Jay Rubin - Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Dont Tell You

This book was called Gone Fishin in its first incarnation, and though it has prompted more enjoyable feedback than anything else Ive ever published, the editors tell me they are tired of responding to readers complaining that the book concentrates too much on Japanese grammar and not enough on trolling for salmon. They have come up with a title that supposedly gives a better idea of the books contents, while my own contribution to this edition is limited to a new section on analyzing difficult sentences. A number of typos have been fixed as well.

I had a great deal of fun writing this bookperhaps too much fun for some tastes, but being neither a grammarian nor a linguist, I felt free to indulge myself in the kind of play with language that I have enjoyed over the past twenty-odd years of reading, translating, writing about, and teaching Japanese literature and the language in which it is written.

My approach may not be orthodox, and it certainly is not scientific, but it derives primarily from the satisfaction inherent in the use of a learned foreign language with a high degree of precision. If nothing else, I hope to share my conviction that Japanese is as precise a medium of expression as any other language, and at best I hope that my explanations of perennial problem points in grammar and usage will help readers to grasp them more clearly as they progress from cognitive absorption to intuitive mastery.

As much as I enjoyed the writing once it got started, I must thank several people for making me put up or shut up. My wife, Rakuko, was the first to urge me to write down some of the interpretations I was teaching my students at the University of Washington, such as the Johnny Carson hodo. Many of the students themselves were helpful: Jody and Anne Chafee, now much more than former students, who will never again translate active Japanese verbs into English passives; John Briggs and Veronica Brakus, among others, who provided new terminology and materials. Sandra Faux of the Japan Society offered a sounding board in her newsletter, and Michael Brase of Kodansha International was the one who made me believe that a bunch of disconnected chapters could be shaped into a book.

I almost hesitate to thank Michio Tsutsui and Chris Brockett, two ordinarily respectable linguists whose reputations could be besmirched by association with this project, but they saved me from some howlers at several points and gave me more confidence in the validity of my analyses than I would have had without their help. Chris, in particular, both cheered and disappointed me when he informed me that others had beaten me to the invention of the central concept of Part One, the zero pronoun. To this day, however, I remain innocent of what he calls a very rich theory of zero pronouns in government and binding theory, a fact of which I should perhaps be ashamed, but my scholarly interests lie in other directions. Linguists may conclude, as he suggests, that I am merely reinventing the wheel or often working in the dark, rather like a nineteenth-century engineer arguing against phlogiston, but students of the language are the ones I am writing for, not linguists, whose technical lexicon keeps most of their no-doubt useful theories effectively hidden from all of us. Talk about phlogiston!

I would strongly urge anyone who has found the book worth reading to send me corrections or suggestions for more and better example sentences or additional topics in need of explication should a revised version become a possibility some time in the future. While the above-named individuals were immeasurably helpful in the development of this book, errors of fact and interpretation are entirely the responsibility of Professor Edwin A. Cranston of Harvard University, to whom complaints should be addressed.

If the format of this series allowed for a dedication page, it would have borne a fulsome tribute to my daughter, Hana, whose good sense, adaptability, intelligence, and patience made me very proud of her during the often trying months in which much of this book was conceived and written.