Humour me a moment.
Did you know that the Japanese language doesn't come with an assortment of punctuation tools? Well, not technically. You’ll sometimes get a period, sometimes a comma, but even so the rules for their use aren’t nearly as strict as they are in English. Generally, so long as your sentence is structured in a way that makes sense, you can pretty much slot in words and phrases however you please. If only English were the same way.
But Japanese people don't get off so easy. For one, there's kanji. But kanji aside, they're forced to contend with other, much stricter affairs within their culture to worry about the minutiae of punctuating a sentence. Take manners. Japanese people are very good at manners, probably because they’ve been around longer than the very first roots of the English language. It’s no wonder they find their way into everything, from addressing others, giving and receiving gifts, bowing, bathing, eating, visiting someone’s house, using chopsticks, purchasing or selling goods, and so on. The list is endless. Japanese culture is so densely threaded by rules on how-to-do-x that, like bread without yeast, a rabbit without ears, or, hmm, a fly without wings? (which obviously would be called a ‘walk’), without them, the culture would be impossible to recognise.
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| Japan never shies away from making known its priorities. (Stolen from Reddit) |
Such as it is, Japanese people are wired for manners; they’re never not thinking of what common courtesy they’ve failed to execute, could improve on for next time, or whether the bow they just executed was ten degrees too much. Even if they’ve given up on life and refuse to show courtesy to anyone, they’ve done so knowing what they’ve forsaken. They’ve given up on purpose. “Social rules, smocial schmules,” they say at supermarkets as they single-handedly throw their money straight onto the cashier’s table and not even into the tray. Blasphemy!
New Zealand, on the other hand, has only the bare minimum of social rules necessary in order to function: smile, try to be pleasant, and everyone will think the world of you. And in a host of situations where Japan may have implemented a courtesy or two, New Zealand simply hasn’t bothered (nor, really, had the time).
Take, for example, road construction. In New Zealand, upon entering a road construction zone, you’ll quickly see some notable placements that mark it as such: cones, arrows and signs, to name a few. The signs will say things like: “Road Works Ahead”, “30km/h temporary”, and “Slow Down”. And at the end signs like “Works End” (with or without a “thank you”) will see you off. All in all, they’re brief and to-the-point.
In cases where a lane has been cut-off so that all the cars must share a lane, there may be a man with his own sign on which one side (green) reads “Go” and the other (red) “Stop”. This leaves little to no room for confusion. When he turns it to red, you stop, and when he turns it to green, you go. Clockwork.
In Japan, road construction attempts to be clockwork but fails. There are of course the helpful numbers that tell you to what speed you should slow down. There are also prefecture mascots painted and/or stuck onto the sides of cones (such as an adorable cat named Shimaneko), whose cuteness makes you feel a little bit better about being inconvenienced. But numbers and cute cats are where the novelties end and the confusion begins.
If the construction zone is staffed, you can bet there will be far more staff than the number of jobs available to them. Perhaps three of them will be stationed fifty metres from each other, each equipped with a white flag and a red flag. Now, supposedly the white one means “go” and the red one means “stop”, but they don’t simply raise one and lower the other at the appropriate times. Rather, they make nonstop sweeping, broad gestures with their whole body, which, due to the nature of flags in wind, makes it rather difficult to know which of the two flags is being brandished and what exactly the given gesture (there are several) means.
One simply must copy what the car in front is doing, or, if there is no car, commit to either slowing down or maintaining the current speed while keeping one’s eyes locked on the flag-bearer, looking out for “changes in gesture”. Even Japanese friends have joked (while being completely serious) that they have no idea what the road men
Another reason this remains tricky for even the Japanese is that sometimes the flag-bearer doesn’t have flags but batons, and apparently the batons (which are both orange) come with a different list of gestures than the flags. At other times there are neither flags nor batons, and the stop/go man in question must simply improvise with the limbs God gave him. Come to think of it, it’s almost as if these guiding implements (flags, batons, neither) are the remnants of antiquated combat forms, each with their own sets and subsets of techniques. That would be cool, if only they translated to traffic guidance...
