Signing my name in Japanese Sign Language (JSL) for the first time was not easy. Even after I figured out the five signs I needed, it took some practice to gracefully string them together. Luckily my JSL instructor was very patient with me and the rest of the students in my JSL circle as we tried to force our hands into hiragana signs. Yep, I was in Japan… learning Japanese Sign Language.
It All Begins With A Leech Baby
Deafness in Japanese history goes way back. We’re talking the Kojiki (one of Japan’s oldest Shinto texts) and Japan’s Shinto creation myth. (For the uninitiated: there’s a god and a goddess named Izanagi and Izanami who take it upon themselves to form the islands of Japan).
After Izanami and Izanagi create Japan, they figure they need to create baby-gods and goddesses who can enjoy it. The ceremony of god-making involves walking around a pillar and greeting each other. Not too complicated, right?
Well, Izanami (the lady god) greets Izanagi (the dudely god) first, which is against the ceremony rules and they end up with what the Kojiki describes as a “leech child.” I’ll just let your imagination do the work of what this kid looks like. (Here’s a hint: no bones!)
Izami and Izanagi do what any good parents would and send their leech baby off in a reed boat, never to be seen again. Then, they walk around the pillar once more and get their hellos in the right order. They go on to create a whole slew of Japanese gods, none of which look like bloodsucking worms.
But despite being the sole captain and crew of his own reed boat, Leech Baby grows up and becomes Ebisu, the Shinto god of fishermen, merchants and wealth. Not bad for such humble beginnings, eh?
Ebisu is usually portrayed as having very large ears, which don’t do him a lot of good because he’s deaf (one of the side effects of being a leech baby, I guess). But don’t worry, according to some local customs, you can always bang some pots and pans to get his attention.
Japan’s Spotty History
So you would think with Ebisu being a pretty cool god who happens to be deaf Japan would historically be a decent-ish place for Deaf people, right?
(Spoiler alert: Not so much.)
First of all, there’s not much info on being deaf in Japan. In 1862, we know that the Tokugawa Shogunate sent out some envoys to Europe to learn more about deafness by having them visit schools for the deaf. Then, sixteen years later the first Japanese school for the deaf was built in 1878 [Wikipedia].
But, just because there was a school for the deaf didn’t mean that deaf people were treated well, though. Being deaf was thought of as more of a disease or disability, so if you were deaf you weren’t thought of as the same as everyone else. In fact, we don’t even have to reach that far back in time to see some pretty less-than-stellar actions against deaf Japanese people. For example, in 1965, a deaf man was accused of murdering the owner of a sushi restaurant. The defendant, Kido Takashi, wasn’t provided with a sign interpreter during the police interrogation, had a hearing lawyer who couldn’t sign, and when an interpreter was finally allowed, the police argued the interpreter wasn’t official legal counsel. Therefore, they were able to listen in as Kido’s lawyer tried to build his defense.
Luckily for Kido, he was given an appeal and a reduced sentence, because the judge felt he was developmentally disabled. Of course, if the judge had only understood sign language, he would have been able to see Kido could understand and communicate perfectly well.
People like Kido Takashi didn’t have a whole lot of rights under Japanese law. In fact, people who were deaf and mute were considered financially incompetent in Japan and had the legal status of minors until the Japanese Federation for the Deaf (JFD) challenged those laws in 1979. Up until then, a deaf person in Japan wasn’t able to have a driver’s license, sign a contract or write a will. It certainly was not a good time to be deaf.
JFD vs D-Pro: Fight!
But things have been getting better. The JFD was formed in the 1950s to help Japanese people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing come together and foster a sense of community. But the JFD also exists to defend the rights and freedoms of deaf Japanese, like the case with Kido Takashi. JFD’s philosophy is that deaf Japanese are Japanese people who happen to be deaf. This includes people who are hard-of-hearing, deaf since birth, or who use a hearing aid or cochlear implant.
However, as with any self-respecting activism group, they do have an arch-rival: Team Rocket D-Pro.
D-Pro came together in the 1980s and they argue that they’re part of a different culture and use a different language than a hearing Japanese person does. In their minds, they’re deaf first and Japanese second. They also believe that a person born to deaf parents and raised using sign-language is “more deaf” than someone who becomes deaf later in life.
One of the biggest battles between them is over the definition of JSL. D-Pro insists that there’s a pure form of JSL and that it’s a completely separate language from spoken Japanese and that to be deaf is to be of a different culture entirely.
The JFD say signing is another form of spoken Japanese (which, coincidentally, helped to get JSL taught in public schools to deaf kids without invoking the wrath of the Ministry of Education). During one particular argument between the two groups, a member of the JFD accused D-Pro of “sign fascism.”
