Reading Japanese isn’t easy — even for the Japanese.
Take Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso for example. He’s made so many public blunders that an opposition lawmaker tried to give him a reading test during a televised session of parliament.
The Japanese leader bungled the word for “frequent,” calling Japan-China exchanges “cumbersome” instead. Another time, he misread the word toshu (follow), saying fushu — or stench — and sounded as if he were saying government policy “stinks.”
While the media and Aso’s political rivals have been quick to heap ridicule, many Japanese have seen a bit more of themselves in Aso’s goofs than they would like to admit. Since his missteps, books designed to improve reading ability have become all the rage.
Aso’s nemesis is his mother tongue’s notoriously tricky mishmash of Chinese characters and its two sets of indigenous syllabaries.
Here is what he — and all Japanese — are up against.
Just reading the newspaper requires knowledge of about 2,000 characters. Another 50,000 are less common but useful to recognize.
And that’s just for starters.
Most characters have several different pronunciations depending on the context. For instance, the two characters in the prime minister’s surname can be read several ways. The first character, which means linen, is pronounced asa or ma. The second — meaning life, raw, or to occur or grow — can be pronounced nama, sei, sho or ki, to list just a few possibilities. And together, they are pronounced Aso (Ah-so).
During last month’s televised parliament session, opposition lawmaker Hajime Ishii chided Aso for his stumbles, saying: “We’d better discuss kanji.”
Then holding up a cardboard panel with a list of a dozen words, he asked: “Can you handle them?”
Aso refused to take the impromptu test, but Ishii didn’t back down.
“Today, those who can’t read kanji are scoffed at, and people are rushing to buy textbooks,” he said. “Perhaps you deserve credit for boosting their sales.”
Literacy-boosting books are selling briskly. One titled, Kanji that Look Readable but are Easily Misread, released a year ago, has sold more than 800,000 copies — most of them since Aso’s mistakes first got national attention in November, said Yukiko Sakita, a spokeswoman for Futami Shobo Publishing Co.
“We owe a lot to Prime Minister Aso,” she said. “Many people don’t want to make mistakes like his.”
The book has held the top spot in the weekly best-seller rankings compiled by Japan’s largest distributor, Tohan Co, since the beginning of this year, ahead of The Speeches of Barack Obama, which ranked second for weeks before falling to 17th this week.
“A text like this holding the No. 1 spot is extremely unusual,” said Tohan official Hiroki Tomatsu. “As far as the book ranking is concerned, Mr. Aso beat Mr. Obama.”
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