Nothing But Words

The first Japanese proverb I posted was from a book published 56 years ago. Today’s is from a more recent book, 101 Japanese Idioms, published in 1993. So if you make this very insulting comment about someone, it’s probably less likely to sound quaint:

Sashimi no tsuma
Garnish for raw fish

However attractive, the garnish that accompanies a serving of sashimi is of no significance. Some people may not even notice its presence. Such is the degree of dismissal sashimi no tsuma carries when used in discounting the importance of a person’s attendance at a meeting or gathering.

A note on pronunciation: when I tell people unfamiliar with Japanese about my experiences learning it so far, they are always surprised when I tell them it has very few sounds that don’t exist in English. A native English speaker won’t have much trouble pronouncing most Japanese words reasonably well (after you get used to all the vowels being monophthongs). One of few divergent syllables is the “tsu” (つ) in tsuma. Americans will recognize it from tsunami, but we tend to drop the “t” sound at the beginning. You can make the correct sound by trying to make an “s” and a “t” sound at the same time. What works for me is trying to make a “su” sound, while holding the front of my tongue at the front of the roof of my mouth. And like anything else, if you practice enough, it comes to feel natural.

Tucked away in a corner of a bookshelf in Maria’s office at Villanova I found a small green book, about 4 inches by 8 inches, printed in 1955: “Japanese Proverbs – Tourist Library Vol. 20.” Reading through it has been a lot of fun. This is the first of at least a few blog entries where I’ll share some of my favorites. Be cautious if you’re thinking of using one though – the book is 56 years old, so it’s likely many of these are now quaint.

This first entry concerns a few proverbs related to tatami, gossip, and differing perspectives on the best age for wives.

Atarashii tatami demo tatakeba gomi ga deru
Even new tatami, when thoroughly beaten, will give out dust

If you pry into the private affairs of other people, you are likely to find that they are not free from shortcomings. The floors of most rooms of a Japanese house are covered with thick mats called tatami. Though shoes are not worn inside a Japanese house, the tatami easily gather dust, as may be expected. Since a vacuum cleaner is of little use for tatami, it is the custom with the Japanese to take them outside, at the time of spring cleaning, and dust them by beating them with a stick. Hence, this proverb. Another tatami proverb goes, “Nyobo to tatami wa atarashii hodo yoi” which means “Wives and tatami are better when new and fresh.” (Cf. New brooms sweep clean.) The grossness of this insult to one’s better half is tempered with the reasonableness of another humorous proverb, Nyobo to nabe-kama wa furui hodo yoi (Both wife and pot get better with age).

Tomorrow’s Christian Science Monitor has a fun article on a topic I’ve been meaning to write about, but they got to it first: the difference between men’s Japanese and women’s Japanese. It’s a personal story written by an American journalist working in Japan:

Wherever you go, men and women tend to speak differently. But in Japan, those differences are more pronounced than in many places. Among the multilayered rules of grammar and usage governing spoken Japanese, there also exist underlying concepts of “men’s Japanese” and “women’s Japanese.” By the end of my 2-1/2-year stay there, I had unwittingly become conversant in the latter form.

Like many Western men who spend more than a year in Japan, I learned most of my intonation, expressions, and slang – the things not taught in the classroom – by mimicking a Japanese girlfriend.

I thought my Japanese was fine, while in reality the effeminate, almost childish twang I had been learning made me sound very much like a 20-something, pink miniskirted Japanese woman.

My Japanese isn’t good enough for me to share a specific example of this, but I’ve been immersed in the language long enough to have an ear for the difference in how Japanese men and women speak. It really is a striking contrast. The men typically sound quite gruff and blunt, and the women often speak in an artificially high pitched or even nasally tone.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have spent a good amount of time around both Japanese men and women. But like many male foreigners working in Japan, the article author was in an English speaking office, and was mostly around Japanese women when not at work:

The solution, of course, was to hang out with more Japanese guys. But for me, a freelance journalist with a part-time job and daily Japanese classes to attend, I had little time for new friends.

Besides, Japanese men, unlike their friendly female counterparts, are often inaccessible. They generally work 12 hours at a stretch and afterward go out in tight-knit, impenetrable groups. My girlfriend once tried to recruit a few male coworkers to teach me better Japanese but had little success. They were either too busy or just too exhausted.

My friend Fred, who’s an American living in Tokyo, married to a Japanese woman, went through the same experience as the author. He told me about one night during his first year in Japan, he passed a policeman on the street and offered him a high, lilting “konban wa” (good evening). He said the officer halted him, quickly surmised the situation, and corrected him with a low, gravelly “konban wa!” My friend Chris, who is half Japanese, told me of a female friend who had the opposite problem many years ago: she was in Japan learning Japanese from a bunch of male friends (surly teenage guys to boot), and later had to unlearn a number of Japanese language habits that were very inappropriate for a woman.

