The Great Pronoun Crisis

Japanese pronouns are an interesting bunch. In general, spoken Japanese skips over pronouns when the subject is assumed. For example, in English, if you want to say that you ate, you say: "I ate." However, in Japanese, it's usually assumed that you're talking about you, so it's perfectly natural to say "Ate." As a result, subject-less sentences such as "Saw a movie," "Slept well," and "Want to know" are considered complete, since in each it's assumed that the speaker is talking about themselves. It's an economical language in that any unneeded markers are usually dropped. Of course, if you want to talk about your friend, you'd say "[Friend] ate," and so on and so forth.

In addition to this indirect way of speaking that seems quite vague to native English speakers (including myself), it's also a complex and difficult language to learn because speech is highly specified. At a talk by Alfred Birnbaum, a former translator of the popular (and my favorite) author Haruki Murakami, he pointed out this particular difficulty when it came to translating. In Japanese, it is possible, without knowing who is speaking, to deduce gender, age, social status and origin (what part of the country, from the city or a rural area) of the speaker entirely based on the type of speech. In the case of fiction, this is difficult for the translator because a lot of explaining must be done about the characters in English that is implicit and doesn't require extra effort in the Japanese.

This, among other things, is why Japanese can at times seem impossibly entangled in many layers of speech patterns, levels of politeness and styles - why there seem to be 10 different ways to say one thing, each one based on the situation and who's saying it to who.

My reason for writing is because I am going through a grammatical identity crisis. There are about five or six common ways of saying "I," compared to one in English. There's Watashi, the standard, non-gender specific title; Boku, used mainly by males, which has a relaxed, cooly detached tone; Watakushi, used in formal settings; Ore, a gritty, more confrontational term used to assert masculinity (used mainly among teenagers); and Atashi, which is most common with the 18-25 female bracket in a similar way that Boku is popular with males.

Herein lies my identity crisis. In high school I was encouraged to use Boku; in college I was rebuked and told to use Watashi; and now I can't seem to remain either of them for any length of time. I want to be Boku: hip, loose, casual. But since I've been most recently trained to be Watashi, I usually unconsciously use Watashi, which isn't really a problem except that soon after calling myself Watashi, I remember that I actually want to be Boku, and, mid-conversation, at times mid-sentence, leave Watashi by the wayside and become Boku.

I wonder at what point Japanese decide which pronoun to use - if one day they decide "I think I'm done with Boku, let's switch back to Watashi," and never miss a beat from then on, or if it's a more prolonged process, dotted with anachronistic references to a former self. I also wonder what they think of the fact that I can't figure out what to call myself, whether they commiserate with my Multiple Pronoun Disorder, my Grammatical Schizophrenia, and whether the fact that conversations end soon after I make this mistake indicates that it's a more serious problem than I previously thought.