Yahoo – AFP, Miwa Suzuki (AFP), 25 June 2013
 |
University
student Akihiro Matsumura uses his tablet computer in Tokyo
on June 19, 2013. (Photo By Yoshikazu Tsuno)
|
As a
schoolboy, Akihiro Matsumura spent hundreds of hours learning the intricate
Chinese characters that make up a part of written Japanese. Now, the graduate
student can rely on his smartphone, tablet and laptop to remember them for him.
"Sometimes
I don't even bother to take notes in seminars. I just take out my tablet to
shoot pictures of what instructors write on blackboards," he told AFP.
Like
millions of people across East Asia, 23-year-old Matsumura is forgetting the
pictographs and ideographs that have been used in Japan and greater China for
centuries.
While some
bemoan what they see as the loss of history and culture, others say the shift
frees up brainpower for more useful things, like foreign languages, and even
improves writing as a whole.
Naoko
Matsumoto, a professor of law who heads international legal studies at the
prestigious Sophia University near Tokyo, said the students in her classes now
write more fluently than their predecessors.
 |
Akihiro
Matsumura (L) uses his tablet
computer as his friend practices writing
Chinese
characters in Tokyo on June 19,
2013. (Photo By Yoshikazu Tsuno)
|
"I'm
in my 40s and compared with my generation, they have more and more
opportunities to write using Twitter" and other social networking
services, she said.
"I
think they are actually better at writing" because they write in a simple
and easy-to-understand way, she said.
Priorities
are changing with more emphasis placed on building logical thinking strategies
-- a case of content becoming more important than form.
"The
skill of handwriting kanji (Chinese characters) perfectly is becoming less
necessary compared with earlier times," the professor said.
Kanji
developed in China as a mixture of pictographs -- characters that represent a
thing, like "mountain" -- and ideographs -- those that depict an
abstract concept, like "think".
Greater
China uses only these characters -- a simplified version on the mainland and
the traditional form in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Japan
imported kanji some time during the first millennium to use as a writing
system, despite there being no linguistic link between Japanese and Chinese.
By around
the 8th-9th centuries, it developed a syllabary -- a system of consonant/vowel
blends -- called "hiragana".
Where kanji
contain a meaning, but no inherent sound, each hiragana character represents a
sound, but has no inherent meaning -- like a letter in the Latin alphabet.
Unlike the alphabet, however, each syllable only ever has one sound.
A second
syllabary, called "katakana", also developed. Modern-day written
Japanese is a mixture of kanji, hiragana and katakana, with an increasing amount
of Western script also thrown in (known as "romaji" or Roman
letters).
In both
Chinese and Japanese, computer and smartphone users need only to type the
pronunciation of the kanji from the constituent sounds using either the
syllabary or the alphabet. They then choose one of several options offered by
the device.
Very
different meanings can come from the same sounds. For example, in Japanese,
"shigaisen" produces "street fighting" and
"ultra-violet rays".
"It's
easy to forget even the easiest of characters," said Zhang Wentong, an
assistant at a calligraphy centre in Beijing.
"Sometimes
you've got to think for ages. Occasionally I'll repeatedly type the character
out phonetically in my phone" until the right one pops up.
Graduate
student Matsumura said his reliance on devices leaves him adrift when faced
with filling in forms for repairs at the electronics shop where he works
part-time.
 |
University
student Akihiro Matsumura
writes sentences on a tablet computer
in Tokyo on
June 19, 2013. (Photo By
Yoshikazu Tsuno)
|
"I
sometimes can't recall kanji on the spot while a customer is watching me,"
he said. "I remember their rough shapes but can't remember exact
strokes... It's foggy."
Traditionalists
fear that forgetting kanji means the irrevocable loss of a fundamental part of
culture.
In Hong
Kong, Rebecca Ko said her 11-year-old daughter uses the computer more and more,
but she insists the child learn traditional characters, and sends her to a
Chinese calligraphy class.
"We
cannot rely too much on computers, we should be able to write... (and) we
should be able to write neatly, it's a basic thing about being Chinese,"
she said.
But, says
Matsumura, times change and the spread of technology gives people opportunities
to develop their language capability in other ways, for example allowing some
to read more.
"I'm
one of them. I used to listen to music blankly on trains, but I now read news
and other things," he said.
Guardians
of the characters say there is no evidence of any drop-off in enthusiasm.
The Japan
Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation, a Kyoto-based organisation, says the number
of people who take its exam every year is holding steady at around two million.
People are
"increasingly using text messages rather than making phone calls",
which means they need to know which characters to use, said a spokeswoman.
And kanji
characters are not falling out of favour with all younger people.
Yusuke
Kinouchi, a 24-year-old graduate student at the Tokyo Institute of Technology,
thought children should keep learning the characters in the way they have done
for hundreds of years.
Kanji
provide a certain economy, he said, where one character can stand in for the
sounds made by several letters in a language such as English -- something
particularly useful on Twitter, for example, with its 140-character limit.
But beyond
the economy, there is one other good reason to keep them alive, he said.
"They are beautiful."
