The day that Johnny Carson retired from late-night televi sion was a sad moment for the teaching of Japanese-or at least for the teaching of the use of the quantitative nouns
hodo and kurai in positive expressions. Students seem to catch on to the use of these words in negative sentences ("There is no straight man as overweight as Ed McMa hon," etc.) , but when Carson went, that may have ended our only hope for a clear conceptualization of the positive uses of hodo.
All About Particles (Power Japanese, p. 66) provides examples of both kinds of usage. For the easy negative type:
Kotoshi wa kyonen hodo samuku nai desu. I "This year is not as cold as last year."
For the harder positive type we find:
Kyo wa benkyo ga dekinai hodo tsukareta. I "Today I'm so tired that I can't study."
Extensive research has demonstrated that the soundest illumination of this second usage was offered at irregular intervals by Johnny Carson, normally early in the show, during the monologue. At some point, Carson would make a statement involving an extreme condition, such as how hot or cold the weather was or how bad the economy was,
to which the well-trained audience responded, for example, "How cold is it?" or "How bad is it?" Carson's answer il lustrated the extent to which his original statement was true. When the audience asked about the economy, "How bad is it?" he might respond with such an allegedly clever rejoinder as, " It's so bad that Organized Crime had to lay off ten judges," or "It's so bad that oysters are producing fake pearls."1
"So . . . that . . . " is the key to interpreting positive statements of extent using hodo (or the virtually equivalent
gurai or kurai) .' Try to break the habit of mechanically using the word "extent."
If we apply the Carson method to clarifying the sen tence in which the student tells us how tired he is, we can ask, like the audience, "How tired are you?" To which he answers like Johnny, ''I'm so tired that studying is impos sible"-not a particularly amusing rejoinder, but scarcely inferior to the fake pearls.
The important point is to note first what the central statement is without the hodo construction. If we throw out the hodo and the clause that modifies it, we end up with a simple positive statement, Tsukareta I ''I'm tired." (The subject of tsukareta is, of course, "I" [the zero pro noun in Japanese], not kyo I "today," which is a time topic.) The hodo signals us to ask the speaker, "How tired
are you?" To which he has already replied, "I'm so tired that I have this modifying clause hanging on me"-no "I'm so tired that I can't study."
Thus, when you encounter a hodo expression followed by a positive statement and you have trouble figuring out the exact relationship of the parts before and after the
hodo, put yourself into the place of Johnny Carson's au dience and ask, "How much did you do your final state ment?" Then quickly switch to Johnny and answer, "I
did it so much that what-1-said-before."
Here are some examples, several with negative endings before the hodo but all with positive final statements:3
1. [Yasumu hima ga nai hodo] hatarakimasu. He works. How much does he work? He works so
much that he has no time to rest.
2. Kono shigoto wa [kodomo de mo dekiru hodo] yasashii desu. This job is easy. How easy is it? It's
so easy that even a child can do it.
3. [Yoru nemuru koto ga dekinai hodo] shinpai shi mashita. I worried. How much did I worry? I wor ried so much I couldn't sleep at night.
4. [Gba mo iranai hodo] atatakai desu. It's warm. How warm is it? It's so warm you don't need an overcoat.
5. [Nakitai hodo] komatta. I was upset. How upset was I? I was so upset I wanted to cry.
6. Ano hito wa [tsukaikirenai hodo] kane ga aru. He has money. How much money does he have? He has so much money that he can't possibly spend it all.
Now, just in case I assumed too much regarding hodo
with negative statements, let's apply a similar approach to a few examples:
Mizu wa [biiru hodo] oishiku nai.
Take the hodo clause out, and you have the main clause:
In other words, we're talking about "water" first and foremost, and are comparing it with the thing in the hodo
clause.
Once you've isolated the main clause, the hodo signals you to ask the un-Carsonesque question: As good-tasting
as what?
To which the answer is: Water is not as good-tasting
as beer.
A couple more examples, including one to go with the beer:
Migi no me wa [hidari hodo] akaku nai. The right eye is not red. Not as red as what? The right eye is not
as red as the left.
Konshu no shiken wa [senshu no hodo] muzukashiku nai. This week's exam will not be difficult. Not as
difficult as what? This week's exam will not be as
difficult as last week's.
[Sore hodo] omoshiroku nai desu yo. It (zero pronoun) is not interesting. Not as interesting as what? It is not as
interesting as that. This can work like the English idiom, with no clear antecedent to either sore or "that": "It's not all that interesting." "Say, how was that flick, 'Double Im pact'?" "Oh, it wasn't that interesting."
Kanji
Kanji are tough. Kanji are challenging. Kanji are mysteri ous and fun and maddening. Kanji comprise one of the
greatest stumbling blocks faced by Westerners who want to become literate in Japanese. But kanji have nothing to do with grammar or sentence structure or thought patterns or the Japanese world view, and they are certainly not the Japanese language. They are just part of the world's most clunky writing system, and a writing system cannot cause a language to be processed in a different part of the brain any more than it can force it to some other part of the body (excepting, of course, Lower Slobovian, which is processed in the left elbow) .
George Sansom had the right idea back in the thirties when he noted that the sounds of Japanese,
simple and few in number, are very well suited to no tation by an alphabet, and it is perhaps one of the tragedies of Oriental history that the Japanese genius did not a thousand years ago rise to its invention. Cer tainly when one considers the truly appalling system which in the course of the centuries they did evolve, that immense and intricate apparatus of signs for recording a few dozen little syllables, one is inclined to think that the western alphabet is perhaps the greatest triumph of the human mind. 1
To this, I can only add that banana skins provide one of the best surfaces for writing kanji if one is using a ball point pen. Since this book is intended to help with an un derstanding of the Japanese language, it will have nothing further to say about kanji.