Chapter One
Grades Aren’t Everything
I decided
to take Japanese on a whim – or, more specifically, on my mom’s whim. I was a freshman in high school that had to
pick a language elective and had no idea what to do. Summer vacation ticked away. Back to School Night rolled around, and I
still hadn’t decided.
My mom had
seen enough.
“You have
to choose something, Chad.”
“I know.”
“The school
offers Spanish, French, German, or Japanese.
Which one are you going to take?”
I
shrugged. None of them got my motor
running.
Mom sighed,
“Japanese looks interesting. Why don’t
you give it a shot?”
Japanese? Why would I take Japanese? I loved Pokemon, sure, but so did everyone
else. Still, I had even fewer reasons to
take French.
“Okay. Yeah.
Sure,” I replied. “Why not?”
It didn't
seem like a life-changing decision at the time, but I guess life-changing
decisions don't make themselves known right away.
I clearly
remember my first class. I entered the
room and searched for a seat, entranced by the calligraphy and ukiyo prints on the walls. The bell rang and a tall, young-looking white
woman stepped to the front and started delivering instructions. In Japanese.
I had no idea what was going on.
I looked around, hoping to pick up some cues from my classmates, but all
I saw were wide eyes and slack jaws. The
teacher kept saying things. It was clear
she wanted us to do something, but it wasn't clear what. We sat for a moment, leaking nervous giggles
as we waited for the English to come. It
didn't. She kept talking, eventually
adding some gestures. To this day I have
no idea what she was saying. Stand up!
Look at the board! Sit down! We just tried to follow her hand gestures and
make it through the hour.
The
language was the most bizarre string of noises I had ever heard. "Ohayo gozaimas[1]." What the hell was "Ohio goes I mahss"
supposed to mean? Do that many Japanese
people live in Cleveland? I thought
Japanese was the stupidest thing I had ever heard.
Japanese
would continue to sound strange to me for the next decade. Fortunately, however, after a few months it ceased
to be just a bizarre string of sounds.
It changed into a string of magic words, and I needed to learn them all[2].
School was
never very difficult for me. I teetered
on the edge of a nervous breakdown if I ever got less than 95% on a test. I was essentially equally capable in every
subject, but for whatever reason I (thought I) was particularly good at
Japanese. I learned the alphabet (the
syllabaries to be exact (there are two)) right away, and memorized all of the
kanji on the walls. I listened to the
teacher's pronunciation and practiced at home until I could copy it. I worked out grammar patterns before she
taught them to us, and all in all was pretty proud of myself.
I got great
grades and the big head that went along with them. It was a trick, though. My grades fooled me into thinking I knew
things, when in fact I didn't know anything at all.
My First Trip To Japan
Every other
year, Spann Sensei took a group of students to Japan. When I was a sophomore, I was one of
them. I had never left America before – I
had never even been out of state without my parents before - but I wasn't that
nervous. My Japanese was pretty good, after
all, so I would be fine. That's what I
thought. I had yet to realize that test
scores don't mean anything. I put on the
group windbreaker, said my farewells, and got on the plane.
Looking back, I wish I had spent
the flight savoring my self-confidence because it was soon to disappear.
The trip
was divided into two parts. The first
part was group sightseeing in Kyoto, which was amazing. I'm not sure there's anything more exciting
than exploring a foreign country with a group of friends. Everything was strange, and I looked upon it
all with wonder, even those things that today strike me as totally
uninteresting. If I could recapture the
joy I felt upon learning that Japanese toilets have seat warmers, I would
probably die on the spot.
I still
have very clear memories from that trip.
Lines of tour buses. The green
wall of hedges leading to the precincts of a dark wooden temple called the
Silver Pavilion. Vending machines filled
with unfamiliar drinks and coins of actual value rapidly disappearing into them. We went to a shrine called Heian Jingu, where
I had myself photographed pretending to meditate on a rock. We went to a theme park called Nagashima Spa
Land and had the entire place to ourselves because it snowed until
mid-afternoon. The Steel Dragon wasn't
running, but we rode the White Cyclone about twenty times instead.
