RedheadedGaijin's Open Salon Blog

How to Be a Smartass in Japanese

Fri, 3 Apr 2009 21:04:04 -0400

I have been in Tokyo for almost a month now, and my English is already starting to suffer.

Not in the sense that I'm forgetting it, but it's starting to mutate into my own butchered version of the language. Just the other day I mistakenly refered to the English language like so: "It's written in American."

Though I still speak English with my friends in the program or my family on the phone, lately, much of my life has been in Japanese. I was placed with a wonderful family in the ward of Nerima, and the best English spoken in the house is the father, who can read written English but oftentimes doesn't understand it. He peppers his sentences with the words he remembers: "Fantasitc!" "Beautiful!" "Molester!" (The last one is my fault. He might not have latched onto it had I not laughed so hard.)

When I learned that my host family didn't speak any English, I was excited as the prospect of improving my Japanese so much, but something else occurred to me. Was it possible to assert my personality in a foreign language?

Much of who I am back home relies on words. Keeping sarcastic running commentaries on everything from classes to TV shows, using vocabulary that makes me cringe later at my own pretentiousness - what was I going to be if not a smartass?

And not only that, but I was told, in great detail, by everyone from the study abroad office to my exchange program, what I should expect from "Japanese culture." That it was a quiet, subdued place, where people always sacrificed their individuality for the sake of the group. That the father was always the boss of the family, the mother was little more than a servant for her husband, and children are never allowed to be children. I had prepared myself to separate my American identity from my Japanese one, and observe all the niceties and set phrases I had learned in class.

Instead, I found a family who might not fly in the face of these cultural traditions, but are nowhere near as cold and forbidding as the textbooks would have had me think. The father is your typical Japanese "salaryman," but I think there are few things he enjoys more than taking abuse from his wife and daughters. The mother does her fair share of chores, but works as a professional piano player, and her husband makes us dinner once a week when she has her late night gigs. The girls have their responsibilites, from piano to ballet, but they have no less fun than any kid I've ever met.

In the company of these people, I've found it's much easier to express myself than I thought. I've probably talked the most with the father: when we're not riffing off of each other, he loves to discuss cultural differences, and he's always interested to hear more about what things are like for me. I love playing with the girls, and the older one especially wants to learn more English. And just the other night, after asking me about my love life, the mother admitted that Japan's attitude towards women is not ideal, and that women are looked down on for working after they have children. "But," she said, with a fond grin for the man she spends most of her time teasing, "he said that he would support me in whatever I chose."

Of course, just because I express myself doesn't mean I haven't made adjustments for the culture I'm living in. I don't talk loudly in public, especially not in English. I walk on the very edge of the sidewalk so bikes don't have to swerve around me. I spend the majority of my day on the train, sandwiched between four anxious salarymen. And when I go back to America, it's going to be very strange, living without "Ittekimasu," "Tadaima," "Ittedakimasu," "Gochisousamadeshita," and a nice hot bath at the end of the day.

But from now on, I think I'm going to be wary of anyone who tries to explain to me what "Japanese culture" is.

Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection...

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 13:02:31 -0500

So as I get ready to go on my trip (only three more days!) I have been nudged into posting some of my writing here. Believe me, I'm far more terrified than you are.

But I guess this works. For the Open Call, I was going to make a post about how I was addicted to writing, but who wants to read people's Thoughts on Writing when they're not written by Stephen King? And one of the most important tenets of writing is "show, don't tell" after all.

So here's a short poem I wrote a few years ago. I didn't know which one to post, so I started with the one I've won money off of. I also posted a gorgeous illustration that my friend Laura Laurain did for me after reading this poem at the beginning of the post. Enjoy!

Narcissus

Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection
on the shores of San Francisco, even when
fully aware of the difficulties involved
in pulling him out of the water
and coaxing him into a church.
He can't promise his reflection sickness and health
when health is a scarce commodity,
he's stuck with clandestine candlelit dinners
because people are starting to talk,
slipping him the phone numbers of normal girls
rather than watery illusions,
but he doesn’t have the willpower to
walk past mirrors and shop windows
and keep his eyes tightly shut.
They can't be bound together
through life and death and paperwork,
not when gods and goddesses only
regard one as real, and the other
as some unattainable fantasy
who watches from the water,
worrying that some day
Narcissus will evaporate.

The First of Many Japan Posts

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:02:25 -0500

Okay, confession time: I lied in my bio. Twice. I'm not actually 21 until next month, for one. I was just rounding up so I wouldn't have to change it later.