From my various encounters with the men wielding the weapons, I’ve inferred that there are indeed rules on how to guide people, but that many of these men never studied them properly. Perhaps this refusal to study is why there are a lot of unstaffed construction zones nowadays, where instead of a real man gesturing profusely, a digital man will be gesturing profusely instead. It’s something you have to see for yourself. It’s not enough to say “THANKS” in block letters; they have screens set up to depict, in low-frame-count-repetition, generic Japanese road men sweeping their flags low, bowing, and sometimes tipping their hats. But, hey, it’s quirky, like the cats, and it’s true that I find myself suddenly OK with being inconvenienced for the following 60-180 seconds.
Or perhaps there’s nothing to study; these men are supposed to be engineers after all, not traffic guides, and all that gesturing really comes down to is intuition.
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| Also, this isn't irony; it's a coincidence. Irony is a poacher being stampeded, or the Japanese teacher being better at English than the ALT. Yikes. But we're talking about punctuation, not definition. This is a topic for another day. (Borrowed form https://bit.ly/2Zt8wyu) |
New Zealand doesn’t share any of the fancy etiquette of Japan, so is less liable to making people confused. But our easy-bake culture is a trade-off for the language we’ve chosen to speak, thanks in part to all the stops and slow-downs that this language imposes, named, in a word, punctuation. English punctuation makes many, many of us confused, and by ‘us’ I mean native speakers.
Like Japanese road men, we didn’t study the tools we’re meant to be using; we just got given them and know that they serve a function somewhere, sometimes. Such as that semi-colon in the previous sentence, and that hyphen between 'semi' and 'colon' (which doesn’t actually need to be there), and the commas that are keeping this sentence from hitting the brakes and coming to a halt - or as we Kiwis say, a full stop.
Actually, we’re pretty good with full stops. If you know what a sentence is and isn’t, then you probably know when to use a full stop or any of its variants (question marks and exclamation marks). But with the others, we kind of just do what “feels good”. (Ahh, how I do empathise with the road men…)
Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, writes that truly good punctuation leads the way without drawing attention to itself. In other words, not like Japanese road men.
Commas are among the most popular items that we fail to tuck away properly. They have so many functions, aren’t optional like semicolons or (sometimes) hyphens, and, when typing, they’re always in easy reach of the right index finger. They’re, shall we say, too convenient, like the sides of your trousers after you’ve washed your hands and there’s no towel in easy reach. “Trousers are for wearing, not drying!” your Japanese colleagues will tell you. Everyone in Japan carries a hand towel in their back pockets, you see. Social rules. We westerners misuse trousers daily, and no one in the west tells us off.
Well, commas are like trousers, people.
Check out the following I came upon just this morning. I reckon two different authors wrote these, despite them coming from the same web page, because one has commas and the other doesn’t.
"If you’ve received a registration code in the post enter it on our registration page"
"Print the form, sign it, and return it to us"
Let’s be clear. They both need commas. One author has forgotten this (nary a comma has been inserted), while the other has employed not only the first, necessary comma, but a second completely optional Oxford comma! Totally baffling. And to think this is a government website.
What could be worse than this, you ask? Let me show you a, well, I don't even know what you call them. A re-post? They're the author-less quotes that people share and re-share that, probably because they're author-less, are almost always just... OK, you know?
Here:
“A church that will not CONFRONT sin, will eventually end up CONFORMING to sin.”
Someone, anyone, please, tell me what the comma is doing there. The quote sounded almost clever until it forced me to stop halfway through. It was like ripping open a bag of chips and finding out they’re all broken into unwieldy bits. You can hardly call them chips anymore. Ghost chips, maybe.
I understand the issue: the second half of the sentence is, in the author’s mind, a kind of punchline. It needs weight, or at least he thinks it does, because these mid-sentence, wait-for-it pauses (even though there isn't any real suspense anyway) are what young, modern pastors do in their sermons, or what young, modern YouTubers do in their video essays. He wants to do in written form what they always do in spoken form. And in order to get around the issue of having the punchline in the same sentence as everything else, he’s gone and dumped a comma in there.
I could be a stickler and say, “This is not how you use a comma”, and a long time ago I’d have felt justified in doing so. But this kind of response doesn’t mean anything or serve anyone, and over the years I’ve learned that ‘rules writ in stone’ are less important than, like, utility and stuff, yeah? What I’m saying is this: if you can dry your hands on your trousers, go ahead; and if the comma you’re misusing achieves something for the reader, then you should use it in confidence. But the simple fact is that it doesn’t. It adds nothing. Rather, at least for me, it hinders the flow of the sentence and thus the impact of the message it’s trying to convey.
