By Will Lerner, Communications Manager for Portland Japanese Garden & Japan Institute
Portland Japanese Garden is both a public garden and a cultural institution that was established to introduce people to the gifts of Japanese culture through nature, art, education, and beyond. Throughout its more than 60 years of operation, the Garden has often turned to specific Japanese terms to further enlighten its visitors, members, volunteers, and staff about the nation’s approach to such things as landscape architecture techniques, philosophies on continual improvement, or the healing qualities of nature. However, Japanese concepts often don’t have an airtight English counterpart—interpretation, translation, and localization often rely on a combination of historic practices, thinking that adapts to new realities, and subjectivity.
Related: Learn more about the meaning of wabi sabi.
Often English can fail to capture the true quintessence of a Japanese term, as Kakuzo (aka. Tenshin) Okakura noted in his 1906 classic, The Book of Tea. “Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observes, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade—all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of color or design,” Okakura penned. “But, after all, what great doctrine is there which is easy to expound?”
Attempting to translate any Japanese word into English isn’t always simple for a reason—the languages are profoundly different. Whereas English has 26 characters that make up its alphabet, from which a multitude of different sounds may be voiced, Japanese has three different sets of characters in something that would more accurately be labeled a “syllabary.” While two of them (hiragana and katakana–46 of each) are phonetic, the third character, kanji, derived from Chinese, are ideographic. Each kanji represents an idea, object or concept, having multiple pronunciations depending on the context. English and Japanese also have different “rules” for sentence structure; a literal, word-for-word translation of Japanese into English or English into Japanese would render a sentence into a befuddling word salad.
English itself is a difficult language to master, even for those who get a head start from being raised speaking it:
- A given sentence’s intention might change completely based on which word is emphasized. For example, read “I never said he ate a salad” aloud seven times, stressing a different word each time to come up with seven different intended meanings.
- The spelling of a word gives no real indication of how it’s pronounced. “Cough,” “tough,” and “dough” don’t rhyme!
- The “rules” for writing in English must often be broken and ignored. For instance, “feisty” stands in defiance of the rule, “’i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c.’”
And that is just a few of the headaches. Using English to convey the meaning of a Japanese word, then, is a collision of challenging lexicons. Learning both English and Japanese is a credit to the resilience of those who brave the pursuit.
“Languages are directly tied to cultures and how people think,” shares Mayuko Sasanuma, Director of Cultural Programming for Portland Japanese Garden and someone who speaks both tongues. “For instance, in Japan, we typically show great deference to seniority and leadership, which results in our language having many layers of honorific expressions. Japanese culture can party be characterized by its ambiguity and high context. This explains why we often omit the subject from our sentences and don’t differentiate between the singular and plural forms for our nouns, as there’s shared understanding among people.”
The American-born Donald Keene (1922-2019) is considered one of the foremost Western scholars on Japanese culture. Aside from numerous books he authored on the subject, he also helped introduce Japanese texts to English-speaking audiences through his translations. “The translator is entitled to resort to every legitimate means at his disposal in order to keep the work he is translating immediate and alive,” he writes in Appreciations of Japanese Culture (1971). “What is ‘legitimate’ depends of course a good deal on the audience he has in mind.”