This month, for the third time in as many decades, I'll be trying to learn Japanese again.

Last Spring my wife and I spent a week in Tokyo as part of our honeymoon. I picked Japan as place abroad that was reasonably friendly to Americans, politically stable (my brother had been in Kenya during the recent unpleasantness), could be reached with a nonstop flight, and had plenty of things to see and do. Japan was a safe place where we were assured we could get around without speaking the local language.

What I discovered during my week's stay was that Tokyo was like a gigantic, never-ending bowl of delicious, brightly colored candy that I could not stop eating, a combination of Manhattan, Las Vegas, and Skittles. We would shoot across town on the subway and swoop down on various sights and attractions, to be regaled, amused, and occasionally baffled by the wonder that is the capital of Japan.

Early on in our trip we decided we'd some day return. I decided that coming back and writing about Japan would be a great book project. My take on Japan would be somewhat different, and my background would allow me to be a bit more blunt. It would be a Brysonesque saga of an American dog-paddling through a foreign land.

There's just one problem: I can't speak Japanese. I've tried twice and failed, once in elementary school, and once in high school. Disgusted, I vowed at the end of high school that I would never try to learn it again.

The legacy of failure is that I have some level of comprehension of Japanese, roughly similar to the way an ant can comprehend an elephant. I can understand maybe one word in a thousand, words that occasionally that my memory dusts off and says, slightly amused with itself, "hey, I know this, it says 'mountain'". You can imagine how often you see or hear the word "mountain" in Tokyo, on the Kanto Plain, or on the menu in an Izakaya, or trying to figure out the instructions printed on a Japanese toilet. I know so little Japanese at times I'd be better off if I knew none at all.

 I briefly considered trying to write the book without trying to learn Japanese again, but I worried that too many jokes would be a variation on, "...but I couldn't understand what was going on." The book would be much more interesting if my Japanese existed at some point on the continuum between ignorance and fluency, at least a little farther down the line from where I am right now. It would be even more interesting if I was fluent.

It was time to break the vow and go back to school.

Being in Japan as a Japanese American is a little funny at first, because suddenly you're surrounded by people who, at first glance, look a lot like you. You don't stand out too much, except your clothing (the English on your t-shirt actually makes sense.) Gradually, the differences become apparent: you notice they don't act like you, they don't walk like you, you're a little bit fatter than them.

The most obvious difference is internal: you have no idea what anyone is saying. (That is, unless the word "mountain" is involved.) In your mind, walking down the streets of Japan and looking at billboards, magazines, and monument plaques, and eavesdropping on the conversations of strangers, part of you thinks, and all of you wishes, that there must be some mistake, and that you should be able to understand this stuff. You think that surely some button must exist, somewhere, either on your skin or in your biochemistry, that would allow you to understand everyone. It particularly feels that way when watching old episodes of Star Trek in your hotel room, where William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy have been dubbed into Japanese. Overnight, even Kirk and Spock, among your oldest friends, have now become incomprehensible.

You wish there was some easy way to do it. You wish there was a switch, or pill, that would grant you understanding. Please, let me commence with the hilarity now. I'm so ready to start writing. It'll be good, I promise. Let me make ironic commentary on a society that is completely irony free.

In Norse mythology, the hero Sigurd slays the dragon Fafnir and is then able to understand the language of birds. That sounds pretty good to me. I'm not saying that slaying a dragon would be easier than learning Japanese for the third time at the age of 37...no, that's exactly what I am saying. 

So next week I'll be sitting in that chair, for the third time, next to my wife, struggling to learn Japanese yet again. This time I really do want to learn, not just fulfill a language requirement, and I'll have her to turn flash cards with. I hope my memory holds, I hope my enthusiasm doesn't flag, and I hope I can forget about the failures of the past. And if I can get just a little bit farther down the line than I am now, I know with certainty that alien world of 120 million people promises to open up just a little bit more to those willing to dog-paddle it.

I also hope that unlike Signur, none of the Japanese people I'll be able to talk to tells me to kill anybody.