Multibabel

So I’m in the middle of an internet drought, and I think I’m dying from it.

It seems that, on average, it takes at least two months to get internet set up in Japan. I have been without it for about one month, and I can‘t even comprehend one more month like this. My cell phone has become somewhat of substitute, albeit a poor one, but it only keeps me loosely connected. But beyond that, I never truly realized how much I relied on it for entertainment until I have been without it for a extensive amount of time. So for that reason, I have found a considerable lack of things for me to do in my apartment when I get home from work. I have tried Japanese television, which despite being unintentionally hilarious, can get old after awhile. Then I tried DVDs, but a limited supply keeps me restricted. So now as I stumble in from work, I long for some form of entertainment as I cook dinner. But worst of all, the lack of fast internet in and of itself is an inconsistency for me. A country that has such advanced technology and internet, even going so far as to get television on the cheapest of cell phones, can’t get me a decent internet connection in a short amount of time.

But such a situation may in fact be a blessing in disguise. It’s impossible to blog and email as much as I would like, and I have no stupid TV during dinner, but I also find I try to entertain myself with much more fulfilling pursuits on my days off. Instead of sitting on my bed all day glued to a glowing screen, I am up and out of my apartment exploring. And in Nagoya, there is always something ridiculous and fascinating going on.

In a nutshell, when I’m out in Nagoya, I find myself constantly bombarded by three O’s: Outrageous Street Acts, Over-the-Top People, and Overwhelming Shopping Centers. And it would be easy to think that one would fade into the background against such situations, but gaijin in Nagoya are still enough of a novelty that I don’t. In fact, in some situations, I feel like I stand out, and are made to be somewhat of an ambassador of the Western world. Whether it be the young child who shyly turns towards his mother because I don’t look like any one he’s ever seen before, or the izukaya owner who speaks no English and yet greets us warmly with a bit of an awestruck smile, one cant help but remember that you are a minority here. I guess that over time it can get old, but for now I’m still somewhat pleasantly amused by it.

When I think of it, the term multibabel comes to mind; how nuances of meaning are lost in translation, but the general message remains the same. And in truth, I feel that’s what I have been experiencing. Things that are similar enough to connect us, and yet different enough to keep it interesting.

For example, I was out last weekend with a few people at a local western style bar. It draws an even crowd of foreigners and Japanese, and therefore is a cool place to go. Somehow, through happenstance, my group ended up trying to sit at the same table as a few Japanese men. After a few polite laughs and nervous shuffling, somehow we ended up sharing the table with them. Now one person in our group spoke poor Japanese, and one in their group spoke poor English, and yet somehow we spent the whole night together. We discussed, through gesture and broken language, topics varying from drinking to hanami to the Wutang clan (the rappers, not the martial artists), but half of the time our conversations broke into the international reaction to a language barrier: raised eyebrows and lots of laughter.

But then someone, by stroke of genius or dumb luck, brought up baseball. It was like all floodgates broke away. It didn’t matter that none of us really fully understood each other; we all understood baseball. A full ten minute conversation without a peep of incredulous laughter then erupted; we discussed the Nagoya Dragons as they shouted out famous Japanese players in the Major Leagues. Though it eventually degraded into screaming “Matsui” and then responding with cheering, it was an absolutely hilarious moment as it was going on.

And truthfully, since then I’ve discussed baseball several other times, and was even informed of all the differences between the American and Japanese baseball leagues by one student of mine. But there are a few other interesting cross cultural experiences I’ve had. Like the fact that Denny’s is everywhere in Japan and apparently way more delicious than the greasy grossness that is Denny’s in the states. I would even go as so far to call it amazing. Or even better, I have finally experienced Karaoke as it was meant to be.

On the day we signed our contracts, my training group decided to celebrate in one the most Japanese ways we could imagine. So that night, we wandered Sakae, found a huge JoyJoy karaoke in the downtown area, and rented ourselves a nice big room. And let me tell you, I finally understand the obsession.
You walk into the brightly colored building and pay a flat rate. This gets you a private room for karaoke, free drinks the entire time, and an endless amount of bad 80s rock ballads to keep the night going. Sitting in the dark karaoke room, surrounded by TV screens, tambourines, and drinks, you cant help but belt out every bad song that comes up on the screen. With an extensive list of English songs, it was like a catalogue of songs drunk white people like to sing. I swear, I have never sung so much Queen in my life. (Which I would like to have my Aunt know had the largest collection of songs of any band in the English language section, and I have heard them many a time in bars and department stores. She was right about how popular they were here.)

So as I go out and explore Japan, the biggest cross cultural experience of all is the one I undergo every day: my job.

Work is something I have been asked a few times to blog about, but in truth, it’s the only thing I haven’t really wanted to write about. It’s something that I experience every day; something that takes up so much of my time and thoughts, that in my free time, I want to think about other things. What Japan is like to live in, and what happens when I’m outside of the realm of teaching. Though there is one thing I will say for certain: I love this job.

I feel like I am being paid way too much to talk to people and play with kids. Of course they’re learning English, and I do structured lessons, but I try to make it fun enough for all my classes that it sometimes doesn’t feel like work. And yet at the same time I feel a certain pride in being a teacher, that I am helping someone else to learn something new. This realization was quite shocking for me, actually, and filled me with great respect for people who choose to be educators. The time flies effortlessly as I am wrapped up in teaching the nuances of the English language, and then I get home at the end of the day and am utterly drained from the output I had to put out.

