One of the first things my new boss told me after I came to Japan to work as an English teacher in the early 80s was that “all Japanese are bilingual”. By that, he meant that every Japanese was fluent both in hyojungo, the standard language used for television, radio, books, and magazines, and in the local dialect that people use to varying degrees to conduct the business of everyday life in their communities. I soon found out that he wasn’t exaggerating; despite taking three years of Japanese language courses at university before coming to Japan, in the first months after my arrival in Kyushu I often had no idea what people were saying in the local dialect.

I wasn’t alone. While Japanese know and understand the most common traits of the many dialects in the country, they can get sucked into the verbal quicksand just as quickly when people get down and dirty with the hardcore version of their local language. In fact, the leaders in Kagoshima at the southern end of Kyushu encouraged the use of their arcane dialect during the feudal period as an instant detector of spies from the Shogun or Imperial court, who didn’t have a prayer of keeping up linguistically.

I spent a weekend in Kagoshima about a year after coming to Japan, by which time I had started to get comfortable with my local dialect. But the folks in Kagoshima might as well have been speaking Urdu considering how little I understood them. In fact, I went with that same boss and the other English teachers at the school to visit some people affiliated with his international exchange program. He was angry with me after we returned, accusing me of doing a poor job of socializing by not engaging them in conversation or laughing at their jokes. I protested that I had no idea what they were saying. That explanation cut no ice with him: “None of us understood what they were saying either, but we laughed along with them to be friendly.”

I’ve come to appreciate the Kagoshima dialect more since my first inauspicious exposure to it—middle-aged women have a wonderful, distinctive speech rhythm that sounds as if they are half-talking and half-singing—but it is still deucedly difficult to pick up. (And no one in Japan has a clue about what they’re saying down in Okinawa.) Indeed, I’m very impressed by how the Japanese use dialect, because they are, in a real sense, bilingual.

I remember well an evening spent eating and drinking with two brothers one night not long after my arrival. Both spoke the local dialect, and they used that exclusively when talking with each other. But they knew I could understand only standard Japanese at the time, so that’s what they spoke to me. It was fascinating to subtly detach myself from the conversation that evening and watch how they handled themselves. It was as if they had a valve in their heads; when they faced each other, they spoke in the local dialect. When they faced me, they switched without a moment’s hesitation to standard Japanese. I found out that I could activate this valve by altering my posture at the table with them. If I leaned in closer, they spoke the standard language, but if I leaned back in my chair, further out of their range, they switched immediately into dialect.

This sounds astonishing, but everyone under a certain age can do it. It’s different with the oldest generation of Japanese society today, however. An example close to home is my wife’s parents. It was frustrating in an amusing way when I tried to talk with them after I got married. Both her father and mother were educated before World War II, when standard Japanese was less firmly established than it is now. I suspect they didn’t consider their local dialect as anything but the standard language, because that’s what they had used all their lives (though my father-in-law should have known better because he was in the Imperial Navy during the war and knew Japanese from everywhere in the country.) They asked me questions using the local dialect, and I couldn’t understand them. My father-in-law would turn to my wife and tell her to translate what they said into English for me. That made it doubly hilarious, because my wife knows very little English and has never been particularly anxious to learn. She retorted that they should use standard Japanese instead, which I could understand.

With this almost unlimited stock of subject matter, the Japanese themselves love talking about dialects, either their own or someone else’s. I soon found out that if I had trouble getting an adult English class off the ground, I could easily arouse everyone’s interest if I started talking about dialects. I discovered the perfect question that would set off a lively debate. Browsing in a bookstore one day, I picked up a paperback copy of a recently published play. All Japanese books have a strip of paper that runs from front to back along the bottom of the book, with the ends folded into both covers. This is used to advertise the book’s contents. The strip of paper advertising this book contained the bold statement: “You can’t seduce a woman in standard Japanese.” Toss that bait out to a class full of intermediate-level or higher Japanese adults, and they’ll pick it clean quicker than a piranha dining on a dead fish.

I noticed that particular book because it was written by Hisashi Inoue (top photo), a well-known novelist, playwright, and essayist. I first read his work when the professor for my third year Japanese literature class assigned one of the sketches Inoue wrote for a comedy group called the Tempuku Trio. It was wickedly clever, with a lot of jokes impossible to explain in English, making it all the more appealing to the students. I wound up buying the anthology of those scripts in two paperback volumes and using it for my own study.

The name of the play was Kokugo Gannen (The First Year of the Japanese Language), and it debuted at the Kinokuniya Hall in Tokyo in 1986. Being an Inoue fan, I was delighted to see this article in the Japan Times about the play’s recent revival concurrent with the first performances of his new drama. Here’s how the reviewer describes the plot:

The hero is Seinosuke Nango (Bsaku Sato), an Education Ministry official and Japanese language expert. As the play begins, his family and servants are preparing for a party at their home to celebrate the delivery of his new book of Western songs with his own Japanese lyrics for elementary school children.

However, rather than marking the end of his travails, the party is significant for another, much weightier assignment Nango receives; creating a new, homogenized and simplified Japanese language based on the lingua franca in the new capital of Tokyo.

What follows is nothing short of hilarious — as Nango himself, a Choshu dialect-speaker from present-day Yamaguchi Prefecture in the far west of Honshu — strives diligently to fulfil his commission in a household where his wife and her father come from Kagoshima in Kyushu, and speak in a different dialect, as do the servants, who are from places as diverse as Osaka, Tokyo, Tohoku and Nagoya.

With some 10 very different dialects under one roof, Nango’s earnest efforts to find a linguistic lowest common denominator — and metaphorically, of course, a new unified national identity — are the side-splitting stuff at the heart of this farcical tale of nation building.

Indeed, each character speaks in such strong local dialects that many Japanese in the audience have to concentrate hard to catch all the meanings (when the play was screened on television it was heavily subtitled.)

Note that the play is set in the latter half of the 19th century; the suspension of belief required for all fiction would not be possible in a modern setting because of the universal use of the standard language by contemporary Japanese.

I nearly forgot—can you seduce a woman in standard Japanese? The Japanese I discussed this with in class had mixed views. Men in their 20s insisted that it was not possible, claiming that it was essential to use dialect. It was fascinating to hear the rebuttals from middle-aged women, who were equally adamant that men had to use standard Japanese. As one woman explained, if a man used dialect in the clinches with her, she would think he was just playing around and not being serious.

One final note: Kyushu is close to southern Korea, and there has been extensive interaction between that part of Korea and Kyushu since ancient times. One distinctive feature of the local dialect where I live is the tendency to pronounce the “se” sound as “she”. For example, the Japanese word for teacher is sensei, but in the local dialect, it comes closer to sounding like shenshei. (Though it looks more exaggerated in print than it sounds in actual speech.)

It was almost startling when I was told some years ago by a Korean man from Busan that the same tendency to pronounce the “se” sound as “she” is also a characteristic of one of the dialects in southern Korea, just across the strait. But I really shouldn’t have been surprised. Sometimes the ties between us are closer than we suspect.