グローバル・コミュニケーションに宿る「熱」The Hidden Heat of Global Communication

At last we have entered an age in which communication between languages, through translation, matters enormously. Before the 2020s, information sent out in other languages was nearly impossible to understand. We now live in a future where it is translated easily by technology and can simply be read.

At the same time, drawing on the benefits of an age of great migration, a movement is growing not to leave the errors that translation produces alone but to correct them through lived experience with our own bodies. The balance of this large movement will remain extremely important.

The text I am writing and publishing now, for example, is written first in Japanese and then translated into English. How what I think in Japanese is understood by native English speakers is, unfortunately, practically impossible for me to know.

One should be aware of this, and what needs particular care is that English and Japanese differ completely in linguistic structure. The philosopher Tetsuji Yamamoto presented this as a "subject-based language" in English against a "predicate-based language" in Japanese. The styles of the languages are entirely different, so everything differs, including thought, action, and conduct. Here has stood the wall to mutual understanding until now.

Does this mean that even in the 21st century, communication mediated through translation will remain inherently incomplete?

I write in Japanese, so I am never certain how a reader in English will take my words. But I write knowing that, once translated, most of the intent cannot be conveyed. That is not the writer's resignation; it is what one might call "best effort," the basic design philosophy of the internet.

Even so, as the age heads toward the height of global communication, a writer has a responsibility to keep thinking about this problem.

Having taken that on, one thing I am sure of is whether heat has gone into the transmission of information. This heat, netsu (熱), is a very Japanese concept and hard to put into English. It is closer to a more spiritual exchange than to the nuance of passion.

Nor is this limited to communication between Japanese and English. Even among speakers of the same mother tongue, it is hard to be sure how much has reached the other person. But when netsu goes into it, the degree of transmission rises.

So the heart of twenty-first-century global communication is, in fact, not raising the technical precision of translation to the highest level but the netsu of the people who speak, that is, the maturity of their thought. In communication that has cooled, what would have been conveyed is not.

It is true that intent failing to arrive in translation is an everyday matter. To fill the gap, many means are now considered, such as raising translation accuracy technically or acquiring cultural learning, but that netsu, out of sight, matters enormously is almost unrecognized.

So the problem of global communication in translation begins, first, with the speaker putting netsu into the words. And what is asked of the listener is the skill of grasping how much netsu is held in them, rather than reading the translated surface information.

Once a writer has met the responsibility of writing with netsu, all that is left is to hope it reaches the reader. The reader, for their part, does not read the translated sentences but grasps the author's unseen netsu contained through the whole, and trusts the sense gained there that cannot be put into words.

When this is understood, and the gap of information between languages is filled by moving the body, a dialogue for a new age becomes possible.

The one who has shown this important viewpoint is Haruki Murakami. His literary works are translated worldwide and carry considerable influence, yet his Japanese works and his English works are entirely different. In effect, one could say the English Murakami rests on the work of his translators. If so, why can readers in the West understand Murakami? This question is very important in the twenty-first century.

What I feel reading Murakami in Japanese, a pleasant sensation that cannot be put into words, I believe I would feel the same in whatever language he was translated into and read. That is Murakami's distinction: he is a rare writer who is highly gifted at creating a universal image and calling it up in the reader.

A typical case in which this exchange does not go well is Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country. Set the openings side by side.

Japanese: トンネルを抜けると、そこは雪国であった。

English: The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.

A reader who understands Japanese can see that Kawabata's sentence has no subject anywhere. Once translated into English, a subject is set and a copula arises of necessity. The literary space Kawabata drew then disappears, which makes it hard to grasp a universal image of the kind Murakami's gives.

Even so, netsu is extremely varied. Murakami's work has a strange power of image-making that can only be called a heat like air, and the Japanese feeling found in Kawabata's work is neutralized in it.

Whether one has netsu is directly tied to how one thinks and how one lives in the everyday life of the individual. At the human level that no country or language can gather in, when we speak words, we can overcome this long-closed problem of translation.

The current itself has only just begun, so more struggles lie ahead. When languages differ, concepts differ and ways of thinking differ. To overcome this wall, the skill of grasping netsu is needed, and I believe it will be the most important foundation of twenty-first-century global communication.