So, if you’re learning Japanese, once you get past the basics, definitely make an effort to spend some time learning from someone of the same gender.

Bins of Ultraman finger puppets at the Ultraman store under Tokyo station. The sign says “Don’t mix the heroes and the monsters! Please.” View at Picasa Bins of Ultraman finger puppets at the Ultraman store under Tokyo station. The sign says “Don’t mix the heroes and the monsters! Please.”25-Feb-2007 03:54, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 3.2, 6.71875mm, 0.017 sec

This is a silly picture, but I like it a lot. It’s from the Ultraman store in Yaesu Chikagai – the vast underground shopping mall attached to Tokyo station (it’s funny that the Japanese borrow from English to describe an above ground “shoppingu moru,” but if it’s underground, they have their own specific word, “chikagai”). You’re looking at 2 bins of Ultraman finger puppets (and you can see Eidan’s hands in there too) – one contains heroes and the other contains monsters. The sign reads “hīrō to kaijū wo mazenaide ne,” which means “do not mix the heroes and the monsters, ok?” with Ultraman and a monster adding “onegai” (please).

The verb is mazeru, “to mix.” Thanks to the class I’m taking I recognized the “nai” form, which is the informal, negative form (kids are usually addressed with informal language). I needed Maria to explain the “de” at the end – it makes the verb a command. Then “ne” is there to soften it a bit. The word bubble underneath saying “please” provides an additional, humorous contrast to the command.

Ultraman originated in Japan, and I can’t get over the fact that they put “ultra” in his name, as that’s a word that is really hard to pronounce in the Japanese syllabary. His name comes out as ウルトラマン – U-ru-to-ra-ma-n. His logo always has the ル (ru) and ト(to) in slightly smaller print, to suggest that those syllables should be de-emphasized, but still, it’s not a word that lends itself well to Japanese at all.

This post is mainly for my Japanese 1 classmates from last semester (I hear almost everyone has continued with Japanese 2 this semester – that’s great!). As I mentioned in my post a couple days ago, I’m getting plenty of Hiragana and Katakana practice simply by looking at all the signs I pass by. Just over half the signs I see are mostly Kanji, so I can’t read them, but the rest are mostly Katakana and Hiragana, which I can read. So the pictures in this post are some real life examples of how helpful it is to be able to read these two writing systems. I have additional comments in the photo captions. For the Katakana signs, see if you can figure out the English words they’re based on before reading the captions.

When I visited Japan in 2004, I met up with a friend of mine who had been working in Tokyo for a year or so. He told me living in Japan was the worst thing for the Japanese language skills he had acquired taking classes in the US. He put in a lot of hours at his job in an English-speaking office, and his circle of friends were Americans. He ended up speaking Japanese mainly just to order food and give directions to cab drivers. At the time I found this hard to believe, but now I find myself having the same experience.

The logical solution would be to try to make some Japanese friends, but taking care of the boys severely limits time for that. My natural social group here is the moms at Kai’s school. They all hang around when school gets out, while the kids play in the school’s playground for a while. I get to practice my Japanese with them a bit here and there, but I spend most of my time chasing Eidan, to keep him out of trouble (Japanese playgrounds are a lot of fun, but – by American lawsuit-happy standards – are really dangerous for toddlers. I’ll probably write more about this later).

Having said all that, I am making advances. I wouldn’t say I’m covering a lot of new ground, but I’m becoming more adept at using the skills I already have. People talk much faster than what I was used to in the classroom, and at first it all sounded like a blur. But now I’m getting better at being able to at least parse out the words I know when I hear people talk. With my own speaking, I can produce some simple sentences naturally, in that I can say them without having to think about the fact that I’m speaking Japanese: asking where something is, ordering food, exchanging greetings, etc. I can put together more complex sentences, but once you start adding adjectives, indirect objects, etc., I have to think about what I want to say before I can say it.

One stumbling block has been dealing with old ladies. Young people generally have no problem understanding my Japanese, but older women I deal with (typically at cash registers) seem to not comprehend even my simple “ie, kekkoo desu” (no thanks) as I try to turn down their offer for yet another pair of chopsticks to bring home with the food I’m buying, as they look puzzled and then stuff them in the bag anyway. I imagine I’d have the same problem with old men, but I don’t encounter them much (you don’t see them in service jobs as often, and, from what I can tell, there aren’t as many of them, as they don’t live as long).

