In which your new favorite protagonist takes a big, fat, meaty bite out of a new language and, in the process, realizes that the topic of oral sex is so unavoidable in this day and age that it sometimes just brings itself up in the classroom.
My tiny new Japanese cell phone may cause cancer, but it cures it, too. I bought it last night and have been playing with it for the better part of the morning. It’s sleek and silver, about the thickness of ten playing cards wrapped in tissue paper. None of the two thousand possible ringtones really appeal to me, so I’m happy to discover I can program in my own songs. The instruction manual includes a picture of a keyboard, each note corresponding to a certain button combination on the keypad, so naturally I’ve spent an hour programming in the theme song to Dallas. The dramatic crescendo could use some work, but I decide to do something else and save my emotional energy.
I’ve already read the two books I’d brought with me, so I start nosing around the place for any discarded literature. My roommate Sean, the heartbreaker of the household, had recently let me borrow some of his Playboys, but I’d lost interest after reading the interviews. Plus, a few too many of the pages were sticking together.
I thumb through the day’s Daily Yomiuri newspaper before remembering that my other roommate, Ewan, has a shelf full of books in his room, the only traditional tatami room in our small, Western-style apartment. Ewan is a thirty-nine-year-old Australian introvert, possibly the only introvert Australia has ever produced and exported. He is tall and thin, with an angular, friendly face like that of a marionette or that elf who wants to be a dentist in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. He’s soft-spoken, loves pasta and chopping up vegetables, and has never been married. Yep, that’s about all I know.
I slide open his door and tiptoe in, my socked feet enjoying the tickle of the woven tatami underneath. From the bare-bones look of the room, it appears Ewan has really thrown himself into capturing the minimalist Japanese decorating style. There’s no furniture except for a folded futon on the floor and a small bookcase in the corner. Since I’m a snoop, I pad over to the closet space and start sliding open doors. Each cabinet holds absolutely nothing interesting. There are folded sweaters. Folded pants. Socks. A crate of underwear. A box of envelopes. Some pens. A disposable camera. I close the doors so I don’t collapse on the floor and plummet into a deep sleep, and then I turn and step lightly toward the bookshelf, hoping for the best. Since Ewan’s a bookish fellow, I figure he’ll have a respectable collection of titles to choose from. Maybe I’ll finally read The Brothers Karamazov, Look Homeward, Angel, or Dianetics.
Unfortunately, it turns out that his are the books I would read only if I had a gun to my head. Titles like If Lions Could Talk, Third World Geology, and The Psychology of Rabbits abound. My eyes brighten when I see the word “sex” in one of the titles, but it turns out to be The Sex Life of Plants.
I search and search his room looking for something, anything, readable. The most exciting thing I come across is a map of Yokohama, which I promptly swipe and have a read through. (It doesn’t hold my interest for long, too bogged down with details, unrealistic plot contrivances, soulless narrative…) Then I see a book about learning Japanese kanji characters, and I nearly run away screaming.
Though I planned to take some emergency Japanese lessons at Berlitz before arriving in Tokyo, I never actually got around to it, what with all the emergency CD shopping, emergency bar hopping, emergency beachgoing, emergency Internet surfing, emergency lying around, and emergency last-minute freaking out. I did buy a language book called Japanese the Fast and Fun Way and a Japanese-English dictionary, but the extent of my study has so far been a few perfunctory looks at their back covers (very nice: simple, colorful, practical).
Though I learned the two phonetic alphabets without too much trouble, I’m deathly afraid of the kanji symbols that make up the bulk of the written language. Not just because there are twenty thousand of them, each with two pronunciations. Not even because each symbol must also be written in a certain stroke order. (To a guy who mixes his cursive and printed script, and upper-and lowercase letters when he writes-KinD oF LikE this-this is absolutely out of the question.)
The last straw is the fact that kanji symbols are listed in dictionaries according to the number of strokes, so to find a specific kanji I must know that it has twelve strokes and not ten or fourteen. I’m not prepared for that kind of life.
