Ribbing Ingrish

turned up in the American press:1 A rage to travel abroad is sweeping the Japanese in spite of the 'doru shokku' (dollar triggered by President Nixon in August (Atlanta Journal, 14 December 1971, p. 1-D). This lead line of a UPI news item from Tokyo is followed by three additional references to the shokku; the first two in the form shokku and the last simply as dollar shock. Although only time will tell if we are witnessing the borrowing into English of a construction invented by the Japanese (but using loanwords from English and an English idiom); dollar shock seems to be a likely candidate. In the 4 October 1971 issue of Time, there was an article headed Adjusting to Nixon Shokku, which contained another reference to the doru shokku (dollar shock) as well as the additional expression Nixon shokku. One might suppose these expressions have been made by analogy with another phrase known to the Japanese, future shock, after the book of the same title.2 In the 17 July 1972 issue of Newsweek (p. 34), there is passing reference to future shock in another article on Japan: Fortunately, Japan's innate self-discipline and sense of harmony have cushioned much of the 'future shock' . . . and so far Japan is relatively free of the urban crime, drug addiction and disorders so prevalent in other industrialized societies. The quotation marks suggest that the writer is referring to the Japanese use of this term. There are, however, even earlier reported uses of shokku. Shortly after sputnik in 1957, Japanese observers of the United States are said to have introduced the term suputtoniku shokku in reference to American reactions to the Russian satellite. Recent expanded use of shokku may be seen in another article in Time (3 September 1973, p. 18), where it has the

History · Japanese History and Culture

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