->point

此文我有中文翻譯，但是，太長了，我不想打出來，而在網路上我還沒有找到全面的翻譯，暫時看看英文了，看了，談談你的觀點如何啊？
ABSTRACT --- Divergent world views of Japan and China are reflected in fact that Japanese language has entirely different set of written characters to express foreign words and names, making them immediately recognizable as foreign, while Chinese has no such distinction, depicting non-Chinese names entirely in Chinese characters; Japan feels at odds with foreign things and people, whereas China embraces them with easy condescension; characters used for foreigners in Japan are also used for Alberto Fujimori, Peru's deposed president, who is of Japanese ancestry, and Kazuo Ishiguro. novelist who left Japan at age 5 and is British citizen; distinctions are sometimes difficult to draw.

PASSAGE---

March 17, 2004
LETTER FROM ASIA
Japan and China: National Character Writ Large
By NORIMITSU ONISHI

OKYO — Of all languages in the world, Japanese is the only one that has an entirely different set of written characters to express foreign words and names. Just seeing these characters automatically tells the Japanese that they are dealing with something or someone non-Japanese.

So foreign names, from George Bush to Saddam Hussein, are depicted in these characters, called katakana. What's more, the names of foreign citizens of Japanese ancestry are also written in this set of characters, indicating that while they may have Japanese names, they are not, well, really Japanese.

By contrast, in Chinese, no such distinction is made. There, non-Chinese names are depicted, sometimes with great difficulty, entirely in Chinese characters. Foreigners are, in effect, made Chinese.

At bottom, the differences reflect each country's diverging worldview. In contrast to the inner-looking island nation of Japan, China has traditionally viewed itself as the Middle Kingdom of its name, the center of the world. If it is natural for Japan to identify things or people as foreign, viewing them with some degree of caution, it may be equally natural for China to take "Coca-Cola" or "George Bush," and find the most suitable Chinese characters to express them.

In Japan, the rigid division between the inside and outside in the language underscores this country's enduring ambivalence toward the non-Japanese. The contrast with China is stark, and speaks also to the future prospects of Asia's two economic giants as they compete for influence in a world of increasingly fluid borders.

While today's Japanese travel overseas with an ease and confidence that would have been unimaginable only two generations ago, they remain uneasy about foreign things and people coming here. Safer to label them clearly as foreign.

Not so China.

"China is a big continent and has an inclination to think that it is No. 1 and that others are uncivilized," said Minoru Shibata, a researcher at NHK, Japan's public broadcast network. "Therefore, they feel that giving Chinese names to foreigners is doing them a favor."

China and Japan represent the two nations that still widely use Chinese characters in their writing. The Chinese, as the creators of this system, still use them exclusively.

Come to Japan, and things get extremely complicated. In their everyday lives, the Japanese use three different sets of characters in writing — four if the widely used Roman alphabet is also included.

First are the Chinese characters, called kanji here. Japanese names are written in kanji. Currently, the number of kanji permitted for names stands at 2,230, and selecting a character outside this list is illegal. Parents have been pressing for an expanded list, though, and so the justice ministry said recently that it is considering adding between 500 and 1,000 characters.

Second is a set of phonetic characters used for Japanese words. Third are the katakana, the set of phonetic characters for foreign words.

"There is no other language that has three sets of characters — only Japanese," said Muturo Kai, president of the National Institute for Japanese Language.

In the United States, parents' freedom to name their children may be absolute. Here the government and the media set the boundaries of names and the way they are written, thereby also setting the boundaries of Japanese identity.

In the media, the names of George Bush and Saddam Hussein are written in the characters reserved for foreign names. But so are the names of people of Japanese ancestry, like Alberto Fujimori, Peru's deposed president, or Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of "Remains of the Day," who left Japan at the age of 5 and is a British citizen. Their names could be written in kanji, but are instead written in katakana, in an established custom indicating that they are not truly Japanese.

The distinctions are sometimes difficult to draw, as they touch upon the difficult question of who is Japanese, or, rather, when does someone stop being Japanese. If Mr. Ishiguro had kept his Japanese citizenship all these years, would his name be written differently here? Why is the name of Mr. Fujimori, who holds Japanese citizenship and now lives in exile here, not written in kanji like the names of other Japanese? The media have no set criteria.

Are the criteria citizenship, blood, mastery of the Japanese language or customs? Or, in this island nation where leaving Japan has always meant leaving the village, does one start becoming non-Japanese the minute one steps off Japanese soil?

There is a strong argument to be made for that. Children of Japanese business families stationed overseas for a few years invariably encounter problems returning here. Schoolmates often pick on them and call them gaijin, meaning foreigner or outsider. That problem has decreased in recent years, as more and more Japanese have spent time abroad. But those children are still considered to have suffered from their years overseas, in contrast to, say, an American child whose experience living abroad would usually be considered a plus.

