Japanese

Once a week I have Japanese lessons. I learn slowly like boxer from “Animal Farm”. But I can’t really replace it anymore. Boxer learned only three letters of the alphabet: “A”, “B” and “C” and wrote them daily wearing a hoof on the sand to refresh his memory.

I noticed that Japanese has such syntax as if it were going backwards. It feels as if a person is moving away from what he is saying. I told my teacher Mr. Yoichi and he confirmed that this was the case.

In the film “The Last Samurai” there is a scene
in which Algren, together with an interpreter named Simon Graham, visit the Emperor, and then come out of the meeting and the translator tells how to do it: “One step back. And they step back. And they step back.” And so they go backwards all the time, facing the Emperor. Well, the Japanese language has such a structure that it is said all the time one step backwards, not one forward.

It seems to me that Japanese culture is permeable to such an extraordinary, beautiful (and incomprehensible to us) courtesy, not because it comes from feudal relations or something like that. This is because Japanese has this structure: constant withdrawal. In Japanese it is said “they step back”. I would love to move backwards forward.
一歩後退