I went to
my first onsen. An onsen
is a Japanese hot spring. When Americans
think of hot springs, they think of slimy, sulfurous pools of algae-infested
muck hidden in the woods and patronized by otherwise unbathed, unshaven
hippies. Japanese hot springs are, thankfully,
different. Frequented by everyone, they are
clean, reputable, well-maintained, landscaped, and occasionally located in the
middle of the city. People get naked,
and just sort of sit around together. It
sounds weird, but it's not (seriously, it isn't). Our school didn't allow us to get naked (and
no one would have if they did), so we soaked in our swimsuits. The Japanese people laughed at us, but we
didn't particularly care. Spann Sensei's
husband received an unsolicited back scrub from a naked old man. We freaked out. It started snowing as we sat in the springs
and I clearly remember thinking, "I could stay in this country
forever."
I loved
Kyoto. There was the good: the joy of staying
in my first Japanese inn; and there was the terrible: the taste of my first
Japanese breakfast. I will never forget
either. I was in awe of the temples, and
for a moment thought I might like to become a monk (thankfully I did not act on
the impulse). If the trip had ended in
Kyoto, it would have been the most amazing trip ever.
But the
trip didn't end in Kyoto.
Home School
For the
second part of the trip, the scene shifted to a small town in Saitama Prefecture
called Kounosu. We went there because a
few years earlier Spann Sensei had been an ALT in Kounosu. ALT stands for Assistant Language Teacher, a
job held by native English speakers in public elementary, junior high, and high
schools. My high school classmates and I
weren’t sent to Kounosu to be ALTs, however.
We were sent to Kounosu to make fools of ourselves in Japanese
homes.
Before
leaving America, I was excited for the homestay. I got a hand-written letter from my host
family, a father, mother, younger brother and younger sister - the exact same
configuration as my own family. I
figured I would fit right in.
After being
in Japan for a few days, however, my feelings towards the homestay
changed. I started to realize how little
Japanese I actually knew. Kyoto was
amazing, a steady stream of moving experiences, but that's because I was
surrounded by people who spoke English. I
was in Japan, but it didn't feel like it.
As long as you're with friends you can easily get by in a place that
doesn't make any sense. You can laugh
off the language barrier. Sure, you
can't read a menu, ask for directions, or understand what people are saying. You don't know what's polite and what's
rude. You don't care because none of it
applies to you.
We spent
four days in and around Kyoto, visiting temples, going to hot springs, and
eating sushi off conveyor belts, but the truth is that we didn't really
interact with any Japanese people.
Sightseeing is great, but it isn't cultural exchange. Getting thrown into the middle of a family
would be. It meant that I could no
longer escape the fact that I was in a foreign country. As the transition from simple sightseeing to
actual cultural exchange drew near, my anxiety levels went up accordingly.
The day
finally came. I said goodbye to my
friends and got into my host family's mini-van, heart pounding in my chest.
The first conversation I had with
real Japanese people went worse than I thought it would. As I got into the car, they asked me
something using words I had never heard. I replied with something random. Silence.
They asked me something else. I
grunted and nodded. More silence. After a minute I thought to ask my
fifth-grade host brother something, but realized that I didn't know how to
address him.
In Japanese the proper way to
address someone depends on a number of factors.
Are they older or otherwise more socially powerful than you? Is this the first time you've met them? What day of the week is it? Have you eaten dinner yet? What color shirt are they wearing? Is Saturn in ascendancy or the house of Mars? At the time, I knew there was system, but I
didn't know how it worked. Eventually I
settled for a hesitant "Teppei-san..." (Not quite Mr. Teppei, but not
how you normally address a ten year-old boy, either.). The car lit up with laughter that quickly
died out into more silence.
Welcome to
Japan. The real learning starts now.
