The trigger which urged me to write this article is an episode of a cartoon “King of the Hill”, where an Asian American is introduced.
I happened to know that from a YouTube movie about Asian American, in which a guy was talking about the episode.
According to him, in the episode, an American guy from Laos gets a question from Hank Hill like:
“So are you Chinese or are you Japanese?”.
And the Lao American answers
“No, I’m from Laos, you know. It’s a southeast Asian country.”
Then he asks again.
“OK. So are you Chinese or are you Japanese?”
This confusion occurs because most European and American people don’t know much about Asian stuff like Asian countries, cities, people, languages, cultures and so on.
However, among various and diverse Asian countries, the most famous ones are China and Japan, which is one of the reasons creating the above-mentioned confusion.
On this article, I picked up main remarkable differences based on my perspective as a Japanese. To understand the gross differences, please go on to the followings.
1. Language
I think most Europeans and Americans find confusing is the linguistic distinguishing between Chinese and Japanese. That’s because both of them use Chinese characters. But, from a Japanese perspective, they are totally different.
1.1. Difference 1: the position of verbs in sentences
When I learned English, teachers taught students that verbs come before objects in sentences like
“She really appreciated the gift.”,
“The jury found the defendant guilty.”.
This is one of the remarkable difference between English and Japanese. And in this case, Chinese language is the same as English. Which means
1)Chinese: Verbs come before objects in sentences (English is here.)
2)Japanese: Verbs come after objects in sentences
Although there are exceptions related to the grammarical rule above in Chinese languages, generally speaking, the difference in the position of verbs in sentences is a deep crevasse lying between Chinese and Japanese.
1.2. Difference 2: Japanese has tense, Chinese doesn’t
This is one of the most remarkable stuff when I was learning Chinese. As is written on the title, Chinese language doesn’t have tense as the native speakers of English use. Probably you don’t understand what I’m explaining on this paragraph (1.2. Difference 2). To make you sense, I wrote below examples showing the difference among English, Chinese, and Japanese.
Ex1 – English: I played a video game yesterday.
Ex2 – Chinese(literally translated without changing the grammatical order):
Yesterday I play video games.
(Original: 昨天我玩儿电子游戏 )
Ex3 – Japanese(literally translated without changing the grammatical order):
Yesterday I video games played.
(Original: 昨日私はテレビゲームで遊んだ。 )
As you read, Japanese language brings the verb to the last position while Chinese language puts the verb to the position just after the subject. But the crux here is that Chinese verbs aren’t conjugated according to the tense decided by time.
Which means, when you talk with Chinese people in Chinese language, you have to check when the event (in this case, playing video games) occurs, is occurring, occurred, and, in some cases, will occur to know the event is a present one, past one, or, perhaps, future one.
(Notice: in Chinese language, there are some verbs expressing the events happening future. For example, there is a verb “打算, dasuan” meaning “plan” or “will”. If you are in scenes where such verbs are usd, you can grab what is being talked about are future events.)
2.Geography
First, please take a look at world maps. Particularly, a close look at East Asian area is necessary. And you can see a really huge country and other countries surrounding the largest one. If the maps you are watching are types having the names of countries written on the maps themselves, there must be “China” or “People’s Republic of China” on the largest. That is China, which is one of the most famous country, not only in Asia but also all over the world.
Shifting your eyesight eastward, there are islands clustering around the eastern shore of China. They are Japan, which is a sovereign country. As you know, Japan is an insular nation. And China is 25 times as large as Japan. On this large territory large cities are disperse. Considering the transportation between huge cities, as you see, China is more overloading than Japan.
3.Demography
Strictly speaking, China and Japan are multinational states. However, considering the variations of peoples they embrace, China well exceeds Japan. China has fifty six peoples including the largest group “Han”. Although the majority “Han” people accounts for approximately 92% of its population, not only the rest of fifty five peoples but also regional differences among Han people are fully diversified. One of the remarkable feature depicting this demographic diversity is dialect (some people may think “dialect” should be categorized into “language”).
It is like, if there are two Chinese people from different regions, they can’t talk by using their own dialects. To communicate, Mandarin (the standard Chinese language) is needed.
On the contrary, when it comes to Japan, Japanese accounts for approximately 98% of its population.
Every country has people having the ancestry different from the main stream. In the case of Japan, although Korean people, Chinese people, and Ainu people, who are a minority group, live there, Japanese people, including me, find Japan a country composed of only Japanese people.
This is a huge difference lying between China and Japan, which might be, in my perspective, a cause preventing Japanese people from being tolerant of those from oversea countries. And this is, I think, a reason why some people find Japanese people a flock of racists.
4.On ending
Generally speaking, it is really difficult to understand cultures extremely different from your own ones. This is also the case to we Asian people. Chinese and Japanese languages have a vocabulary meaning “Europe-America”(欧美: Chinese, 欧米: Japanese). Though there are remarkable differences like the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and the United States, at least Japanese people frequently use the word. When using “欧米”, which reads “Ou-bei”, the users mingle up European stuff with American stuff.
That is the same to European people and American people, isn’t it? It is normal. Asian cultures are difficult for Caucasian people to understand. But what is important is, I think, to respect each country, culture, language, and custom. Which is how, I believe we humans can avoid unnecessary conflicts and achieve peaceful relationships among different nations.
If you get interested in Asian languages, please listen to the following podcast episode at first.
5.Materials
1)This is the video which was talking about the episode of “King of the Hill”.
Title: ASIAN | How You See Me