I’m doing a few things to at least maintain my Japanese skills:

• I’m taking a Japanese class that meets once a week. It’s offered by the Minato International Association and cost only 5000 yen for 10 classes (that’s about $40). It’s their “Step II” class – about half of it is familiar from my class at Penn and the other half is new. The teaching style is also quite different: the students in the class are from all over the place, and many don’t speak English, so there is no common “fallback” language for the students. The instruction is almost entirely in Japanese, and the teacher compensates for the lack of a common language by using a lot of visual aids. Just about every new word we learn is accompanied by a picture.
• I’ve finally worked out a good, efficient daily routine, so I’m now starting to squeeze in half an hour a day to study.
• I’m listening to JapanesePod101 podcasts on my iPod while I stroll Eidan back and forth to Kai’s school. I’ve tried out several different podcasts, and JapanesePod101 is by far the best. The lessons are usually fictional stories play-acted in Japanese, and they are often very funny. After listening to the scene they then break down the key lines to analyze the grammar and vocabulary. Highly recommended! You can download the podcasts for free through iTunes.
• I’m keeping up my Katakana and Hiragana by trying to read all the signs I walk by. This is actually a lot of fun – it’s kind of like doing crossword puzzles on the go. The Katakana signs are especially enjoyable, as they’re almost always transliterated English words, but they’re usually changed just enough that it takes some thinking to figure out what the original English word was. I’ve taken a lot of pictures of signs like these and will post some of the best ones soon.

A special promotional edition of Toppo chocolates, using the name Toppa instead View at Picasa A special promotional edition of Toppo chocolates, using the name Toppa instead08-Jan-2007 03:24, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.125 sec

…with a name that may seem familiar. The usual name for these is Toppo, and I’ve seen them before in Japanese markets in the US, but they’ve decided to at least temporarily give them the far superior name, Toppa.

Also note the “School of Lock” ad on the box. There are sounds in Japanese that are hard for me to distinguish, and many Japanese have the same problem with certain sounds in English. In this case, it’s a not a mistake, it’s a self-conscious joke – there’s a small image of a lock next to the text. From what I can tell, School of Lock is a radio program marketed to students.

And for my fellow CGS Japanese students, note the Katakana across the top of the “T”, which still says Toppo. The “po” (ポ) is stylized. In the US we see English letters stylized in all kinds of ways, and it’s the same in Japan with Katakana and Hiragana. Since I’m surrounded by Japanese signs everywhere I go, my reading is getting much faster (not that I always know the meaning, however), and I’m catching on to the various stylizations.

I would divide my experiences this past week with the Japanese language into 3 different categories: reading the Japanese used for native expressions (written with Kanji and Hiragana), reading the Japanese used for foreign words (written with Katakana) and conversing in Japanese.

Reading Kanji: We didn’t get to studying Kanji in my Japanese class, as there was plenty to learn as it was, so I wasn’t expecting to read Kanji when I got here. There are approximately 2,000 standard Kanji characters used for native Japanese words (and many more less commonly used ones). I can read the phonetic Hiragana characters that are sprinkled in sentences, but the primary meaning of a sentence is usually embedded in the Kanji, so knowing the Hiragana usually doesn’t get me very far. This led to a comical, miserable failure our first night in the apartment. Maria had to go out to tend to some things related to her job, and before leaving she was kind enough to pick up some prepared food for me and the boys for dinner. All I I had to do was heat things up. I struggled with deciphering the Kanji buttons on the microwave (and hitting them in random combinations) for about 5 minutes before giving up. It was a combination convection unit and I couldn’t get anything besides the convection part working. So I thought I’d try the gas range. No luck there either – I tried everything I could think of but couldn’t get a fire going. By this time Eidan was getting very fussy so I needed to give him a bottle. But I had to warm it up somehow. With only three buttons, I was able to figure out the rice cooker! It took a while, but I heated up some water in there and stuck his bottle in it to warm up. While I was busy with all that Kai had crawled into bed and fallen asleep with no dinner (as he hardly got any sleep on New Year’s Eve), and after Eidan finally got to drink his lukewarm bottle, he fell right to sleep too. (I felt a bit better when I learned later the range wasn’t working because the gas was shut off, since the apartment had been empty).

Reading Katakana: this has gone really well. There are a lot of foreign words that have been incorporated into Japanese, and being able to read them has been a big help. I was able to order Kai a ハッピセット at McDonald’s (ha-ppi se-tto – in Japan a happy meal is a “happy set”), myself a ココア (ko-ko-a – a hot cocoa) at a coffee shop, find a トイレ (to-i-re – toilet), and so on. The only thing that drives me crazy is trying to tell the difference between ソ (so) and ン (n). Print is often stylized and the difference can be subtle.

