Yokohama Dialect

WITH RARE EXCEPTIONS the foreigners at the ports never learn Japanese. On the whole they are probably wise. It is not a language that can be picked up easily and a smattering would be worse than useless in their business. As a result, their transactions are conducted through the medium of a banto or head Japanese.

Servants and tradespeople soon acquire sufficient English to meet their needs. In earlier days when foreigners were new to the country, it was evidently necessary to learn a little every-day Japanese and a curious local dialect grew up, a few words from which still persisted when I first went to Yokohama. My servants used to call Sunday Dontag and Saturday Handon (Han means ‘half’ so that Handon meant half dontag). A walk or an outing was marumaru (literally ‘round-round’) and food was tabero (literally ‘will eat’), a foreign dog a Kameeru (‘come here’) and so on.

In course of time the foreigner picked up an odd word here and there such as ic (no), yoroshii (good), warni (bad), kakai (dear), yasni (cheap), atarashii (new), furni (old), kaimono (purchases), so des’ka (is that so?), kirei (clean, beautiful), takusan (plenty), arimasu (is), arimasenu (is not), which the ladies, in particular, used with telling effect. By extending the meaning of these words a little they were able to carry on animated conversations with their servants and shop-keepers, who made it their business to learn foreign- Japanese. I used to have a copy of a delightful book of colloquial Japanese written by the entirely apocryphal Bishop of Honmoku but I have unfortunately lost it and I doubt if there are any copies now left in existence. Conversations in it ran something like this: