When Rabbi Marvin Tokayer was tapped to serve as the rabbi of Japan’s Jewish community in 1968 he was certain that he would have to master the Japanese language in order to communicate with the local residents. Indeed if someone would have suggested that Japanese people would prefer to communicate with him in Yiddish he would have thought that person was a meshuganeh. Until the day he picked up the phone and was addressed in Japanese-accented Yiddish.

The caller was Kazuo Ueda a Japanese master’s degree student at the University of Tokyo. “It was very difficult for me to understand him” Rabbi Tokayer recalls. “I asked him what languages he spoke. He told me that he spoke German but not English. And then he named another language —Yiddish.”

After Rabbi Tokayer recovered from his surprise he replied “Shulem aleichem. Kum aher (come here)” inviting the mysterious caller to continue the conversation in his home.

“The man who appeared on my doorstep had taught himself Yiddish but had never heard a word of Yiddish spoken in his life. This was before the days of CD players. We took out a made-in-Japan tape recorder and I began singing songs such as Oif’n Pripitchuk and other Yiddish songs simply so that he could hear the language. And of course we spoke in Yiddish.”

You Don’t Have To Be Jewish

Kazuo Ueda first discovered Yiddish at a lecture he attended in Prague. The speaker mentioned a lecture that had been given in Prague in 1912 by the Jewish author Franz Kafka who had said “Ladies and gentlemen you understand much more Yiddish than you realize.” Ueda who had specialized in German had never heard of Yiddish before but he was intrigued and decided to learn more about it.

The ambitious young student did not content himself with listening to Rabbi Tokayer’s Yiddish songs. He went so far as to travel to Jerusalem’s Meah Shearim neighborhood where he spent as much time as possible in the company of Yiddish speakers observing their use of the language and jotting down every new word that he learned.

Ueda who is today a professor in the Department of German at the University of Fukuoka in southern Japan eventually achieved a greater degree of proficiency in Yiddish than many people who speak it. Two years ago he published an extraordinarily improbable tome: the very first Yiddish-Japanese dictionary ever to be created. The culmination of decades of work the dictionary includes an introduction dealing with Yiddish culture a section on Yiddish grammar and a unidirectional dictionary that contains more than 28 000 word entries. Designed to be user-friendly it has a transliteration of every entry and other features that make it easy to use.

To compile this complex endeavor Ueda engaged the services of a number of foreign language experts including one who supplied him with the meanings of many Yiddish words that originated in the Russian language. His staff helped him find the corresponding Japanese terms for every Yiddish word.

The only disadvantage of the 1302-page dictionary is its price which is astronomical even by the standards of one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Selling at 60000 yen the equivalent of about $770 it’s hardly a bargain. 

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