Katakana Anaysis Draft

I believe that Katakana was probably born with its solitary or so purpose: exclusively for male Japanese, or for Japanese Constitution, etc. However, as time went by, the use of Kanatana might have been evolved or added and subtracted with a couple of reasons.

First, Japan has historically accepted various foreign culture. At the same time, Japanese people needed to describe whatever foreign things they accepted. As an illustration, if Captain Smith had come to Japan for the first time as a western person with blue eyes and blond hair, he would have probably said, "How do you do? my name is Smith. hu hu hu" Didn't Japanese people need to write "Smith" in Japanese? I think that's the most frequent explantion of Katakana usage. In the handout which Sato sensei gave us, there are four explanations on Japanese writing system. All of them are talking about "loanwords and foreign names" for Katakana. This is the starting point where each of explanation could develop toward different ways. For example,I love my Lumix GF1. In its Japanese manual, it indicates ヂジタルカメラ that means digital camera in English. There is no doubt on the fact that Japan is one of the best digital camera producers, but it was not originally from Japan. That's why they expressed ヂジタルカメラ in Katakana.

Second reason why Kanakana is I think the emphasis. I can easily find this on the label of Asahi beer at Mitsuwa supermaket in Edgewater, New Jersey. アサヒビール　スーパードライ. It means "Asahi Beer Superdry". It contains not only loan words (Beer Superdry), but it also does the emphasis on 朝日 or あさひ. It looks in Kanji or hirakana is more proper, but the reason why asahi in Katakana is probably that asahi company'd like to emphasize thier brand name. I think this is similar with the function of CAPITALs of the alphabet.

Finally, as one of the handout explanation says, they would be onomatopoeic words. When I saw ボシューーッ in Dragon ball manga, although I could not speak out the exact reason, I emotionally agreed with the use of Katakana. What do you think? ボシューーッ is the expression of sound, mimicing the surreal weapon is shooting a surreal beam toward an enemy. Kanji or hiragana?

From the reasons described above, I understand why each textbook has differnt explanation on Katakana. I want to suggest that the main reason is history. The time Japanese people lived must have given birth to the various reasons. And how can this be defined in a mechanical way?

ジュ　ホミン。