The I-Ro-Ha of Japan (1979)
A population about half that of the United States inhabits the Japanese archipelago, which has an area of roughly 372,000 square kilometers, or 1/25 that of the United States. The seas surrounding the islands have served as a barrier separating the Japanese people from and as a waterway connecting them with the Asian continent. Until modern times, these seas allowed suitable cultural importation from advanced nations while greatly reducing the danger of invasion. And, even when invaders sometimes entered from west or north, they were unable to drive the Japanese out. The inhabitants of this relatively isolated island nation have skillfully opposed all comers by means of a distinctive culture and psychological outlook.
In the nineteenth century, Japan alone of the East Asian nations escaped the catastrophe caused by European colonial rivalry. Barely maintaining sovereignty, Japan managed to seize the opportunity presented by the European threat and modernized. Though there are several ways to explain why the formerly exclusionist Japanese took such a step, probably it was not pure volition or ambition to assert national supremacy but stark realization of inability to resist with force and a consequent need to devise a new method of coping with prevailing circumstances as rapidly as possible. Thereafter, while preserving their own social traditions and ways of thinking and living, the Japanese successfully grafted to their old social structure Western philosophy, technology, and economic and governmental systems. The traditional Japanese accretive attitude inspired the people to develop under a set of circumstances in which both East and West, both old and new, exist side by side in an amalgam where contradictions are ignored.
I do not know whether the distinctive Japanese mental makeup that has enabled the people to achieve this amalgam is intrinsically valid for other circumstances. I do know, however, that Japan exists today as the outcome of the process of cultural accretion. Since this is true and since mankind will probably remain on the globe for some time yet, [End Page 37] an investigation of Japan and the Japanese as they are now can have meaning for other peoples. It is in this belief that I have compiled the following sampler.
The I-Ro-Ha Syllabary
One of the heroes of old Japanese legend is a fisherman of the name of Urashima Taro. (He was taken to an underwater place called Ryūgū-jō by a sea tortoise that he caught and mercifully released. At the palace, he was greeted and richly entertained by a princess. But it is his name itself, and not his adventure, that is the object of my present interest.) All Japanese children learn to write their names—and everything else too—in four ways:
Chinese characters (logographs, or as they are sometimes not entirely accurately called ideographs)
Hiragana, a cursive syllabary by means of which all Japanese sounds can be represented
Katakana, a blockish version of the syllabary, used now for emphasis or for writing words of foreign origin
Roman letters
Though all four writing systems are employed together in combination, the most frequently used are Chinese characters and hiragana. In the eleventh century, fortyseven (all but terminal n) of the forty-eight hiragana symbols were arranged in a poem that goes as follows:
Iro wa nioedoChirinuru (w)oWaga yo tare zoTsune naranUi no OkuyamaKyō koeteAsaki yume mijiEi mo sezu*
The verse, which expresses a Buddhist sentiment about the transience of all things, may be paraphrased as follows: "Colors (flowers) are fragrant, but they fade. In our world, none is permanent. If, today, we pass the inner mountain of illusion, there will be no more shallow dreaming and no more drunkenness."
Here too, my interest is in the syllables themselves, not in the sentiment. The I-RoHa arrangement has assumed something like the significance of Western alphabets as a device for ordering all manner of things. In the Edo period (1615–1867), this poem was the first thing small children learned to write, as the ABC is for Western children. In [End Page 38] Japan a person who did not know the basics of a subject was said not to know his I-Ro-Ha. There were playing cards with graphically attractive versions of I-Ro-Ha. Poems of the tanka and the renga styles are arranged in sets according to the I-Ro-Ha of their initial words. In Edo—modern Tokyo—fire brigades were sometimes named I-Ro-Ha, syllables. Storehouses, ships, and teahouses were arranged in the same way. In short, the idea of the I-Ro-Ha order penetrated most aspects of Japanese life.
In the following pages, I employ this I-Ro-Ha order to list a number of things that represent traditional and contemporary characteristics and distinctive attitudes of Japanese culture, society, and economy.
• The syllables with unvoiced consonants are as follows: i, ro, ha, ni, ho, he, to, chi, ri, nu, ru, (w)o, wa, ka, yo, ta, re, so, tsu, ne, na, ra, mu, u, i, no, o, ku, ya, ma, ke, tu, ko, e, te, a, sa, ki, yu, me, mi, shi, (w)e, hi, mo, se, su. Voicing and labialization of consonants are accomplished by means of diacritical marks. For instance, the addition of two superior dots converts te to de. In some cases elisions occur: Ki is elided in the combination Kyo.
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Note
This essay first appeared as Teiji Itoh, "The I-Ro-Ha of Japan," Tsune Sesoko ed., The I-Ro-Ha of Japan: An Alphabetical Interpretation of Japanese Concepts (Tokyo: Japanese Preparations Committee for International Design Conference in Aspen, 1979), 19–23. It is reprinted here with permission.
