Share

Share, pronounced as two syllables, sha-re (sharray), is the general Japanese term for linguistic humor, wordplay, wit, elegance of diction. The most common meaning of the word is “decoration.” Oshare (with an honorific o-) means anything from dressed up, to elegance, or dandyism and foppery. Share therefore means elegance of speech or writing: thus anything from a simple pun to a tissue of poetic rhetorical flourishes. Today when Japanese people talk about Share meaning wordplay, puns of some kind are generally indicated. This entry discusses Share in Japan in both modern and traditional times.

The Japanese language is peculiarly well suited to puns but not at all to rhyme. Like the Polynesian languages, Japanese has a small number of phonemes and a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel structure (CVCV), with only five vowel sounds (the five pure vowels). There are thus, in the written language, only six ways in which any word may end—in one of the five vowels or in the letter n—so rhyme occurs all the time and is neither noticed nor used as Share. Because there are huge numbers of possible syllables in European languages (e.g., English can produce thousands of different syllables), finding a rhyme is clever; but in Japanese, with fewer than a hundred possible syllables, it is not. Thus other forms of literary elegance developed in Japanese.

Because of the small number of possible syllables, the same ones need to be used over and over, creating huge numbers of homophones. Lecturing in Australia during the 1970s, dramatist Hisashi Inoue (1934–2012) pointed out that the prime minister of Japan can be delivering a perfectly serious speech and make a horrendous string of puns. These will not be noticed because the situation is defined as inappropriate for punning.

Chinese characters were imported into Japan in the 6th century CE. Their Chinese readings were Japanized and Japanese readings attributed to them. Almost all characters therefore have at least two readings and many have more. Vocabulary and characters were borrowed from several different Chinese dialects, depending on which area of [Page 689]China was culturally dominant at the time. Thus the hundreds of different syllables and the various ways they were pronounced in different dialects of Chinese all had to be squeezed into the 90 or so syllables of Japanese, multiplying again the number of homophones. The standard Kenkyusha dictionary, for example, lists 22 words read as kanshō, ranging in meaning from spikenard (a rare plant), a chime, and a government office, to meddling and sentiment. These homophones can be unambiguously distinguished by being written in Chinese characters, but if spelled out in the hiragana or katakana syllabaries also used in Japanese, they may become ambiguous and “punny.”