Lying on Ewan’s futon is a workbook filled with his, er, stroke practice. I’m impressed. Sure, it looks like they were done by a three-year-old, but at least he’s trying, and that’s more than I can say for me. Seeing how Ewan is so hard at work learning his letters, I start thinking maybe it’s time I finally make that leap into the linguistic unknown. I came here, after all, to shock my system, to give myself over to new and even scary possibilities. So far it’s been very easy to live here knowing only a few phrases and hand signals. Some teachers have actually been here upwards of five years and still struggle to understand train announcements. Sure, it might seem incredibly lazy, but if your job is to speak English, then the need for fluency in Japanese isn’t so desperate on a day-to-day basis.
Ignorance may sometimes be bliss, but not when you’re wondering whether or not you’re on the right train or if what you’re about to eat is filled with bean paste and not chocolate. Besides, it’s my God-given right as an American to speak my mind and fill others’ ears with my thoughts, my opinions, my innermost feelings, and my repressed childhood memories. It seems a shame that I should let a tiny thing like a complete ignorance of the language keep me from doing it. I now know only a few more words than most Americans learned from that Styx song “Mr. Roboto.” This absolutely must change.
Yes, my honeymoon period is officially over. I am settled. I am working. It is time to hit the books and prepare myself for my future career in Japanese films, television, infomercials, music videos, car shows, or Internet porn, whatever. I decide I’ll ask around at work for a good teacher.
I work in the Kamiooka school of Yokohama, situated on a big shopping street across from the gigantic Kamiooka Station/Bus Terminal/Shopping Center, and above a Burger King, which means that the smell of french fries pervades the entire school and I must eat at least one large order every day.
The pace here, like that at a Burger King, is manic. Every day I teach about seven forty-five-minute lessons and then spend another forty-five minutes in the free conversation room, where students of all levels discuss whatever topic is suggested or move from topic to topic according to interest level. (Mostly the students just sit and stare at the teacher until the teacher says something.) The classes generally consist of three people, unless a student pays extra to have individual instruction. We have ten minutes between classes, during which we’re meant to grade each student on a number of points (listening, grammar, confidence, pronunciation, poise, dress sense, etc.), make recommendations, pass the file on to the next teacher, then get the files for our next class, open them up, and quickly choose a lesson that each hasn’t done yet or needs to do again based on comments written by a previous teacher.
It’s all very stressful and crowded in the tiny teachers’ room as we scramble for the limited number of seats, sometimes ending up writing our files while leaning against the file cabinet that other teachers keep needing to use or sitting on someone’s lap. This sense of pandemonium coupled with the smell of burgers, fries, and chicken fingers wafting through the room sometimes makes me feel as if I’m not actually an English teacher at all, but a fry cook.
Needless to say, we teachers have been forced to become intimate with one another, much like actors and actresses filming a love scene. Except our love scenes are every forty-five minutes and generally involve not two people, but ten.
And to make our lives that much more exciting, there’s the persistent presence of Jill, our head teacher from Australia, a woman who, in spite of her fondness for brightly colored blazers and hair bleach, possesses all the warmth and approachability of a Salem, Massachusetts, prosecutor circa 1654.
Jill likes to lord it over us minions with a firm hand and a furrowed brow. And, sometimes, a hot pink pantsuit. Her most pronounced personality trait, besides a tendency to dribble ketchup and mayonnaise all over herself while eating BK Flame Broilers, is her staunch Australian patriotism, coupled with a similarly staunch dislike of Americans. She’s surely the proudest, most irrationally nationalistic person from Australia I’ve ever met. Of course, most Australians are proud of their country and generally get a massive kick out of being Australian, it’s just that their pronouncements about their homeland don’t sound like government-sponsored propaganda the way Jill’s do.
I’d recently overheard her chiding a student in one of her classes in her high-pitched Betty Boop squeal: “Why do you want to go to America? America is dangerous. Australia is much prettier, and the people are so much nicer.” Apparently she also works for the Australian Tourism Board.
In Jill’s mind, she’s not doing her job as an English teacher in Japan if she’s not riffing on the international nightmare that is the USA.
A few days ago I’d heard her say to a class of three stern-looking businessmen, “Americans are soooo lazy!” Which is fine, we are, fair enough, whatever. Sure, statistically we work longer days than anyone else in the world, but we also, statistically, probably ingest more kinds of fried potatoes while sitting on the couch for hours on end than any other country. But the fact that this statement is coming from a woman of about five feet eight inches and surely no less than 180 pounds somehow annoys me. She may hate Americans, but she sure as hell seems to love our Ben and Jerry’s New York Fudge Chunk Swirl.