Kids classes are phenomenal, and have become some of my favorite lessons to teach. They require the most prepartaion and energy, but I love rolling around with kids being stupid, so the work I put in seem entirely worth it. And on the whole, Japanese students are some of the most well-behaved and good natured kids I’ve ever met. Of course, generalizations are never true, and I’ve had a few kids classes with five 7-year-old boys who just want to wrestle and throw cushions at each other. But they are normal kids, and if the class degrades into that, I can always corral them by chasing them around the room a little and wearing them out. And the adults? Some of them are such interesting people with enough of a grasp of the English language to make for really entertaining discussions. Of course not every student designs robots or travels across most of southeast Asia, but if you can find a topic they are really interested in, they can go on about it for a long time, English skills be damned. They also ask questions about the intricacies of English that I myself never really considered. When I get a really thoughtful one, I feel like I’m learning a little more about English myself. I’ve never thought of all the subtle differences of my mother tongue, and I am constantly impressed by the insightful people who study English.

In fact, their drive and constant embarrassment at not speaking English well has really driven me to learn Japanese. When they apologize for messing up a sentence, I try to remind them that they speak English infinitely better than I do Japanese. It is a certain mentality that many English speakers have, unfortunately, that everyone should speak English around the world. But I get almost embarrassed that I know next to nothing of the language of Japan. So in my free time, I have been studying Japanese with a passion. I sit for about an hour each night and review my Japanese or do a few lessons on my Japanese program. And truth be told, I study for the fun of it, if not just the necessity. Japanese is infinitely simpler and at the same time much harder than English. And though speaking is difficult in and of itself, it is a masterable task. Reading and writing, on the other hand, are infinitely harder.

If you are not familiar with Japanese writing at all, there are two main alphabets. Kanji is the very difficult one with thousands of characters, and really, you must study for years to master. You need to know about 2,000 just to read the newspaper. The Kana, hiragana and katakana, conversely, only have about 60 characters total and are much easier to learn. This is the writing that is used on menus and signs and in most daily usage, and the one children learn before they move on to the more difficult kanji. It’s a phonetic alphabet used for Japanese words and loan words, and each character represents a sound in the word. So where as my street, Kurumamichi, only has two Kanji to represent it, in the Kana there are 5 characters, one for each sound (Ku-ru-ma-mi-chi). And that, my friends, is a simplistic and very short explanation of the very confusing writing system that surrounds me daily. Between the two, the Kana alphabets are much simpler and much more useful. I will never be able to read a book with Kana, but I will be ok with menus and food packages, so it is the writing I have been working on mastering.

Between the writing section on my Japanese lessons and workbooks I have purchased (Let’s Have fun with Kana! I’m serious, that is the title), I have been working on learning a few characters each day. And in truth, I’ve really enjoyed it. This last Saturday, as I got home really late from my shift, instead of going out, I stayed in and practiced my Kana for a few hours. And seriously, I had fun doing it. There is something so artistic about the characters that I feel more like I’m drawing then writing when I practice. At this point I only recognize a few characters in a long string, but when I do? Its very exciting.

For example, one of the first few words I learned was otokonoko, which means boy in Japanese. The kana are separated as o-to-ko-no-ko. The first time I read just the Kana and recognized the corresponding sounds and words? I was left exhilarated by the fact that I comprehended these foreign symbols. It must have been the same as when I was a child and realized for the first time that I could read things around me. And written out, the characters are almost like art. It was a thrilling experience, and the main reason I have really buckled down and started to study.

So now that I’ve sufficiently bored everyone with the intricacies of the Japanese writing system, this all goes back to my respect for the Japanese I am teaching and the fascination I have for the differences and similarities between them and ourselves. So I leave you with an interesting anecdote the illustrates this fascinating cultural exchange.

My first day teaching, I had a two hour lesson with a really low level English student. He was very driven, but the first hour completely dragged as I tried to get through a structured lesson and watched him struggle on the grammar. Being that it was a lesson designed for at least three students, my heart went out as he tried to do it, and I helped him as much as possible by breaking up the lesson with enthusiastic encouragement and trying to engage him in side topics. But even with this, at the end of the hour, we both were utterly drained.

Dreading another lesson, I returned after ten minutes with one in mind and steeled determination. But as he came back from the break, he simply sat down and placed in my hand his open diving license. Intrigued, I asked him about it, and his eyes lit up. Even though his English was very poor, using gestures, broken English, and lots of pictures on the white board, he painted a portrait to me of his many extreme sport adventures. It didn’t matter that we didn’t speak the same language, I spent an amazing hour with a really interesting person telling me all about his intense ski trips in Hokkaido where he hiked up the mountain before skiing down, and showing me photos of sharks and fish from scuba diving trips in Bali and Tahiti.

So no matter the differences, the seemingly insurmountable language barriers, we can always find a way to communicate to understand each other. So if you’re ever in Japan, don’t worry about being understood, because somehow you will make it work.

Or worse comes to worse, you could always bring up baseball.