Deviating from 'ki-sho-ten-ketsu

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Speak Up / Deviating from 'ki-sho-ten-ketsu'

Ian Willey Special to The Daily Yomiuri

It makes for an awkward moment. When introducing essay writing to my university students, I go into a little contrastive rhetoric. The English academic essay, I say, has a strict, legalistic organization, derived from the rhetorical tradition of the ancient Greeks: The writer makes a point (the thesis statement), provides evidence to support that point (the body paragraphs), and wraps up everything with a closing statement (the conclusion).

In Japan, however, compositions follow the ki-sho-ten-ketsu pattern: The writer introduces a topic (ki), develops the topic (sho), departs from the topic in a tangent intended to cast a new light on the topic (ten), and concludes the paper (ketsu). Research done in the past few decades confirms this difference between Japanese and English writing.

Yet, invariably, half of the class eyes me dubiously. That isn't how I learned to write compositions in school, some say. Ki-sho-ten-ketsu is for story writing, not the kind of essays written for class. Several students, however, look at the chalkboard with an enlightened gleam in their eyes. As class proceeds I realize how little I, an American, know about my students' education. And I wonder how, in an educational system famed for its uniformity, so many students can have different backgrounds when it comes to writing.

Ki-sho-ten-ketsu became cemented in the English as a foreign language (EFL) lexicon in 1987, with John Hinds' paper about rhetorical differences between Japanese and English. Hinds asserted that Japanese writing is inductive; responsibility falls on the reader to understand transitions between paragraphs or topics in a composition. English, on the other hand, is more deductive, and the writer is expected to make a statement and explain it clearly and logically.

When writing in a foreign language, people apply writing strategies they learned in their first language. Thus, native English speakers may be perplexed when reading a Japanese writer's essay in English, particularly when they encounter the ten element, which would be regarded as a deviation. Hinds thus stressed the need to inform students of different culture-bound rhetorical patterns when they engage in second-language writing.

That ki-sho-ten-ketsu is alive and well in modern Japan seems beyond doubt. Hinds himself examined Japanese newspaper columns and found an abundance of ten paragraphs. Having taught writing classes in Japan for several years, I continually find ten-like paragraphs in student essays. They usually occur two-thirds of the way through the essay, and begin with "By the way."

In addition to ki-sho-ten-ketsu, two lesser-known composition strategies in Japanese rhetoric have been described: the "return to baseline theme" and the tempura or "quasi-inductive" approach.

In the "return to baseline theme," an opinion is given at the beginning of an essay, but no attempt is made to explain it. The writer goes on to discuss seemingly disconnected topics, then suddenly and without explanation restates the opinion made earlier.

A writer following the tempura or "quasi-inductive" pattern makes statements about a topic in the beginning and middle of the paper, though an opinion or controlling idea is not introduced until the end. The implication is that essays written by Japanese students in English do possess distinct methods of organization, but a native English-speaking reader, normally the teacher, would be put off by the seemingly disorganized styles, and unwilling to make the effort to connect the threads set down by the writer.

But these three patterns alone do not account for all the essay types I have encountered. Most fascinating to me is an essay that begins with a proper English-style intro paragraph, continues with two or three body paragraphs, and then branches off with a new point into a completely new essay, as though two essays had been fused together. How did that happen?

The reason for the profusion of writing styles can be explained by the fact that writing strategies are not uniformly taught in Japanese schools. A visit to the Web site of the Education, Science and Technology Ministry reveals that writing (kaku koto) objectives are presented for primary, middle and high school Japanese (kokugo) classes. Students should be able to express their ideas with clarity, and organize their writing effectively based on the content and audience.

But the objectives are rather vague, and explicit writing strategies are not described (nowhere is there any mention made of ki-sho-ten-ketsu, either). It is up to the instructors to emphasize writing strategies they feel are appropriate, if they have time to teach any at all.

One Japanese high school English teacher told me that writing in Japan is considered an individualized act, and students writing in Japanese are given more freedom of expression than they would have when writing a composition in English. A composition's success or failure depends on its own individual merits, not necessarily its adherence to a preconceived standard.

At the university where I currently teach, I was a member of a selection committee for a group of medical students applying for an intensive study-abroad program. Applicants wrote two essays in Japanese, which we had to judge. When our group met to discuss the essays, it soon became clear that the other members used different criteria from mine in their evaluations. Essays that I felt were strong, that is, well-organized, with a clearly stated opinion, were often evaluated poorly, and vice versa.

One professor repeatedly said he could not feel this or that writer's "passion," and gave those essays low scores. Interestingly, there was often little agreement among the Japanese professors in their evaluations. It seemed, we were all evaluating the papers with different criteria in mind.

Deciding the successful candidates took much time.

If writing in Japanese allows for greater individualized expression than in English, writing teachers should continue to expect all sorts of surprises in English essays written by students. But these surprises may provide the best clues in helping us to understand how our students, as individuals, compose their thoughts.


Willey is a lecturer at Kagawa University in Kagawa Prefecture.

(Apr. 21, 2006)