During these chaotic breaks between classes, when we teachers are using one another’s backs as makeshift writing surfaces so we can recommend that Hiro work on his pronunciation and sentence production or that Masako give up studying English and perhaps take up a more suitable hobby like hang gliding or miming, Jill likes to barge into the teachers’ room and pick a playful fight with any available American in the room-like, for example, me-and ask inane questions like, “Why do you people refer to fringe as bangs? That’s so annoying.”
Though her outrage at America’s total lack of respect for such a mainstay of the English language as the word fringe is certainly understandable, I am at a loss as to how exactly we are meant to answer such a charge to her satisfaction. I have no idea how the word bangs came into being. Maybe it has something to do with Americans’ love of guns and the noises they make?
All I can think to say to this is, “Why do you say cunt instead of can’t?” but I don’t say it, because it would bring the conversation down to a level that no one is likely comfortable stooping to just yet. So I keep my comments to myself, look her in the eye, shrug my shoulders, and speak the only Japanese I have learned so far: “Wakarimasen.” (“I don’t know.”)
MOBA is the most popular language school in a country that has as many language schools as the U.S. has places to buy coffee milkshakes, and the students have many reasons for wanting to study English. Some are businessmen and women who do a lot of traveling abroad and need English so they can move up that ladder a little faster or chat people up in hotel bars more easily. Many are housewives with kids in school (or no kids at all) and money and time to kill. There are also a lot of high school and college-aged kids who want to travel, want to be able to speak to the foreigners they see, think “English is cool,” or simply want to know what Kanye West is going on and on and on about.
There are also a few people learning English because they’re movie buffs and want to be able to watch American movies without reading the subtitles. By far the best justification I’ve heard for studying English, though, was given by an extremely low-level fifty-something woman named Keiko, who says she is learning English because she wants to teach her son. This I regard as a triumph of convoluted logic. I don’t know how old her son is, but surely he’s at least a teenager by now. Why doesn’t she send him to the school? Really, at the rate she’s going, she’s going to be on her deathbed and her son is still going to be saying things like “This is a pen” and “I enjoy to surfing.”
I ask around about Japanese lessons, and everyone says I should talk to Joy, an excitable Latina from New York who seems to have an insatiable appetite for new hobbies.
“Well, I tried at this one school near Yokohama Station that’s got a really convenient schedule and everyone seems really nice and you can get private lessons,” she said.
“And how did it go?”
“Oh, I didn’t go with them because they were too expensive.”
“Oh.”
“But I heard the community center across the street has really cheap lessons.”
“Oh, cheap would be nice.”
“Yeah, but all the classes take place in the same room at the same time. It’s really loud and hard to hear the teachers.”
“Uh-huh. So…”
“So anyway,” she continues, “I’m thinking I just won’t take lessons right now because I kind of want to join a gym, and I’ve got my life drawing classes, and I want to study that flower arranging stuff. And learn how to kabuki.”
Thankfully, soon after this spirited but useless exchange, I meet Yoko Ojima, an intermediate-level student who takes private lessons. She’s about fifty years old and has wispy gold and purple streaks in her short hair. Her face is always immaculately made up, her lips a dramatic dark crimson, her eye shadow echoing the purple in her hair, her skin painted powder white. An active and busy woman, she runs a medical clinic that she co-owns with a male physician, whom she hates. Understandably, she is always at least five minutes late for her lessons, rushing in breathlessly with a few shopping bags, a leather bag overflowing with folders overflowing with papers, and a sheepish smile overflowing with many apologies.
Teaching Yoko is always a nice break from the shy, low-level pupils who make up the bulk of our student population at Kamiooka MOBA. Since she’s not a beginner, she can thankfully talk about her life beyond what her hobbies are, how many people there are in her family, what she ate for breakfast, and what her favorite movie is. And she doesn’t mess around. The first day I taught her I’d learned that she’d separated from her husband because he’d had an affair and later shacked up with his secretary. We discuss her marital situation at length during each lesson-how he stops by her business every week to drop off money, how his secretary just wants his money, how Yoko won’t divorce because if she does, she’ll have no legal right to his money due to Japan’s weird divorce laws that service the men and screw the women. I begin to feel more like a therapist, who, in addition to offering emotional support and acting as a beacon among the rocks, corrects his patients’ grammar and pronunciation.