Conversing in Japanese: it turns out my pronunciation of Japanese is superior to my vocabulary. This means I’ll say a simple phrase to a waiter or clerk, and I guess I say it well enough that it sounds to them like I know what I’m doing, so they dive into speaking normal Japanese to me, and I get lost very quickly. But so far everyone I’ve encountered has been very nice, and they don’t mind getting through the transaction with a combination of miming, my limited Japanese, and their limited English. But even my limited knowledge has come in very handy. For example, in our apartment building, I was getting in the elevator and I was followed by another resident who had his hands full carrying two large packages. He said to me “rokkai onegai shimasu” and I knew to push the 6th floor button for him. One thing I’ve had to learn quickly is the general use counters, mainly for ordering food. For example, if you want two of something, you use futatsu, not ni (koocha o futatsu kudasai). Another important phrase I’ve learned is “Sumimasen, Machigaimashita.” (Sorry, I made a mistake). I had gone into a handicapped bathroom to change Eidan’s diaper (as that’s where the changing table was also located), and Kai used to the toilet. We couldn’t figure out how to flush the darn thing. I ended up hitting a green button, which turned out to be the emergency help button (living in the US, I would’ve expected such a button to be red). A voice came over an intercom, presumably asking me what the problem was, and I didn’t know how to answer. Saying sumimasen and shitsuree shimashita over and over didn’t get him to go away, so I slinked away with the boys. (And it turns out, to flush the toilet, there’s a square panel that you need to wave your hand over).

My Japanese teacher and I have invited my fellow students in the introductory Japanese class to read my blog, so they can follow my adventures in Japan next year. I will try to write regularly about my language experiences in particular. I’ll use this post to introduce my family and recap what this trip is all about.

We will be staying in Tokyo for six months – arriving on New Year’s Eve, and staying until the end of June. My wife Maria won an International Affairs Fellowship in Japan from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Maria teaches political science at Villanova. Her research is primarily in the area of Asian political economy – you can see more about her research on her home page. She will be working at the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC). Although she is not a native speaker of Japanese, she is close to fluent.

We have two boys: Kai, 5, and Eidan, 1. Kai will attend 1st grade in a Japanese public school, and I will take care of Eidan during the day. My plan is to explore a different part of the city each day with him.

I work at Penn’s School of Medicine Information Services as a project manager. I’m very fortunate to have a boss who is willing to let me switch to part-time status while we’re away, and work remotely from Tokyo.

We will be living in Minato-ku, which is a district in the heart of Tokyo. Pictures of our apartment were posted by the landlord in the summer to advertise its availability, and they’re still up. It’s tiny – about 500 sq ft – but we decided that, for the money, we’d rather have a small place in the city than a big place in the suburbs, as Maria will have a shorter commute, and it’ll encourage us to go out more. We are near the Shinagawa station, which is near the bottom-center of this map.

We already have two vacations planned: we’ll go to the Sapporo Snow Festival in February and we’ll visit a few of the northern islands of Okinawa during Golden Week in late April/early May.

I’ve been to Japan twice before – for a one week visit and for a two week visit. I extensively blogged the latter trip, with lots of photos and cultural observations. (Note there’s a technical glitch with my slideshow viewer – if you use the navigational arrows when in a slide show, you won’t get the right pictures. You need to jump back to the blog entry and click on the next photo).

In 30 days it will be December 30th in the US. We will be flying over the Pacific Ocean that day, and since we’ll cross the date line, that means we’ll arrive in Tokyo on New Year’s Eve. And when I get there, thanks to my Japanese class, I’ll be ready to say あけまして おめでと ございます(akemashite omedeto gozaimasu – happy new year! – that’s the phonetic Hiragana – I don’t know the Kanji). Although, it’s my understanding that they don’t use this phrase until it’s actually the 1st. The class has gone really well. It’s a non-intensive introductory class, so I am far, far from fluent. But I believe I’ll be able to handle basic tasks like ordering food and letting a taxi driver know where I want to go.

I’ve been supplementing my classroom learning with Manga-jin magazine. It’s been out of print for almost 10 years, but back issues are still available. It contains Japanese manga (comics) with detailed English translations. I’ve picked up some great phrases that would never come up in class, like “otosan nobori” (daddy climbing – something Eidan does routinely). Here’s an example from the magazine.

We leave Philly for RI on the 22nd, to spend Christmas with my family, and we have an awful lot to do before we go (we fly from Boston to SF on the 28th, and then leave for Tokyo on the 30th). Our “to do” list keeps getting longer as we keep thinking of more things we have to take care of (figure out just how little we can get away with packing for a 6 month stay, cancel the car insurance, bring our tax documents so we can do our taxes in April, etc., etc., etc.). All our paperwork came through today for our visas, which is nice, because it means we can actually go (we’ll be there too long to just use tourist visas).