Ramble: Whenever I see people talking about “Pronouns” in the context of the Japanese Language, I cringe a bit
It’s something that comes up again and again, and every time it does, I can’t 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.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s highly, highly debatable if “pronouns” in the western sense even exist in the Japanese language. Personally, I am on the side that says that, no. They don’t. What we understand as “pronouns” 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 don’t 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 don’t realize is that the concept of “gendered pronouns” 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.
The many different words for “I” and “You” 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 for “I” or “You” is extremely fluent and dependent on era, place, upbringing, social situation, and many, many more factors, rather than just gender or age. Women who use “Boku” and even “Ore” exist. Men who use “Watashi” are very common. Reducing those words down to our narrow concept of “gendered pronouns” is reductive and just flat out wrong.
As for “Kare” (”He”) and “Kanojo” (”She”), a little known fact is that, until about a 100 years ago, the word “Kanojo” did not exist. “Kare”, until that point, was a fully gender-neutral term, which literally meant “That person in my field of sight”. You know how “Kanojo” came into being? It was invented in order to translate the word “She” in American novels when all other ways of translation would have resulted in too much confusion! That’s 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!
That’s why things like people asking “what gender pronouns characters in Anime/J-Games” use, or people debating the “correct pronouns” for the gems in Houseki no Kuni really, really annoys me. “Pronouns” say almost nothing about a character’s 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 and “Kare” for one another, but they also call each other “ano ko”, a term that traditionally has a lot more feminine connotation than “Kare” originally had masculine connotation. The use of “Kare” is clearly it’s 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 don’t know the gender of a sibling, you refer to them as “Kyôdai”, which is technically also a masculine kinship term, but in absence of gender, it becomes neutral. As long as you don’t know the gender of the sibling, they’re “kyôdai”. As soon as you learn the gender, they either stay “kyôdai” (masculine) or become “shimai” (feminine). That’s just how Japanese works.
I know it’s 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 doesn’t work and just leads to misinformation.