I mention to her how clearly backwards these divorce laws are to an American.
“Oh my God, Yoko, if you divorced him in the U.S., you could take him for every sorry yen he has.”
She furrows her brow and tilts her head to indicate she doesn’t understand.
“I mean, in America, you would be able to get his money,” I try again, this time adding some hand motions. “He was screwing around on you, right?”
A nod, then another furrow and tilt.
“He was…uh…having sex with his secretary, right?”
“Yes,” she says with a roll of her eyes. She obviously feels the same way I do about this. Really, an affair with a secretary? That is about as imaginative as dipping your french fries in ketchup. I would have given the guy a few points if he’d strayed for the love of a trapeze artist or a bass player, but come on, a secretary is just a slap in the face.
“Well,” I continue, “all that you would need to do is get a private investigator to follow him around and take pictures of them necking in the park during lunch.”
Furrow. Tilt. Nervous smile.
I repeat what I’d said slowly in more basic terminology and act out the parts about the taking of the pictures and the necking. Her eyes widen.
“Then, you take the pictures, text them to your lawyer, and BAM! Money.” Here I rub three fingers across my thumb in the international signal for “mucho dinero.”
Her brow unfurrows, her head untilts, and she sighs, wishing desperately she could litigate a divorce in New York City. As it stands, they just live separately from each other and Yoko does what she can to bleed him dry of his and his secretary’s funds.
She lives in Kamiooka with her twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Fumiko. Both of them are currently studying to be Japanese language instructors, and they are nearing the completion of their course.
“Oh, reeeeally?” I think.
I feel like I’ve started to develop a special closeness with Yoko, one that transcends the confines of our cramped classroom. We’ve discussed her marriage, her business, and Fumiko, whom she fears is too awkward to ever marry and will live with her forever. Could I maybe take things to the next level and ask her to be my Japanese teacher?
“You know, I am very interested in studying the language.”
She says, “
” reverting back to Japanese. “Really?” She pauses. “We can to teach you.”
Yessssss. And, better yet:
“We do for free, because these days we cannot charge for to teaching. Not yet get certificate.”
Now, if I were the uncertified teacher, I wouldn’t likely be paying much attention to such an inconvenient rule, but this is a good example of the tendency of many Japanese towards being honest and law-abiding. There are, of course, exceptions, like, I don’t know, the Japanese mafia, whose hobbies include getting ungainly tattoos, carrying automatic weapons, and using their chopsticks to put a person’s eyes out, but generally, the Japanese respect the rules, as opposed to Westerners who would cheat their own mothers if it meant turning a profit.
So on a Wednesday evening a few weeks later, I meet Yoko and Fumiko out on the street in front of the school, and they lead me to their home behind the Keikyu plaza, high up on top of a very, very steep hill. For the first time since my arrival here, I realize how deeply disappointed I am that my fantasy of traveling hither and yon (mainly yon) upon a moving sidewalk conveyor has not been realized.
They live on the fifth floor of a giant condominium complex with a lot of security cameras and electronic checkpoints. The little area outside their door is full of Disney garden figurines: the Seven Dwarves, Bambi, Thumper, Daisy, Cinderella’s mice, and, inexplicably, the Tasmanian Devil. We go inside, relieve ourselves of our footwear, and Yoko leads me to the dining room table, where we will be doing our studying.
It’s a cozy condo. The hallway leads to a tiny kitchen on the left, opening into a dining area straight ahead with a finished wooden table and flanked by a china cabinet full of tiny Japanese bowls and cutlery and a few muted watercolors decorated with swirls of calligraphy. Beyond this is a small sitting room. And the Disney theme continues. A piano stands on the left wall, and next to it is a large shelf full of Disney sheet music and Seven Dwarves tea tins. A big framed puzzle of Cinderella, the Fairy Godmother, and the newly transmogrified pumpkin coach hangs above the piano.
