The language of globalisation

Japan is … well, different. Which does not say much, if one considers that the minutiae of experience make every day (even in familiar places) different from one day to the next. But the differences in Japan are palpable, albeit reminiscent of China, which I visited last year, in some ways. But only up to a point, at least in Japanese cities.

The shopping area in uptown Osaka, to begin with, is far more glitzy than even the glitziest areas in Shanghai and Beijing. The difference also shows in the way (especially young) Japanese dress — invariably very, very fashionably, particularly the girls and young women, with Louis Vuitton handbags and the like in evidence aplenty. And every second (young) person is texting on their ubiquitous mobile phones (the flick-open type, without exception), even while walking. Despite Japan’s excessive foreign debt, this is obviously a very affluent society.

Hot pants and the tiniest of miniskirts are the current flavour here, combined with stockings (presumably because of the winter chill) and high-heel shoes — a strange combination of shoe and bootie — which give the girls a strangely clumsy, and yet sexy, appealing, gait.

My partner and I are here at an Asian conference on (higher) education (ACE), taking place at the conference centre of one of the upmarket hotels in Osaka. Needless to say, because we are travelling on South African rands, we are not staying there, but at a much less expensive hotel, with rooms so small that one of us has to retreat to the little box-like bathroom while the other is getting dressed. But it is clean, the breakfast is edible (to me), even tasty (to her), and most importantly, it is affordable in an otherwise very expensive country.

The conference theme is “The Globalisation of Education”, and my own paper presented here addresses ethical issues raised by the reciprocal international flows of students between countries across the globe, such as, for example, the fact that migrating students invariably find themselves in a situation where cultural differences impact negatively on at least some of them. In other words, the crucible of mutually interacting world cultures is one where some prove to be more vulnerable than others. Nowhere is this more apparent than where different languages meet, as evidenced in some of the papers that I have attended. One of these dealt with the incidence of English “loan-words” in Japanese, gleaned in the course of a detailed study of five different Japanese television genres, including a talk-show and a news programme.

The presenter was at pains to show that the (long) list of such loan-words that he and his fellow researcher were able to compile, was more exhaustive than two such lists compiled by someone else before them. While the statistics provided in this regard may be interesting, by itself, to some, the obvious question raised by the research seemed to me to go beyond the lists themselves, namely: Why do the Japanese borrow so many English words, integrating them seamlessly into their own language? Is this because there are no Japanese equivalents for these words, because the borrowed words articulate an experience not already encapsulated in existing Japanese words? That is, is it because they make a certain kind of experience possible, which Japanese does not accommodate?

I put this question to the presenter, who seemed nonplussed, and asked me to elaborate. To clarify the question, I put it to him that one could either understand the phenomenon of loan-words in terms of a representational conception of language (such as Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language in the Tractatus, which is anything but straightforward, however), where words and sentences are taken to represent states of affairs in the world, or one could approach it from a Heideggerian point of view, according to which “language is the house of being”.

From the latter perspective, far from reflecting already existing, experienceable states of affairs or conditions, language is what first makes experience possible: words and sentences turn what would otherwise be mute, (non-)experiences, into intelligible ones, just like Kant’s categories of the understanding (for example causality) do, without which intuitions of/in space and time would be “blind”. If one added the insight of discourse theory (Foucault, Lacan) to this, it further means that language, which first structures experience into something intelligible, is not purely descriptive, that is, axiologically (value-related) innocent, but simultaneously “arranges” experience in terms of asymmetrical power-relations.

Having listened to my elaboration, the presenter responded by saying that, in his view, many, but not all, English loan-words used in Japanese sentences do not have equivalents in Japanese. It therefore seems that, depending on one’s theory of language, they either capture an experience on the part of Japanese people that is not accommodated by Japanese words, or they enable such experiences for the first time.

At this point another member of the audience (clearly also, like the presenter, a Western person with a thorough knowledge of Japanese) remarked that, in his judgement, all the cases of English loan-words used in Japanese, whether or not they have Japanese equivalents, can be explained differently. According to him, Japanese people believe it is “cool” to intersperse their Japanese words with English/American words or phrases, sometimes adapted or condensed to fit in better, but still recognisably of English or American provenance.

There was my answer: Heidegger plus discourse theory. These loan words, for example, “masscomm”, for “mass communication”, enable “novel” experiences on the part of the Japanese, but precisely of the kind where they participate vicariously, indirectly, via borrowed words, in the cultural-linguistic power represented by, or vested in, the words concerned. This is why it is “cool” to use these words. I have noticed the same phenomenon among non-English-speaking students in South Africa.

Here, then, was a telling manifestation of the effects of globalisation: Japanese people (probably like those from many other, non-English speaking nations) borrow English/American words or phrases, because and in so far as using these embodies, symbolically, their participation in global culture, where the dominance of English is symptomatic of the economic and political/military dominance of the Anglo-American bloc or alliance. But, circling back to where I started, this means that the Japanese are not so different, after all. In the age of globalisation, they, like everyone else, are buying into the lure of the Americanisation (or McDonaldisation) of the world.