What the heck IS koukyou???

[Laurie Berman]

I am translating a little article that is causing me absolutely no
headaches, except for one that will not go away.

The author is talking about Portland, Oregon, and the fact that (as
he perceives it), the citizens there work together to solve their own
problems instead of relying on government to solve their problems for
them. What I am having trouble with is the use of 公共 as an
abstract concept, as in the examples below.

I have thought of public/common good, and as of now I am leaning
toward "public responsibility" as the term I can plug in there with
the least difficulty, but it is not on the nose, and it bothers me
that I can't find a noun corresponding to this 公共.

Here in the US, people are always debating the role of government,
and basically that is what this guy is talking about, but that is now
how he has framed the question. Do we have a way of expressing the
question of
公共とは何か?

Examples:

公共とは何か

公共に対する考え

ポートランド市の公共を語る際にキーワードとなる
が、「Neighborhood Association」 の存在である

「公共」という問題に対して、特に難しい議論をし
ている訳ではない (at the neighborhood association meetings)

公共を形づくるもの

公共に関しては、住民側も大きな責任を有している

公共は誰が担うものなのか

Laurie Berman

[Andrew Lardinois]

Why not self determination?

Might check occupyportland.org for more?

Andrew

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[Dr. M. S. Niranjan]

How about "public administration"?

Dr. M. S. Niranjan

[kaori Chikura]

2011/10/17 Laurie Berman <berma...@verizon.net>:

> Here in the US, people are always debating the role of government, and
> basically that is what this guy is talking about, but that is now how he has
> framed the question. Do we have a way of expressing the question of
> 公共とは何か?

I've seen them translated as "public" or "publicness" with quotation marks
in scholarly journals. It is certainly the translation of an English
word "public"
but the reason it is so difficult to translate it back is that the
Japanese term,
koukyou is closely associated with the New Public Administration,
especially when used as a noun.

When the idea was brought to Japan, the translation treated "New Public"
as a noun clause. Thus, the beginning of a debate on "新しい公共とは何か".
The phrase caught on and became so widely in use that it caused more people
to make cognitive association with the New Public even when they simply
use the word "public".

Kaori Chikura

[Herman]

On 10/16/2011 12:04, Laurie Berman wrote:

> I have thought of public/common good, and as of now I am leaning toward
> "public responsibility" as the term I can plug in there with the least
> difficulty, but it is not on the nose, and it bothers me that I can't
> find a noun corresponding to this 公共.

"Community" or "the commons" may be suitable.

Herman Kahn

[Steven P. Venti]

Laurie Berman <berma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> Do we have a way of expressing the question of 公共とは何か?

My take on this could be out of date, but I personally would avoid the use of
the word "public," which in my flavor of American English is still synonymous
with government, local or otherwise.

I would probably use the words "community" or "common" to render most of the
phrases you gave as examples.

HTH

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Steven P. Venti
Mail: spv...@bhk-limited.com
Rockport Sunday
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCPpd20CgXE
-----------------------------------------------------------------

[Laurie Berman]

On Oct 16, 2011, at 4:34 PM, kaori Chikura wrote:

> When the idea was brought to Japan, the translation treated "New
> Public"
> as a noun clause. Thus, the beginning of a debate on "新しい公
> 共とは何か".
> The phrase caught on and became so widely in use that it caused
> more people
> to make cognitive association with the New Public even when they
> simply
> use the word "public".

Thanks, that explains a lot. In fact, when I think about it, I am at
a loss to explain why a term like "the New Public" is possible, and
yet it's impossible to use "the public" in the same sort of context.
But there you have it.

> I've seen them translated as "public" or "publicness" with
> quotation marks
> in scholarly journals.

I guess I haven't read enough scholarly journals to feel comfortable
with "publicness."

I did consider using a word like "community" or "commons," but you
see, his (increasingly explicit) point is that "the Japanese
mistakenly equate 公共 with government." "公共は、住民が担
うものである”etc. I don't think you can say that the Japanese
equate community with government. And it also sounds odd to say that
citizens are responsible for "public administration."

(The fact that I am unable to overcome this problem suggests to me
that English speakers are the ones who equate "public" with government.)

Then there is this: 行政が主体でなければ公共にならないという考え

There are don't see any way around interpreting 公共 as public
good.

Laurie Berman

[M. & B. Hasegawa]

I am translating a little article that is causing me absolutely no headaches, except for one that will not go away.

公共とは何か?
Examples:
公共とは何か
公共に対する考え
ポートランド市の公共を語る際にキーワードとなる
が、「Neighborhood Association」 の存在である
「公共」という問題に対して、特に難しい議論をし
ている訳ではない (at the neighborhood association meetings)
公共を形づくるもの
公共に関しては、住民側も大きな責任を有している
公共は誰が担うものなのか

Laurie Berman

I wouldn't think you'd need to use the exact same phrase all the time. The public role, the community, the public sector, the public responsibility - each might be used according to the context.
In fact, in English it could sound awkward if the same expression were used over and over again.

