Kyle Mizokami's Open Salon Blog

Japanese-y IV : Memory and Betrayal

Tue, 3 Mar 2009 16:03:57 -0500

Five classes into my reintroduction to Japanese, I’m learning some interesting things. Some of these things have very little to with the language, but rather the process of learning. I’d been out of the learning game that I’d forgotten that the subject matter isn’t the only thing you learn in school--you also learn quite a bit about yourself. Thing such as, you know, how much you can look like a prick when congratulating yourself against the backdrop of a family in existential crisis.

First of all, I’m really learning Japanese. I really can say some useful things, and I can pick familiar words and phrases out when watching Japanese news clips and TV shows on YouTube. I started doing this because Japanese is naturally spoken quite fast, and I’m learning to read and speak it quite slowly. Unless I train my ear to hearing it how it’s normally spoken, on the streets of Japan I’m just not going to be able to keep up.

I can understand maybe one common word in fifty. That’s not great, but it’s better than what I could understand three months ago, which was absolutely nothing. Hearing that one familiar word or phrase is still a new feeling, and it’s like striking a little bit of gold. Just the other day I experienced a great feeling of accomplishment when I picked out the word for lawyer (“bengoshi”) from a TV clip about a girl and her family who risked being deported from Japan, so much so that I momentarily forgot about her plight. There I was, high-fiving myself and laughing, while on my computer screen a very somber filipino family brooded, the girl looking like she was about to face a firing squad, speaking impeccable Japanese about how her bengoshi was advising her on a last-ditch effort to remain in the country.

I can still memorize things. I am immensely pleased at this bit of good news. I want to shout it from rooftops. I hardly try to remember anything anymore. Computers, PDAs, cell phones, and even cars do all your remembering for you. You don’t have to remember exactly what was said on the Internet it--get the gist, and bookmark the page. Scan, scan, scan. Come back later for clarification. I hardly remember anything I read on the Internet, but I have it bookmarked somewhere.

I have flash cards to thank for my memorizing. Flash cards really do work. I have about thirty words and phrases to remember a week, and it’s been seven weeks now. I memorize them all, and I have about 80% retention after 24 hours. Whether any of it settles in remains to be seen. Regardless, I consider this all very good progress indeed for someone in his mid-thirties.

Past Japanese classes have proved very useful in advancing learning. It’s like finding an old road and deciding to build a new road on top of it. I have a background in everything we’ve learned so far, of varying familiarity. It all helps, a little bit. I did, however, learn of a rather large, gaping hole in my understanding of the language. I knew words such as “otosan” (father) or “okasan” (mother), but apparently those terms could only be used to describe individuals outside my own family. I was astonished to discover that there is a whole different set of words used to refer to members of your own family.

I sat at my place at the table, silently rocked by this revelation. What the hell? I learned the words for family members in elementary school, then again in high school. I trusted the school system to give me a honest education. Why would they have taught me, all those years ago, how to speak about any family but my own? It didn’t make sense, but apparently that was exactly what happened.

This was bullshit.

I remained at my seat, struggling to remain calm. After a few minutes of befuddlement and anger, I resigned myself to the situation. There was no explaining the past, only dealing with the present. I would roll with the punches. It was to be expected that there would be two, or perhaps three words for mother. I thought up tricks for remembering these new words.

“chichi” (father): I thought of my father as a Puerto Rican golfer wearing a pork pie hat.

“haha” (mother): I pictured my mother laughing.

“ane”’/”ani” (older brother/other sister): There is a Takeshi Kitano movie where one of the main characters calls his older brother “ani”. This was at a time when I was not too interested in things Japanese, and saw it because it was a Yakuza movie set in Los Angeles, and co-starred Omar Epps. There’s a great scene where Kitano nearly gouges Epps’ eyeball with a broken bottle. Then they become friends.

“Ane” becomes much easier to remember when you can remember “ani”, which you remember because of Omar Epps.

“ototo”/”imoto” (younger brother/sister): I thought of a younger brother stubbing his toe on a door. I thought of a little girl on a motorcycle.

“otto” (my husband): I thought about Otto von Bismarck--him being the only person named Otto I could think of--and imagined him with his wife.

“tsuma” (my wife): This sounds like nothing in the Western world. Nothing could help me with this. I was on my own.

“musume” (daughter): I thought of a little girl eating Muslix.

“musuko” (son): I had a slight problem with this. “Musuko” sounded feminine. I’ve known a lot of Japanese girls over the years whose names end with “ko”. There was a certain disconnect here. So...I remembered this as the one with the ironic disconnect.

There. Memorized. Done. No matter what else would happen, what miscarriage of learning occurred in the past, I wouldn’t be stopped. I would laugh, make light of it, and crush it. Next.

