In their work introducing the rich tradition of oral storytelling in the Tsugaru dialect, Joshua Lee Solomon and Megumi Tada of Hirosaki University are moving beyond traditional geographic and linguistic boundaries. Having translated the unique folklore of northeastern Japan from its local vernacular into English, they’ve also facilitated a workshop combining English language education and studies of the region. In the workshop, students learned to perform the tales under the guidance of master storytellers from the preservation society Wa no mukashi-ko, and eventually performed in English alongside the storytellers performing in dialect. We discussed, via Zoom, the interrelated areas of translation, cultural preservation, and language education. Listening to their retellings of favorite folktales, I experienced firsthand how the emotions of storytelling—nostalgia, laughter, heartache—transcend space and time.
Mary Hillis (MH): Could you give some background information about the local Japanese dialect in Tsugaru?
Joshua Lee Solomon (JS): There is a lingering perception that the Tsugaru dialect is used by uneducated or somehow uncivilized people, and this is connected to a long history of prejudice against the poorer regions in northeastern Japan. The Tsugaru region was historically isolated for a very long time by mountains and its relative distance from the political and economic centers of the country, so it’s a repository of very old Japanese words.
One of my favorite examples of this is the word in the Tsugaru dialect of “udade.” Depending on the age of the person you’re talking to, they might say this word only means something really bad or uncomfortable, whereas young people are more likely to use it meaning cool and good—the same way you use “yabai” in contemporary standard Japanese (like certain expletives in English used in either positive or negative connotations). But actually, I think this word comes from the Manyoshu, which is an ancient collection of poetry. In the text, there’s the word “utate” and that word is an intensifier—meaning “extreme” or “very much.” In this way, there are older Japanese words that are kept in the current language.
Megumi Tada (MT): Yes, some ancient words remain. The pronouns “wa” (I) and “na” (you) come from the ancient words “ware” and “nare” or “nanji” respectively. They are not usually used in modern times, being the types of words typically found in esoteric literature, like Manyoshu or other Japanese classics.
JS: One interesting thing I can mention is the apocryphal story often told about this vernacular language. As a spoken language, one of Tsugaru’s characteristics is that it tends to be not spoken very clearly—it’s often mumbled. The story goes that it’s so cold in the region that people don’t want to open their mouths and let the heat out! That’s obviously not true, but it’s the story that people tell.
MH: Wa no mukashi-ko is a local group of storytellers who are carrying on the oral traditions of the region. At your university, you’ve partnered with them to deliver a workshop for students. Could you describe the group, their activities, and interactions with the students?
JS: I’ve done research on the cultural anthropology of the Wa no mukashi-ko group and their actions of passing down the culture, and my main area of interest is the construction of place, the tension between preservation and inheritance. When you look through Japan at so-called local traditions and local culture, you find lots of “preservation societies,” and in that concept, there is a tendency to remove whatever cultural artifact of note from society, from time—to put it in a bottle and preserve it, so that it doesn’t change.
However, what interests me about this group is that they actively change the form of the stories and the performances to suit the times. Through that process of adaptation and change, they’re inheriting the language, they’re inheriting the stories, and they’re passing down this concept of Tsugaru as lived place and history. Their mission statement is somewhat conservative; they say that the older generations have wisdom and valuable knowledge that they want to pass on, and I think there is value in tradition that is larger than the individual, stretching diachronically back in time. On the other hand, however, I think there’s something interesting in the way that they’re able to bring it into the present, prolonging it with a certain degree of success and moving it into the future.
MT: In an interview with the storytellers, they told us that they are more interested in passing on our indigenous cultures to the younger generation. They were glad, in that sense, that they were able to collaborate with the students, and students also learned how emotional similarities can transcend differences between languages. No matter how different the languages are, there are similar emotions. One of the international students from Tibet who took part in the workshop said that he had heard a very similar story from his parents or grandparents at home, so he could relate to it.
MH: The university students enrolled in the workshop performed some of the group’s repertoire in English. Could you describe the process of translating traditional stories from the local Japanese dialect into English?
MT: I try not to make a one-for-one translation because it’s impossible, so I put more emphasis on understanding the atmosphere, ambience, and emotion—rather than the exact meaning of the words. Because there were so many varieties of stories—fun stories, pathetic stories, action stories, and also bizarre stories—I really enjoyed translating them, and I tried to understand the content rather than focusing on them linguistically.
JS: There’s no good answer, so I rely on producing what I call a marked language. Everyone learns standardized Japanese in school, so even if you grew up hearing spoken Tsugaru dialect every day of your life, the first experience of reading the dialect is not a neutral experience, and everyone has some kind of visceral reaction to that.