Beverly D. Hasegawa

[Steven P. Venti]

Laurie Berman <berma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> Then there is this: 行政が主体でなければ公共にならないという考え
> There are don't see any way around interpreting 公共 as public
> good.

You have us at something of a disadvantage, since you are familiar with the
entire document (and we aren't), but it's difficult for me to understand why
you can't translate that as: The idea that local government is supposed to take
the lead in all community projects.

[Hart Larrabee]

Laurie,

> The author is talking about Portland, Oregon, and the fact that (as he perceives it), the citizens there work together to solve their own problems instead of relying on government to solve their problems for them. What I am having trouble with is the use of 公共 as an abstract concept, as in the examples below.

I think this is "public commons" or simply "commons," with this slippery usage originating in the Hatoyama era of recent political history. You might look at the surprisingly readable June 2010 "Declaration of 'New Public Commons'" (「新しい公共」宣言):

English:
http://www5.cao.go.jp/npc/pdf/declaration-english.pdf

Japanese:
http://www5.cao.go.jp/npc/pdf/declaration-nihongo.pdf

Good luck!

Hart
ha...@valley.ne.jp
Nagano, Japan

[kaori Chikura]

2011/10/17 Laurie Berman <berma...@verizon.net>:

> I guess I haven't read enough scholarly journals to feel comfortable with
> "publicness."

Oh no. I'm sorry. It's some Japanese scholars who weren't very
successful translating their articles accurately because of this
language interference. They must have faced the same problem as yours.
It was my mistake that I didn't mention that they were translated
works.

Kaori Chikura

[Fred Uleman]

Have you used "civil society" elsewhere?

- -- --- ---- ----- ---- --- -- -
Fred Uleman, translator emeritus

[Dale Ponte]

Public sphere...new public sphere. And you might try googling these
with "Jurgen Habermas."

And for the grab bag:

popular [whatever]
the good of the community
public/community at large
society at large
... in general
... as a whole

Varying the English case by case sounds like the right approach.

~
Dale Ponte

[jmarc...@comcast.net]

Laurie asked:

The author is talking about Portland, Oregon, and the fact that (as  
he perceives it), the citizens there work together to solve their own  
problems instead of relying on government to solve their problems for  
them. What I am having trouble with is the use of 公共 as an  
abstract concept, as in the examples below.

I have thought of public/common good, and as of now I am leaning  
toward "public responsibility" as the term I can plug in there with  
the least difficulty, but it is not on the nose, and it bothers me  
that I can't find a noun corresponding to this 公共.

Here in the US, people are always debating the role of government,  
and basically that is what this guy is talking about, but that is now  
how he has framed the question. Do we have a way of expressing the  
question of
公共とは何か?

Laurie,

The old term for 公共 in the sense of "public good" or "common good" is commonweal. I see no problem with using this today. 

The "commons" today tends (to my mind, anyway) to be associated with a famous article by Garrett Hardin entitled "The Tragedy of the Commons" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons). It has been developed by other experts on development who examine issues of sustainability, and also by free market economists who warn about limiting private property. It is a a highly debated concept, and does not seem to fit your examples in any case.

I would also not use either "civil society" or "public sphere". "Civil society" has been defined variously by different political philosophers since Locke, but the generally accepted view is that it is the totality of voluntary social and civic relationships and organizations that undergird society's functioning. Civil society is explicitly defined as being separate from state institutions on the one hand (which are ultimately based on coercion) and the realm of the market (which in theory is based on impersonal market mechanisms) on the other. And there is a perfectly well established and widely used Japanese term for "civil society" already, 市民社会.

The term "public sphere" is closely associated with Habermas, and is concerned with the deliberative realms in society where people can come together and discuss and reach agreement about social, political, economic and other questions. Although the term is bandied about a lot today, if you actually read Habermas you will see that he thinks the public sphere (which functioned fairly freely in the 17th and 18th centuries in countries like England) has been poisoned by large corporate media and advertising and the rest, so his actual view is that we LACK an adequate public sphere in contemporary liberal capitalist democracies. This view is most pronounced in his first book, "Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere", an echt Marxist study which describes how the public sphere was drained of much of its value by the rise of monopoly capitalism from the late 19th century. I would not use this term either, as it is highly problematic and degenerated into something of a vacuous academic buzzword in the 1990s, as did "civil society" at times.

I think commonweal, common good or public good are best for the context that you are looking at, and they could be used more or less interchangeably.

HTH,

John Marchioro

[Dale Ponte]

Public interest?

~
Dale Ponte

[kaori Chikura]

2011/10/17 <jmarc...@comcast.net>:

> would not use this term either, as it is highly problematic and degenerated
> into something of a vacuous academic buzzword in the 1990s, as did "civil
> society" at times.

Koukyou also has been a vacuous academic buzzword in Japan for
sometime. Does that justify using "public sphere"? Judging from how
you described the word, I think it fits perfectly.

