Whenever I see people talking aboutĀ āPronounsā in the context of the Japanese Language, I cringe a bit.
Itās something that comes up again and again, and every time it does, I canāt help but remember how difficult it can be for people to think outside the box of their own culture. I understand that fact. Still, I would like to try and explain a bit.
Iāve mentioned this before, but itās highly, highly debatable ifĀ āpronounsā in the western sense even exist in the Japanese language. Personally, I am on the side that says that, no. They donāt. What we understand asĀ āpronounsā is a concept entirely alien to the Japanese language. They do have nouns that fulfill similar purposes, yes, but those nouns are not used in the same way. They donāt count as their own, grammatical category of words, like pronouns do, and they are far, far, FAR less frequent in usage, as Japanese has different ways of indicating who or what the speaker is referring to when talking about a previously named subject or object. Japanese is very context sensitive like that.
What people also donāt realize is that the concept ofĀ āgendered pronounsā is partially not the same thing in Japanese as it is in English at all, and partially something WE forced onto Japan, rather than something that comes natural to the language.Ā
The many different words forĀ āIā and āYouā that exist in the Japanese language evolved out of different dialects, rather than being inherent to how the language uses gender, and who uses what word forĀ āIā or āYouā is extremely fluent and dependent on era, place, upbringing, social situation, and many, many more factors, rather than just gender or age. Women who useĀ āBokuā and evenĀ āOreā exist. Men who useĀ āWatashiā are very common. Reducing those words down to our narrow concept of āgendered pronounsā is reductive and just flat out wrong.Ā
As forĀ āKareā (āHeā) andĀ āKanojoā (āSheā), a little known fact is that, until about a 100 years ago, the wordĀ āKanojoā did not exist.Ā āKareā, until that point, was a fully gender-neutral term, which literally meantĀ āThat person in my field of sightā. You know howĀ āKanojoā came into being? It was invented in order to translate the wordĀ āSheā in American novels when all other ways of translation would have resulted in too much confusion! Thatās all! The only reason the term exists is to translate the western concept of gendered pronouns, which was so alien to the Japanese language, they needed to make up a whole new word for it!
Thatās why things like people askingĀ āwhat gender pronouns characters in Anime/J-Gamesā use, or people debating theĀ ācorrect pronounsā for the gems in Houseki no Kuni really, really annoys me.Ā āPronounsā say almost nothing about a characterās gender in Japanese, and as for the Houseki no Kuni thing, this is a post-apocalyptic world without gender, where the Japanese language had absolutely no reason to maintain the artificial, western-ish gender structures that were forced onto it. Yes, the gems use masculine kinship terms andĀ āKareā for one another, but they also call each otherĀ āano koā, a term that traditionally has a lot more feminine connotation thanĀ āKareā originally had masculine connotation. The use of āKareā is clearly itās original use as a gender neutral term, and the use of masculine kinship terms is out of a lack of gender neutral kinship terms. Japanese does that. When you donāt know the gender of a sibling, you refer to them asĀ āKyĆ“daiā, which is technically also a masculine kinship term, but in absence of gender, it becomes neutral. As long as you donāt know the gender of the sibling, theyāreĀ ākyĆ“daiā. As soon as you learn the gender, they either stayĀ ākyĆ“daiā (masculine) or becomeĀ āshimaiā (feminine).Ā Thatās just how Japanese works.Ā
I know itās a problem born of ignorance rather than malice, but people really, really need to stop trying to apply western grammatical concepts to the Japanese language. It doesnāt work and just leads to misinformation.
