Iwa ni Hana

Recently I was asked by a Japanese acquaintance (who happened to be learning Chinese) as to how Chinese people distinguish levels of intimacity and politeness in oral speech. As you may know, in Japanese, you i) conjugate verbs and ii) use a different set of honorific nouns to show respect to your listener or reader (see this Wikipedia entry for details). But Chinese does not really conjugate verbs, and although a different set of honorific nouns can be used to show politeness, such nouns tend to be appear only in written form and almost never in oral speech. So how does the Chinese, with cultural concepts of insider group and outsider group similar to the Japanese, distinguish between formal speech and informal speech from a linguistic perspective? While I am far from having the complete answer to this, I believe the partial answer may be in the use of nicknames.

You just know that A is speaking to B in Chinese in familiar terms if a number of nouns of people, things, corporate entities and places are substituted with:

i) nicknames that only the speakers or their immediate circle knows

ii) nicknames made up on an impromptu basis

On the other hand, you just know that A and B are speaking formally if they use proper nouns that can be found in a dictionary.

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Quite in spite of its illustrious pedigree with Kenji “Ghost in the Shell” Kamiyama as director, the general impression the 11-episode anime series Eden of the East gave me is that it is like a game of bingo. The story and the marketing are all about hitting certain sets of keywords that you know you have heard somewhere else in various combinations before. Of these keywords, there are two I would like to focus on – one is 正しい道 [tadashii michi] which means “the correct path,” and the other is kuuki 空気 [kuuki] which means “air”.

In Eden of the East, the antagonist is billed as an old man who takes it upon himself to guide the country to “the correct path,” and goes about it by giving twelve randomly chosen individuals 10 billion yen each to spend as they believe would revive the country; meanwhile, the protagonist is billed as “a young man who fights against the air of this country” and is among the twelve individuals chosen. Now, “air” is a loaded word in Japanese politics. For more explanation I would suggest this article by Joichi Ito on The New York Times dated 2007. Joichi Ito is an insightful blogger whom I have been following for several years and the plot of Eden of the East happened to remind me of one of his most interesting blog entries back in 2004 about the cultural context of money in Japan:

One important Japanese businessman once told me. Power in Japan is not about having money yourself. It is about having the influence to move money.

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