Much of the confusion comes from the fact that this whole
"what-is-koukyou" debate revolves around redefining the term. It may
seem tautological to try to find an exact match to an abstract concept
yet to be defined.

Kaori Chikura

[jmarc...@comcast.net]

I wrote

> [I] would not use [public sphere] either, as it is highly problematic and degenerated

> into something of a vacuous academic buzzword in the 1990s, as did "civil
> society" at times.

And Kaori responded:

Koukyou also has been a vacuous academic buzzword in Japan for
sometime. Does that justify using "public sphere"? Judging from how
you described the word, I think it fits perfectly.

Kaori,

I actually do not think so, based on Laurie's examples. The public sphere is ultimately about deliberation and opinion formation, which are a prelude to action. That is, it is about a process that is conducive to certain outcomes (discussion and opinion formation that is undistorted and uncoerced by major actors like big corporations and the central state). In most Laurie's examples, it sounds to me that what is being discussed in not a process but rather an end, namely the general public good. 

I also think it is problematic to pluck a term like "public sphere" from an author like Habermas, assume that one knows what it means without having bothered to read his work (which explicitly places the time when there was a functioning public sphere in the fairly remote past), and then use it extravagantly to describe present-day arrangements, which that same author views as being largely devoid of the virtues of the public sphere in the past. Unlike Humpty Dumpty, I do not think that "a word means whatever I decide it to mean, neither more nor less". That unfortunately has been the way that a lot of authors have used both "civil society" and "public sphere".

And it is no help to Laurie to suggest that it is OK to use a misused term like "public sphere" here simply because some (not all) Japanese academics are also sloppy with their definitions and diction.

John Marchioro

[Dale Ponte]

On Oct 17, 7:39 am, kaori Chikura <den.to....@gmail.com> wrote:

> Much of the confusion comes from the fact that this whole
> "what-is-koukyou" debate revolves around redefining the term. It may
> seem tautological to try to find an exact match to an abstract concept
> yet to be defined.

How incisive. Now who would be the audience for the article Laurie is
translating?

~
Dale Ponte

[Dale Ponte]

After googling "public sphere has come to" for considerations about
the application of the term, it does seem to me that public sphere, in
its true sense, would inject a dialectical slant (and whatnot) which,
as John points out, is not in evidence in Laurie's examples. It is
quite at odds with:

>「公共」という問題に対して、特に難しい議論をし
> ている訳ではない (at the neighborhood association meetings)

~
Dale Ponte

[Laurie Berman]

On Oct 17, 2011, at 5:22 AM, jmarc...@comcast.net wrote:

The "commons" today tends (to my mind, anyway) to be associated with a famous article by Garrett Hardin entitled "The Tragedy of the Commons" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons). It has been developed by other experts on development who examine issues of sustainability, and also by free market economists who warn about limiting private property. It is a a highly debated concept, and does not seem to fit your examples in any case.

I would also not use either "civil society" or "public sphere". "Civil society" has been defined variously by different political philosophers since Locke, but the generally accepted view is that it is the totality of voluntary social and civic relationships and organizations that undergird society's functioning. . . .

The term "public sphere" is closely associated with Habermas, and is concerned with the deliberative realms in society where people can come together and discuss and reach agreement about social, political, economic and other questions.

John,

Thanks so much for that summary. I think most of the terms that have been suggested are very relevant to the topic of the article and will be useful in some contexts, or when a write-around seems called for, so in that sense they are all extremely helpful. But as you note, they don't solve the particular problem I raised.

On Oct 17, 2011, at 9:39 AM, kaori Chikura wrote:

Much of the confusion comes from the fact that this whole

"what-is-koukyou" debate revolves around redefining the term. It may

seem tautological to try to find an exact match to an abstract concept

yet to be defined.

You make a very good point.

And yet, these "re-defining" sort of discussions are precisely the ones that call for a decent one-to-one equivalent of the term in question, because how can you redefine something if you can't articulate it succinctly?

Flexible write-arounds and iyaku are my bread and butter, and it is not my intention to translate every 公共 exactly the same way. However, when the theme is "koukyou," and the author persists in saying things like, "What is Koukyou?" "Whose responsibility is Koukyou?" "It is time to reflect on the meaning of Koukyou" "We must change the way we think about Koukyou,"  it's hard to keep dancing around the term without losing the thematic focus as the author conceived it. So, is my challenge as I see it.

On Oct 16, 2011, at 6:11 PM, Hart Larrabee wrote:

I think this is "public commons" or simply "commons," with this slippery usage originating in the Hatoyama era of recent political history. 

Hatoyama era? Oh, right, I remember now. How could I have ever forgotten the "New Public Commons" initiative?

But seriously I think that you're absolutely right that the author is thinking of 公共 in the same way that Hatoyama was, and I only hope he does not therefore insist on using "public commons" as a translation, because I think it would cause difficulties.

Anyway, many, many thanks to all contributors. I have much food for thought as I revise.

Laurie Berman