Nothing But Words

When in Japan, Talk Like a Man

Topic: Learning Japanese
Tags: Japan, Japanese Language

Tomorrow’s Christian Science Monitor has a fun article on a topic I’ve been meaning to write about, but they got to it first: the difference between men’s Japanese and women’s Japanese. It’s a personal story written by an American journalist working in Japan:

Wherever you go, men and women tend to speak differently. But in Japan, those differences are more pronounced than in many places. Among the multilayered rules of grammar and usage governing spoken Japanese, there also exist underlying concepts of “men’s Japanese” and “women’s Japanese.” By the end of my 2-1/2-year stay there, I had unwittingly become conversant in the latter form.

Like many Western men who spend more than a year in Japan, I learned most of my intonation, expressions, and slang – the things not taught in the classroom – by mimicking a Japanese girlfriend.

I thought my Japanese was fine, while in reality the effeminate, almost childish twang I had been learning made me sound very much like a 20-something, pink miniskirted Japanese woman.

My Japanese isn’t good enough for me to share a specific example of this, but I’ve been immersed in the language long enough to have an ear for the difference in how Japanese men and women speak. It really is a striking contrast. The men typically sound quite gruff and blunt, and the women often speak in an artificially high pitched or even nasally tone.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have spent a good amount of time around both Japanese men and women. But like many male foreigners working in Japan, the article author was in an English speaking office, and was mostly around Japanese women when not at work:

The solution, of course, was to hang out with more Japanese guys. But for me, a freelance journalist with a part-time job and daily Japanese classes to attend, I had little time for new friends.

Besides, Japanese men, unlike their friendly female counterparts, are often inaccessible. They generally work 12 hours at a stretch and afterward go out in tight-knit, impenetrable groups. My girlfriend once tried to recruit a few male coworkers to teach me better Japanese but had little success. They were either too busy or just too exhausted.

My friend Fred, who’s an American living in Tokyo, married to a Japanese woman, went through the same experience as the author. He told me about one night during his first year in Japan, he passed a policeman on the street and offered him a high, lilting “konban wa” (good evening). He said the officer halted him, quickly surmised the situation, and corrected him with a low, gravelly “konban wa!” My friend Chris, who is half Japanese, told me of a female friend who had the opposite problem many years ago: she was in Japan learning Japanese from a bunch of male friends (surly teenage guys to boot), and later had to unlearn a number of Japanese language habits that were very inappropriate for a woman.

So, if you’re learning Japanese, once you get past the basics, definitely make an effort to spend some time learning from someone of the same gender.