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Lesson 76: The Right Opening

[Video Link]

Today we're going to look at something that is important in itself but also throws light on some of the subtleties of Japanese that are very useful to know as we go forward into deeper immersion.

So, what we're going to look at is four different ways of saying something that in English are all covered by the one word "open".

Now, these are "aku", "akeru", "hiraku", "hirakeru".

Now, when we look at these at first they look like two self-move/other-move pairs, don't they?

And up to a point they are.

But what this is going to illustrate is something of the subtlety of the whole self-move/other-move concept in Japanese, as opposed to the much more technical and clear-cut contrast between transitivity and intransitivity in English and other Western languages.

So, if you're not familiar with the concept of self-move and other-move verbs (what in the West tend to get called transitive and intransitive verbs) I'll put a link to my video on that subject above my head and in the Comments below.

The second thing we notice is that when you write them with kanji, you can't actually see the difference between "aku/akeru" and "hiraku/hirakeru".

Now this is partly because they are actually interchangeable in many cases and on the whole if it's not a case where it really needs to be "hiraku/hirakeru", people will generally read "aku/akeru".

But if a writer wants to specify that she's using "hiraku" for a particular effect (and we'll look at some of those effects a little later) she will write it in hiragana to make the matter clear.

Right. So first let's take the top two, "aku/akeru".

"Aku" is self-move. "Akeru" is other-move. They both mean "open".

So, "aku": a door opens, a bottle opens; "akeru": open a door, open a bottle. That at least is the theory.

In practice, we will often hear Japanese people say things like "me-wo aku" (open one's eyes), which is technically incorrect in the eyes of the grammarians because "aku" is self-move and they're using it in an other-move way: open one's eyes.

Now, I'm somewhat challenging the grammarians here and I'll tell you why in a moment, but you should stick to the actual grammatical model because there are only a limited number of instances in which Japanese people do use "aku" transitively (and I'm using the word "transitively" deliberately here -- you'll see why in a moment) and you don't want to be memorizing which those are.

If you use "akeru" as the other-move version -- opening your mouth, opening the door, opening anything -- you'll never go wrong. That's always correct.

So why am I challenging this official view that "aku" ought to be intransitive?

Well, I've got a slight feeling here that Japanese grammarians are a little bit influenced by Western thinking and by the Western concepts of transitivity and intransitivity.

When Japanese people say "me-wo aku", I believe the instinct or the feeling behind it is that opening one's eyes is toward the "aru" side of the "aru/suru" map that we talked about in my transitivity lesson.

In other words, opening one's eyes is closer to being self-move, closer to being then doing, as opposed to opening the door, opening a bottle or some other external object.

Now, that's my take on this, and you can ignore it if you want to, but we'll get on to some more of these subtleties which are not disputed by anybody as we go forward.

So now let's look at the difference between "aku" and "hiraku".

They both mean "open". "Aku" is officially speaking self-move, although we can see that there's a little bit of leeway here; "hiraku" is both self-move and other-move quite formally.

The difference between them has nothing to do with self-move or other-move.

It has to do with the kind of opening that we're talking about.

So if we talk about opening a bottle, taking the lid off a box, anything like that, it's definitely "akeru".

On the other hand, if we talk about a flower opening it's definitely "hiraku".

So something that unfolds, opens out, is "hiraku".

Something that simply becomes open instead of closed is "aku/akeru".

And if you like Japanese children's songs, you may well have heard the hand-game song that goes "musunde hiraite te-wo utte musunde".

"Musunde" is "musubu", which means "gathered or joined" and that refers to a closed hand.

"Hiraite" refers to a hand that's spread out like an open flower.

Now, there are various areas where these two are interchangeable, but even when they're interchangeable they stress one aspect rather than another.

So, for example, a French door can "aku" (open) or "hiraku" (spread open).

Eyes generally "aku", but they can be said to "hiraku", and when we use "hiraku" instead of "aku" in these cases it's rather like in a movie when you zoom in on someone's eyes slowly becoming open or on doors slowly spreading open.

There's more sense of the actual process of the opening, of the spreading out.

So this gives a subtlety that we don't have in English that can be infused into speech or writing just by choosing "hiraku" instead of "aku".

Now, when we come to more metaphorical or abstract uses, the distinction is important again.

For example, we can say "mise-wo akeru" or "mise-wo hiraku" and they both mean "open a shop", but "mise-wo akeru" implies simply opening in the morning for business or opening after the lunch break or something like that, simply literally opening the shop, just opening the doors so the customers can come in.

"Mise-wo hiraku" implies opening a shop for the first time, opening to the public.

In other words, spreading out like a flower, changing from something that was closed into something that's open.

And just a side-note here: with an umbrella, which also spreads out and you might be inclined to say "hiraku", we don't usually use that, it's generally "sasu" for opening an umbrella.

Now, what about "hirakeru"?

The Japanese grammarians, or at least many of them, actually designate "hirakeru" as the self-move version of "hiraku".

But that doesn't really make any sense, because "hiraku" itself is both self-move and other-move.

So what's actually going on here?

This is quite interesting.

"Hiraku", which can be either self-move or other-move, is further over to the "suru" side of the map than "hirakeru".

And what do I mean by that?

Well, I did a video a while ago about what I call untranslatable Japanese.

And this is about Japanese verbs that really can't be reproduced in English because they express states rather than actions in a way that just doesn't happen in English.

A very simple and common example is "wakaru", which is often translated by English dictionaries and textbooks as "understand".

It certainly doesn't mean "understand", but when you get a better translation that will tend to be "be understandable" or "be clear", and that's much closer to what "wakaru" actually means, but the real meaning can't be translated into English because it's actually not an adjective like "clear" or "understandable". It's a verb.

So what we're really saying is "do understandable / do the act of understandability" and this just doesn't have an English translation.

And there are lots of stative verbs like this and I talked about them in the video.

And "hirakeru" really comes closer to being one of these.

"Nureru", which is often translated as "become wet", but it doesn't actually mean "become wet" -- It can include that but implies "existing in the state of being wet".

It may mean "become wet and then continue to be wet" or it can just mean "be wet", but of course it isn't "be wet", it's in fact "do wet", which isn't translatable into English.

The same with "hirakeru". So it's used in cases like, for example, we often say "un-ga hirakeru", which means "one's luck opens".

Now, we could say "un-ga hiraku", and that would mean "one's luck unfolds like a flower, becomes open", but "hirakeru" implies not just unfolding but continuing to exist in that state of unfoldedness.

The reason we would be more prone to say "mise-wo hiraku" is partly because it's more other-move than "hirakeru" and we're actually doing it to the shop, we're opening it; also because stress is on this act of opening the shop.

"Un-ga hirakeru": the stress on the actual opening of the luck is less important than the fact that it's going to change.

From then on, we're going to be lucky, whereas at the moment we're not so lucky.

So, I think this gives us a view not only of the four words for opening in Japanese and how they work, how they interplay.

A lot of the time they overlap with each other and it doesn't matter too much which one you use.

In some cases it really is important, either for what you're specifically saying or for the nuance and implication and atmosphere that you want to build by saying it.