This feature began with an overview, introduced the two discoveries of bunsetsu and Old Japanese kana usage, read the original texts of each, and traced their influence on later generations. To close, let’s grade all of it from today’s vantage point.
An unshaken premise — Old Japanese kana usage
First, the discovery of Old Japanese kana usage is accepted, in ancient-Japanese research today, as an unshaken premise. The fact that man’yōgana in Nara-period texts are strictly sorted into two groups has been repeatedly confirmed by later research as exactly the fact Hashimoto checked anew, as we saw in the close-reading article. In research that tries to reconstruct the sounds of ancient Japanese, this distinction is used as a matter of course, as one of the starting points. Hashimoto’s careful stance — “don’t pin down what the sounds were yet” — can be said to have been the right way to proceed for later research as well.
Still unsettled — what the two sounds actually were
However, on what those two sounds actually were, several views continue to coexist today. It’s the very problem about which Hashimoto himself, as we saw in the close-reading article, said “I can’t state anything conclusive.” Later generations developed the eight-vowel theory — reading it as a difference in vowels — as a leading hypothesis, but it isn’t regarded as the only answer. The names “kō” (Type A) and “otsu” (Type B) are merely convenience labels for the distinction that Hashimoto assigned, not names that indicate what the sounds are. That has not changed from Hashimoto’s day to ours.
A useful tool, but not all-purpose — the bunsetsu
The assessment of the bunsetsu is somewhat more complicated. As a tool for teaching Japanese in the classroom, the bunsetsu remains indispensable today. That the “insert ne” method — testable by ear — suited showing beginners the structure of a sentence was seen in the plain-language article.
In research, though, the situation is different. The bunsetsu is just one way of cutting, based on breaks in pronunciation, and isn’t always the best unit for explaining how a Japanese sentence is structured. Other units — word, phrase, clause — are often used instead. On fine points such as whether to split a form like “saite ita” into “saite” and “ita,” the conventions of school grammar and the analyses of linguistics don’t necessarily agree.
Two assessments of one scholar
It’s interesting that two works of the same Hashimoto Shinkichi receive such different assessments. Old Japanese kana usage is a discovery that brought to light a “one-time fact” about a language of the past, and once correctly checked, it is hard to overturn afterward. The bunsetsu, by contrast, is a framework for “how to cut and explain” the present-day language, and how far that framework is useful varies with the purpose.
This difference overlaps with the lesson seen in the verdict article of the Yamada Yoshio feature: that “the value of a discovery and the durability of the theory explaining it should be graded separately.” Hashimoto’s work shows both sides of that lesson, plainly, within a single scholar.
Summary
| Verdict | Subject |
|---|---|
| An unshaken premise | Old Japanese kana usage — the fact that man’yōgana are strictly sorted into two groups |
| Remains as a classroom tool | The bunsetsu — a way of cutting based on breaks in pronunciation, checkable by ear |
| Not all-purpose | In research, the bunsetsu is used alongside other units such as word and phrase |
| Still unsettled | What the two sounds actually were (several views coexist, the eight-vowel theory among them) |
In a nutshell — the “fact about the past” that Hashimoto Shinkichi checked still doesn’t move. The “framework for explaining the present” that he built is still alive in the classroom, but it isn’t all-purpose.