For these folk tales, my basic strategies are to emphasize the orality of the text by adding a lot of commentary—addressing the reader: “Oh have’n I a good story for you today! Do you know why it is that Mt. Iwaki’s left shoulder is a bit lower than the right? Well, then, I suppose I’ll have to tell you of how, long, long ago, there lived an ogre on the mountain—oh, that ogre!” I add these kind of interjections to preserve their orality, and defamiliarize the text just to a point where it doesn’t interfere with comprehension and the feel of the reading. I might do this by inverting the order of certain sentences to unbalance the reader and remind them that they’re not reading a so-called “natural sounding” or unmarked text. Then the last thing that I do is (depending on what a publisher will allow me to do) put everything in italics, bold, or small caps—something to give a visual indication that this is something different from what you’re used to reading. These are all kinds of experimental possibilities.
I was speaking with James Westerhoven, who famously translated Dazai Osamu’s novels into English, and also does Dutch translation. He translated a short story that was written in the same dialect, and he translated the narration as unmarked language; for the dialogue, he chose to use an American New England accent because he thought the northeastern feel would come through. I don’t agree completely with that approach, but I think that’s one of the least objectionable strategies you can take to remind the readers that this is a colloquial text. So, I think my answer is to just stress the orality in whatever way I can, experiment with different methods, and ultimately, never find the correct answer.
MH: Do you find that there are emotional or performative aspects that are lost when the stories are written down and translated, or are they able to be preserved in the text?
JS: There are two master storytellers, and they’ve organized their archive of texts. They rewrote texts they found in the library, as well as texts they remembered from their childhoods, and they have over one hundred scripts written down. So we have a translation from the oral to the written. Then their students study the text, and they translate it back into oral performance. Also, when we took the recordings of these performances, we were allowed to photocopy their scripts, and many of them include lots of changes, additions, elisions, and all sorts of comments, so there’s an adaptation process going on in the performance, which I think is a nice way to feel that sense of the oral culture.
If you look at some of the commentary on the history of dialect writing in this area, one of the really incisive comments was that in Japanese, usually you write kanji, which are ideographs, and then you attach readings to them—the furigana glosses. One commentator says that in this case, the pronunciation gloss is the main text, and then we add kanji to it to give the sense of intonation that the speaker would have used when they were speaking. The example they give is the word “odenki” (weather), for which there are perhaps six different sets of kanji that you can add to it—is it a glorious day, is it nice weather, is it just talking about the weather in a neutral tone, and so on. You are probably familiar with Walter Benjamin’s essay on translation and that the process of translation is not doing violence to a text, but adding a different perspective on the core idea. We are interpreting through the kanji what the words mean on paper, so that’s one more aspect interpreting the essential meaning of the text.
As for the emotional connection, I’m very emotionally neutral when I approach the text, but I think there’s a strong connection between nostalgia and spoken dialect in Japan. We’re more used to hearing spoken stories as children—the mother or the father reading the storybook to us, rather than reading the text on the page. I think there are these kinds of emotional cues that listeners received from the performances that are quite different from when we read a book.
MT: In terms of emotion, when we perform in a dialect, it has a more powerful influence than the language itself, and it is more convenient to convey the emotional side. Common Japanese and the standard language are very different, so I think students understood that too—when you are speaking in your dialect, it comes from somewhere deep down, and it can transcend into something universal, which can be understood by everyone.
MH: What kind of performative techniques did the professional storytellers use? How was their performance with the students received by the audience?
MT: The techniques consist of a performance voice that can be projected to the audience, and the performers optimize pauses, which can be effective. Also, some of the action stories require them to do the actions; during those performances, we had sword action battles, and they mimicked as such. One of the master storytellers said that she uses hand gestures a lot to express distance or closeness. Also, they always wear kimono or other traditional Japanese clothing to show that this is a traditional Japanese performance, which contains that cultural sense of the story.
The audience was a mixture of local people, students, and college faculty. Some understood our dialect, but there were others who didn’t, so it was very interesting that they could understand the story by listening to English, by listening to dialect, and by reading the English transcripts as well. There are some differences, but ultimately some knowledge transcends language and fills in the discrepancies, and that was very interesting for me.
MH: Could you give some examples of folktales unique to the region?
JS: There is the story of Yuki Onna, the Snow Lady story. This is a character who’s found all throughout northeastern Japan; she’s like a witch or specter. The story they perform is a translation of Lafcadio Hearn’s short story—he is a non-Japanese who came to Japan in 1890 and loved Japanese ancient culture. He wrote a story in English, it’s then translated into Japanese, and becomes a national Japanese culture that’s now been localized, so it’s an interesting example.
