Japanese words in English

Here’s a pub quiz question for you: What’s the only (real) country that is also a verb?

Have you got it yet?

I’ll put you out of your misery. It’s Japan.

Collins English Dictionary defines the verb as ‘to lacquer with japan or any similar varnish’. And ‘japan’ as a noun long since verbed is ‘a lacquer or varnish giving a hard, glossy finish’.

So much history in one little verbing. Japanese art has influenced European art profoundly, principally in two spurts: from the mid-seventeenth century for a century and a half or so, when the import trade run mostly by Portuguese or Dutch merchants quenched the almost unquenchable European thirst for decorative pottery, such as imari ware with its strong blues and reds and elaborate gilt, or kakiemon, and lacquered objects and objets de vertu such as those fascinatingly conceived carved objects somewhat demeaned by being described as ‘toggles’, netsukes. And second, from the mid-nineteenth century, after Japan re-opened its borders in 1868, after which in Britain the Aesthetic Movement became enthralled by Japanesery (1885) or its more chic Frenchified cousin, japonaiserie (1896), that is, the craze for all things Japanese when it comes to interior decoration and the decorative arts.

By 1688 there was already a British ‘Treatise of Japaning’, telling furniture makers how to B&Q it; a century and a half later Jane Austen still feels the ripples of that first wave when she makes Catherine in Northanger Abbey fall almost Gothickly under the spell of a cabinet that ‘was not absolutely ebony and gold; but it was japan, black and yellow japan of the handsomest kind’.

Later in the nineteenth century, Van Gogh, among many of his contemporary artists, copied and was influenced by Japanese prints by the master printmakers Hiroshige, Hokusai and others, those ‘pictures of the floating world’ as the translation of the Japanese ukiyo-e has it, the area of cities, especially Edo (now Tokyo) where theatricality met immorality and was immortalised in magisterial woodblocks that the Japanese general public could afford.

As an example of the Japaneseing aesthetic craze, in the first chapter of Oscar Wilde’s largely indigestible The Picture of Dorian Gray, the birds in flight that cast shadows across the heavy tussore silk drapes of the painter’s decadent studio produce ‘a kind of momentary Japanese effect’.

You say manga, I say ikebana.

Which Japanese words one is conscious of as affecting English will surely depend on age. (Sorry for the truism, which applies across language: but truisms are called that because they’re true, if hackneyed.) For people younger than me, it’s manga and anime culture that will sit atop their mental furniture if asked to name a Japanese word in English.

For me, the resonances of Japanese words are rather different. For instance, off the top of my head, kimono springs to mind. But earlier than kimono in my memory is reading about origami, the art of artistic paper folding, in a Reader’s Digest Christmas Annual or some such. I think I managed to beguile some time by creating a lopsided and flightless bird, but failed miserably to achieve anything more aerial, ‘cack-handed’ being my middle name. Much later, when introduced to the gentleman who did ikebana for the Emperor and the Court, I was impressed that a full-time profession could be made out of that art of highly artistic and intellectual flower arranging.

A simple soup

Landing with a bump back down to earth, in my kitchen cabinet I have miso sachets ready to make a delicious noodle soup whenever I manage to kid myself I’m being healthy. (Though talking about miso may feel vaguely modern, in fact it’s one of the oldest Japanese loanwords in English.) Some noodles, spring onions, soy sauce, a finely sliced mushroom or two, pak choi (which is a Chinese word) if you have it, a plonk of sherry, and you can create a soothing thin broth of what Nigella calls ‘templefood.’

I digress.

With food in mind – and food is always in my mind, I’m notorious for it among my friends – it’s worth looking at some of the staples of Japanese food now entrenched in the Anglosphere. You’d probably have to have been living under that proverbial rock not to know what sushi refers to.

If panko breadcrumbs can be considered food, they’re the second Japanese food item that graces my kitchen cabinet. I don’t know what you do with them, but I tend to use them to leaven the day-glo-orange breadcrumbs you can use to bread haddie and the like for frying.