My Poor Host Mother
Japanese is
notorious among foreign learners for its differing levels of formality. There's 1) Casual Street Language, spoken
with family or friends; 2) a more formal type of conjugation for, I suppose you
could say, All-Purpose Politeness; and 3) the highest level of formality, Royal
Court Speech, in which speakers alternately debase themselves and deify the
people they are addressing (this sounds complicated, and it is, but not
impossibly so. You can figure it out in
a decade). In class, we learned
All-Purpose Politeness, which is where you should start. The last thing we need is a nation of
American children learning to speak like Yakuza members. Nevertheless, All-Purpose Politeness isn't
the type of language used in the home.
That posed a problem.
We drove to
the family's house and brought my luggage into the room I was to use, an immaculate
Japanese-style room with a tatami floor.
Then my host mother started asking me things. At that point, I had lost all confidence in
my Japanese. I had no idea what she was
saying. She repeated herself numerous
times, to no avail. Berating myself for
not understanding her, I managed to move the conversation along, which is to
say, I shrugged and nodded a lot, hoping she would stop talking. Eventually, she pulled out a futon and sent
me off to brush my teeth.
Later on I
figured out what she was trying to say.
It wasn't anything terribly difficult.
Faced with the task of communicating with a 16 year-old boy who didn't
even understand that, it's amazing the woman didn't pass out. Maybe she did, just in a place where I
couldn't see her.
I was like
a dog. I remember at one point being
taken for a walk in the park – I wasn’t leashed but probably should have been –
as the family tried to find something this confused, mute kid they were stuck
with could do. I couldn’t say much, but eventually felt I
had to say something. Luckily, I was prepared. There was a vocabulary list among the
pre-departure material we received, and one item on the list was the word
"Takahashi," which was translated into English as "a Japanese
name".
“Wow,” I thought to myself, “that's
a really cool word. I could use
that. I will memorize it.”
So I did. As I walked in the park with my host mother,
I thought I would say something nice about my host sister's name, Mizuki.
"Mizuki," I proudly said
to her, "That's a great Takahashi."
Mizuki, that’s a great Japanese name. I thought I had made a clever sentence. But the confused look on my host mother's
face made it evident that something was wrong.
It turns out that "Takashashi" doesn't mean "a Japanese
name," but rather is a Japanese
name. If a foreign child were to come up
to you and say, "Jessica, that's a great Smith," you would probably
be as confused as my host mother was.
Of course,
that wasn't the only stupid thing I did. The house I stayed in had a peculiar bathroom. After our walk, my host mother asked if I’d
like to take a bath. “Wonderful,” I
thought, “I would love a bath,” and nodded enthusiastically. She led me into the laundry room, past the
washer and dryer, and up to a frosted glass door. On the other side of the frosted glass door
was a tiled room with a bathtub. My host
mother parked me in front of the frosted glass door, said, “Go ahead, take a
bath,” and left the room.
I had no
experience with a bath room of this sort (because it really was a bath room; there was nothing in it but a
tub and a shower head) and had no idea where to take off my clothes. Should I take them off in the laundry room
and just go into the bath room naked? Or
should I take them off inside the bath room?
I remembered from the orientation material that in Japan you are
supposed to shower on the tile floor outside
the tub before getting in, and so I worried that my clothes would get wet if I
took them inside. I sat there for a few
minutes debating, kicking myself for not envisioning this situation at the
pre-departure question-and-answer session.
Eventually, I decided to go ahead and disrobe in the laundry room. Unfortunately, it took me about five minutes
to come to that decision, so as I was in the process of pulling my t-shirt over
my head, my host mother walked into the room with a basket of dirty
clothes.
She then quickly walked out of the
room with a basket of dirty clothes.
My host
mother did all sorts of things for me.
She made me breakfast every morning.
I didn't eat it because I couldn't stand the idea of fish, seaweed, and
pickles first thing in the morning, but I appreciated the effort. When I was starting to get tired of Japan,
she took me to Tsutaya (a bookstore/video rental store) and let me rent a copy
of Jurassic Park. She even washed my
underwear.