On the dining table are two books: 500 Basic Kanji and Japanese for Busy People. They are shiny and new, and seemingly purchased just for me. The prices for both are scribbled on a piece of paper and placed bookmark style in the Kanji book, so while Yoko and Fumiko begin furiously to prepare a meal, I get some yens out of my wallet to pay them back.
Since I’ve already done a little studying on my own in preparation for my lessons, I decide I’ll be clever and thank them for buying me the books and explain that I have some money to pay them, all in Japanese. I practice a few times silently before taking the plunge and adding some vocal cords.
“
,” I say to Yoko when she walks into the room. “Thank you for the books. I’ve brought some money.”
“O-
,” she corrects me, wincing and giggling.
It’s amazing the difference one little omitted syllable can make. She shakes her head and waves her hand like she’s sending away a bad smell.
I read in one of Ewan’s books that the syllable “o” is an honorific, placed in front of some words to make them softer or more polite. I’d omitted it in front of the word “money,” and this omission had drastically altered the sound of the sentence, judging from Yoko’s reaction. So instead of saying, “Thank you so much for the books. I’ve brought some money,” I’d actually said something like, “Here’s your money, you greedy bitch. Thanks a fucking lot.”
It is this kind of tiny but pivotal error that seems so easy to make on a regular basis when trying to communicate in Japanese as a foreigner. When learning a new language, especially one completely unconnected to your mother tongue and filled with such contextual nuance, you’re naked, totally unprotected, walking blind in a brambly and treacherous terrain full of colloquialisms, multiple meanings, varying levels of politeness, and double entendres. I am terrified that one day, while trying to tell someone they look nice, I’ll instead end up saying I want to lick their daughter’s underarms. I’m about to learn what it’s like to be the student crying over his textbook and not the teacher laughing up his sleeve.
Here’s the thing: if you’re going to learn a new language, you’ve got to be unafraid to make mistakes, relax, and have fun. What I tell my students, in other words. I’d thought I’d been blowing out a bunch of useless hot air, but turns out I was wise beyond my own understanding.
During the lesson, I sit at the dining room table with my notebook and books in front of me while Yoko and Fumiko team-teach me. They stand on each end of a dry-erase board that they’ve wheeled into the room, and both hold large wooden pointers for easier gesturing. Fumiko, a giggly gal with a frizzy bob, proves herself quite the opposite of her exceptionally put-together mother. She dresses in sweats, doesn’t bother with makeup, and laughs loudly with her mouth wide open-a no-no for women in Japan. Once, at Yoko’s prompting, she covers her mouth and nearly succeeds in knocking a tooth out with her large wooden pointer.
She drills me on basic pronunciations of the phonetic characters and some simple words and phrases, playfully jabbing me with the pointer whenever I make a mistake. Yoko then takes the reins and corrects my mistake, making me repeat after her until I get it right or I feel like I’m losing my mind, whichever comes first.
Yoko: KonNIchiwa
Me: Konichywa
Yoko: No, no. Konnichiwa
Me: Konichywa
Yoko: Kon-NI-chi-wa
Me: Konichywa
Fumiko: KON-NI-CHI-WA!! [jab with wooden pointer]
Me: Konnichiwa!
Everyone: [applause]
The ladies escort me through the wonderland that is basic, bottom-rung, just-off-the-boat Japanese, from the different greetings for the different times of day, to expressions for politely leaving work before someone else, expressions for politely refusing more food, expressions for politely asking where the toilet is, expressions for politely requesting something in a restaurant, expressions for politely saying no, you would rather not eat pizza for dinner because you had that shit for lunch, and about what seems like hundreds of different ways of apologizing for what seems like a hundred different things I didn’t realize I could do wrong. We cap things with a session about useful expressions to use when riding in a taxi: saying where you need to go, where to stop, giving directions to a driver, and such. All in all I do pretty well, with a few minor exceptions hardly worth mentioning.
Yoko/Taxi Driver: Where would you like to go?
Me: Can you please take me to the park? First, drive straight. And then take a left at the next stoplight. After that, go straight.
Y/TD: OK, I understand.
Me: Now please rent a room on the right at the next stoplight.
Y/TD: Um, I don’t understand.