And I'm not actually "currently" studying in Japan. I leave a week from tomorrow. Again with the rounding up! But you can hardly blame me for being a little impatient; I've been waiting for this for a long time. (Japan, that is. Not that finally being able to go to Dave and Buster's unattended isn't exciting in its own right.)

This isn't the first time I've been to Japan. I traveled to Tokyo three years ago. It was a high school graduation present. It also should have been the worst vacation ever. Imagine going overseas with a feuding mother and daughter and a recently broken-up couple as your traveling companions. Then imagine them declaring that you'll all have to stay together at all times because, in the words of the aforementioned mother, you might be kidnapped and sold into a "white slavery ring." Add in some truly poor planning and about $500 in traveler's checks that no one would exchange, and it had all the makings of a truly painful trip.

It should have been, but it wasn't.

On our fifth day of traveling, we took a "bullet train" from Tokyo to Kyoto for a day trip. I would have preferred to stay in the old capital longer, but my traveling companions insisted that we could get the Kyoto experience within a few hours. When we got hopelessly turned around in the city, I learned that it was, in fact, possible to lose a five story pagoda.

After an embarrassingly public argument over whether 200 yen (about $2.00 at that point) was too much to spend on public transportation, I convinced everyone to get on a bus to Gion, the historic district. When we stepped off the bus, I was surprised at how empty the streets were; I had been expecting more tourists, at least. But our timing wasn't the best. The cherry blossoms were long gone, and the famous Gion Festival wouldn't be for another week.

We wandered into the first shrine we saw, and the grounds were even quieter and emptier. The only sign of life was the undisturbed line of shoes by the entrance. Here, I finally had a chance to wander off alone, and I climbed the hill in back to get a better view of the grounds:

When I came back down, I found the group again in the shrine's gift shop, asking the monk working there about the meaning of the omamori, or brightly colored charms with very specific purposes. He pointed to each one and explained its meaning - safety in travel, proficiency in exams, luck in love. Each of my friends snatched the red and orange love charm, giggling that they sorely needed it.

After they had wandered away, I approached him, and picking up the green and yellow charm, I asked him in halting Japanese, "I'm sorry, what did this one mean?"

He smiled at me, replying in English. "Your Japanese is very good." I knew he was flattering me, but I blushed anyway. "This is for happiness."

I smiled back, and held onto it. Happiness sounded like a good option.

"Do you like it here?" he continued.

"It's beautiful," I told him, examining the travel charm as well. "I wish I didn't have to leave so soon."

"Then you'll return here," he told me, with a lot more confidence than I had in the idea.

As it turned out, he was right.

A Super Freak's Love for Little Miss Sunshine

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 14:02:31 -0500

Out of all the movies I've seen, I've related to quite a few of them. But the ones that really stick in my mind are the ones with themes that speak to my own experiences. When I went to see Little Miss Sunshine, I had just moved back to the area I grew up in to enter college - I hadn't lived in Florida quite long enough to make any lasting friendships, but it was plenty long enough to fall out of touch with my childhood friends. There were few things I understood better than the awkwardness of starting from scratch.

It was appropriate, then, that Little Miss Sunshine is a movie about just that. I watched just about every character lost just about everything, whether it was their job, their dream for the future, or the things they thought defined their identity.

The movie could have easily left things there; there have been many powerful, award-winning movies that chronicle the descent of their characters into misery and decay. I've always squirmed through those movies, but with my film buff friends throwing around phrases like "the truth of the human condition" to describe them, I never tried to argue.

But Little Miss Sunshine goes a step beyond stripping everything away from its characters: it lets them start over. Even though not a single one of them gets what they want, the movie gives them a triumphant ending anyway. And as an unabashed optimist, I think that's much more truthful.

Message aside, the execution was absolutely perfect. I admire and envy the writing, and the way it could play a plot point for drama in one scene and laughs in another without giving me whiplash. ("Where's your grandpa now?" "In the trunk of our car!") The actors brought the characters to life wonderfully. While my favorite was Steve Carrell's Frank, I'm impressed at Paul Dano's ability to make me adore Dwayne, who I would probably want to slap in real life. The family's broken down van is practically a character itself, and I'm mad that I didn't think of it first.

Though I'm long past the uncertainty of my freshman year of college, Little Miss Sunshine is still an important movie to me. Rewatching it always reminds me that while starting over is terrifying, it isn't impossible.