Will the Japanese language die, crushed by the onslaught of English? This question has set off some heated talk in Japan recently because of a book suggesting that it may. First, a friend of mine in Tokyo, a member of a small reading club, told me about it. Then another friend wrote to say the book became the rage in academia. So I bought and read it.
"Nihongo ga horobiru toki: Eigo no seiki no naka de'' (Chikuma Shobo, 2008) by Minae Mizumura turns out to be a collection of essays on language with no real focus. Some have suggested that its eschatological title is a publishing gimmick, and they're right. What strikes me is the author's relationship to English.
Mizumura was transplanted from Japan to New York at age 12 because her father was assigned to the city in the early 1960s. Perhaps because Japanese employers still did not have the wherewithal to rotate their overseas assignees every three or four years, Mizumura received not just a full secondary education in a New York suburb, but a full postsecondary education as well, in the end living in the U.S. for 20 years.
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