Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [249]
What, then, remains of the Japanese overseas language community, half a century after Japan’s expulsion? Many who survive from the generations that attended Japanese schools can still converse in the language. But it seems that it is hardly used as a means of communication, even among this generation:70 the opprobrium that the Japanese had stirred up lasted so long that it prevented any advantage being taken of this heritage when Japanese industrial interests began to spread again. The old Japanese empire has in no way served as a launch-pad for the global spread of Japanese products, and latterly of Japanese culture, in the last four decades of the twentieth century.
Japan’s fifty years of language spread can be seen as a demonstration in miniature of the career of an imperial language. Like the other colonial empires, Japan took advantage of its technical and military superiority over other countries—in this case, its close neighbours—to increase its territory. It then faced the problem of what to do with the native populations there, people who did not think of themselves as Japanese. It attempted everywhere to convert them into members of its own community, certainly not trusting them to associate themselves voluntarily, but setting considerable store by education in the Japanese language. As everywhere else, this conversion process failed.
There was reasonable success in spreading the language, but once the political motive for using it was gone, the language turned out to have no independent staying power. The framework suggested to explain the decline of Russian can be applied here too. The creole motive was absent, since essentially the whole overseas population had been repatriated. There was no nostalgia for life under the flag of the Rising Sun, nor any wish to preserve unity with its speakers. Indeed, the bitter memories that the few years of Japan’s control had caused were such that even when there were globalisation reasons to renew economic links through the language, they were disregarded. Permanent language spread, it turns out, is not to be achieved through planning, or naked force.
* Camões is the doyen of Portuguese literature, and his great work celebrates the achievements of the Portuguese mariners. The name Lusiadas, although it recalls ‘Iliad’, is actually a learned equivalent for ‘the Portuguese’, meaning the progeny of Lusus, the mythical founder of the race who lived in (Roman) Lusitania. The work was actually written, for the most part, in Goa, so it is a product of Ultramar, as well as a celebration of it. It was published in 1572.
* ‘Father, what has brought you to this land so far from India?’ Reported in his Itinerario da Índia por terra, quoted in Lopes (1936: 33-5).
† Now Bandar Khomeini, on the Straits of Hormuz.
* It became the default European language in the Indies, and apparently in western Java, in the region of Preanger, even Dutch was known popularly as basa Perteges—an interesting conflation of language misnomers, with basa, through Malay bahasa, from Sanskrit bhā⋅ā, and Perteges a corruption of Portugues (reported in Lopes 1936: viii).
* To compare with English dialects, Indo-Portuguese makes it like the E in a refined Scots pronunciation of ‘Edinburgh’, standard Portuguese more like the a in Cockney ‘mate’.
† Even so, in 2000 the state’s official language was declared to be Konkani, an Aryan language related to Marathi and Hindi.
* This was part of the global impact of the Enlightenment on Catholic governments (see Chapter 10, ‘The state’s solution: Hispanización’, p. 374).
* Palembang in Sumatra was the principal city of Śrī Vijaya, the ancient state that was most likely responsible for the spread of Malay round the markets of the East Indies. This proverbial