You might say there’s some serious tension there.
JSL And Japanese
Not to choose sides or anything, but as a foreigner (and a hearing person), I felt as though the style of JSL I dabbled in was distinctly Japanese. (We’re still cool, D-Pro! Don’t hurt me!).
If you want to sign “hello” in American Sign Language, you tap your fingers against your brow in a pseudo-salute. But in JSL, the sign for “hello” is holding your two pointer fingers a few inches apart and then bending them towards one another – kind of like two people bowing to each other.
When I was learning JSL, our instructor told us it was okay to make up our own signs as long as they were clear and straightforward. At one point, I was trying to brag about my mastery of the piano, but didn’t know the sign, so I pretended to play a scale on a keyboard. Turned out my off-the-cuff sign was the right one. A language where I could intuitively figure out vocabulary? Sign me up! (Pun shamelessly intended.)
Of course, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere and even the JFD has taken issue with signs being made up willy-nilly by hearing people, particularly in the ’80s and ’90s when NHK started airing two television shows that featured JSL. One was called Everyone’s Sign and the other was Sign News.
JFD had no beef with Everyone’s Sign, which taught hearing people the basics of signing. Sign News was where things got troublesome. Sign News would run the news headlines from earlier in the day and translate them into sign. The problem was sometimes there would be words in the reports for which there were no signs and the news report voice-over was so quick that finger-spelling was out of the question, so the newscasters had to invent their own signs. Then, people learning JSL or training to be interpreters would watch Sign News and later integrate the signs used on the show into their own signing. See where all this is going?
There are some other interesting cases of signs being made up as well. Some deaf college students are signing in ways that reflect the onomatopoetic styling of spoken Japanese and manga. People who speak Japanese pepper their sentences with lots of interjections like そう (sou) and ね (ne). Kind of like how in English we can’t, like, stop using the word like.
And although a whole word can be represented with a single sign, spelling things out is sometimes necessary, like if you’re telling someone your name. JSL has a whole alphabet of signs representing individual hiragana/katakana. And JSL learners have an edge over written Japanese learners – there’s no difference between hiragana and katakana in JSL! Whether you mean や(ya) or ヤ(ya), for example, the sign is always the same: holding your pinky and thumb out and touching the fingers between to your palm.
Young Japanese signers will fingerspell their conversational interjections and drag them across their body to look like the sound effects in manga frames. They might sign へへへ (heh heh heh) for a creepy laugh or さ (sa) when they’re confused. (If you want to sign your own creepy laugh, the sign for ヘ(he) is basically the sign for ヤ(ya), but with your wrist bent down.) The most interesting thing here is how the sign gets positioned as if it they were in a frame of manga. It doesn’t get any more Japanese than that.
To keep up with all this creativity, one of the JFD’s new goals became to research and create new signs for words that up until then didn’t have a counterpart in spoken Japanese. About 100 new signs are generated each year and then those signs are later incorporated into the JFD’s other projects, like their textbook series for JSL learners called Our Sign Language or わたしたちの手話 (watashitachi no shuwa) and their JSL-interpreters training program. They also hold training seminars throughout Japan specifically to encourage people to use these hot-off-the-presses signs. And all of these projects help spread the use of JSL and hopefully promote a sense of community among everyone, Deaf and hearing alike.
The JSL Future
As the number of sign language interpreters and signers increase, the better things seem to be getting for people who use JSL. In 2002 the National Training Institution of Sign Language was established. In 2006 Japan amended the “Supporting Independence of People with Disabilities Act” to encourage local governments to have more JSL interpreters.
Even the Imperial family is getting involved… well, at least one of them. Kiko, aka Princess Akishino is a student of JSL and attends various sign language events around Japan. In 2008 she even participated in the National Deaf Women’s Conference. The future of JSL is looking up and up, and although things were pretty terrible for deaf people in Japan not all that long ago, they’ve made some big recent strides to help make amends.
Whether they agree with the JFD or D-Pro or neither, I think we can all rest easy knowing that Japanese people who are Deaf are making their homeland proud.
Before you go, I want to share with you what is easily the best sign I’ve seen so far. Popular at the Tsukuba College of Technology, the sign for “pizza” involves you making a “P” sign on your knee, which is 膝 (hiza) in Japanese. Get it? P – hiza? Sounds just like Pizza.
Editor’s Note: I hope you learned a little bit about JSL! Tomorrow’s post is also about JSL, focusing more on actually learning it as well as using it to help with your regular Japanese learning. So until then, I guess it’s…
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