The Farting Old Man—this is a story with a classic form, where you have the good old man and the greedy old man. In the Tokugawa period, the samurai class had a flatulence contest, to see who could make the best sound and the best smell. In the story, the good old man entertains the rich man, and he gets a present, but the greedy old man’s performance is subpar, and he gets punished in the end. What’s interesting there, though, is that this is an example of how the stories are so old that they draw on this culture that probably people don’t know about anymore.
There’s a whole genre or subgenre of the folk tales that deal with the sankin kotai (alternate residence) system where the daimyo (lords) would go to the Edo capital. It’s all about how the Tsugaru lord is a braggart, and he always makes brash promises about how great Tsugaru or his retainers are, but then he gets into trouble in the end.
The last one is called The Red Comb. Like the Snow Lady story, this is a localization of a broader story that’s told elsewhere, usually called the Tsurara Onna story, or the Icicle Lady story. In the typical story, a beautiful woman comes and stays for the night at the lonely farmer’s house, and when she takes a bath, she disappears. In this very short story, you have the good old man and the good old woman—man and wife—and they’re quite lonely, they don’t have any children. One night in a snowstorm, they hear a crying baby outside. They open the door, and the old man is entranced—there’s this beautiful woman standing outside, and she has a baby. She says, “Take my child, protect my child,” so he takes the baby, and she disappears into the snowstorm—just vanishes. They’re so happy with the baby and they love her so much, but she refuses to go in the bath. One day, in the springtime, it’s getting hot outside and she needs to go in the bath. When she does, the man and woman wonder why she doesn’t come out. When they go to check on her, the only thing in the bathtub is her little red comb floating on top of the water. You can see how there’s emotional resonance with the loss of a child, infertility, and hope to expand the family, and the real tragedy of it makes it a powerful story.
MT: There are so many powerful stories, but the one I like most is Tosa no Sunayama (The Sand Hills of Tosa). It tells of a very poor family, and the daughter who is taking care of this family. Her father is sick and bedridden—actually futon-ridden—and there is no food, so she is trying to steal something from the fields. The village rules were very strict at that time, and the punishment for stealing food was to be sold to slavers. On the last night, before she leaves the house, there is this young lad fleeing from slavery, and they try to escape together, but the next day after they’ve left, a tsunami comes and the whole village is destroyed. It’s a very sad story, but there is also a moralist aspect to it—to warn that someday, a tsunami will surely come again.
MH: How did you become interested in using these local stories in the classroom, and what do you think is the role of local folklore and culture in a language learning curriculum?
MT: I’m a Tsugaru native—I was born and raised in Hirosaki until I went to the Tokyo area to attend university; this project interested me because it was my language. I started translating the stories because it’s my niche, fitting to my interest in Tsugaru culture. Also, the region is far from the central metropolitan area, and therefore not a matter of much interest. I wanted to explore the culture more deeply; by translating it into English, it can become a part of the global culture, and in encountering other cultures, something new might be produced.
In the future, I would like to compare some of the Japanese folklore with another culture’s folklore, such as American ones: Edgar Allen Poe or Mark Twain’s stories have great elements that convey their culture and vernacular. Such particular cultures and settings are comparable to the ones that we have here in Tsugaru, so I hope to work on that later on.
JS: With regards to applying local folklore in the classroom, we’re both located at Hirosaki University, and our university is very interested in a curriculum that is oriented toward what they call “glocal education”—using global perspectives and applying them in a local area or local materials. We’re heavily encouraged to use local materials and generate interest in locality through our classes.
There’s research being done by Robert Sheridan (Kindai University), Kathryn M. Tanaka (Hyogo University), and others on culturally familiar materials. Their research argues that when you use culturally familiar materials, it activates learner schemas; being already aware of certain concepts, it helps scaffold, or support, their language learning. For example, if students are reading a folklore story and there’s a good old man and a bad old man, they’re immediately able to start predicting what’s going to happen in that story because they already know these tropes from reading Japanese folklore. There’s evidence to suggest that students are more interested in topics they’re already familiar with. This is not to say that our students are already familiar with local folklore specifically, but they do have this general knowledge from growing up in Japan that helps support the use of it in the classroom.
Joshua Lee Solomon is a lecturer in the Hirosaki University Center for Liberal Arts Development and Practices with a PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. He teaches English language and Japanese literature and culture, with a special interest in regional literature, dialect, and minor literature, particularly in Tsugaru and in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.
Megumi Tada is an associate professor at the Center for Liberal Arts Development & Practices, Hirosaki University. She holds an MA in English Literature. She teaches English and Business English in the Liberal Arts courses as well as in the self-access learning center called the English Lounge. Her interests include experiential learning, Project-Based Learning (PBL), and language policy.
Mary Hillis is an educational arm assistant at Asymptote. She has an MA in English with a specialization in teaching English to speakers of other languages. She lives in Japan, where she teaches English language and literature at the university level.
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