Miyamoto Fujiko, guest fellow
Japanese https://i-rich.org/?p=1924
The similarity between the Japanese and the Korean languages
When I first began learning the Korean language, I wondered why the Korean language and Japanese are so similar in grammar and pronunciation of words.
I realized that it was easy for me to learn the Korean language or Hangul, because I am Japanese, have received education in Japan and live in the Japanese culture, in which I naturally learned kanji. In South Korea, Japanese kanji idioms and words remain almost intact and at present, these Japanese words are replaced with the phonetic letters of the Hangul. Thus, once you learn the rule of Hangul pronunciation, Hangul words instantly become Japanese kanji idioms in your head.
Kanji writing system was first invented in China and then, through the Korean Peninsula, kanji culture was introduced to Japan with the arrival of Buddhism. The Korean people generally think that Korea taught kanji to Japan. During the Meiji period, the Japanese invented many two-word idioms out of English words and reversely, through the thirty-six years of Japan’s annexation of Korea, kanji invented by the Japanese people came to be used in the Korean Peninsula.
For example, kanji words such as gakko (school), shakai (society), yakkyoku (drug store), keizai (economy), keikaku (plan) and yakyu(baseball) were all invented by Japanese people. The Korean people hardly know this fact.
Abolition of the use of kanji in the current Korean language writing
Nevertheless, kanji writing has become a problem in the present Korean language, where words made of kanji are written exclusively in Hangul. Such a complete expulsion of kanji made me feel very uncomfortable when I saw my children’s school textbooks in South Korea. Hangul being phonogram, the textbook written in Hangul seemed to have been written entirely in the manner of the Japanese phonetic hiragana letters.
Hangul writing is excellent in the sense that almost all foreign languages, including English, can be pronounced in Hangul. However, when it comes to homonyms, Japanese people can understand the meaning looking at the kanji, but in Hangul, there are no kanji to indicate the meaning of the word and one must try to understand the meaning by referring to the context of the sentence and guess the original meaning of the word written with Hangul letters.
To mention some extreme examples, Hangul letters for bouka (fire prevention) and houka (arson) are the same. And Japanese words zenki (first period), zenki (aforementioned), denki (electricity), denki (biography), denki (electiric appliances), zenki (entire period), senki (time for opening hostilities), senki (battle flag) are all written in the same Hangul letters. In English, a word may be phonetic but may have a prefix or suffix which makes the word ideographic. On the other hand, Hangul is a mere enumeration of sounds without any ideographic structure. Hearing a word, one cannot understand the meaning immediately, which is unnatural as a language.
Thus, in exclusive use of Hangul, I cannot help questioning whether South Koreans grasp the meaning of the word correctly and deeply and use the word fully knowing its meaning.
For example, we have the medical term of jibiinkouka (dealing with ears, nose and throat) in Japanese and looking at the kanji word we can immediately understand the parts, but I wonder whether South Koreans could immediately grasp what each Hangul letter refers to.
Educational problem arising from the non-use of kanji
As mentioned above, I remember wondering, looking at a Korean junior high school textbook, how well my sons understood whether the word refers to place, person or other thing. In junior high school, there is a class for learning kanji and students learn exclusively kanji in that class. However, the textbooks for other subjects do not carry kanji at all. It is highly questionable how effective limited learning of kanji is to children in their study.
As a private tutor, I taught Japanese to a Korean company executive in his fifties to sixties. He told me that when he was young, kanji was still used in newspapers, which was helpful in learning Japanese. However, at present, none of the newspapers use kanji or no kanji subtitles are seen on the Korean TV, or no kanji is used on the Internet, which poses a problem to children in learning subjects at school.
Personally, I am posting on YouTube videos that cover civilian activities in South Korea. In making the videos, it is essential to create Japanese subtitles to indicate the proper names of places and universities. I had extreme difficulties in checking the proper use of kanji on the Korean Internet, for there are no kanji available. Fortunately, searching through the Yahoo! Japan engine, I have found that names of places and proper nouns are written perfectly in kanji.
Thinking problems due to the non-use of kanji
It is said that the South Koreans have the national characteristic of putting emotion prior to reason. I think that the elimination of kanji culture has greatly affected the Japan-South Korea diplomatic relationships, which has become a serious obstacle to conducting reasonable dialogues.
I once saw a video showing the discussion between old Koreans in their eighties who had graduated from the Seoul University in the Korean Peninsula during the Japanese rule and the war-time journalist Mr. Inoue Kazuhiko. I was totally amazed at the Japanese language fluently spoken by those old Korean men with their use of respectful and humble language and their wide vocabulary of Japanese. South Koreans living in Japan and those Koreans now studying in Japan learn kanji in the Japanese culture and I feel that they are very different from the South Koreans living in Korea in their thinking and judging abilities.
Of course, Hangul has excellent features, and I am simply amazed at the current Koreans’ quickness in action and thinking with their promotional power and wonderful energy.
In December 2019, Mr. Kim Byungheon started it all with the action for the removal of the comfort woman statue in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, in which I have been participating myself. Mr. Kim Byungheon is the President of the Korean History Textbook Research and represents the National Action to Abolish the Comfort Women Act. How can he continue to gallantly reveal lies in the anti-Japan South Korea and to undauntedly tell the truth when such opinions are suppressed in South Korea? Where does his swift action and ability to analyze the situation come from? I believe that is because director Kim Byungheon majored in Chinese classical literature and is an expert in kanji, faithfully conforming to the meaning what kanji bears. He is far more considerate and sophisticated than other Koreans. While ordinary South Koreans are apt to swallow the distorted history they were taught, director Kim is superbly quick to detect lies and fallacies.
In 2014 and onwards, director Kim at the Korean History Textbook Research directly made many phone calls to publishers about the many mistakes found in school textbooks and pointed out errors and corrected them, which is a truly remarkable achievement.
According to director Kim Byungheon, particularly, 99% of the statements regarding Japan in Korean modern history are either fabricated or distorted. This year will be the fifth anniversary of the movement of the National Action to Abolish the Comfort Women Act led by director Kim Byungheon. I believe that the rich idea and powerful action within the movement have been formed, based on the Korean trait of thinking and swift action, combined with a thoroughly thought-out theoretical philosophy well versed in kanji and conscientious morality.
Resume the use of kanji in writing
Therefore, South Korea, having deleted kanji culture, should gradually resume the use of kanji in school education and spread it throughout the Korean society.
Incidentally, it was at the time of the Park Chung-hee government that the exclusive use of Hangul in South Korea was implemented. In May 1968, President Park instructed his cabinet to establish a five-year plan for exclusive use of Hangul, setting 1973 as the goal. Since then, President Park himself changed all writings into Hangul. Then, in October that year, the goal was reset to be 1970, three years earlier than the original plan, together with powerful seven-articled instruction, concentrating on the use of Hangul. The concept of the deletion of kanji and exclusive use of Hangul policy “regards the ideographic kanji as anti-modern in the modernization trend. Through the linguistic life of our country, it is considered a part of enlightening efforts to eliminate kanji. Total elimination of kanji is modernization,” which is simply absurd. It was all because kanji was eliminated completely that South Korea eventually failed to notice the historical lies. Without the revival of kanji writing, it would be impossible to narrow the gap in the historical and international issues between Japan and South Korea.