I would crush it all. In possibly the last attempt to learn a language of my life, I will not fail. I will, as a matter of fact, prevail. I will draw on the entirety of my personal experience, from Otto von Bismarck to Omar Epps, to claim it.

Japanese is mine.

Japanese-y, Part III.

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:02:37 -0500

On the first day of class, I was one of the few people who openly copped to having even the slightest familiarity with Japanese.

We sat in the classroom, tables arranged in a U shape, regarding each other and the books and papers in front of us. The teacher breezed in and then took a seat facing us She introduced herself and then after a quick self-biographical sketch to break the ice, asked if anyone else had ever taken Japanese before. Only a few of us admitted to it, the rest looking like their sergeant just asked for volunteers for a suicide mission.

Other than myself there was J., who had already taken the beginning conversation class in the same program, and whose eagerness to answer questions in class was quickly tempered by the not-too-obvious differences between conversational and written Japanese. Three incorrect answers and he suddenly lost his urge to shoot his hand up and answer every question. For my part, I made an ambiguous, partially affirmatory gurgling noise deep in my throat that admitted to nothing, but which could be interpreted as being slightly familiar to an unspecified extent with the language.

It was obvious that more than half the class had indeed studied the language before, in public school. Many accents were already practiced and many students seem to be picking up an entirely new alphabet awfully fast. I could pick out which students were from San Francisco--where the public schools have a language requirement--and I knew that Asian students gravitate to the Asian languages.

I remember how the game was played--if it’s been a really long time, admit to nothing, because the alternative is to risk being inserted into the system above your comprehension level. Teachers always think you know more than you really do know. This is what happened to me in high school--my high school teacher thought I knew more Japanese than I really did, and she expected more from me. Which she had certain grounds to--after all, she had also been my third grade teacher in the same public school program. But she overestimated what I knew, and I spent an entire year of her saying and thinking, “come on, you know this,” when I honestly did not. I spent a year in high school wishing she had frozen to death on the slopes of Mount Whitney.

Only a handful of people seemed to be genuinely starting from square one the way my wife was. Some people pronounced Japanese words the way the way they might be pronounced in Chinese, which, considering they speak English with Chinese accents, is not all that surprising. One student in particular was completely baffled not only by the character system, but the fact that characters stood for syllables, not individual words. We silently rooted for her, especially when she struggled with the pronunciation, but she disappeared after the first class. It’s possible she’s taking the class on a Wednesday or Saturday instead. Or maybe she’s not.

The teacher asked for a show of hands of people who had been to Japan. On this, my hand also rose up straight and proud. Hell yes. There were about four of us.

The teacher herself is quite good. She’s native Japanese, from Chiba province--wherever that is. Her English is accented, but quite intelligible. Oddly enough, sometimes she speaks English and it sounds like she has no accent at all, in these unguarded moments that last a second or so. It’s quite bizarre. Endlessly enthusiastic, at times it seems she’s adopted the persona of a talk show host. She would be very good at it--she’s engaging and keeps the class moving along at a steady clip.

Our classmates are very eager to learn, friendly, and encouraging. Why they’re here is an interesting question, one I wish the teacher had asked. Why are any of us here paying to learn such a difficult foreign language? I’ve already identified the guy with the Japanese girlfriend at home. He’s never said it, but it’s obvious and he finally alluded to it last night. Otaku and anime nerds? Her..and maybe him, although he might be a serial killer instead. Class polyglot? Over there.

There’s a low pressure attitude in adult classes I’m only now picking up on. I have to keep in mind that the class is strictly voluntary, and that unlike college, everyone has to have a reason to be here. People provide their own motivation. People are treated like adults, and there’s less pressure to learn. You won’t be chided in front of the rest of class for not doing your homework, but you’re an adult, so you did it anyway.

Thanks to my previous attempts to learn Japanese I only have to dust off what I used to know to get me through the first two classes. I pick up the first twenty hiragana characters easily--after all, I knew them back and forth more than 20 years ago. Writing them was like using a muscle I had not moved for decades--the first results were quite painful and embarrassing, but the more I worked at it the more the old skill came back--as well as the bad penmanship habits. The rediscovery and resumption of old habits, as though I had been doing them all along, is a bit eerie.

More valuable than old memories though, previous attempts have laid a groundwork for the current learning experience that is really useful. Japanese doesn’t sound alien and exotic--it sounds like a language I should know. Familiarity--I don’t look at hiragana and think, “Isn’t that one odd? It looks like a goldfish!” The cadence of the language, vowel/consonant/vowel/consonant/, as well as the accents are all coming back. Much like a construction site that was torched and then abandoned after the foundation was laid, it’s easier to build upon all of this than nothing at all.