Chinese identity is a different matter. Whether you are a fourth-generation Chinese-American student at Berkeley, or the children of Chinese operating a restaurant in Lagos, Nigeria, you are considered Chinese, or an insider, upon returning to China. Your name will be written in the same way as everybody else's. Unlike Japan's, Chinese identity transcends borders.

"Chinese people have a strong feeling of comradeship toward overseas Chinese," said Naokazu Hiruma, who is in charge of language use at the daily Asahi Shimbun and studied in China. "Overseas Chinese have a long tradition, and they remain Chinese even after generations have passed. Japanese regard second- or third-generation overseas Japanese, even though they are of Japanese origin, as `people from that country over there.' "

 Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

 DIFFERENT OPINION---

National Character Writ Large?
A recent Letter from Asia in the New York Times by Norimitsu Onishi entitled Japan and China: National Character Writ Large advances the proposition that the way in which Japanese writes foreign words reflects the strong separation that the inward-looking Japanese make between things foreign and things Japanese. Onishi writes:

Of all languages in the world, Japanese is the only one that has an entirely different set of written characters to express foreign words and names. Just seeing these characters automatically tells the Japanese that they are dealing with something or someone non-Japanese.
Onishi contrasts the Japanese with the outward-looking Chinese, who have no special way of writing foreign words but create Chinese character spellings for them. He's right about the difference in national character, but I am doubtful of the relationship he suggests between national character and writing.

Japanese is written in a mixture of three sets of characters. One set consists of 漢字 [kanji] "Chinese characters". Most 漢字 are of Chinese origin, though as I've previously mentioned, there are some 国字 [kokuji] "national characters", which were created in Japan. The other two sets of characters are ひらがな [hiragana] and カタカナ [katakana], each of which by itself constitutes a basically phonological, moraic writing system. Except for certain details hiragana and katakana differ only in the shapes of the letters e.g. hiragana な vs. katakana ナ [na]. Japanese can in principle be written entirely in hiragana or entirely in katakana, though this is rarely done in practice. What Onishi refers to in the passage quoted is the fact that foreign words are usually written in katakana. This is true, but it isn't true that Japanese "has an entirely different set of written characters to express foreign words and names".

Historically, there is no association at all between katakana and foreign words. Originally, Japanese was written entirely in Chinese characters, where the characters were sometimes used for their meaning and sometimes for their sound. Not just any character could be used for its sound: for each syllable a certain set of characters could be used, up to about a dozen. This writing system is called 万葉仮名 [man'yoogana] "10,000 leaf kana", after the 万葉集 Man'yooshuu "collection of 10,000 leaves", the great anthology of poetry compiled in 752 C.E., which was written in this writing system. Over time, the redundant characters were eliminated, so that each syllable was represented by a single character, and the characters were simplified, which had the effect of differentiating them from Chinese characters. For instance, the katakana letter ナ [na] is a simplification of the Chinese character 奈.

This systematization and simplification of the 万葉仮名 took place twice, resulting in hiragana and katakana. hiragana came to be used particularly by women, katakana (together with Chinese characters) by men. Prior to the Second World War, katakana were routinely used to write native Japanese words. When European words first began to enter Japanese in the latter half of the sixteenth century, in many cases Chinese character spellings were created for them, as I've mentioned before. There was no special way of writing them.

Two relatively recent developments give rise to the impression that katakana are for writing foreign words. The earlier of the two is the shift away from maximizing the use of Chinese characters. This resulted in most of the old Chinese character spellings for European words being abandoned, and in the cessation of the creation of Chinese character spellings for newly introduced foreign words. The more recent of the two is the postwar shift to hiragana as the default phonological writing system. Together, these resulted in foreign words being written phonologically, and in the use of katakana becoming special.

Even if katakana were not developed for the purpose of writing foreign words, are they now used exclusively for this purpose? No. katakana are also used in a number of other situations:

• to write the common names of plants and animals in scientific text, e.g. カエル [kaeru] "frog";
  to write certain female given names e.g. エミ Emi and マリ Mari;
  to write slang words such as インチキ [inchiki] "fake";
  to write onomatopoeic words such as ワンワン [wanwan] "bow-wow";
  to spell out a person's name so that the reader will be sure to pronounce it correctly;
  to write any word when it is desired to emphasize it, as italics are used in English;
  

Until recently, telegrams were always written in katakana. However, in 1988 it became possible to use hiragana, katakana and roman letters in telegrams, so the default writing system for telegrams shifted to hiragana as it had for other text.

So we see that even now katakana are by no means used exclusively for foreign words. The real principle at work is that hiragana is the default, while katakana is marked. When you want to mark something as special, you use katakana, rather like italics and scare quotes are used in English. The fact that Japanese usually write foreign words in the marked writing system may reflect a particularly intense interest in what is foreign and what is Japanese, but it isn't really very different from the English practice of writing words and expressions still perceived as foreign in italics, such as ad hoc and force majeure.

by Bill Poser