It’s alive! Power over life and death with aru and iru

Aru and iru are two of the first words that students of Japanese learn. Aru is for inanimate things and iru is for animate things.
テーブルの上にペンがある。tēburu no ue ni pen ga aru There is a pen on the table.
庭にワニがいる。niwa ni wani ga iru There is a crocodile in the garden.
The pen is inanimate, so we use aru. The crocodile is animate, so we use iru.
Aru can be used with people, and in old Japanese there only was aru for everything. Even today it is perfectly acceptable grammatically to say:
あの人は子供がある。ano hito wa kodomo ga aru That person has children.
However, this is just ticking the ‘has child’ box, rather than conjure up images of living breathing children.　In this case, iru is preferable, and as a non-native speaker if you use aru it may sound like a mistake. The distinction between iru and aru gets more interesting, though, when you consider what it means to be ‘animate’.

Live fish for sale in a supermarket, would use aru. They may be alive, and animate, but they’re food, first and foremost. Live bait is the same.

スーパーに活魚がある
sūpā ni katsugyo ga aru
There are live fish (for sale) at the supermarket.

ワニの生き餌として使うウサギがこのかごの中にある
wani no ikiesa toshite tsukau usage ga kono kago no naka ni aru
The rabbits that we'll use for the crocodile's live bait are in this cage.

Lice and fleas as well can be distinguished in this way. Iru and you’re talking about a creature, aru and you’re talking about an infestation. The use of aru depersonalises them; they’re condemned.

肩の上にノミが一匹いる
kata no ue ni nomi ga ippki iru
There is a flea on (your) shoulder.

このハリネズミはノミがある
kono harinezumi wa nomi ga aru
This hedgehog has fleas.

On the other hand, you can use iru to give life to inanimate objects.

急いでいるときにかぎって、タクシーがいない。
isoideiru toki ni kagitte, takushī ga inai
There's never a taxi when you're in a hurry.

The taxi moves about under it’s own power, so you use iru. They move around freely and independently. Trains don’t get the same treatment, though. You can’t use iru with a train, because they’re stuck to a track and a timetable. There’s no free will. In fact, just having a person associated with the car can warrant the use of iru. If you see a police car outside your house:

パトカーがいる patokā ga iru

Because you know that there’s a policeman nearby, possibly in your house and asking too many questions. But if it was parked outside a police station

パトカーがある patokā ga aru

It’s just a car.

Cuddly toys in a shop for sale would be aru. Who cares about them?
But a child’s favourite toy would be iru, because of the personal relationship between the toy and the child. In Toy story, Andy would use iru with Woody, even without seeing him move. Because to Andy, Woody is alive! In Toy Story 3, he might use aru, though. Poor Woody.

ウッディとバズがベッドの上にいる Uddi to Bazu ga beddo no ue ni iru Woody and Buzz are on the bed.

ウッディとバズがゴミ箱の中にある Uddi to Bazu ga gomibako no naka ni aru Woody and Buzz are in the bin.

The distinction is very much at the discretion of the speaker, and given the right context, almost anything could use either.

NHK has a remit to provide television that commercial channels don’t, and produce quite astounding concepts such as panel shows about washers. I don’t mean anything related to cleaning, but the small disk that goes on a bolt to help the nut stay on. As I say, NHK take their remit very seriously. The fact I was watching such a programme says more about the quality of commercial television in Japan than it does about my interest in washers. Anyway, after various explanations about the importance of washers, they wheeled on a rusty old bicycle. Do you think we can unscrew this bolt? They asked, showing just how rusted and manky the nut was. A quick spin of the spanner, and off it came. The big reveal: there was a washer there, stopping the nut from rusting to the bolt. In surprise, one of the panellists exclaimed: ワッシャーがいた！Wasshā ga ita! This wasn’t just a simple ring of metal: it was the hero of the day. By using iru, she’d granted the washer a soul.

Stop thinking in English! Active, passive and causative

Japanese verb conjugations are often said to be easy, due to having so few irregular verbs. However, that doesn’t mean that they are easy to use. The causative, despite being a fairly elementary bit of Japanese, is really hard to master. It’s not used as much as other verb endings, and it feels so different from English equivalent that it doesn’t come naturally. I’m not going to cover how it’s formed; there are plenty of other places on the internet with that information.

What do I want to explain is how it logically fits in with way of thinking behind Japanese.

Let’s take a simple situation. We’ve got a queen, a crocodile and the seven dwarfs. The queen, alloyed that the dwarfs helped Snow White, sets the crocodile on them. Things don’t end well for the seven dwarfs.

There are three participants in this incident, and we can describe what it happening with each of them as the subject.

The queen makes the crocodile eat the seven dwarfs.
女王がワニに７人の小人を食べさせる
This sentence has two objects: the crocodile and the dwarfs. Japanese doesn’t like having two を in one sentence, so the actor, the crocodile, is marked with a ‘ni’. Now, what does the queen do? In Japanese we can drop the objects and it’s still a grammatical sentence.
女王が食べさせる
She caused it, so the verb is in the causative.

With the crocodile as the subject it becomes:
The crocodile eats the seven dwarfs
ワニが７人の小人を食べる
What does the crocodile do?
ワニが食べる
He’s doing the main action, so his verb is in the active voice.

Finally, the poor seven dwarfs.
The seven dwarfs are eaten.
７人の小人が食べられる
What do the seven dwarfs do?
７人の小人が食べられる
They are the victims of this heartless attack, so the verb is in the passive.
I believe that linguists normally use the word ‘patient’, but victim is more appropriate, and this very apt for the Japanese passive that tends to have a negative sense.

You can see that the causative, active and passive voices can be used to change the focus of the narrative, even though they’re all describing the same scene.

In English and many, if not all, other Indo-European languages, it is very important to include information on who is the subject; the person, gender and number. Is the subject the person speaking, the listener, or somebody else? Are they alone, or in a group? English has mostly lost the verb inflexions that mark this, but the pronouns live on and it’s still a core part of the way of thinking behind the language.

In contrast, Japanese doesn’t really care about that. The language is far more interested in the role of the subject. Did they cause it? Did they do it? Were they affected by it? This is why Japanese doesn't really have pronouns in the same way English and other European languages do. There is such a wide variety of ways of saying 'I' and 'you' in Japanese because they're not grammatically fundamental to the language and are therefore easier to change.

The meaning translates easily into English, but not without losing the symmetry in the verb forms. Often for any given situation you only hear a single sentence describing it, so the relationship between the causative, active and passive isn’t always obvious, but knowing the relationship between them is key to understanding the internal logic of the Japanese language.