Week 5 and the difficulty is definitely ramping up. It is getting harder, no question. And as it gets harder I have to make a decision: am I truly serious about this or not? This weekend I contemplate learning to count to the thousands. Not that hard. But deeper down the rabbit hole I go, and as I watch the TV news feeds from Japan, I notice that world opening up just a tiny bit.

Japanese-y. Part II.

Mon, 2 Feb 2009 16:02:02 -0500

[Part II about the decision my wife and I made to start taking Japanese language classes.]

A few days before our first class we bought our books at a local bookstore. It was when it dawned on me that I was going to pay $80 for textbooks I realized I was going back to school again, and that this class, which I had originally thought of in purely theoretical terms, was actually going to happen. I really was going to make another go at learning Japanese.

Learning Japanese always seemed so daunting and hard. The second time I tried to learn, I was in high school at the time and I was satisfying a language requirement, nothing more. I was taking Japanese because someone I never met decided that I should learn a language I would never use, something I was fully aware of. Japanese was the hardest thing I ever tried to do, and I was just not motivated.

The difference this time around is that I am motivated--I do want to learn. Unlike previous attempts this is not a purely academic requirement, and I don’t resent doing it at all; it was all my idea. I do intend to use it, to actually talk to people and find my way around Tokyo on a daily basis, researching a book. That’s the plan, anyway.

There were two books to purchase for class, a textbook and a workbook. The textbook was published by The Japan Times, a black and white book that in many ways resembled the book I used in high school, particularly the black and white illustrations. Browsing the textbook, it became clear that we were going to learn so-called “romaji” for class. “Romaji” is term invented for Japanese written phonetically using the Latin alphabet. We could bypass--for now, anyway--learning the entire 50+ hiragana character alphabet, the most elementary of the Japanese alphabets, before learning anything else.

This always seemed to me to be the more reasonable way of learning Japanese. We could pursue the dual track process of learning hiragana and learning words and phrases simultaneously. Instead of waiting for three weeks to learn the hiragana for “neko” (cat), we could just write neko. It took the pressure off memorizing the characters as the keys to learning the language and applied it more evenly to learning characters, grammar, and verbal skills.

The workbook was locally produced by the school and showed--to my relief--just how elementary the class was going to be: the two basic alphabets, hiragana and katakana, and that was it. Inexplicably, many empty spaces in it are filled with cartoonish anti-smoking messages. They’re a bit demented but as a distraction they’re far from unwelcome. In some ways, it makes it feel even more Japanese.

On the first night of class I left the house with my schoolbooks and, since the school was less than a mile away, made a walk out of it. I found the building, located in an alley in a residential neighborhood a short distance from San Francisco’s Japantown. I let myself in and instantly recognized that first day of class feel--the bustle, people trying to find their way around, a slight whiff of apprehension everywhere. I located the classroom on the second floor and went inside.

No wife--she’s probably looking for parking. I nod to Sam, part of a couple we are taking the class with, and find a place for my wife and I to sit. The room is small, and the tables are arranged in a U shape, with one table at the head. It’s a small class, with room for only about twelve people at most.

The atmosphere is weirdly tense and a bit awkward, just like the first day of class always is. There’s no reason why nobody shouldn’t talk, but nobody does. The silence is uncomfortable and a bit oppressive. This is college, or high school, all over again. It’s always the same.

Nothing else to do, I stare at my notebook, idly straightening my pile of books and papers. I think. Let’s have this work out. Please. I need to know that I can do this. This would be a big mid-life win.

Three minutes after the hour the teacher breezes in and class starts.

“Mr. President, time is short, and the enemy has blue hair.”

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:01:21 -0500

Mr. President, thank you for seeing me on such short notice, and so early into your term.

I've been with DHS for about three years now, sir. Yes sir, that's right, I'm one of those guys that does cultural analysis work. Oh! Of course you can read on my badge! I forgot I had it on. Says it right there, doesn't it? Ha! Ha. (Oh boy.)

There, it's uh, straight now. You know you really can't tell with these things unless you stand in front of a--

The job? Why yes sir, I like it very much, sir. It's a tough job, but someone has to secure our cultural borders. Which is exactly why I'm here, actually. Mr. President, we've detected a threat to American culture, and--yes, it is, sir. It's quite serious.

I understand you are busy, and I promise you, the importance of this issue will bear out your seeing me.

Which brings me to the reason why I’m here! Mr. President, I understand that you are a comic book fan, and--

But!

Mr. Pres--!

But!

Yes sir. I did say the subject of this meeting is serious. Please hear me out.

Mr, President, I understand you collect Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comic books. "Collected"--yes, of course. I doubt any other presidential library will have such a unique contribution.

You know the exquisite treasure that America has in it's comic book traditions. These are American comics, written by Americans, with American values, and...yes sir, I'm quite aware that Conan is a Cimmerian, not an American. My point is that he's a staple of American fantasy and exhibits classical American virtues--he's strong, independent to the point of being a loner, a hard worker. A kind of cowboy for Hyboria, wouldn't you say. I knew you would!