I’m a fairly middle-of-the-road cook, with the occasional velleity of upping my game. What mostly sets me back, TBH, is the prep time that chefs routinely ascribe to their recipes: their ‘ten minutes’ translates into three quarters of an hour minimum. That said, I’ve often ogled jars of yuzu in the supermarket but never bought one, mostly because I thought it was a lot to pay for an exiguous quantity of something I couldn’t guarantee I’d ever use. (Clap your hands if you’ve been there too, not just with yuzu😉.) So prized is this fragrant fruit, that I understand it’s a thing in Japan to have a bath filled with it during the winter.

But we don’t need to be as exotic as yuzu to think of everyday ‘British’ foods (emphatic air quotes round ‘British’ here) with a Japanese twist that we’re all now mostly familiar with: think ramen, think udon, think soba. Two of those are homespun Japanese words, but ramen comes from the Chinese for ‘to pull’ and ‘noodles’. And then there are gyoza dumplings, yakitori chicken, edamame beans, that ubiquitous mouth-tingling wasabi paste, and so forth. This is a blog post, not a culinary dictionary, so I won’t go on. Except that …

overarching all these bits and bobs of imported Japanese food culture must sit the word umami, for the fifth basic taste – along with sweet, sour, bitter and salty – that we didn’t have a name for or even know existed until someone premiered the word in the Japanese journal of psychology Shinrigaku Kenkyu in 1963. Since then it’s gone from strength to strength – metaphorically, you understand. I don’t think there are yet units to measure the intensity of umaminess, unlike, say, the Scoville Heat Units used for chillis.

Moving off the topic of food now but still in the domestic sphere, you could have knocked me down with a feather when I found out that the aucuba, ornamental laurel, is not Latin. Well, it is and it isn’t. It’s Modern Latin based apparently on Japanese words for ‘(being) green’, ‘leaf’, and possibly ‘tree’.

A touching tale

Still in the domestic realm, the akita is a rather handsome breed of large dog, named after a region of Northern Japan. As the American Kennel Club notes, akitas are ‘famous for their dignity, courage and loyalty’ and are ‘hard-wired for protecting those they love’. Indeed. Who could not be moved by the story of Hachikō, who every day for ten years went to the railway station to await the arrival of his master, a professor, on his commute home from university, but his master had died at work, never to return alive on the train.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t as yet said much about the history of the words I’ve mentioned, the disappointing truth is that they don’t mostly have exotic stories to tell. They’re a bit ‘it does what it says on the tin’ words – absolutely no disrespect intended. To illustrate my point, tempura means ‘fried food’, sushi means ‘sour rice’ and yuzu just means, possibly, ‘fruit of tree’ – though it might come from Middle Chinese. Kimono means ‘clothing’, from kiru, ‘to wear’ + mono, ‘thing’. Saké, however, might just possibly be derived form a word meaning ‘to prosper’. I’ll drink to that.

Zen and the art of pottery

Chinese culture, religion and language have massively influenced Japan from the first millennium bce onwards. In fact, even that quintessential financial symbol of Japan, the currency, the yen, is from Chinese: it’s the Japanese en, which comes from Chinese yuan, ‘circular object, dollar’. Then there’s Buddhism – think Zen and koans, those riddles such as ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’; art forms like pottery – think raku and ‘studio’ potters like Bernard Leach; and, finally, the written language, the complexities of which I’ll spare you. Suffice it to say that romaji, the Roman alphabet used to transcribe Japanese into an alphabetic form you and I can read, combines Japanese roma ‘Roman’ with ji‘character’.

Some imports from Japan hide their ancestry. If we talk about the head honcho, we’re unknowingly using the Japanese hanchō, ‘squad leader’. Tycoons are literally ‘great leaders’, from Japanese taikun, from Chinese ta, ‘great’, + chün, ‘ruler’. And of course, emojis have nothing to do with the e– of email or emotion and everything to do with Japanese e, ‘picture’, + moji, ‘letter’. Fortunately, the rebarbative business speak ‘to open the kimono’, meaning ‘to open the books’, seems to have died a death.

After all this japonaiserie, it’s really time for me to go and meditate on my tatami mat before reclining on my futon and drifting off mentally into that gorgeous ‘floating world’ I mentioned earlier. Tatami mats constitute a standard measure influencing the size of traditional Japanese homes and, incidentally, even influenced Bauhaus aesthetics.

By Jeremy Butterfield
Jeremy Butterfield is the former Editor-in-Chief of Collins Dictionaries, and editor of the fourth, revised edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.