The other day a coworker told me a great story about translation that I looked into a bit more. It's one that people love to cite as a poignant example of the importance of clear communication. But every telling of it that I found took a slightly different interpretation, and it's very difficult to sort out which is the most accurate, (at least without resorting to, you know, real research).

The basic story goes that the Potsdam Declaration was issued near the end of World War II as an ultimatum to the Japanese, to "surrender or be crushed." It was our last warning before using the bomb. It refused to be specific about the threat, but the Japanese did have some intelligence to tell them the threat was not empty (I'm not sure whether we knew that they knew). As a response the Prime Minister made a statement in which the definitive verb of reaction was 'mokusatsu.' It was interpreted as "we ignore the declaration" and the bomb was dropped nine days later. Everything beyond that changes depending on who's telling the story.

My coworker had seen a movie (not really a documentary, so potentially some elements were fictionalized, although it was supposed to show what really happened) that had a German professor translating the statement for Truman. He knew about the subtleties and ambiguities of the word and tried to explain it to Truman, but Truman chose to intepret it as 'ignore/reject.' The translator also apparently said something about the form of the verb that was used, and how it indicated that the Prime Minister was perhaps trying to subtlely indicate that he was uncomfortable giving a direct answer to such a powerful adversary ("as if you [Truman] asked me to comment on your shoes"), while saving face and his army's morale. There was also something about the motivation for stalling the U.S. being that Japan would have rather surrendered officially to Russia.

This page gives a brief account, and the main feature setting it apart is that it seems to place most of the blame for any translation error within Japan, saying that Tokyo radio said in Japanese 'we will mokusatsu the declaration and fight on' but remaining ambiguous about where exactly the translation to English took place. This scenario in general seems pretty plausible to me.

This page gets more into the definition of the word, and interprets it in a way that makes the outcome seem particularly unfortunate. It is telling the story in the larger context of the Whorfian hypothesis, which states that the language we speak as natives determines how we think and perceive; I can't say I understand the connection they are trying to make. Anyway, they offer as a definition for mokusatsu, "We are going to agree in due time with your demands; you know it and we know it; but let's both pretend that we have not yet agreed, so that we can save face by not seeming to cave in too soon to your demands."

This is a rather more thorough and trustworthy account that I just found, and agrees with another one from a book in saying that there are really two relatively simple definitions of mokusatsu, 'ignore' and 'refrain from comment.' The Prime Minister meant the second, but it was interpreted as the first, and then turned by American media into 'reject,' which is clearly incorrect.

Lastly, this page looks at the word from a business point of view and doesn't even mention the history behind it. I like it for that, since it's probably untainted by opinion about the war or desire to tell a good story. However, it's also possible that the use of the word has changed since 1945. It discusses the word as the name of a strategy in business negotiations that Japanese employ frequently. The negotiators simply stop the talks and sit with their eyes closed, or leave the room. As he says, the idea is one "of 'killing' the other party's case or proposition by letting it die in the vacuum of silence." (As I've been putting off saying, the literal meaning of the characters in the word are 'silence' 'kill'.) One can see the vague continuum of meanings forming, but this is certainly a far different intepretation than the one two paragraphs above, where they are simply putting off agreeing to the demands.

Now let's look at the word itself. As mentioned above, it consists of two Kanji, 'moku' meaning 'silence' and 'satsu' meaning 'kill.' It is technically a noun with the verb form 'mokusatsu suru' - 'to do mokusatsu', but oddly, the Japanese Web Dictionary I've been relying on only gives verbs as meanings: "ignore, shelve, smother, treat with silent contempt." These certainly seem more on the side of the business article.

I was initially a bit sceptical about the "we both know we'll agree eventually" interpretations; it just seemed a bit too perfect and ironic. And the more reliable sources that I found seem to support a slightly harsher meaning, although 'reject' is certainly not what was meant. But on a higher level, I doubt that a more correct translation would have drastically altered our world by preventing the dropping of the bomb. After all, the declaration was an ultimatum; there wasn't supposed to be a third choice for 'we'll take some time to think about it.' Ignoring it, refraining from comment, or anything like that really is tantamount to rejecting it anyway. I'm too ignorant about the rest of the history, however, to speculate about whether or not they really would have been ready to surrender a short time later, or to the Soviets.

It certainly would be nice to get ahold of the actual statement of the Prime Minister, if it exists as a document, to see if anything else sheds light on the intent, and what verb form he used. So far my cursory googling hasn't brought me that, although the Mainichi article linked above talks about something that comes closer.