i'm writing too much about one word.

it's wednesday, people, and as promised, i'll deliver to you an interesting japanese word. it'll get you thinking and maybe offer a bit of insight into japanese culture.

ok, today's lesson involves a little word that looks like this:

家内
かない
kanai

now, i'm going to withhold the definition for a second here. i'll tell you what the kanji (chinese characters) mean first. the first one, 家, is read ie, uchi, ya, ke or ka in various cases. it's meaning, though, never changes. it means "house" or "home." the top of the character, with the little vertical line and the dealie with the horizontal line with the two little thingies hanging off the sides, um, ok, screw it. this: 宀. this signifies "roof." according to my dictionary, the thing under the roof is "pig." i'm not kidding. so, as we all certainly know, when there's a pig under a roof, you know you're home. to the right, you'll see a typical japanese house.

the second kanji means "inside" and is pronounced uchi at times and nai at others. upon consultation of my dictionary, the two elements of uchi/nai, 人 (person) and 冂 (enclosure), seem to make a lot more sense as "inside" than roof and pig do as "house." although in many cases i suppose this uchi could refer to your average mime.





putting these two kanji together, we get "house" and "inside." what could this mean? well, some good guesses would be "interior," "household," "indoors," or "video game-obsessed wimp loser," but, boy, those are so wrong. i can't believe how wrong they are. the real meaning is "my wife." interesting, huh? so when a husband introduces his wife, he says "this is my kanai," or, "this is the one who is inside my house." would americans say something like this? it surely seems sexist to me, an american who has been told that women and men are to aspire to similar goals and that women are not exclusively bound to household work. now, i know that 'home-dweller' is not necessarily what japanese people actually, intentionally mean when they use the word. after all, there are plenty of english words that we use unconscious of their origins. however, japanese is different because of its use of kanji. every japanese person knows that 家 means "house" and 内 means "inside." the meanings are right there in the pictures, and there's no way to misread them.

interested, i looked up the etymology of the english word "wife." apparently "wife" has no house-related connotations. in fact, it simply means "woman," although the ultimate source is unknown.

to me, as a learner of japanese, kanai, among other words, was a bit of a window into japanese culture. when i came to japan, i was alarmed at the invisibility of women. i was alarmed at the incapability of men to do just about anything at home; their apparent violent allergy to cleaning, cooking, or doing dishes. i've always heard that language is an illuminating window to a culture's character. turns out it's true.