Ah, Nihongo. Of all foreign languages, this is the one that keeps you on your toes. An Occidental beginner might suspect that the Japanese did it on purpose -- sowed their language with mines and pitfalls to thwart non-native penetration. To 16th-century European missionaries, Japanese was the devil's language, impossible to learn, Satan's fiendish device for depriving this otherwise promising island race of Christian salvation.

The Japanese take pride in the difficulty of their language. Even today, when Japanese-speaking foreigners are commonplace, the view persists that real Japanese can only be spoken by real Japanese. English is for everyone -- anyone can master it. Perhaps this good-natured contempt explains in part the conspicuous Japanese failure to do so. (Hopefully the introduction next month of English instruction in elementary schools will help remedy that.) Japanese, on the other hand, with its nuances, studied ambiguities and pregnant silences, is more than a language, it's an art, conferring on its native speakers the distinction of being born artists.

Artists, devils -- or neither? "No," writes Harvard Japanese-literature professor Jay Rubin in his book "Making Sense of Japanese," "Japanese is not the language of the infinite. Japanese is not even vague. The people of Sony and Nissan and Toyota did not get where they are today by wafting incense back and forth. The Japanese speak and write to each other as other literate peoples do."