white with foam

You know what the best part of our eight-week beginning Japanese class is, so far? It’s not the weekly manifestation of that tired old dream canard where you get called upon and totally lay an egg. It’s not the open-ended shukudai (do homework or not do homework; there is no try). It’s not that guy in the back with the perfect diction who never seems to get rattled.

The best part is this: after four weeks, I only know one verb. It is, of course, the state of being. I understand that the building and parsing of sentences requires that some things be kept simple, but I’m really bumping my head on the lack of action here. Nevertheless, the concept really opened up for me today that wa between subject and fact about the subject isn’t an arrogant assertion (“David is an office worker” / “David-san wa kaishain desu.”). Rather, it says that David is in harmony with office worker-dom. Harmony is at the very root of being, a value which in turn is there at the very roots of the language. Thanks, Bill, for loaning me your copy of “The Japanese Have A Word for It.”

BTW, you know that obnoxious pentatonic riff at the very beginning of “Turning Japanese”? The one that says “cue Asian” in the same way the first bar and a half of “Dueling Banjos” says “cue redneck”? Can we just knock that shit off right here and now? It’s not hot, and it has not aged well.

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