We stop the lesson after thirty minutes and prepare to have our meal. I stand nervously, wondering what I should do, while Fumiko sets the table with plates, chopsticks, and teacups and Yoko finishes the yaki soba and salad in the kitchen. Fumiko looks at the job she’s done setting the table, tilts her head in consideration, and goes back into the kitchen and whispers something to Yoko. This prompts Yoko to come survey the table, tuttut, and do some rearranging. She asks me to sit, and she and Fumiko bring out the food: a heaping pan of yaki soba and one whopper of a salad.
“
!” Yoko says, prompting me to repeat this standard phrase one says when receiving food.
“Itydikimasoo!” I beam, and we all dig in. The ladies enjoy a few giggles over my use of the chopsticks. Don’t get me wrong, I can use them, but since I’m left-handed, I have a special way of holding them, just like we southpaws have a unique way of holding pencils and pens. We don’t hold them, per se, we grab them, as if we were trying to strangle the life out of them. I can feed myself with chopsticks, but I prefer to do it alone in a dimly lit room and not in front of a peanut gallery of Japanese critics.
After dinner, I make my way to the toilet, while Yoko and Fumiko clear the table, clean the dishes, and presumably argue about when the hell Fumiko is going to find a goddamn man and move the hell out of the house. I am delighted to discover in the bathroom a Washlet, one of those high-tech toilets you find in the nicer Japanese restrooms. It has a slew of useful functions, like a butt sprinkler, a heated seat, and a dizzying selection of sound effects to muffle the user’s unseemly emissions.
Toilets are a national obsession in this country of 100 million people and, if all goes well, 100 million daily turds. But the sheer volume of human waste isn’t the main reason these Washlets are so necessary. It’s the waste of water resulting from the tendency of Japanese women to flush repeatedly in order to mask their own excretory noises. These toilets solve that problem, allowing you to have a seat, choose a rushing water or an oscillating fan sound (a laugh track might be fun), sit back, and let it loose, giving yourself a sprinkle afterwards. And even though I’d gone in there just for a piss, I’m unable to leave without sitting my bare bottom on the heated seat (ahhhhh) and giving myself a little splash. I’m sure I’m blushing on the way out.
I return to the dining room table to see it set again for the dessert course. But this is no ordinary dessert. Yoko and Fumiko stand by their chairs until I come back to the table, then gesture for me to sit down. They join me, and Yoko begins an elaborate and carefully executed procedure of making and serving the tea. This here, I think to myself, is a Japanese tea ceremony. Just like I’d seen in The Karate Kid Part II. With any luck, this particular tea ceremony will not end with one of the ladies letting her hair down, reaching across the table, and kissing me full on the lips.
I watch as Yoko performs every action with a studied yet poetic grace. When it comes time for us all to partake, she instructs me on how to turn the cup with three (or is it four?) short, controlled movements and bring it back around to its starting position, at which point she indicates, with nods in my and Fumiko’s directions, that we should now raise the cup to our lips and taste its delicious greenness. We do and then place the cups delicately down onto their saucers.
We also enjoy some small cakes Yoko had picked up from the local bakery. She slices each in half before passing them to us on saucers and providing us each with a fork the size of Homemaker Barbie’s spatula. I see that the cakes are filled with a mysterious thick brown substance and hope to God it isn’t one of those Japanese concoctions that looks to be filled with chocolate when actually it’s stuffed with a semisweet bean paste. I bite into it with a smile and, my fears totally confirmed, swallow it as quickly as possible. Lying through my teeth, I proclaim it “
” or “Delicious!”
No sooner have we finished our tea and cakes than Yoko turns to me and asks, “Do you want hear Japanese harp? Maybe I can play for you now.”
Wow. I’ve had a free Japanese lesson. A delicious free Japanese meal. A front-row seat at a free Japanese tea ceremony. A free Japanese bean paste cake thingy. And now she’s offering to play me music? Of course I want to hear the Japanese harp, that goes without saying. But I have a sinking feeling that I’m setting myself up for some bad karma, accepting all this free stuff without giving anything back. I mean, I had offered her an ear to vent about how awful her husband is, but surely she’s overcompensated me by this point. Let’s see…I could stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, follow this with my famous rendition of “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee,” and finish things off by doing that thing I can do with my left eyeball, but it always takes me so long to uncross my eyes after that.
