

Don’t laugh. Hear me out first. I have been studying both languages for a very long time. Japanese for more than 35 years, and German for more than 40 years. I still don’t understand them very well, although I can fake both languages well enough to get paid for translating Japanese and German patents to English. But I do understand the striking similarities between these two languages and cultures, although nobody seems to know about them except for yours truly.

I was a legal immigrant both in Germany and in Japan, I was gainfully employed in both countries, I paid taxes, held long discussions in German about the injustices perpetrated by white Europeans on American Indians (Germans always talk about this when somebody mentions “Amerika”, or at least they used to in the eighties). I spent long hours well past midnight with my Japanese coworkers drinking sake and eating yakitori (grilled chicken) in cheap Japanese restaurants in Tokyo while talking about (I really can’t remember …. what the hell were we talking about? I can’t remember a thing). Fortunately, at the last moment I realized that I was becoming too Germanized/Nipponized, which scared me so much that I moved to California. Twice, actually, once from Germany and once from Japan. Also, my first love was a German girl, my last love was a Japanese girl, and I could go on and on. I’m just saying these things to give you an idea of what an ardent student of both cultures I have been most of my life.

I don’t have a degree in anthropology, sociology or ethnography, but since I do have a degree in Japanese studies, my theory is based on the uncanny and most improbable similarities between the two languages. My own explanation for these linguistic and cultural similarities is really quite logical and simple. During the great wandering of tribes in Europe (which is in German called Völkerwanderung, between 300 and 800 AD), when Germanic tribes such as the Vandals, Huns, Saxons, and Goths spread throughout Europe, one of these tribes must have made it all the way to Japan. I don’t know when or how, but I would like to study this issue in more detail at some point. If I can’t find enough time and resources at present, perhaps I will become an ethnographer in my next lifetime if there is one.

If you study early Japanese history, you will see that most historians and anthropologists assume that there were successive waves of immigration to Japanese islands in different historical periods from what is today China and Korea, but also Siberia, the Philippines and even Mongolia (via Korea). There are no written documents for these waves of immigration and we don’t really know when exactly this immigration occurred. The evidence that is available is mostly anthropological or genetic, similarities in pottery designs, etc.

Based on my theory, one of the tribes that ended up on Japanese islands was a Germanic tribe. Although no historical evidence exists because writing was introduced to Japan relatively late (with Buddhism in the 5th century via Korea), the evidence can be found in linguistic and cultural similarities between the Japanese and German people. First of all, both the Japanese and the German language has the verb at the end of the sentence, pretty much regardless of how long that sentence is. When you speak Japanese or German, you really have to concentrate on what you are saying because otherwise you may not remember which verb you were going to use at the end of a very long sentence. As far as I know, only the Japanese and the German language is insane exactly in this manner. Japanese interpreters who translate into English must wait until a sentence is finished (because in an English sentence, the verb usually comes right after the subject), while being glared at by an uncomprehending monolingual lawyer who is in charge of the deposition.

Another peculiar feature of the German language are compound nouns. Mark Twain wrote eloquently about the insanity of the German language more than a hundred years ago. You can read about it from his viewpoint here. The Japanese version of German compound words is called 熟語 (jukugo, or compound words or characters). You can string together 3, 4, 5, 6 or more characters when the indomitable Yamato spirit of the Japanese people moves you to create a new word in Japanese, just like Germans can string together as many or more nouns, without any separation between the words. In Japanese, there are no separations between characters or words anyway, and it’s not really clear what a word is or if there is such a thing. Again, both languages are equally insane in this respect, except for one thing. In German, you at least know how to pronounce the word roots in a long compound. In Japanese, you usually have two or more choices for pronunciation from which to choose. There are rules for pronouncing characters depending on the context, but there are so many exceptions to these rules, for example in 当て字 (ateji, or irregular characters), that you could also say that there are basically no rules. You either know how to pronounce it, or you don’t. Mark Twain would love it.

One thing in the insane German language that Mark Twain riled against was what he called split verbs. Japanese does not have an exact copy of German “split verbs”, but it has 助詞 (joshi, auxiliary words or particles) which are positioned after the relevant noun or adverb or anything else, something like “postpositions”, which to my mind are very similar. Let’s first take a look at Mark’s Twain English explanation of what a German split verb looks like.

The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called “separable verbs.” The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance. A favorite one is reiste ab — which means departed. Here is an example which I culled from a novel and reduced to English:

“The trunks being now ready, he DE- after kissing his mother and sisters, and once more pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen, who, dressed in simple white muslin, with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich brown hair, had tottered feebly down the stairs, still pale from the terror and excitement of the past evening, but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly than life itself, PARTED.”

(From The Awful German Language, by Mark Twain).

Whenever I translate a German patent or a Japanese patent, I always have the same feeling of chasing after something, like a fox chasing after a fast, cunning and malevolent rabbit (a verb, the second part of a split verb in German, or a particle in Japanese), which instead of being where it should be, somewhere where you can see it easily, is hidden somewhere behind something else, usually so far away from me that by the time I find it, I no longer remember what was it that I was looking for. Or if do remember the first part, by the time I get to the second part of the verb in German or to the particle in Japanese, I forget the technical term in English because it is a word that I will probably not encounter in another patent for the next twelve years, at least. If I was translating from Japanese to German, I would not have this problem. Had I been born as a German or a Japanese child, my brain would be trained from infancy to remember that according to the proper and natural order, there is something at the end of the sentence that will suddenly give meaning to the whole paragraph. This concept appears to be perfectly normal to German and Japanese children. But not to children born in the rest of the world, because their genes were not contributed by the same tribe that traveled during the Völkerwanderung all the way from Europe to Japan.

In addition to seemingly unexplainable linguistic similarities between the Japanese and the German language, there are also many similarities confirming my theory about the same origin of both nations between cultural concepts that can be seen for example in Japanese and German idioms. Certain ingrained cultural notions and attitudes translate seamlessly from Japanese to German and vice versa, but not to other languages. One of them is the basic Japanese and German natural rule that everything, and I mean everything, has to be structured in a certain way. There are absolutely no exceptions! The Japanese word for this philosophy of a certain natural and preordained structure in absolutely everything! is ちゃんと (chanto, which could be translated as proper or correct in English, and as was sich gehört or geignet in German, and comme il faut in French).

But since this is again a very complicated subject, I think I’d better save this discussion for another post.