returning to Japan, worked for the Bakufu government as a translator and produced his first publication, a Chinese-English-Japanese dictionary titled Zôtei kaei tsûgo 増訂華英通語 (New and Revised Chinese English Dictionary of Common Speech).
In 1862, he was employed as a translator (翻訳方) with an official Japanese envoy to Europe. In 1864 he received orders from the Japanese government’s Office of Foreign Relations, Chinese Translation branch, and in 1865 completed Tôjin ôrai 唐人往来 (Primer on the Chinese.) Nishi Amane coined the terms, such as logic (論理), philosophy (哲学), ethics (倫理) and phenomenon (現象). Thanks to their contributions, Japanese translated words are still used to this day in East Asia.
The most illuminating example of explaining the power of Chinese writing is the word democracy (It is called 民主主义 in Chinese, 민주주의 in Korean, and 民主主義 in Japanese, all of which have the same Chinese character at its roots but with different ways of pronunciation in three East Asian countries). Translation based on literal sounds of words such that a word is pronounced similar to de-mo-cra-cy in Japanese would not be intuitive, because translation based on the sound does not fully grasp the meaning.
However, with 民主主義, literally meaning the system (主義) of people (民) becoming the main ruler of the government (主), even if the concept was new to the Japanese people, they would gradually grasp the meaning intuitively after going over several times.
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These Japanese invented Chinese words are also used in China and South Korea with slightly different pronunciations and different writing methods
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One of the biggest differences between China’s failed attempt at modernization and Japan’s successful modernization was that China only tried to mimic the surface of Western institutions and preserve the core values of China while Japan completely transformed itself into one of the Western likes. Successful translation of new concepts into Japanese was very instrumental in Japan’s rapid nationalization by bridging the gap between the West and Japan in a short period of time.
And the power of Chinese character lies in the fact that each character conveys specific meanings so that they could be put together to create a new concept without causing much confusion in the first place.
Asianpolyglotview 