Plus, I remember something I’d read in the welcome packet that MOBA had sent me before I’d left the U.S.:
If you should lose a personal item, such as your wallet or purse, cheer up. It is highly likely that it was turned into the station master or the nearest koban (local police box). Simply show up and make a clear identification.
No, not that one. This one:
The Japanese are very preoccupied with maintaining the status quo. It is of utmost importance not to offend anyone, and they are generally uncomfortable saying a direct “no” to a request. So instead of saying “no,” often they will utter a noncommittal “maybe.” This should be construed as “no.”
Yoko had said the word “maybe.” So does she really want to play the Japanese harp for me, or is this just her Japanese way of saying, “OK, Tim, look, I’ve given you a lesson, I’ve fed you, introduced you to my daughter, hell, I even did a dang tea ceremony for you, which I’ve never even learned to do properly. What’s next? Need a haircut?”
What to do? I really want to hear that harp. I’d also been hoping that later she would bring out her samurai sword and kendo sticks.
I finally decide that I’ll bring my viola and washboard to the next lesson and give Yoko and Fumiko a little show. I’ll also get Jimmy to send me some Pepperidge Farm Sausalito cookies and S’mores Pop-Tarts so I can impress the ladies with some sweet, sweet Americana.
“That’d be great,” I reply.
Yoko and Fumiko promptly stand and move into the living room, where they start rearranging the furniture. They shove the coffee table against the far wall, open one of the sliding doors and chuck a sitting chair into the bedroom, and move a bunch of potted plants out onto the balcony. The gaping hole left in the middle of the living room is soon filled with the arrival of a humongous Japanese harp-a giant ocean liner coasting into a harbor. Yoko and Fumiko bring out the four-foot-long instrument, place it on two stands, one on each end, and start positioning little white plastic pieces under the strings in order to tune it.
I’d never known the Japanese harp was so massive. I’d seen old drawings of men and women sitting cross-legged on the floor strumming them, but in contemporary Japan, everything seems to get smaller and smaller with time, from cell phones to computers to cameras to paperback books to quantities of breathable air. Seeing the ladies drag in this bulky and unwieldy piece of polished wood with dangling strings and begin to transform it into an instrument, I think how, in Japan, size reduction of modern obsessions is one thing, but respect for tradition is another.
“Shrink everything else,” I can hear the old Japanese samurai say as they collapse their swords down to something the size of toothpicks and place them in their back pockets. “But let the harp remain large enough to demand its own room.”
Yoko finishes setting the harp to the right pitch, grabs some sheet music off the bookshelf, and then brings a chair over and sits down with the harp before her. She slides the little string picks on her fingers, bends toward the harp, and begins to strum and sing along to an old Japanese ballad. It’s a vaguely familiar melody, yet I can’t figure out why.
“I’ve heard this before,” I say as Yoko continues singing and Fumiko starts picking her cuticles.
“Sakura…Sakura…Sana denchi to o-mo-u…”
Yoko stops. “You want play?” she asks.
“Oh, no, I can’t. I…” I can’t think of a decent reason not to. So Yoko stands and allows me to take her place in front of the harp. She instructs me briefly on how to read the notes of the Japanese score she’d been playing. Then she gives me the picks off her fingers so I can put them on. But I can’t. They’re too small for my fingers, naturally.
“No ploblem,” Yoko assures me as she goes into the other room. “More large size I have.” She reappears, bringing a few more picks for me to try on. As I attempt one after the other without success, I decide that big Western men were not meant to play this instrument.
“You can play no picks.” Freestyle.
I strum the notes of the song, and slowly, pluck by pluck, I get the hang of it. Yoko and Fumiko sit watching me, Fumiko intermittently gnawing on her fingernails and sucking up the blood, Yoko looking at her disapprovingly. There are lots of stops and starts and plenty of foul notes plucked, but I get through it without hurting myself or damaging the instrument, which I consider a victory. Yoko and Fumiko obviously do as well, for their applause at the end of my performance is impassioned and relieved.
