Source overview: Eiwa Taiyaku Jisho

荒井郁之助 編 - 英和対訳辞書 (小林新兵衛//開拓使蔵版 pub) – 1872

I’ve been working to more clearly understand the semantics of terms related to colonialism in Hokkaido and Karafuto in the Meiji period. Authors such as James Hevia and Lydia Liu have written at length about translation and British colonialism in China, where certain terms in either language started to be treated as absolute equivalents with direct politically and ideologically laden implications and direct consequences in Anglo-Qing relations. For example 夷/yi and “barbarian” as supposedly referring to the British rather than a more nuanced translation of “foreigner”.

Not dissimilar to this, Nakamura Jun has talked about the phrase 土人/dojin (often translated as “aborigine” or “native”) which seemed to have experienced a sort of semantic drift from referring to “locals” to becoming a racial slur by the end of the Meiji period and thereafter. Given the richness of the research into this topic by these scholars and many others, I’m not going to conduct any sort of philological work on my own, however, I am very conscious of the fact that I’m reading an archaic form of Japanese and that many of the terms used in formal Chinese-inflected documents may have been archaic-sounding even at the time they were written. I’ve been keeping an eye out for old dictionaries

I was lucky enough to find a Kaitakushi-published Japanese-Russian glossary from the early Meiji period, which I glanced through and found 土民 as (through an English-Russian dictionary) “national” (as in, a member of a national community). Later I found a full Kaitakushi English-Japanese dictionary, the Eiwa Taiyaku Jisho, published in 1872, which after a thorough peruse, seems to be quite accurate and thorough.

I intend to use this (and hopefully, if I can find one, a Japanese-English dictionary from the period) to better understand texts from this time period. As both the nuance of Japanese words and English words have changed a great deal in the past 150 years, it’s something of a challenge not just to understand these early texts but translate them. So, for this, it’s useful to at least have a hint of what the intentions of the authors were.

More than this, however, I’m interested in, like Hevia and Liu’s studies referred to above, value-laden Western colonial terms rendered into Japanese and how these loan-translations were paired with or superimposed onto existing Japanese vocabulary. For this purpose, I did a survey of key terms related to race/racism, indigeneity, and colonialism to better ascertain how these ideas were framed in the time period.

In this dictionary, “aborigines” (pg. 5) is defined as “最初の住民” or “土人”, whereas “native” (pg. 310) refers generally to locals (“此土地の住たる人”), and in its adjectival form, to native plants, animals, etc (“根元, 生付, 生の”). “Indian” (pg. 238) refers strictly to India. “Savage” (pg. 415) is defined as “荒の？き人” and “猛悪人” , or in its adjectival form, “荒き”, “馴れて居るた” and “猛なる夷狄” and doesn’t seem to have been used to specifically refer to particular nations or ethnic groups. This is closely mirrored by Barbarian (pg. 39), translated as “バルバリン人”, “夷人”, “夷狄”, and while “barbarism” is much the same definition as the adjectival form of “savage”, added to this is “荒テ居ル不行儀なる蛮夷ノ” and “規則ナキ”. “Colony” (pg. 89) is defined as “殖民”, “殖民所” or “動物の一群”.

The fact that, at least in this dictionary, there isn’t a clear racialization of terms like “savage” or “barbarian” which – by the mid 19th century – were quite racist in English is interesting, as is the factual definition of “aborigine” as “first people” or “first residents”. This seems to confirm to some degree Nakamura Jun’s thesis. However, it’s interesting that there is strong association of lack of law and order and “savage”, which would make this an accurate translation of the English term. Interesting in that from Vitoria’s time forward, “Indians” are defined as devoid of sovereignty and sovereign power, which is the nucleolus of any legal system. They would not be savages because they’re lawless, but lawless because they’re savages. Finally, it’s interesting that (while I didn’t include it in my list above) “civilized” is not yet calqued at this time as “文明”, and “barbarian” is not so much translated, but transliterated, and the 夷/yi character is prominent in the other two translations given.