Japanese youngsters say 'oha' to new language
By Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO - The increasingly popular practice of sending e-mail and pictorial messages among the young in Japan, made possible by high-technology cellular phones, has seen the development of a new type of Japanese language, one that focuses on short-cuts.

In other countries, youngsters also send each other short messages through mobile phones and shorten words to abbreviations and symbols to make communication faster. But mobile phones are used more by youngsters in Japan, fueling debate about how it may be changing language and culture.

When 16-year-old Miri Takahashi wants to tell her friends she cannot go the movies, she does not call them. Instead, she presses several arrow buttons on her mobile phone to send a picture of a sad face.

"It's easy to send a picture rather than writing a long sentence. A picture also conveys my feelings very well," explains the teenager, who says she wants to live in the United States some day.

Miri is called "a kid of the mobile-phone age", a term used in Japan to describe tens of thousands of teenagers who say they cannot live without their mobile phones. According to a recent survey by Kyodo News Agency, 90 percent of students own keitai or mobile phones, which they use primarily for sending mail to one other.

The survey also indicated a widespread dependency by youngsters on mobile phones in their daily lives, be it in school, at home or in the subway. "The mobile phone is part of my life because it provides me with a link to my friends," says one respondent in the survey, quoted in the Japanese media.

As Miri's example illustrates in Japan, youngsters prefer abbreviations, "emoticons" and even pictorial icons to typing messages. This has led to some concern among some older Japanese and social analysts about how this penchant for using abbreviations and signs - replacing a language - may affect an integral part of a national culture that is more than 2,000 years old.

For example, one of Japan's most commonly used terms, ohayo gozaimasu, or the polite form of "good morning", is now just oha among teenagers - something simply incomprehensible to older Japanese.

The list of abbreviations is getting longer by the day, and some parents say their children have begun talking a language that is as different to them as English is to Japanese. "The Japanese language has been developed over a long history and is rich with nuances and deep meaning. It's a pity the new generation is not well versed in it," says Yuko Ogasawara, a social researcher at International Christian University.

Labor recruiter Minoru Sekiyama says he was shocked to find undergraduate students not being able to write their job applications in formal kanji, or Chinese characters, without checking their dictionaries - in their mobile phones.

"Kanji and hiragana are an integral part of the Japanese people. But young people have forgotten to write these words because keitai with icons is taking the place of Japan's alphabet," he argues.

The Japanese written language is made up of three writing systems: kanji, the system used on more formal occasions, hiragana, the everyday system of lay people, and katakana, used for writing foreign words. The written language uses a combination of all three. The Japanese language also follows a strict code of conduct where, for example, formal script and words are used when addressing people of higher status, men, and the elderly. Against this backdrop, abbreviations or misspellings - as in mobile e-mailing - can distort the language altogether, critics say.

Kon Sakimori, who teaches cultural sociology at Nihon University, describes the new trend as representing a "dilemma" among the younger generation and the way they see relationships with other people today. "The younger generation see e-mail communication through mobile phones as a way of protecting themselves from getting into deeper relationships," he says. "By declaring their love in an e-mail rather than expressing the same emotion verbally, they strive to keep a certain protective shield."

Sakamori explains that young people are afraid to make a commitment in personal relationships, and thus prefer communicating through their mobile phones.

Still, the sociologist says this trend does not necessarily translate into a younger generation that does not believe in love - it just shows they have a different view of life. "These people have a different concept of love from their elders. They want to protect their freedom and also have relationships," Sakamori adds.

Despite the changes in the Japanese language, Sakamori says he is not worried about keitai becoming a threat to Japanese culture. "There is no doubt young Japanese have been affected in a major way by the use of keitai, but that does not mean they will stop being Japanese," he says. For instance, he cannot foresee an era when younger Japanese walk into their homes with their shoes on, or reject a typical Japanese bath, two customs deeply entrenched in the culture.

Miri, meanwhile, says she has not even thought about the deeper ramifications of mobile-phone language as her elders have. "I really don't know what the fuss is about," she laughs. "I like the shorter ways of writing and speaking Japanese because I feel free from the stuffy constraints of formal Japanese."