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.

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.

Love and a Twenty-Sided Die

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:12:31 -0500

The other day, puttering around in the project room with my wife, I bent down to pick up the contents of a small plastic organizer I had knocked over. A number of small wargame counters from the game "Port Stanley: Battle for the Falklands" had spilled out of the organizer all over the floor, and I wanted to pick them up before the cat took to chewing them. Royal Marines, a Pucara air unit, HMS Fearless, and a grab bag of Argentine infantry units had scattered across the old, dirty rug.

The counters and other things in the cabinet were the last artifacts from another age. They were twenty five years old, and holdovers from the days when I used to play wargames and role playing games, usually by myself. I couldn't bear to throw them away, and I probably never would. From every evaporated interest of mine I keep something--my paintball gun, my fishing rods, an old Apple laptop that I can't even power up anymore. I like having them around, as reminders of old passions, though they do tend to clutter the place up a bit.

I opened the cabinet doors, inspecting the contents. I pulled open one drawer and found I had discovered the Dungeons and Dragons dice drawer, filled with a number of brightly colored, jewel-like dice. These were relics from junior high school, during my time as a Dungeon Master. A Dungeon Master's dice collection was a symbol and extension of his authority, and I had a good collection.

The relics were semi-secret. I had mixed feelings about my past involvement in Dungeons and Dragons. Ten years ago, admitting that you were once into D&D was irredeemably tainting. Like the fact that you were an enthusiastic participant in orgies, it was not something you told women. Now, for some reason, it's cool to admit that you were once a D&D gamer. I have no idea why, but suspect Judd Apatow and his movies have had something to do with it.

I placed a finger in the tray and gave the pieces a good rattle. Protected from dust and dirt, they looked like they did the last time I used them...sometime in the mid-Eighties, probably while listening to Phil Collins tapes. It actually looked like I had just put them away.

Most of the dice were made from clear, brightly-colored plastic. Four-sided die were pyramid-shaped--each facet had three numbers, each number pointed in one of three directions. Six sided die--well, you know. Eight sided resembled two four-sided glued back to back. Ten and twelve looked like cheap, sparkling jewels. Twenty and thirty sided dice resembled buckyballs. I still had them all. Numbers were carved into each facet, and highlighted by using crayons of contrasting colors to fill in the number and make it really stand out. I never thought of myself as much of a decorator, but you don't want to know how much time I agonized over what crayon color looked best against ruby-red clear plastic.

I sat on the floor and idly pawed the pieces. I thought about the times when I used to play these games. I had never not been into girls--I'd had a huge crush in kindergarten on a half-Okinawan girl whose father had been in the Air Force. That really did nothing for my socialization around them--I was awkward around girls for decades. Games like these were their own entertainment, of course, but they were also a way to distract myself from the fact that there were girls out there. There were times when, wallowing in hormone-fueled self-pity, I would listlessly push cardboard counters around a map of islands in the South Atlantic wondering if I would ever find someone.

"Here, take this." I said, picking up a twenty sided die and putting it in my wife's hand. Clear and colorless, with strong black numbering, it had been used to compute innumerable fates in mortal combat against owlbears, orcs, and wolf-gods, divine how many pieces of gold should be in found treasure chests, and generally used to wow other gamers.

"You want to give me this?" My wife asked, slightly confused.

"Yep," I said. It felt like a sweet gesture, and it was. But it was a repudiation of all past doubts and uncertainties. Of all those times when I commiserated with Phil listening to that album where his face looks like a big, sweaty orange. It was planting a big nerd flag in the palm of my wife's hand, claiming her and our future together. It was a motivational YouTube video I wanted to show to every geeky, awkward kid out there who was a younger version of myself. Hold onto your dice, boys, and wait for this moment that I had.