The author has gone to multiple lengths to "maximise readability". He’s capitalised the big C-words to emphasise the cleverness of employing contrasting adjectives that both begin with C (memorable!). He’s used the word ‘sin’ not once, but twice, to make the focal point of his message crystal clear (we’re talking about sin, guys! SIN!).
And he’s… well, he’s stuck a comma in there. Yeah. Ahem.
Punctuation is fun.
I’ve already forgotten what that comma was trying to achieve. Oh, right, emphasis.
It’s all a bit much for such a simple and straightforward sentence, you know? All you needed to tell people was “slow down, road works, thanks”, which the sentence did fine without any of the flourishes. But then you went and added the flourishes. You gestured and bowed and signalled, and then my eyes weren’t on the road but on the person doing the animations (literally speaking, I fixated on the comma). And while the guide books of yesteryear aren’t perfect and there’s always room for rule-breaking and/or experimentation, they’re there for a reason. And while some books differ on what works when (and while opinions do matter), the functions for a comma, while numerous, are actually very tried. You can’t invent a new one and expect it to just fly. The sentence flew just fine on its own.
This goes for the Japanese, too. You can't invent a new gesture - no matter how broad or sweeping - and expect everyone to understand what you're trying to communicate.
But Japan is Japan, and I can’t critique it too much. While drivers, daily, are bewildered by the side-of-the-road theatre productions they come upon at road construction zones, car accidents remain very, very few. Likewise, while the comma in the above example does nothing except force me to pause and then pick up again on a ‘will’ (which, honestly, why would you make me do that?), no one is actually sitting there thinking “What in heavens did I just read?”
Japanese people get a lot of flak for failing to show appropriate grace and manners, for breaking just one of a thousand social rules. I sometimes think a bit more hand-towel-brandishing when it comes to terrible grammar usage, too, wouldn't be such a bad thing. But Japan does get to be a bit much, even for me, and every trip back to New Zealand comes with a breath of fresh, clean, green air. I can relax, I can care less, I can use my trousers however I like. That sentence went on too long.
The point is, I understand: be it flags, batons, pens, paint brushes or nothing at all, correcting every single whimsical gesture wouldn’t help anyone; it'd only make us scared to gesture at all.
Which might be bad for the traffic - if the road men did nothing at all.
What am I trying to say, then? Be aware, I guess. Be aware that if you know your forms and techniques, you can move with grace and elegance. You can guide the way with flourishes and tricks that people will scarce be privy to. They’ll arrive at their destination knowing not how they got there.
But if you don’t, you can still guide the way; you’ll just confuse a few people now and then who may have learned something different.
Either way you’ll make mistakes, because punctuation is hard and not everyone understands interpretive dance. Whatever tools you have in hand, be it a road sign or a comma, be aware of the power they have, and then unleash it, with as few, movements, as possible.
Actually, we’re pretty good with full stops. If you know what a sentence is and isn’t, then you probably know when to use a full stop or any of its variants (question marks and exclamation marks). But with the others, we kind of just do what “feels good”. (Ahh, how I do empathise with the road men…)
Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, writes that truly good punctuation leads the way without drawing attention to itself. In other words, not like Japanese road men.
Commas are among the most popular items that we fail to tuck away properly. They have so many functions, aren’t optional like semicolons or (sometimes) hyphens, and, when typing, they’re always in easy reach of the right index finger. They’re, shall we say, too convenient, like the sides of your trousers after you’ve washed your hands and there’s no towel in easy reach. “Trousers are for wearing, not drying!” your Japanese colleagues will tell you. Everyone in Japan carries a hand towel in their back pockets, you see. Social rules. We westerners misuse trousers daily, and no one in the west tells us off.
Well, commas are like trousers, people.
Check out the following I came upon just this morning. I reckon two different authors wrote these, despite them coming from the same web page, because one has commas and the other doesn’t.
"If you’ve received a registration code in the post enter it on our registration page"
"Print the form, sign it, and return it to us"
Let’s be clear. They both need commas. One author has forgotten this (nary a comma has been inserted), while the other has employed not only the first, necessary comma, but a second completely optional Oxford comma! Totally baffling. And to think this is a government website.
What could be worse than this, you ask? Let me show you a, well, I don't even know what you call them. A re-post? They're the author-less quotes that people share and re-share that, probably because they're author-less, are almost always just... OK, you know?
