Native-Speaker Beliefs about Nihonjinron and Miller's "Law of Inverse Returns"

Abstract

The reaction of Japanese to foreigners speaking Japanese has been much speculated about over the past thirty years as interest in learning the Japanese language has increased, and as the Japanese themselves have faced explaining who they are to the rest of the world. The Japanese are often labeled xenophobic by the mainstream media, as a 1996 Reuter's article in the New Zealand Herald, which describes how Japanese people react negatively when a foreigner can speak Japanese fluently, testifies: In one of the odder twists to Japan's relationship with the rest of the world, many natives don't like foreigners who speak Japanese too well... the Japanese are proud of the fact that they take a long time to get to know. If someone speaks [their language] fluently, all of a sudden the theory that Japanese are impenetrable doesn't hold much water. It threatens the status quo.The belief that Japanese people react negatively to foreigners speaking Japanese fluently is not restricted to the layman, however. Roy Andrew Miller, a well-known Japanese linguist (Miller 1967, 1971, 1980, 1986), and Takao Suzuki, who has written widely on the topic of Japanese sociolinguistics (Suzuki 1975a, 1975b, 1987), both claim that Japanese people are exceedingly uncomfortable when faced with a foreigner who speaks Japanese like a native. Miller (1977a, 1982) has stated this opinion quite explicitly in his so-called Law of Inverse Returns (1977a: 78): Every non-Japanese who becomes involved in learning the Japanese language must contend with a facet of sociolinguistic behavior that can be called the law of inverse returns. This law holds that the better you get at the language, the less credit you are given for your accomplishments; the more fluently you speak it, the less your hard- won skills will do for you in the way of making friends and favorably impressing people; but by the same token the less you do with the language, the more you will be praised and encouraged by Japanese society in general and your friends in particular.

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