His demeanor and his Sony company pin indicated he was an executive who commanded attention when he spoke. I was listening to him, too, albeit from a distance--two seats away on the Green Coach, a bullet train heading for Kyoto. "We import too many of them from the Americans," he declared authoritatively, eliciting nods of agreement from a pair of traveling companions. "If you want to know my opinion, that is what I think." "And we seem helpless to stop this invasion," added the man seated across from him. "We're at their mercy." Puzzled, I wondered just what his product was. Where did the Untied States still hold such a leading edge that these veteran Sony bureaucrats could become so demoralized? I felt mixed emotions (I didn't know whether to feel pride or shame) when I discovered they were lamenting the number of English loanwords heard everyday in the modern Japanese language.
There is certainly a large linguistic trade deficit between the two countries, and if words were currency, one wonders how Japan would stay solvent. While Americans have imported Japanese products in record quantities, most American consumers know few words of Japanese save for sayonara, karate, and the usually mutilated geisha, sumo, or sukiyaki. And while it is true Americans have added sushi and sashimi to the linguistic diet, most Americans' knowledge of Japanese barely goes beyond trying to pronounce the name of the manufacturer of their latest camera, VCR, or stereo.
In Japan, on the other hand, the number of words that have been taken in from English is extensive. The presence of some of these is not surprising: terebi for television, tobako (tobacco) for cigarettes, and the myriad of baseball terms (e.g. homu ran for home run or sutoraiku for strike) all came as the things they described were imported. Many terms, however, are "made-in-Japan" loanwords: that is, vocabulary created using English words as building blocks to make terms that have no real correspondents in the United States or England. Examples include kyanpingu kaa (camping car) for recreational vehicles, raibu hausu (live house) for coffee shops or jazz clubs that have live musical entertainment, and afutaa kea (after care) for service support offered for a product after purchase.
Estimates of the number of commonly used loanwords in modern Japanese range from three thousand to five thousand terms, or perhaps as high as 5 to 10 percent of the ordinary daily vocabulary (cf. Table I). As Table II shows, the vast majority of borrowed words are from English. Of course, different topics and registers employ varying numbers of loanwords. Table IIIa shows the top twenty loanwords as found in one general newspaper survey, while Table IIIb shows the loanwords used in women's magazines to be quite different.
Loanword dictionaries of all types and sizes abound in Japan: the latest edition of the largest contains over twenty-seven thousand entries. Also, each year some publishers distribute linguistic yearbooks or almanacs that constitute a kind of "state of the language," giving the loanwords that have been absorbed during the previous year. These books benefit many people: for example, those who need to know the definition of some specialized loanword, or older, rural, or busy people who may not have been exposed to the latest fad terms.
English loanwords, then, are obviously quite pervasive in Japan. They can be heard in daily conversation and on television and radio
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