Confessions of a Grade School Role Model

A Japanese friend brought over a rental video last night, but too late we discovered it was dubbed.  Major Hollywood releases in Japan are usually available either subtitled in Japanese or dubbed, and one of the first skills an expat must learn is distinguishing from the box which is which.  I've never liked dubbing much in movies anyway, but when it's the wrong language dubbed over the one you know, trying to lip-read for 2 hours is just maddening.

Sometimes dubbing is entertaining -- like when you are no longer amused by the cheerleaders in Bring It On, so you use your DVD player-magic to make them cheer in French.  Dubbing is also fun if it's Keanu Reeves.

But when it's American History X, and Edward Norton, dressed as a neo-Nazi skinhead, is assumedly yelling racial slurs in Japanese, it's just disturbing.  After only a few minutes, my friend and I were both so shaken we had to turn it off.

There was a moment of panic and confusion at lunch yesterday, when a boy in the four-year old class started talking about his "bad home."  After a long exchange of worried looks flashed between teachers, it was finally determined that he had only meant to say "bird house."

There is a single word in Japanese that specifically describes getting someone else to answer for you during a rollcall. A friend claims that if you ask someone to do "daihen" for you, no other explanation is needed, except maybe what you will do for your friend in return. This strikes me as particularly odd given the hardworking, honorable stereotype of the Japanese, except that Japanese college students, the most likely candidates for such rollcall hijinks, often have a different reputation entirely.

If you ever find yourself teaching fruit names to a class of Japanese four-year olds, try to make sure the kid in the front row isn't wearing a shirt that says this: "Don't pee in your WOOL if you don't Dump" (emphasis is the shirt's, not mine). You may find such a shirt very distracting.

There was a hot debate at the four-year olds' lunch table today about whether the average person has 9 or 10 fingers. The controversy arose when it was realized that the 9-fingers theorist had failed to count the finger he was using to count with, on discovery of which the disagreement was peacefully resolved.

Listening to this argument made me realize how many pieces of knowledge, once learned, are quickly taken for granted. How we come into the world knowing nothing, really really nothing, and move on from there. And most urgently, it made me think about what it's been like living in Japan.

The Japanese teachers I work with probably think I'm a little spacey, a little slow, and often very tired. I probably have a dazed look on my face a lot, and I'm sure they find I have a hard time paying attention very long and my mind is often very far away. But I doubt they understand what it is to live with your thumb perpetually dog-earing your mental dictionary, checking your conduct against your inner cultural encyclopedia, and all the while maintaining good humor as the inveterate butt of jokes. They probably don't appreciate that it takes a lot of energy to live in a foreign culture, and that it tires me. Nothing is easy, and there is no going home after a long day of work and relaxing with a few mindless chores; these chores take tremendous energy, energy which my commonsense tells me is ridiculous to have to expend.

I used to find washing my car relaxing: spray it down with the garden hose, wax on, wax off. Now, washing my car involves unscrambling daunting kanji menus at the automat while impatient sedans glare from behind me in line. I can't read the directions on the easy instant food, so I instead spend a lot of time cooking unfamiliar vegetables in indecipherable bottled sauces for one, the slow way. I pay more at full-service gas stations to spare myself the frustration of the Japanese menus at the self-serve pump, and even then, just when I think I've got the order of questions they usually ask me figured out and how to answer them, they still sometimes throw me for a loop. When I eat out, I usually order the same thing, because it's the one on the menu I can read, and can comprehend as a viable food. Everything I do seems to makes me tired.

The obvious thing to do, I suppose, short of giving up and moving away, would be to study more Japanese. The easier thing though is to tell myself more excuses why I don't. Frankly, after a full work day of hearing it, reading it, and attempting to speak it, the last thing I feel like doing is going home and beating my head against the language barrier for yet another hour, and usually I just lay where I fall on the living room floor and watch the latest straight-to-video from Hollywood, savoring every poorly-acted morsel of English. When I do motivate myself to open a textbook, I become frustrated that even though I've just spent an hour memorizing it, it could be years before I get the chance to use my new phrase, "Is this elevator working?" on a real person.

For the record, here it is anyway: Kono erabeta ugoitemasuka?

That really didn't make me feel that much better.

I can understand spoken Japanese reasonably well, but my speaking ability is miserable. Generally I understand what someone wants of me, I just can't communicate my answer. I feel like one of those cinematic coma patients who can hear everything their tearful relatives are saying, but tragically they can't signal a response, if only they could just blink their eyelids or wiggle a toe for "yes"...! Sometimes I picture the late '80s Metallica video for "One." If only a waving pinkie finger could be universally understood to mean, "I know you're talking about me, now stop it." I'm a language teacher, I could just start the movement myself. Others, please feel free to join me.

I've been thinking a lot about Japanese English lately, as it's mostly the only type I encounter. One of the more common Japanese English phrases is "Let's enjoy _____." Let's enjoy happy fun bowling, let's enjoy the shopping, let's enjoy a delicious fruits, like that. No one ever says things like this in native English, so I've wondered how the phrase came about in Japan. The most obvious explanation would be a direct translation of the equivalent Japanese into English.

There's another explanation though, perhaps. Japan is, to an American college graduate of Generation X for instance, shockingly devoid of irony and sarcasm. Japan is very earnest, which is partly why it can feel so surreal. At times I feel I've stepped onto the set of a corny 50s musical, the neat, matching unselfconscious uniforms, the genuine enthusiasm, the honest-to-god unfeigned perkiness. It has the air of someone about to be sarcastic or kitschy, and I keep expecting that sly rolling-of-eyes, but no one ever gives it. I've seen after-gig punk rock bands become thrilled to gather in someone's living room for a night of stone-cold sober video bowling, on more than one occasion. Japanese don't do karaoke out of self-mocking irony, but they do take singing lessons.

"Let's enjoy _____" may not be an awkwardly phrased pseudo-English statement after all, but a perfectly phrased Japanese sentiment. People here really do seem to enjoy doing things together, on cue, and decisively. I've learned to do my eye-rolling at home, and even then just to stay in practice. The genuine enthusiasm-thing is really growing on me.

I bought a set of children's kanji flashcards recently to add to my self-study materials. A well-educated Japanese friend of mine, who holds a Masters degree in linguistics, was over and flipping through the deck. I noticed him staring a rather long time at the card with the kanji for "mouse," and I asked him why he looked so baffled. Was the kanji printed incorrectly, perhaps? "No, I've just never seen this kanji before. It's always written in hiragana." That afternoon we met up with a med student friend of his, and asked him about the mystery kanji. He'd never seen it either.

I'm not sure if this makes me feel better about my studies, or much worse.

Downtown is a nondescript grey business building called the "Ass Building." On the second floor is a bar called the "Bottom's Up." My Japanese friends think it's absurd how I'm always wanting to stop there and take pictures, and no amount of my yelling, "Butt it's funny!" seems to help.

I am just beginning to understand kanji, the pictographic portion of written Japanese. Since, like the average employee in Japan, I have very little free time to devote to things like study, I learn most of these kanji by tracking patterns in the road signs and shop names I pass driving to and from work. I can't begin to describe the elation I feel recognizing words: "That fork-thing and the four-square box say 'Yamada!' That's someone's name! I'm amazing!" I suspect it's related to the joy very young children get from pointing and yelling "Cat!" every time they see one.

Unfortunately, as fun as kanji-reading is for me as recreation, my rudimentary skills still do me little practical service. For instance, I can see that my heater remote control says "Entrance! blah blah Middle!" and "Something about a field or something!" but a fat lot of good that does me trying to make my apartment warm.