When people ask me how I got interested in Japanese, I usually tell them it was my love for Japanese literature, sparked in my senior year of high school. This isn’t a lie; it was after discovering author Haruki Murakami that I decided to dedicate myself to the language in order to close the gap between the English translations I was reading and the original texts that felt so unreachable.
The fact of the matter, though, is that my interest in Japanese was sparked much earlier. My older sister liked manga growing up, so I also came to like it through the osmosis of siblinghood. This childhood interest exploded into an embarrassing anime phase in middle school, and my insistence on watching shows in the original Japanese allowed me to pick up on a few words from the subtitles. I remember bragging to a friend how, while watching a show, I’d learned the Japanese word for “liar”: usoda. With only my ears and the subtitles to guide me, I didn’t realize that uso was the word for “lie,” not “liar,” and da was a conjugation of the verb desu, “to be.” Still, despite my fragmented understanding, the sound of the language stuck with me—and when I had a chance to study a new language, those butchered phrases that lingered on my tongue pushed me back to Japanese.
It’s an embarrassing origin story, I’m aware—and it’s common. I know now that the popularity of anime and manga in the United States is no accident; the Japanese government has worked hard to cultivate their unique pop culture into a consumable international product. From my middle school’s obsession with Death Note to the tremendous impact that films like Akira and Ghost in the Shell have left on American sci-fi, it’s impossible to quantify the pop culture impact of the U.S.-Japan alliance.
That’s what it’s called now: an alliance. The use of the word here feels a bit euphemistic, carrying the same weight as an offer you can’t refuse. American history books tell the story hurriedly, like someone trying to guide their houseguest past the room they forgot to clean: the bombs fell, the Japanese gave up their military, and then America and Japan became friends. It’s a very American story: a “bad guy” country being reformed by our intervention. If a little bit of occupation was necessary for that, and if that occupation still continues today at the expense of Japan’s most vulnerable populations, well, Japan got rid of their military (completely of their own volition, of course), so all of our military bases are just keeping them safe. It’s only fair they stay on our side, right? I’m no expert at foreign policy, but I do have to wonder: what does the word “alliance” mean when your supposed ally has a gun to your head?
You might be wondering what this has to do with me. The answer is: a lot more than I’d like, unfortunately. Because when you seize control of a sovereign nation, chances are you’re going to need translators. And the question of who were becoming translators in those critical postwar years has significant ramifications for the legacy of Japanese studies in the United States.
Once I declared my Japanese major in college and began to take more classes, I noticed a pattern amongst the translators lauded as “Japanese studies pioneers.” For one, they tended to be men. Second, they were almost always white. Third, many of them were born in the 1910s or ’20s. Japanese-Americans were commonly recruited as translators during the war, but when it came to the postwar period, white American men were the ones responsible for selling Japan to the American public. It went about as well as you’d expect. I will never forget the translation I read in one of my literature classes, where one of these pioneers translated “Chinese noodles” as “spaghetti.” He knew it was wrong, but accuracy was sacrificed for the goal of making Japan palatable to a country that had split its time between depicting Japanese people as rats in propaganda posters and sending Japanese-American families to internment camps. It was a balancing act between humanizing Japanese people and grooming them for their role in America as the fascinating but safe other. It’s how we’ve gotten where we are now: Americans speaking confidently on Japan’s conformity and racial homogeneity, spinning wild tales about oxygen bars and panties in vending machines, and praising orientalist works like Memoirs of a Geisha that have come to supersede even inaccurately translated Japanese texts as prime examples of what Japan is.
The bombing and occupation of Japan fundamentally shaped modern Japanese studies in the United States. It feels obvious now, but when I first committed to learning Japanese in 2016, I never would have made the connection. I would not have understood how this idealized portrayal of Japan had, in some ways, led me to the language. If I was incapable of having that epiphany myself, how can I know that I wasn’t influenced by the exoticizing gaze that has led so many white Americans to the language, either via pop culture or by the portrayals of geisha and samurai in American works deemed classics? It is difficult to reconcile with the immense joy I’ve obtained through learning the language—and while I certainly try to be more conscientious now, I’ve accepted that I will always be unlearning these perceptions.
That being said, there’s a fine line between self-awareness and self-flagellation—and the latter, when discussing dynamics of power and marginalization, runs a high risk of turning conceited. As I’ve deepened my studies and connected with more people who have a relationship to Japanese, a major guiding light I’ve found is the realization that learning a language is a communal experience. From my classmates to my professors to the older couple who took care of me during my semester in Kyoto, I can say with confidence that the relations between Japanese and English speakers do not have to be unequal, and that to assume so runs the risk of taking agency from the former. To paint myself as an intruder in the language is not only pessimistic, it erases the plethora of Japanese and Japanese-American people invested in Japanese-English translation for reasons that have nothing to do with me. So rather than condemn myself as an infiltrator, I prefer to think of myself as a guest; there is a place for me here, as long as I am willing to accept the limits of that place’s hospitality.
And what is a guest’s role? That’s something I’m still trying to figure out, and I don’t think that it’s a static role. But I think that, in general, it follows the code of any guest etiquette: Follow the house rules. Don’t go into private rooms without permission. Acknowledge that not every resident will have the same boundaries. Apologize for plates accidentally dropped, or carpets accidentally dirtied. And most of all, be thankful for the welcome.
Sage Theune is a junior at Smith College. They study English literature and Japanese.
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For a long time in academia, translation didn’t count in the path toward tenure. It takes a lot of commitment and a stable academic status and time to commit to translating a novel. So, short fiction was more feasible in my situation. I think poetry is beautiful, but very hard to translate, and I felt that short fiction was in my wheelhouse.
Naila Arsky ’20 is a senior majoring in Linguistics and a concentrator in the Translation Studies Concentration. Her focus is Japanese literature, though she dabbles in Brazilian works as well. She spent her junior year at Waseda University in Japan during which she translated excerpts of literary adaptations. Currently, she is working on a short story translation from Japanese to English, and a translation of environmental poems from Brazilian Portuguese to English.
