Imagine you’re flipping through channels on a hypothetical Japanese television. The first show you land on is animated; a boy with spikey black hair rides a small cloud across the sky, a young girl in blue armor grasping on to his orange gi as she joins in his mid-air journey. As the two children talk to each other, you notice their clearly affected manner of speech. Both refer to themselves as “Ora (オラ),” a distinctively masculine self-descriptor. The girl lets out a “dabe (だべ)” as a sentence ender, indicating emphasis. The Japanese being used tells you one thing right away: both characters are from somewhere in the sticks of this fantasy world.
You flip the channel. This time, you’re in the midst of a live-action comedy film. A gaggle of bedraggled high school girls walks alongside a country railroad, verdant submerged rice fields on either side. As the girls, covered in mud, complain of their ordeal (“I’m getting a tan!”), their sentences trail off into a telltale sign of their location. Their common sentence-ender is “-ndazu (-んだず)!” The film, you can tell, is set in rural Yamagata Prefecture.
You change the channel yet again. Once more you’re met with animation, although this time of a much higher caliber. A small white car drives across a bucolic vista festooned with sunflowers. A twenty-something couple speaks about agricultural ethos; one does so in a heavy accent. Later, at a farmhouse, the young woman from the car speaks with the young man’s family. Their accents are so strong you have to strain to understand them. It’s clear this is a world far removed from the urban sprawl of Tokyo.
These three programs couldn’t be farther apart in subject matter. Toriyama Akira’s classic Dragon Ball is a gag comedy about superpowered martial artists in a fantastical version of China. Swing Girls is a popular 2004 live-action comedy about a group of high school girls unexpectedly finding themselves through big band jazz. Only Yesterday is a highly-regarded Ghibli film about the ways little childhood traumas stick in the subconscious, and how women are constrained by Japanese society. Yet all three are united by one theme: the use of dialects from the northern Tohoku region to signify that characters are from the most rural, off-the-beaten-track areas possible.
The Narrow Road to the North
The Tohoku region (東北地方) of northern Honshu stretches from Fukushima in the south (not terribly far from Tokyo) to distant Aomori in the north. Altogether, the area consists of six large prefectures (Fukushima, Miyagi, Yamagata, Iwate, Akita, and Aomori) with an area of nearly 67k square kilometers. Historically, Tohoku was the northern terminus of Japan; long before Hokkaido, land of the Ainu, was colonized, Tokoku represented the cold and daunting ends of the Japanese earth. In the 12th century, legendary warrior Minamoto no Yoshitsune found refuge in Tohoku, then ruled as a separate state. Even in the late 17th century, the region still represented a harsh and remote hinterland; famed poet Matsuo Basho’s travelogue from this era, Narrow Road to the Deep North (おくのほそ道), fired the Japanese imagination and led to many retracing the haiku master’s footsteps through breathtaking Tohoku vistas.
In other words, Tohoku’s history already places it as Japan’s remotest backwater. (Indeed, with Japanese society first forming around Kyushu and southern Honshu, Tohoku was the last area of the original main islands to come under ethnic Yamato sway.) Add to this the unique vocalizations present in the wide variety of dialects in Tohoku – collectively called Tohoku-ben (東北弁, Tohoku Dialect) – and we can start to see why Japan as a whole stereotypes Tohoku Japanese as “hick” language.
The Tohoku-Roku
As such a large area, Tohoku can hardly host just a single unified dialect. In reality, each prefecture is home to many unique varieties of spoken Japanese. Take southern parts of Fukushima, for example. Language there tends to hew pretty closely to standard Tokyo Japanese. In mountainous western Fukushima, however, the Aizu dialect begins to switch up “g” sounds for “k” (people order sage instead of sake); locals add emphasis by placing a “-dabbe (〜だべ)” or “-dappai (〜だっぱい)” at the ends of sentences; whole new words appear, like beko for cow (usually ushi in standard Japanese).
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Just west of Fukushima, across the border with Yamagata, the dialects become even stronger. With its deep forests, ancient Buddhist sites, and Sea of Japan littoral, Yamagata has become a go-to location for envisioning the Tohoku dialect. There’s a reason Yamagata is the setting for so many famous films that feature Tohoku-ben, from Ghibli’s Only Yesterday to Swing Girls to the Academy Award-winning Departures. Yamagata features at least four separate dialects, most recognizable to outsiders for sentence endings along the lines of “-ndazu (んだず).
Tohoku dialects seem to only become more distinct as you go further north. Perhaps most famous is Aomori Prefecture’s Tsugaru-ben, a dialect so dissimilar from the standard tongue that it can almost seem like another language entirely. Take this sentence, meaning “I am your cute friend.”
Tsugaru-ben: Wa wa Na no Megoi Keyagu ja. (わはなのめごいけやぐじゃ。)
Standard Japanese: Watashi wa Anata no Kawaii Tomodachi dayo. (私はあなたの可愛い友達だよ。）
Strong dialectal varieties exist in all six prefectures of Tohoku (sometimes called the Tohoku-Roku); Akita, Iwate, and Miyagi all boast unique modes of speech and local accents.
The Stuffed-Nose Dialects
Some things do unite the Tohoku dialects, however; they tend to elide the sounds of zu and su into a single noise (susu and suzu sound like the same word) and to replace hard k’s with hard g’s. Indeed, some credit the reduction in the number of pronounced sounds to the cool Tohoku climate; locals, they say, prefer to open their mouths as little as possible to avoid heat escaping during the frigid winter months.
