white with foam

With six of the eight beginning Japanese sessions behind us, I feel the need to start drawing conclusions about the class, the language, the learning process, and the Japanese people. It’s true that reflecting on something so vast only exposes the paucity of all my vocabularies, and making some dumbass assertions would only seal the deal. At the same time, I know things I didn’t know in February. I know, frex, that the 43 basic Hiragana are a simplified, softened version of a Kanji-like system that flowed in from China back in the day. I can’t recognize them all yet, to say nothing of their primed and double-primed versions, but the pattern recognition is certainly starting.

I know too that in conversation, the difference between present and future tense is entirely contextual — the conjugations are exactly the same. This kinda blows my mind. A bigger cynic would say that hope is bad for the hive — that being able to conjure a distinct future takes up valuable mind-space that, really, the company owns, as surely as they own your soul for 16 or 17 hours a day.* See? Dumbass assertions. Really, what it is is that you need to listen divergently, hear and understand a sentence from beginning to end, and have a little history with your conversational tomodachi in order to really “get” the language. This, obviously, is quite the tall soy latte for a beginner, but I can’t wait until it’s easy, and ordering coffee is the most natural thing in the world.

Some other things I find interesting: first, sensei tells us there’s not really a second person singular pronoun. Or rather, there is, but its use is frowned upon. You’d think that such an inquisitive and self-denying people would at least do this one solid. This Polysics song is for them.

Speaking of self-denial, here’s another corker: after the mass jailings that occurred during World War II, some kind of learned helplessness set in among the Japanese Americans, with effects surely few other groups share. Karyn grew up with very little of her Japanese heritage passed down, just a word here and there from her obachan — perhaps even less ethnic imprinting than I got out among the Santa Fe Trail wagon ruts. This both blows my mind and breaks my heart. You’d think they’d earned their own state, like the Jews. If they wanted it, I’d give ‘em Wisconsin. But the class’ other Japanese American student (Leslie, left, above) confirmed that after the war, the Nisei seemed bent on moving on, with steely stare and gritted teeth. Now their children and grandchildren are, IMO, the poorer for it.

There’s a single word “jindoo” ( じんどう ) for “sidewalk” and “humanity.” Hiraiwa, can you explain that one?

UPDATE: This morning, I received what can charitably be described as a stern version of the otherwise bloodless “Japanese is hard to parse” lesson. I wrote to my friend Ken (the Hiraiwa of the appeal in that last paragraph) after a mutual friend said she’d seen him and his wife recently at the mall. I knew that the word one uses for one’s own wife, kanai, wasn’t right when referring to someone else’s. So I found an online dictionary and found fujoshi, which said it meant “wife” or simply “woman.” So I gladhanded it into the sentence.

Guess what? There’s a pun at work here. Two characters, both pronounced fu, have been switched, and nobody told me. So instead of referring to Ken’s “noble woman,” I called her a “rotten woman.” On the Japanese street, it was probably much cruder than that. ‘Cause Ken rightfully ripped me a new one. I couldn’t have in my ignorance simply called her a doorknob or some other non-sequitur; no, it had to be a grave insult. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad. Ken, I elaborated on it a little more in an email that I hope you at least read, but here, in this slightly more public forum, I’m sorry.

*The Wiki tells me that recently, the term “shachiku” ( 社チく ) has arisen to describe the masses of humanity getting on and off the infamous rush-hour trains. It means “corporate cattle.” Honestly, it’s like an endless showing of “Footloose” over there.

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