Analysis of Odd Uses of Katakana

The odd katakana words I discuss here fall into three related categories:

1) common words where a katakana loan word is used when a non-loan word is available

2) place names in China, when katakana is used but readable kanji is available

3) words written in hiragana or kanji that would make better sense as katakana loan words

1.  There are quite a number of cases when a katakana loan word is used to express something that could be expressed without resort to loan words.  For example, “cancer” can be written as kanji (癌, pronounced がん) or as katakana (ガン).  Apparently there are a large number of scientific words written in katakana, though not all of them utilize both kanji and katakana.  This makes a great deal of sense historically; when Japan was opening up to Europe and America in the latter half of the 1800s, scientific knowledge was one of the things most sought-after by Japan.  Certainly, knowledge of Western science and technology would set Japan apart from its neighbors and help prevent it from sharing the fate China suffered under the Unequal Treaty (不平等条約；ふびょうどうじょうやく).  Since science, or at least this manifestation of science, was thought to come from the West, it makes sense that Western words are often used for scientific ideas.  Still, it makes an interesting clash when those loan words co-exist with non-loan words that express the same meaning.

Another example of a loan word used when a non-loan word would do is トイレ.  There are several other words that can mean “toilet”: お手洗い and 便所（べんじょ）to name just two.  There are a couple possible reasons トイレ might have been added to the Japanese lexicon.  The first is that it may have simply been added as an additional word to refer to toilets; many languages, including English, have a multitude of words to name the place one goes to relieve oneself.  In this case, it would have been viewed as synonymous with 便所.  On the other hand, トイレ may have come into use specifically to delineate a perceived difference between Western and traditional Japanese toilets.  Either Westerners may have insisted that the two are not the same, or Japanese may have come to that conclusion themselves.  The perceived difference would likely have centered around sitting versus squatting toilets.  Unfortunately, I have not been able to find out when トイレ came into use and who introduced it.

2.  Quite a number of Chinese place names can be written either in kanji or in katakana.  In the case of Hong Kong, it almost makes more sense to call it ホンコン than 香港—after all, the city was held by Britain for a hundred years and is best known to the world as “Hong Kong”, not the modern Mandarin pronunciation “Xianggang”.  But with other cities, this makes less sense.  Beijing can be written ペキン as well as 北京; Nanjing can be written ナンキン as well as 南京; Shanghai can be written シャンハイ as well as 上海 (though that one can apparently also be written in hiragana, at least according to WWWJDIC online dictionary).  For pronunciation purposes alone, the katakana may be used simply to remind the Japanese audience to eschew the normal pronunciations of these characters.  Yet this reasoning is not entirely satisfactory: the Japanese language is already accustomed to shifting pronunciation based on what combinations a character is located in, so it should not be too difficult to remember the peculiar combinations arising from Chinese place names.  Also, if pronunciation aid were the only reason to use katakana, that katakana should be used in furigana (the small kana writing above or below kanji), rather than in place of kanji.  When the katakana is used in place of the kanji, it suggests to me a desire on the part of Japan to distance itself from China.  By eschewing their shared characters and using katakana, the Japanese language treats China as simply another foreign country, rather than one with whom it has a long and intimate history.  Given the tensions that have frequently plagued Sino-Japanese relations, it makes sense that there would be times Japan would wish to distance itself from China.  While I cannot guarantee this is the reasoning for using katakana to write place names that already have kanji assigned, it seems plausible.

3.  In opposition to the first point, there are some words that are not written in katakana, yet based on their meaning, it seems that they should be.  たばこ is one; 野球（やきゅう）is another.  Neither one is native to Japan (tobacco certainly isn’t, and seems to have been introduced to Japan by the Dutch and Portuguese, and I very much doubt Japan had any game similar enough to baseball to warrant using the same name). Yet, contrary to the norm for foreign words, these have not been given katakana names.  Actually, apparently “tobacco” can be written either たばこ or タバコ.  But in the case of baseball, not only is the word written in hiragana, it has also acquired kanji.  And baseball is a particularly odd case, since the majority of other sports are written with katakana.  I have no idea why these words are not written in katakana, and find it most baffling.

れいぞうこ（冷蔵庫）is another example of this.  While the kanji makes perfect sense as a descriptive name for “refrigerator”, it is quite confusing why kanji and hiragana are used here at all.  It is extremely unlikely that Japan had refrigerators before opening to various Western countries in the 1800s (and I’m sure historians of Japan can verify this), and to the best of my knowledge, Japan did not have anything similar to a refrigerator before this time.  As a comparison, even the Chinese word for refrigerator (冰箱) is a translation of the English word “icebox”.  (The name is very descriptive of what it is, and the similarity between the English and Chinese names may possibly be a coincidence, but I have heard that the Chinese term was directly translated from the English one.)  If even the Chinese word in this case is essentially borrowed from another language, why is the Japanese term not treated as a loan word?  I have no idea.