Linguistic urban legends aside, these phonological features can have the effect of making speakers of Tohoku-ben sound like they have a bit of a head cold. This is the origin of the term zuzu-ben for the Tohoku style of dialect (although some zuzu-ben exist outside of the region). Roger Pulvers of The Japan Times explains:
“…Tokyoites used to look down on people who spoke with what they loosely called zuzuben, another term for Tohoku dialect. For nearly 40 years I have been studying the literature of Kenji Miyazawa, a writer who spoke Iwate-ben (the Tohoku dialect spoken in Iwate Prefecture). Yet, when I first went to his hometown of Hanamaki, I could not hear the difference between suzu (bell), susu (soot), so desu (that’s right) and sosu (sauce). They all just sounded like ‘szszszszsz.'”
A Language Without Room for Dialects
The story of how the Tohoku dialects became media shorthand for country bumpkin doesn’t end here, though. Truly understanding the route to harmful dialectal stereotyping requires a deeper historical view.
In brief, Japan before 1870 had no standard language. While the upper-middle-class language spoken in the samurai capital of Edo was a sort of business lingua franca, most people around Japan never came close to visiting the capital; locals, most of them rural farmers, tended to live their entire lives within a few square miles. Japan, like most pre-industrialized countries, was an archipelago of dialects, some mutually unintelligible.
All this changed following the Meiji Restoration in 1858. The restoration ousted the Shogunate and quickly began the process of dismantling the feudal fiefs (han) the country consisted of. The goal was the creation of a modern, centralized state, and such states need a national identity. A single, standardized language was seen as one of the most important pillars of a unified Japanese identity.
Down with Dialects?
In 1872, the Meiji government established universal education in Japan. This was the first major step towards enforcing a national standard language. Soon, classrooms were issued with textbooks using only the newly-minted Tokyo standard; local students were punished for using their native dialects in class. (Ironically, the very teachers punishing local students were usually locals themselves, unable to truly speak the standard Japanese they were attempting to enforce).
An especially infamous tool of dialect repression was the hogen fuda (方言札, dialect card). Students caught speaking as they would at home were shamed by being forced to place this board with a string attached around their necks. The hogen fuda was especially infamous in colonial spaces, like Okinawa Prefecture (the former Ryukyu Kingdom, home to completely separate languages from Japanese). The use of dialect cards stretched far beyond the mainland, to later colonies like those in Micronesia.
Hogen fuda only really disappeared long after WWII, in the late 1960s. It was around this era that television emerged, providing a much more powerful destructive force for local dialects than the education system could have dreamed of. Standard Japanese was beamed into every household in Japan. Children and young people throughout the archipelago watched their favorite shows in hyojungo (標準語, standard Japanese) and started mimicking their favorite actors. The threat of the shame implied by hogen fuda was replaced with a desire to be hip and cosmopolitan.
A Linguistic Stock Character
Television not only spread standard Japanese and resulted in the receding of strong dialects; it also helped solidify the stereotypes associated with the very ways of speaking it was inadvertently destroying. People around the country watched shows which featured stock characters with “funny” accents and dialects; the Osakan comedian or merchant, the Fukuoka hothead, the Kyoto socialite. And, of course, the Tohoku bumpkin.
Indeed, while English translations of Japanese media (and especially anime) have tended to give speakers of the famed Kansai dialect of the areas around Osaka a US-style southern drawl, the Tohoku dialect is the one which, culturally speaking, better maps onto the stereotypes of Southern US English. The Tohoku dialect is so associated with countryside know-nothings that even a hint of Tohoku-ben tells a whole story; Dragon Ball‘s Goku, for example, only needs to use the occasional Tohoku-ism and to refer to himself as “Ora” for the audience to know he’s a hick.
Of course, this isn’t a happy situation for many Tohoku-ites. The constant derision towards their accent leads most to code-switch to standard Japanese when living in other parts of the country; the pressure to erase the Tohoku accent has led to depression and even suicide in Tohoku transplants living in Tokyo.
A Rose in Any Other Dialect
Thankfully, there have been some changes towards Japanese perceptions of Tohoku speech patterns. Generally speaking, people are more accepting of dialects than they were in the past. Even as of 1995, a national survey showed that only 17.9% of the Japanese population believed people should avoid using their dialects completely. It’s worth noting, additionally, that this position was associated with age; while over 30% of men over sixty held this view, very few amongst the younger generations felt similarly. Even in 1995, views on the superiority of standard Japanese seemed to be waning.
The Tohoku dialects, in particular, received some much-needed good publicity through the NHK Asadora drama Amachan (あまちゃん). The super-popular show focused on a Tokyoite moving to the Sanriku littoral on Tohoku’s Pacific Coast and becoming a diver. Amachan featured more of the Tohoku dialect than any mass-broadcast show before it, and greatly popularized dialectical terms like “je-je-je” (a sort of local “whoa now.”) Amachan greatly increased tourism to the Sanriku area (itself devestated by the tsunami from the 2011 East Japan Earthquake only three years previous), and spread appreciation for what had previously been perhaps the most maligned of Japan’s dialects.
Tohoku remains associated with a stereotype of rural backwardness; however, a greater admiration for the history and uniqueness of their dialects seems to be coming into existence. And let no one say the denizens of Tohoku are without a sense of self-deprecating humor: just let famed Japanese singer Yoshi Ikuzo serenade you in his native Tohoku-ben about his desire to escape the countryside, and you’ll see just how vibrant – and funny – the dialect can really be.
Main Sources:
Caroll, Tessa. (2013). Chapter: Changing Attitudes: Dialects versus the Standard Language in Japan. In McAuley, T. E. (2000). Language change in East Asia. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon.
東北方言 – フリー百科事典『ウィキペディア』. (n.d.).
Pulver, Roger. (May 23, 2006). Opening up to difference: The dialect dialectic. The Japan Times.
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