Here:
“A church that will not CONFRONT sin, will eventually end up CONFORMING to sin.”
Someone, anyone, please, tell me what the comma is doing there. The quote sounded almost clever until it forced me to stop halfway through. It was like ripping open a bag of chips and finding out they’re all broken into unwieldy bits. You can hardly call them chips anymore. Ghost chips, maybe.
I understand the issue: the second half of the sentence is, in the author’s mind, a kind of punchline. It needs weight, or at least he thinks it does, because these mid-sentence, wait-for-it pauses (even though there isn't any real suspense anyway) are what young, modern pastors do in their sermons, or what young, modern YouTubers do in their video essays. He wants to do in written form what they always do in spoken form. And in order to get around the issue of having the punchline in the same sentence as everything else, he’s gone and dumped a comma in there.
I could be a stickler and say, “This is not how you use a comma”, and a long time ago I’d have felt justified in doing so. But this kind of response doesn’t mean anything or serve anyone, and over the years I’ve learned that ‘rules writ in stone’ are less important than, like, utility and stuff, yeah? What I’m saying is this: if you can dry your hands on your trousers, go ahead; and if the comma you’re misusing achieves something for the reader, then you should use it in confidence. But the simple fact is that it doesn’t. It adds nothing. Rather, at least for me, it hinders the flow of the sentence and thus the impact of the message it’s trying to convey.
The author has gone to multiple lengths to "maximise readability". He’s capitalised the big C-words to emphasise the cleverness of employing contrasting adjectives that both begin with C (memorable!). He’s used the word ‘sin’ not once, but twice, to make the focal point of his message crystal clear (we’re talking about sin, guys! SIN!).
And he’s… well, he’s stuck a comma in there. Yeah. Ahem.
Punctuation is fun.
I’ve already forgotten what that comma was trying to achieve. Oh, right, emphasis.
It’s all a bit much for such a simple and straightforward sentence, you know? All you needed to tell people was “slow down, road works, thanks”, which the sentence did fine without any of the flourishes. But then you went and added the flourishes. You gestured and bowed and signalled, and then my eyes weren’t on the road but on the person doing the animations (literally speaking, I fixated on the comma). And while the guide books of yesteryear aren’t perfect and there’s always room for rule-breaking and/or experimentation, they’re there for a reason. And while some books differ on what works when (and while opinions do matter), the functions for a comma, while numerous, are actually very tried. You can’t invent a new one and expect it to just fly. The sentence flew just fine on its own.
This goes for the Japanese, too. You can't invent a new gesture - no matter how broad or sweeping - and expect everyone to understand what you're trying to communicate.
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| Japanese etiquette extends to the way one places their shoes, too (neatness), and everyone's amazing at abiding by this. Fail, and it'll be immediately obvious who isn't from around here. |
But Japan is Japan, and I can’t critique it too much. While drivers, daily, are bewildered by the side-of-the-road theatre productions they come upon at road construction zones, car accidents remain very, very few. Likewise, while the comma in the above example does nothing except force me to pause and then pick up again on a ‘will’ (which, honestly, why would you make me do that?), no one is actually sitting there thinking “What in heavens did I just read?”
Japanese people get a lot of flak for failing to show appropriate grace and manners, for breaking just one of a thousand social rules. I sometimes think a bit more hand-towel-brandishing when it comes to terrible grammar usage, too, wouldn't be such a bad thing. But Japan does get to be a bit much, even for me, and every trip back to New Zealand comes with a breath of fresh, clean, green air. I can relax, I can care less, I can use my trousers however I like. That sentence went on too long.
The point is, I understand: be it flags, batons, pens, paint brushes or nothing at all, correcting every single whimsical gesture wouldn’t help anyone; it'd only make us scared to gesture at all.
Which might be bad for the traffic - if the road men did nothing at all.
What am I trying to say, then? Be aware, I guess. Be aware that if you know your forms and techniques, you can move with grace and elegance. You can guide the way with flourishes and tricks that people will scarce be privy to. They’ll arrive at their destination knowing not how they got there.
But if you don’t, you can still guide the way; you’ll just confuse a few people now and then who may have learned something different.
Either way you’ll make mistakes, because punctuation is hard and not everyone understands interpretive dance. Whatever tools you have in hand, be it a road sign or a comma, be aware of the power they have, and then unleash it, with as few, movements, as possible.
