国語の教授：学生に方言の調査をさせようと思うんです。
私：相手に迷惑をかけないように、学生に釘をさした方がいいですよ。
Kugi wo Sasu
Kokugo no kyooju: Gakusei ni hoogen no choosa wo saseyoo to omou'n desu.
Watashi: Aite ni meiwaku wo kakenai yoo ni, gakusei ni kugi wo sashita hoo ga ii desu yo.
A Japanese
language teacher: I'm planning to have my students do some fieldwork investigating dialects.
Me: You should make it clear to them that they aren't to make trouble for the people they're in terviewing.
* * *
Kugi wo sasu means to warn someone, to make something perfectly clear. The etymology, of course, has to do with kugi (nail) and so comes from the world of carpentry and construction. Have you ever seen the temple Shosooin in Nara? It's famous as an example of the traditional Japanese practice of constructing buildings without the use of nails. Construction laws change, though, and nails have now been inserted in the temple and such buildings "just in case." It is from this point that the meaning of our expression derives.
There was a reason I warned my friend about how he should go about having his students do their fieldwork. There's the story of a famous Japanese language scholar who, in order to finish his research on the Ainu language, is said to have locked an Ainu in his home and forced him to speak Ainu from morning till night. The informant, already quite old and weak, is said to have died soon afterward. I'm not sure how much of this story is true, but it sounds like something that really could have happened.
This kind of thing is quite common in the field of cultural anthropology. With everything in Japan tending toward standardization, the unique aspects of Japan's local areas are slowly vanishing.
It's said the anthropologists are going from island to island in Okinawa studying the people. The pro- blem is with the way they go about their research.
I've heard some researchers will go up to a person's house, calling card in hand, begin talking even if the person is busy and even go inside their home and start taking pictures. Someone should warn them (dare ka ga, kugi wo sashita hoo ga ii), "Have you forgotten that the other person is a human being and not just some 'thing' for you to study?" Despite what some might think, such behavior cannot be justified in the name of 'science. ' The results of such research are also rarely shown to the people themselves; they are rarely sent copies of the videos made of them.
"Be considerate of the feelings of living human beings! " This is how I would like to warn such 'scholars' (watashi wa so iu hitotachi ni kugi wo sashite okitai).