I couldn’t
say anything, do anything, or understand anything. Going to a foreign country made me feel like
I had gone back to being a baby. I was
even worse-off than a baby. Babies are
cute, and everyone loves them because evolutionary instinct compels them
to. When babies are in trouble, all they
have to do is cry and someone will rush to help them. They aren't expected to know anything, and
don't have any memories of the relatively independent life they were leading in
America before coming to stupid Japan.
What
exactly was my host mother trying to say to me on that first night? She wasn't asking for my opinion on modern Japanese
politics. She wasn't trying to tell me
about the Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea, and she wasn't quizzing me
on Tokugawa Ieyasu's rise to Shogun.
"Did
you eat dinner?" That's what she was
asking me. "Did you eat
dinner?"
The problem was that she wasn't
using All-Purpose Politeness. She was
using Casual Street Language, and I hadn't learned that yet. I suffered defeat at the hands of colloquial
speech, and for a guy as proud of his intellect as I was, it was a painful one.
It was also
inevitable. And enlightening. I didn't actually know everything and that
meant I still had things to learn. If I
still had things to learn then it was time to get back to work.
Othello and Futons
My first
attempt at international exchange was certainly full of false starts, but it
wasn't all bad. Let me tell you a
success story.
In addition to my hardworking host
mother, I also had a host father, a host sister, and two host
grandparents. My host father was busy
with work and didn't get home until what I deemed to be very late (although a
Japanese teenager probably would not). I
don't remember much about the grandparents.
Mizuki, my host sister with the nice Takahashi, was cute, but was also
about five years old.
That leaves my
host brother, Teppei.
A boy of few
words, Teppei and I were well matched.
To be fair, I'm not sure if Teppei was actually a quiet kid or not, but
I can't remember having a single conversation with him. We must have had some sort of verbal
exchange. I'm sure I at least tried to
ask him a question, and I'm sure he replied.
He probably tried talking to me as well. We had no idea what the other was saying
anyway.
And that
was fine. That was, in fact,
perfect. I wasn't exactly in a position
to be having riveting conversations with anyone. Teppei knew that. It wasn't a secret that I didn't understand
Japanese. It didn’t get in the way of
our friendship, though.
Our friendship was built on a
different language: play.
We had
baseball and we had board games. I was
on the baseball team, and brought my glove to prepare for the upcoming
season. Teppei was a baseball player,
too, and we played a lot of catch in the street. We did calligraphy together, and while I
don't remember what I wrote (it was terrible and I threw it away as soon as I
got home), Teppei's katakana
rendition of "Seattle Mariners" would hang in my room for years to
come. Baseball was an important part of
our friendship, but when I think of Teppei the first word that comes to mind is
"Othello,” the board game he carried into my room one day. He sat me down, taught me the rules, and then
proceeded to beat me every time. Mizuki
came in and beat me once or twice. They
had a dog, and if we had played I’m sure he would have beaten me too. I didn't represent America well, but I was
fine with that. It was enough to even be
participating.
When I
arrived home from school, I noticed that there were two futons on the floor of
my room. One of them was Teppei's. The last two nights of my stay were slumber
parties.
Teppei and I couldn't really communicate
but somehow we managed to become friends.
On my last day, the whole family took me to the train station. I can still remember watching Teppei cry. My host mother might have cried too, but I’m
sure it was out of relief.
The Illusion of Fate
What should come next is a
confession. That on that day – my last
day - I truly fell in love with Japan.
That on the plane home I swore to myself that when I graduated from
college I would move to Japan and live there forever. That my future was set and it would be festooned
with cherry blossoms.
If I said
that, though, I would be lying.
I loved
Kyoto because it matched my expectations of what Japan would be. My high school Japanese classroom was an
incredibly appealing place. The kanji on
the walls together with the haphazard placement of a few rice-paper screens
made me feel like I had gone somewhere. Kyoto felt like an extension of my classroom,
and I loved it.
I wasn’t so
sure about the rest of the country, though.
The rest of the country just made me feel dumb.
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