Making Sense of Japanese by Jay Rubin

Author:Jay Rubin [Rubin, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kodansha USA
Published: 2021-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

THE NATURAL POTENTIAL

I said in the introduction to this book that, “All too often, students are subtly encouraged to think that Japanese verbs just ‘happen,’ without subjects, deep within some Oriental fog. In the world represented by Japanese, actions ‘occur,’ but nobody does them,” and I’ve said a lot since then to lay to rest such “twilight zone” notions about the Japanese language. Now I take it all back. There really is a twilight zone in Japanese, and the “natural potential” is it, that misty crossroads where the passive and potential intersect, where things happen spontaneously or naturally. Another term for the “natural potential” (shizen hanō) is the “spontaneous passive” (jihatsu ukemi).

We encounter this form most commonly when an essayist, after supposedly regaling us with objective facts, suddenly ends a sentence with kangaerareru or omowareru or omoeru, any of which would seem to mean “it is thinkable” or “it is thought,” but not “I think.” What is he doing? Ducking responsibility for his own ideas?

“Passive and potential forms are sometimes used in a way which might strike the English speaker as strange,” says Anthony Alfonso. “When something is left, or thought, or even done involuntarily or naturally by a person, the action is described in an OBJECTIVE manner and by means of either the potential form or the passive form with a potential meaning.”10

Take, for example, this somewhat spooky recollection of a childhood incident by the narrator of a story called “Man-Eating Cats.” The day his cat disappeared into the garden’s pine tree, he says, he sat on the verandah until late in the evening, unable to take his eyes off the upper branches of the tree in the brilliant moonlight. Tokidoki sono eda no naka de, tsuki no hikari o obite neko no me ga kirari to hikatta yō ni omoeta. Demo sore wa boku no sakkaku ka mo shirenakatta. “Every now and then, the cat’s eyes seemed to be flashing in the light of the moon. Maybe it was just a hallucination of mine.”11 The italicized phrase translates the natural potential expression yō ni omoeta, which certainly does not mean “I was able to think that…” and certainly does mean something more like “It seemed that…,” “One couldn’t help feeling that,” “One could not but think that…,” etc.

I’m not sure if such a description is entirely “objective,” but it does seem to be removed from the observer’s exclusively subjective domain, perhaps floating somewhere in the middle between pure subjectivity and pure objectivity. The implication is that the environment naturally leads the speaker to think or feel something. These forms don’t translate properly as either passive (“It was thought by me”) or potential (“I could think that”).

A few more examples: When a sad occasion brings forth an involuntary gush of tears, the verb naku, “to cry,” is routinely inflected as a potential, nakeru, as in Nakete kichatta / “I just couldn’t help crying.” When a Japanese fisherman pulls a fish out of the water he doesn’t take the credit for it as English speakers do.

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