Say It Right
by Dave Lowry

“Sensei Smith was telling me that. …”

“It’s ‘Smith sensei,’ not ‘Sensei Smith,’ ” I interrupted, correcting the young man who was talking.

I didn’t know who his sensei was, but I did know that the martial artist’s form of address was grammatically incorrect. It’s one of the most common errors Western budoka make when using Japanese terminology. I know we hear the title used that way all the time, but it’s incorrect.

“In Japanese, written and spoken titles of address almost always go after the name,” I went on. “It isn’t like in English.”

This courtesy applies to all forms of personal address. It’s not something we can disregard if we want to be easily understood in Japanese. For example, we say “Smith-san” or “Miyagi-san,” not the other way around. A child named Tomoko is “Tomoko-chan,” using a diminutive suffix that’s appropriate for children. If Yuki Suzuki is a very close friend, I might call him Yuki-kun, “kun” being another title that’s often used by males to indicate a sense of intimate informality. When writing a formal letter, you’d address him as “Suzuki-dono.”

Of course, the average martial artist isn’t a native Japanese speaker. Furthermore, in most instances, the Japanese understand what we’re talking about even if the sentence is grammatically garbled. But when we say, “Sensei Smith,” it sounds as odd to them as it would to us if they referred to a person in English not as “Mr. Smith” but as “Smith the Mister.”

You might argue that there’s only so much time you can devote to martial arts training and that it’s more important to perfect your front kick than to be able to pronounce its Japanese name, mae geri.

That’s not an unreasonable argument against my position. Despite the fact that matters of language and grammar are important to me because I make a living using them, I’m not sure it’s all that desirable to have a preoccupation with speaking or writing with perfection when the language isn’t your own. Few people are more useless—or irritating—than those who can pronounce all kinds of Japanese martial arts terms perfectly, yet whose reverse punch couldn’t penetrate a bowl of gelatin.

On the other hand, we must feel sorry for someone who has trained for a quarter century yet still can’t pronounce simple words related to his martial art. It’s embarrassing. Imagine talking with someone who claims he’s a big football fan and had played the game throughout his schooling. When you ask what position he played, he says “quarterbuck” instead of quarterback.

There’s a deeper reason we should take the time to correctly pronounce and use Japanese terms: The budo are Japanese arts, and many of their advanced concepts simply can’t be expressed or understood in any language other than Japanese. That, however, is another subject. In this essay, I’m discussing why it’s important to use the correct terms in the correct way.

I’ve heard Japanese sensei tell me not to worry about this, by the way. They insist, “When we’re speaking to our Western students, even we will say ‘Sensei Smith’ so they’ll understand us.”

“Do you say it that way when speaking to your Japanese students?” I ask.
“Well, no, of course not,” they reply.
“Why is that?” I ask. “Are American students just not smart enough to learn it the right way?”

This kind of “ghettoization” of non-Japanese budoka makes my blood boil. It’s nothing short of racism. And its meaning is clear: American students aren’t intelligent enough to learn things the “Japanese way,” so they must be taught a watered-down version.

Consider the implications of such an attitude. If I, as a Japanese teacher, am willing to cut corners teaching you how to pronounce the basic terms used in the dojo, I’m also likely to cut a few corners when I teach you the techniques. If I think so little of your intellectual capacity to use a simple term correctly, how seriously will I take your education in some of the more difficult and esoteric aspects of the art?

Westerners are learning to speak Japanese, and we’re learning to practice the budo just as well as the Japanese. We don’t need a special foreigners section at the dojo. Japanese teachers of the martial ways should expect and demand this of us, and we should expect and demand it of ourselves.

We should also demand that our Japanese teachers to treat us like their Japanese students. We may not always like this last part, by the way. Foreigners in Japan are often treated with considerations and a patronizing indulgence that a native Japanese would never receive. Alternatively, they may be subjected to brutality and ostracism. Both attitudes are disgraceful. But whether we’re training in Japan or with Japanese instructors, we should expect to be treated the same as our Japanese peers—and to take the good with the bad.

About the author: Dave Lowry is a free-lance writer who has trained extensively in the Japanese and Okinawan arts. He started writing Karate Way in 1986.