Japan: Lessons in Communication from the Hatoyama Essay · Global Voices
Tomomi Sasaki

When an online Op-Ed piece by current Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama appeared in the New York Times just days before the Lower House elections last month, national reaction ranged from surprise to consternation to pure mortification. “A New Path for Japan” was an abridged and translated version of “My Political Philosophy” [ja], which was published in the Japanese magazine VOICE. The administration has claimed that they had no prior knowledge that the essay would be released in this way and that Hatoyama was “misquoted“.
‘Security Council Summit on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament’ by Flickr user United Nations Photo
There are two aspects to this controversy: the logic or lack thereof of the arguments made in the essay and the process of how the Japanese text was edited and published in mainstream American media.
Well, was it a matter of bad editing and bad translation?
Seiichi Nakamura thinks it played a big part.
ＰＨＰのＶＯＩＣＥに掲載された『祖父・一郎に学んだ「友愛」という戦いの旗印』と言うオリジナルの論文を、ニューヨーク・タイムズが抜粋して掲載したので、どうしても舌足らずとなり、鳩山代表の意図するニュアンスが、正確に伝わっていない。
その上、クーデンホフ・カレルギーの高邁な思想ＦＲＡＴＥＲＮＩＴＥ（鳩山一郎は友愛と訳した）をベースに、日本人魂を加味した独自の政治哲学を展開しており、能書きだけを提示しているようなものであるから、そっくりそのまま、欧米人、特に、思想的背景の全く違うアメリカ人に理解される筈がない。
誤解を避けるために言及しておくが、鳩山代表の見解は、私自身納得行く部分が多いと感じているし、正確に伝われば、オバマ大統領のリベラルな政治哲学や思想と共通点が結構ある筈で、実りあるコラボレーションが可能だと思っている。
ただし、政治や外交は、極めて現実的であらねばならない筈であるし、現在、世界中が危機的状態にあり、人類社会と地球の将来が岐路に立つ極めて重要な時期に、不用意な言説は切に慎むべきだと思っている。
However, politics and foreign diplomacy must be realistic in the extreme. The world is currently in a very precarious situation and human society is at an important turning point, one that will decide where the path to our future will lead. It's not a time to be making indeliberate declarations.
Takashi Kimura  also believes that straight translation alone is not enough.
「VOICE」に載せた鳩山論文「私の政治思想」で説いた「友愛論」は「和洋折衷型」論議で、英訳しただけでは「暗黙の了解」「以心伝心」「察し」といった間接的話し方の通じない米国では理解し難い。
He goes on to criticize some political ineptness on Hatoyama's part.
かといって、低コンテキスト文化に属すると思われる「グローバリズム批判」を、主題から切り離して抜粋しても海外の厳しい批判に耐えられる内容のものではない。寄稿した事自体が「経験不足」の表れであろう。
MTC at the Shisaku blog says that it's an excuse that doesn't resonate anymore.
I am not sure the “Just-ignore-what-the-essay-says-it-is-only-meant-for-domestic-consumption-and-contains-a-lot-of-code-phrases-that can only be understood-in-the-context-of-Japanese-election-propaganda-and-in-Japan-nobody-believes-anything-printed-especially-when-the-author's-stringing-together-of-platitudinous-utterances-makes-him-sound-like-he-is-stoned” defense is going to work anymore. The damn thing is out of the box now, getting quoted and analyzed.
In “Lost in Syndication: The Case of the Hatoyama Essay“, Nathan Gardels wrote “In the information age, no country is an island anymore, not even Japan.” Gardels is the editor of Global Viewpoint Network of Tribune Media Services and the one who started the balls rolling for the essay to be introduced into the English media.
All this in itself is indeed surprising. Doesn't everyone get that today we live in a global glass house? That in a world tied together by social networks, the Internet, YouTube, web journalism, innumerable blogs and even print syndication, anything you say in Japan is going to be heard everywhere else?
Satomi performed a thorough cross check on the original Japanese essay and the English translation.
さすがスタンフォード博士号、事務所の英語も申し分ない。（まあ、それがアダに出て転載されちゃったわけだけど…。追：短縮版は通信社Global Viewpoint/TMS経由の配信） 両方比べてみると、元の原稿では第1章にカレルギーの名言「人間は目的であって手段ではない。国家は手段であって目的ではない」とその説明が出てくるのに、NYタイムズの転載記事は第2章終盤の「～資本主義が原理的に追求されていくとき、人間は目的ではなく手段におとしめられ、その尊厳を失う」から始まるので、「目的」と「手段」という言葉を元々誰がどういう文脈で使ったのか分からず、のっけから穏やかじゃない。 でもま、変わってる部分と言ってもそれぐらいか。残りは単なるコピペ。でも書き出しで読み手のマインドセットは9割ぐらい決まっちゃうものなので、あの書き出しはなんとかして欲しい。
参考までに全部オリジナル記事と照合し、転載箇所だけ元の日本語に戻してみよう。グレイは削除、オレンジは加筆・編集された部分。
Let's cross check the entire original article, and put into Japanese the parts that they reproduced. The grey words are the parts that were omitted from the NYT post, and the orange is the parts that were edited.
* Excerpted from the English translation [doc] available on Hatoyama's official site. There is also a Korean translation [doc].
Tobias Harris actually found the English version to be better than the original essay:
I do not buy the idea that his original essay was distorted through translation — if anything the translated, abridged version was far superior to the original, which I found to be “a mishmash of pop-anti-globalizationism, mystical brotherhood-ism, and nostalgic conservatism,” and distressed by the idea that it might be a serious guide to Hatoyama's thinking. And at no point in the original essay did Hatoyama give much thought to the positives of globalization. The original reads just like a longer, harsher version of the translation, with nearly a page of discussion of how capitalism treats people as means, not ends, and about how it destroys values, traditions, and communities.
He lists three lessons that he hopes the Hatoyama administration has learned.