Sure it does:
he = kare
they = karera
island - shima
islands - shimajima
I = watashi
we = watashitachi (or ware-ware)
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s no one’s business but the Turks.
No, that is not my assertion. I said words don’t have plural forms, not that there was no means of indicating plurality.
The Japanese language lacks plurals in the English sense. Plural words are usually either preceded with a number and a counter, or simply made understood through context.
https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Japanese/Grammar/Nouns#Plurals
And note for a lot of these, it involves a doubling, shimajima is literally islandisland but shi alters to ji in one of them.
Japanese certainly has a very different and more casual relationship to the plural than English, and often times it has context clues. No future tense in the same sense as English either.
So, to bring this fascinating side trip back around to the main point, the Japanese people have never used any plural form for the endonym for their own nation, which (to reiterate the main point) means than any pluralized exonym is inauthentic and baseless.
Some gaijin made it up for reasons that only made sense to them at the time.
As far as I can remember, in the book Shogun the only ones who used “the Japans” was Blackthorne (English) and his crew (Dutch). Possibly Rodriguez (Spanish) used it when talking with Blackthorne. At no point did any of the Japanese use the term.
So the question would be whether the English or the Dutch at the time would have used “the Japans” to refer to a mysterious archipelago that they had no direct knowledge of (in the book Blackthorne’s expedition was the first English/Dutch expedition to navigate the Start of Magellan thanks to a stolen rutter)? Not whether the Japanese used the term. Possibly the original charter for the Dutch trading company would be a reference, but the expedition was only supposed to head for Japan if they couldn’t trade on the west coast of South America.
Precisely. The question is whether “the time” was contemporaneous with the events in the book.
And as been noted, this usage was never the more popular one.
A few people used it a few times (relatively speaking). So what?
It’s been far too long ago since I read the book, but it’s simply Clavell giving an exotic but historically inaccurate flavor, as he does with too many other details.
I remember reading Tai-pan after I had lived in Japan for a while and just shaking my head.
The Dutch East Indies - per the trading company.
The modern nation of Indonesia, including the name, is largely a product of WWII (independence was achieved on August 17, 1945) and the vision of its first president Sukarno to unify its diverse cultures into one nation. The choice of a foreign word to describe the political boundaries was important, so as not to give one local language preeminence over another.
Despite the constant propaganda for unity, there have been plenty of independence movements, both successful (East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste) and unsuccessful to date (Aceh).
IIRC, East Timor was a Portuguese Colony(?) forcefully invaded by Indonesia after the collapse of Portugal’s overseas dominions. Not so much an independence movement for a province as an ongoing resistance to a crushing occupation.
I would agree with you, as would the inhabitants of Timor-Leste, but that was NOT the official line of the Indonesian government. (As someone who lived in Indonesia for 17 years between 1993 and 2018, I witnessed a lot of recent history from an internal perspective.)
ETA: except I wouldn’t presume to call Timor-Leste a “Portuguese colony” in the years leading to its eventual independence in 2002. I’d have to do a little research before conceding that point, and I don’t think I would. But then, as a former resident of Mozambique I am pretty hostile to Portuguese colonization efforts. No colonialism is good, but the Portuguese were the worst.
It certainly was a Portuguese colony. They called it Portuguese Timor. From 1702 to 1975.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. Of course it was. But was it an official Portuguese colony in 2002? I would say “no” but would check before stating so adamantly. That’s all I meant.
This may appear that I’m directing this towards @gnoitall, but it shouldn’t be.
The point is that this usage was minimal and IMHO, it’s a Clavell thing for the modern audience and the only answer is that the common usage won out.
As my Japanese colleague explained to me, the term 日本列島 is used in specific cases where the geographical terminology is important but in general they use “Japan” to refer to both the countries and the group of islands.
It’s often used in news such as the news today that Russian bombers flew around the Japanese archipelago for the first time in five years, but it’s not used in casual conversations that much.
My unhinged screed posts were to counter the assertion that maybe the Japanese people were used to speaking of (or naming) their nation as a collection of multiple distinct islands (i.e., a plural nation name). This is emphatically inaccurate, and misses a major and pervasive element in Japanese culture and history.
The name of Japan in Japanese is 日本, typically pronounced “Nippon” or “Nihon”; it is singular and has no plural form or phrase.
However, there is another pronunciation for that kanji, which is often used in purely cultural contexts: “Yamato”.
Yamato is the endonym for the majority Japanese ethnicity, comprising the overwhelming majority of Japan’s population.
The Yamato ethnic identification is a powerful cultural driver, reinforcing the well-characterized Japanese tendency toward conformity and group identity. At the bottom of it all, Japanese-ness is Yamato-ness, and there is no plurality or multiculturalism about it. So the name of the nation is heavily underpinned with the idea of singularity, unity, and indivisibility. “The Japans” would be utterly incomprehensibly foreign.
So, to finish beating this dead horse, whoever thought you could name the nation as if it were just an archipelago didn’t consult the natives about it.
Oh, I’m sorry! I misunderstood. No, it sure wasn’t. Portugal dropped its colonies like old shoes in 1975. Signed off of any further responsibility for them. Nice knowin’ ya, bye. Same thing happened with Spain and Western Sahara.
During my time in Mozambique, the third story of the town-house I lived in had a very telling view: the wall-to-wall windows looked out over a desolate scene of nearly empty meadowland, receding into the ocean. A few scattered shacks, dwarfed by the landscape, were the primary evidence of human habitation.
Except for one shabby, unused 10-story cement building next to the ocean, a prominent feature in an otherwise flat landscape. This was all that remained of a luxury hotel the Portuguese had been building when they hurriedly vacated Mozambique.
And why, you ask, did the locals not take over the building and turn it into something useful after their colonizers left? Well, they couldn’t: in an epic fit of spitefulness, the Portuguese poured concrete down the elevator shaft as a final act, to ensure that no one else could use the building after they left.
Every day we lived in Mozambique that dreadful structure reminded me of what terrible thing colonialism is.
I just finished reading King Leopold’s Ghost a few months ago, so I would suggest Portugal had competition.
Ah yes - I should read more on what happened with the Congo. Do you recommend that book?
It involves gorillas and lasers.
Eek! I think I remember that movie, specifically where one of the gorillas throws out a human eyeball.