Speaking Of Words: Who Said 'Toe-Food'

By Michael Ferber, InDepth NH

Japanese has absorbed thousands of English words, such as aidoru (idol), depato (department store), hankachi (handkerchief), and even raisu (rice). Walk through the streets of any city in Japan and you will see lots of signs in the Roman alphabet and many more in katakana, the system for writing foreign words. But English has helped itself to a sizable swathe of Japanese words in return.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists 586 words of Japanese origin that have entered the English language. Quite a few of them, it seems to me, have not entered very far, as they are found mainly in books about Japan, or they are known only to those of us who play the game of go or practice the martial arts (judo or karate) or arrange flowers (ikebana). Even the OED does not list atari, which is what you say to alert your opponents in a go game that one or more of their pieces are in danger, rather like “check” in chess. Of course we know Atari as the name of a company that makes computer games and runs hotels, but it comes from the game.

Many of the Japanese words we know, not surprisingly, have to do with food. Food words often take the lead in linguistic invasions from other languages, such as pasta, pizza, and latte; or taco, tortilla, and dulce de leche; or camembert, coq au vin, and café au lait. From Japan we have absorbed miso, panko, ramen, sake, sashimi, shiitake, soba, soy, sukiyaki, sushi, tempura, teriyaki, tofu, udon, and wasabi, among many other food or drink words, as well as that somewhat mysterious “fifth taste,” umami. You might cook some of these foods on a hibachi.

Sashimi is raw fish, a slice of which is often served on top of a piece of sushi. Teriyaki, sukiyaki, and many other yaki words mean “cooked” or “roasted” something, as also seen in yakisoba, stir-fried soba noodles. Tofu comes from a Chinese compound meaning “rotten beans”; our little daughter thought it was “toe-food,” which was not far off.

Two recently adopted terms with the same ending are kombucha and matcha. Kombucha was originally a brew made of kelp (kombu) brewed with yeast, bacteria, and tea (cha) (Try it!), while matcha is powdered tea, from a root mat– meaning “rub” plus cha. As for cha itself, Japanese took it from Mandarin Chinese, as English also did early in the seventeenth century. In the twentieth century English-speakers discovered chai, which is the way cha is pronounced in Russian, Persian, and other tongues. Surprisingly, “tea,” our main word for the drink, probably came to English from Dutch, which picked it up from Malay te or teh, which got it from the Hokkien dialect of Chinese, which inherited the same ancient Chinese word that led to Mandarin cha.

World War II, of course, gave us some Japanese words, such as banzai, kamikaze, and harakiri (“harey-carey”), but we have been taking them in since Commodore Perry “opened” Japan to the west in 1854. Shogun is one of these, though forms of it spelled variously could be found in earlier reports of the country. The shogun was the “big prince” or taikun, and Americans embraced taikun right away as “tycoon.” A word that occupying American soldiers picked up is pachinko (since 1951 at least), the vertical pinball game. The name seems to combine an imitation of the sound of the handle when it hits a ball, or maybe the sound of the pins (a little like ka-ching, the sound of the now obsolete cash register) with the diminutive suffix –ko (“child”), often seen in female given names. Skosh is another post-war borrowing, first in US Army slang, meaning “a little,” from sukoshi. When I was in Japan I learned to say sukoshi dake, “only a little,” when asked if I spoke Japanese.

Belonging to an important semantic sphere are words connected to Japanese arts and aesthetic culture: bonsai, geisha, haiku, ikebana, kabuki, netsuke, origami, satori, and zen. To learn the connotations and contexts of these words is to immerse yourself in the traditional culture of Japan, whose depth and subtlety seem endless. More recent and more widespread, though perhaps less deep and subtle, are manga, anime, karaoke, sudoku, and kenken. Kenken is a doubling of ken, which means “cleverness,” though I should think that if you’re clever enough to do one, you don’t need to be told twice. To the cognoscenti Japanese has given another word recently, wabi-sabi, which the OED has nicely defined as “a Japanese aesthetic or world view characterized by finding beauty in imperfection, impermanence, or simplicity.” It is a compound of wabi, which can mean “tranquility” with a hint of loneliness, and sabi, which can also mean “tranquility,” but with a hint of agedness or ruin.

We mustn’t leave out the Japanese martial arts, which have attracted millions of westerners: judo, jujitsu, karate, kendo, and ninja, just for starters, and the word for “sword,” katana. Not to mention samurai, the warriors expert in these things.

And to round out the list a skosh: futon, honcho, koi, kudzu, sakura, tatami, tsunami.

One of my favorites is emoji, which ought to be related to “emoticon” but apparently is not. It comes from e, meaning “picture,” and moji, “word,” hence “picture-word” or pictograph; ji by itself means “letter, character,” as in kanji, “Chinese letter(s)” and romaji, “Roman letter(s).” To be fully literate in Japanese, by the way, you most know four scripts: the kanji, thousands of them, based on Chinese ideograms; hiragana, a phonetic syllabary of some fifty characters; katakana, a comparable syllabary just for foreign words; and the Roman alphabet.

A great number of the words English has taken from Japanese are recycled Chinese words, especially compounds, such as tycoon and geisha. More surprising is the number of words that recycle western words. Panko, for instance, comes pan (“bread”) plus ko (“powder”); if pan looks suspicious, it’s because it was taken from Portuguese pão and Spanish pan back in the sixteenth century, since the Japanese had never seen bread before. Tempura may come from Portuguese tempero, “seasoning.” Anime is short for animeshon, which is pretty obviously English, though French animé may have been an influence. Cosplay is a shortening of kosuchumu-pure, that is, “costume-play.” And karaoke is a hybrid of kara, meaning “empty, void,” and oke, which is a shortening of okesutora, which is an attempt to say “orchestra.”

Our word Japan, finally, is not Japanese but Malayan, which passed it on to Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century. In Japanese it is Nihon or Nippon, which translates two Chinese kanji which mean “sun” and “origin” that is, the Eastern Land.

You’ll be glad to know that is all we have space for. Sayonara.

I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.

This story was originally published by InDepth NH.