MAI HOMU SHUGI: EXPRESSING AND SHAPING THE NUCLEAR TOKYO FAMILY

BY GREGORY BENNETT   

Abstract: Though the Japanese language has the syntactic ability to express ownership in a noun phrase by utilizing the possessive particle, at a sociolinguistic level, expressing first-person possession includes a high risk of linguistically demonstrating a lack of humility on the part of the speaker. By the direct importation of the English-language possessive phrase “my home” into the Japanese grammar, mai homu shugi, or “my homeism,” linguistically bolstered and facilitated the expression of a shift in the Tokyo nuclear family structure in postwar Japan (Buckley, 2002). This article demonstrates how mai homu shugi was able to increase the acceptance of the notion that personal ownership and individualism need not obligatorily be deemed negative. At a larger discursive level, “my homeism” is a vibrant example of the ways in which language borrowing can enable interlocutors to coin new phrases for the purpose of verbalizing and fueling social change.

Mai homu shugi, or “my homeism,” is a Japanese linguistic phenomenon that originated in late-1960s Tokyo. It served to increase the acceptance of the notion that personal ownership and individualism need not necessarily be viewed in a negative light, and stressed the importance of the nuclear family unit as Tokyo began to expand and grow as a modern metropolis.

As Henry D. Smith II discussed at length in “Tokyo as an Idea,” Tokyo underwent numerous changes during the post-Edo period, and amidst rapid industrialization and a huge population increase, the interpersonal relationships that existed between its constituents were also subject to modification. Perhaps spawned from the pre-war perception of Tokyo as “a problem,” “escapism,” and “corruption and change” by non-urbanists and those from the countryside, post-war Tokyoites found strength in following Western influence in the late 1960s by making all concerns of the non-immediate family periphery, and focusing on that which is of one’s direct family’s concern. The phrase mai homu was coined in reference to one’s own home and the family members of which it is made, which began trending after a boom in housing purchases due to a widespread increase in income.

This article will explore how mai homu shugi, “my homeism,” both expressed and shaped the restructuring of Tokyo family life in the late 1960s. While this paper cannot delve so deep into the larger economic, political and social effects of mai homu shugi as to disambiguate its correlation with contemporary issues in Japanese society, it will serve to shed light on its complexity as a linguistic phenomenon and address its key role in the reshaping of Tokyo families as a smaller, nuclear unit. Like Andrew Kipnis in his examination of the Chinese word suzhi, my exploration of “my homeism” will discuss its linguistic properties, the contexts in which it arose, and its impact on the social underpinnings of Tokyo family life at the time.

Syntactically speaking, the American English-language phrase “my home” was incorporated into the Japanese lexicon as two lexically separate entities: the first person possessive “my,” which remains unchanged in all contexts, and a given noun-phrase unit, most commonly, “home.” These two lexical entries retain their English-language syntactic properties as possessive phrasal units such as “my home,” and “my car” as they were inserted smoothly into the Japanese grammar. In short, the English syntactic properties remain such that these possessive phrases are never bifurcated (i.e. the Japanese possessive particle is not inserted between the possessor “my” and the object, “home”), function together as a normal Japanese- language subject and object, take the proper subject and object marking particles, and can be generated in perfectly grammatical Japanese sentences. As seen in the application of the “my” possessor to other English-language nouns that have been incorporated into the Japanese lexicon such as “pace” and “iPod,” constructions such as mai pesu “my pace,” and mai aipoddo “my iPod” can be generated. Here, we see the English-language possessor “my” function morphologically as an affix to these borrowed nouns, “home,” “pace,” and “iPod,” such that it has the same possessive meaning constructed as watashi no ie (lit. “my home”), watashi no mama de (lit. “by my way”) and watashi no aipoddo (lit. “my iPod”) in Japanese. Semantically, however, by using the phrase mai homu, which was imported into the Japanese grammar by way of English-language contact, the connotation of possession, selfishness and western-ness can be felt.