Mr. President, sixty four years ago, we won the Second World War. We triumphed against the Axis Powers, and severely curtailed their ability to wage war. Um. Yes, you're quite right: except for Italy, but we believe that problem to be a self-regulating.

Or rather, we thought we did. Since the 1980s, we have been under an assault of escalating intensity from The Empire of--I mean, Japan. Yes, Japan.

No sir, I have never smoked crack cocaine before in my life. I wouldn't know what it looked like!

Mr. President, have you ever heard of "anime"?

Anime is a Japanese word derived from the English word animation. It describes Japanese animation, or rather a particular, and most peculiar, style of it. It is as sinister a cultural threat to America that you’ll find out there.

It’s...well, anime difficult to describe. Visually, it’s a very unique style. Angular faces, big hair, and eyes like teacup saucers. Everyone looks like a scowling teenager, but when they think of something kawai--that’s cute in Japanese--they giggle and look like toddlers.

Thematically it’s women in maid costumes with blue hair and ridiculously large breasts. Giant robots with swords. Lots of space ships. Lots of magic. Powers. Lasers. High kicking.

Anime has established a beachhead in the United States. Have you heard of Pokemon? Dragonball Z? Akira? It’s on the Sci-Fi channel. It’s on the Cartoon Network. There are even conventions dedicated to anime that attract thousands of people every year. There are even Americans that..hold on, let me find the photographs.

There are even Americans, such as those you see here, who dress like their favorite anime characters. It’s called...cosplay. Yes sir, these photos were all taken in the United States by our HUMINT assets. This photo? Yes sir, Washington state is pretty close to Canada, you’re right. They could indeed be Canadians visiting. I pray they are. But the next photos are from Kansas City, Chicago, St. Louis...the Heartland, Mr. President. The Heartland of the homeland.

Mr. President, I’m from St. Louis, and when I was young enough to be into such things, we dressed up as Star Trek characters, and not as some blue-haired freakjob with eyes the size of softballs and a laser samurai sword! I...I can’t imagine what has happened back there. No, I haven’t gone back. I--can’t go back. My family? I’ll just have to visit them when all of this is over.

Cosplay. Just saying it makes my spine freeze.

I don’t know, Mr. President. It’s hard to say how all this happened. Bush and his people, I could never their attention. They would always ask, “Does it have to do with Al Qaeda?” Well duh, of course it doesn’t!

It’s never that simple. Anime is a different kind of problem. It’s all so subtle. It’s hard to even say what the objection to it is--even by me--just that on a certain level, it just seems so wrong.

And let’s consider a moment the cultural displacement. There is only a finite amount of media out there. It’s like an invasive species that comes into an ecosystem and then strangles the natives. Nobody thinks purple-haired cartoon characters are a problem until one day you turn around and realize it’s been a decade since you saw Bugs Bunny.

Would you like to know our policy recommendations for dealing with this threat?

Well, it’s complicated. This is Japan we’re talking about, one of our largest trading partners, and a key defense and foreign policy ally in Asia. We rely on them as a counterweight to the Chinese. No, sir, the Chinese have nothing comparable to anime.

As a result whatever actions we take on this cannot involve economic sanctions or other actions that may impact our trade.

Yes sir, there is also the Free Speech issue. We can’t outlaw anime. We can’t arrest cosplay dressers. We can’t do a thing about it on our own shores.

That leaves us with only one possible recourse: expeditionary warfare. More specifically, the use of our nuclear arsenal.

We believe that a single nuclear warhead, tuned to a 1 kiloton explosive yield will solve the anime predicament. We propose the target as the Tokyo district of Akihabara, the spiritual home of anime. Destroy the head of the octopus and the body dies, especially the part that has infiltrated America.

One surgical, tactical strike with strategic consequences, and we’re back to Star Trek and Daffy Duck.

Blowback? Mr. President, the Japanese will probably never know what hit them. Yes sir, I understand they have a really good idea what a nuke going off is like. But the yield of the bomb will be so small, they won’t even suspect a nuke. They’ll probably think that a gas line exploded. A couple of them. Okay. Maybe a dozen.

Well, sir, that’s my hour. Thank you for seeing me, Mr. President. I hope you’ll take our recommendations under consideration, we worked on them for a long time.

Oh! It's okay--I'm fine. It’s no problem, sir, my kids leave toys lying around the house all the time. Well, what do we have here?

Mr. President, do these belong to your daughters?

Mr. President! We have to get out of here! The Secret Service, we have to evac--

Easy, peasy...what was that again? Japanese, Part I.

Thu, 8 Jan 2009 17:01:52 -0500

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.