As we have seen above, the incorporation of this English-language phrase into the Japanese grammar is a very intimate, fluid merger of two syntactic and morphological systems. This intimate form of language change by way of language contact was most likely viewed by some in the late 1960s as an unwelcome change in attitude among what used to be a very socially closed Japan. However, it is this penetrating use of language that served to illustrate and influence the changes occurring within the Tokyo family structure at the end of the 1960s. Geographically, mai homu shugi was born in the incredibly dense population of the metropolis, Tokyo. While some may argue that due to other cities such as Nagasaki and Kobe having ports that would allow for more English-language contact by way of trade, because the majority of people immigrating from the countryside to the city moved to the capital, Tokyo, and the majority of Japanese-American politics and relations was conducted in Tokyo during the Korean War, it makes sense for Japanese-American culture contact to have occurred at the largest level in Tokyo over all other Japanese cities. As shown at length in Morris-Suzuki’s “The Invention and Reinvention of “Japanese Culture,”” we can see that culture contact is largely the cause for societal changes. This could shed light on how incorporating an English-language phrase such as mai homu into the Japanese grammar served to describe the changes occurring within the typical Tokyo family in the late 1960s. The population density of Tokyo supports the notion that mai homu shugi was able to spread quickly as a new linguistic construct in Japanese, and it characterized the growing trend of Tokyo families focusing on its immediate members who lived in the household.

The tendency for Tokyo families to focus their attention on the concerns of their direct family members in their household spawned from the economic boom in the 1950s and rise in income in the 1960s, whereby Tokyo residents who could afford to purchase their own living space increased in number. This monetary affluence and the subsequent purchases of residences allowed for the sense of possession to be promulgated throughout Tokyo society as a new norm. From this personalized view of one’s life at home, whereby buyers could feel a sense of ownership in their household and its constituents, the notion of making periphery all other issues that were not the concern of one’s immediate family began to take root. As this trend began to grow, the phrasal incorporation of mai homu into the Japanese grammar gave a sense of reality to the societal change; it expressed the foreignness of the concept of the nuclear family, and solidified the notion as a tangible, increasingly popular way of thinking. In that way, mai homu shugi both demonstrated the changes taking place in the Tokyo family and influenced the popularization of the nuclear family among Tokyo households.

From a sociolinguistic standpoint, mai homu shugi served to normalize the concept of possession in Japanese culture, beginning with the Tokyo family unit by way of possessive speech. It underscored the foreign quality of possession with respect to Japanese culture at the time, and was perhaps coined for the sake of reflecting the restructuring of Tokyo families at large. The use of mai homu in speech both reflected this change and promulgated the concept to other Tokyo constituents at the same time. In effect of choosing to use mai homu rather than speaking indirectly, Tokyo constituents were able to make the phrase popular, not only as a fresh, new expression of a change in Tokyo family life, but as a challenge to the social norms of the Tokyo family during the prewar and wartime eras.

It is by examining mai homu shugi from its sociolinguistic impact on discourse involving Tokyo family lifestyle that we can observe how the phrase mai homu both expressed and shaped the trend of making Tokyo families focused on their immediate members. While it is certainly true that the phrase itself did not cause the trend to start, it helped to establish the social change as a new, valid component to the Tokyo family lifestyle, and allowed the concept to reach a multitude of residents living in Tokyo as it began to take root in family culture during the late 1960s. By a given interlocutor’s decision to use the phrase mai homu, he effectively described the phenomenon taking place at the time as well as introduced it to his fellow interlocutor, thereby propagating the idea of the Tokyo nuclear family. In this way, mai homu shugi both expressed and shaped this trend among Tokyo families in the late 1960s.

While mai homu shugi certainly reflects the trend of how Tokyo families became nuclear units, as well as normalized the foreignness of possession and the nuclear family in the late 1960s, it cannot be said that the phrase itself caused this phenomenon to occur. As seen above, it was a combination of Japanese-American culture contact and the boom in housing purchases after the economic upturn of the 1950s that pushed Tokyo constituents to focus on those things that were of one’s immediate family’s concern. It can definitely be said, however, that the phrase mai homu served to establish the existence of the growing trend for Tokyo families to focus inward, and allowed the concept to reach a multitude of Tokyo constituents as they began to approach the cusp of social change in Tokyo family life in the late 1960s. In contemporary Tokyo, the use of the phrase mai homu is certainly less foreign than it was 40 years ago, and naturally, the connotations of foreignness and deviance are not as strong as they once were. However, the phrase is still associated with a certain amount of western-ness, emphasizes the notion of possession with respect to one’s household, and continues to reflect the concept of a nuclear Tokyo family. As mentioned earlier in this article, the mai affixation phenomenon has taken to other imported English-language words such as “car” and “iPod,” and they continue to be used among Japanese today. However, more fieldwork and research is needed to explore the connotations of the application of the mai affix to other imported English language words in contemporary Japanese discourse.

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