It’s getting late, so after the women dismantle the harp again and dock it in another room, I gather my books and papers and prepare to leave. As I put the books into my backpack, Yoko tells me my homework is to learn to write the first ten characters in the Kanji book and to study the two phonetic alphabets, Katakana and Hiragana. I come very close to crying and begging for her benevolent mercy, but I can hardly say no after the good time she’s shown me.
So I tell her I’ll do my best, bow, say goodbye to Fumiko, who’s standing with her hands behind her back cracking her knuckles, give Yoko a gentle American handshake, almost fall over trying to put my shoes on while bowing and saying goodbye, and step out into the hall.
Yoko and Fumiko smile at me from the door as I walk to the elevator, their bright faces flanked by those of Bambi, Thumper, and a half dozen dwarves. All the way home I think of the gloating I’m going to do about all the Japanese culture I’d imbibed in one evening.
The next day at work, I walk into the teachers’ room and greet everyone warmly, waiting desperately for someone to ask me what I did last night or why I was in such a good mood or how to ask a Japanese taxi driver to drive me to the train station.
I see Joy and light up, because I know she’s also taught Yoko, and given her current interest in all things Japan, she’ll probably be very interested in hearing about my evening of cultural immersion.
“I had my first lesson with Yoko last night,” I begin.
“Oh, cool!” she said. “That’s great! Did she do the tea ceremony for you?”
“The what?”
“The tea ceremony. When I went a couple nights ago, she and Fumiko did a tea ceremony for me, and then we all sat around and took turns playing the Japanese harp. It was really fun.”
Am I just one of many? It can’t be. I am chosen.
“Oh, and she made yaki soba, and I learned how to give directions to a cab driver.”
“Uh…that’s cool. Yeah, we did all that.”
“She also showed me a little bit about Japanese flower arranging, which was kind of cool, because, you know, I was wanting to take a class or something, and now I think I’ll just pay her, you know, because she’ll give me a good rate I think, and she’ll, like, teach me Japanese at the same time. But you know what? To tell you the truth, I was most interested in the beautiful kimono collection she has. Did she show them to you?”
“No.”
“God, you should see some of the designs! Oh, and her bonsai garden! Absolutely gorgeous. That woman can do anything, I swear. Oh! And she wants me to teach her Spanish! Que magnifica, no?”
“Oh, yeah, Spanish, that’s great. And the bonsai garden was…you know, just totally amazing. Very artistic.” The lies just pour out of me.
I sit down to look at my first students’ folders and pick a lesson, wondering if I should ask if Joy knows about Yoko’s husband’s philandering and her problems getting Fumiko married. I decide not to, figuring I need to hold on to something of the whole Yoko experience that is mine and only mine, even if it’s also everyone’s.
I pick out a lesson for my class and pull out my new Japanese book, starting in on the first chapter.
The first bell rings, and the other teachers begin flooding in. Joy tells everyone about my night at Yoko’s, and the questions start flying:
“Did you have those tiny cakes?”
“Wasn’t her apartment beautiful?”
“Did she play you any Disney songs on the harp?”
“Fumiko is always messing with her fingers!”
Hmph.
So my experience at Yoko’s wasn’t my own. That’s OK. The key is that I have begun to break down that language barrier and expose myself to the other side of the world. And I’m eating some great food in the meantime. It will happen brick by brick and stone by stone, but it will happen, and one day, I’ll look straight through to where a wall once stood with my Western eyes and not only be able to give a taxi driver directions, I’ll be able to ask him his opinion of the flat tax and banter with him good-naturedly about how dumb the U.S. health care system is.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There are some basics we must cover before shooting for the stars. Like talking about food in the free conversation room, for example.
I have a free period and decide I’ll pop in on Bob, a gigantically tall teacher from Wales who is in what we call the free-con room with about ten students.
I open the door and hear him saying, “Yeah, I really don’t like the taste; it just doesn’t appeal to me.”
I put on a smile as I look around at the students, all of whom have a look of utter horror on their faces.
Bob turns to me. “Tim, do you like manko?”
“Manko…manko…,” I think aloud. “Oh, manko! Isn’t that that bean paste stuff?”
He nods, looking around and wondering what the students find so horrifying about someone not liking manko.
“Yeah, I don’t like that either. The first time I ate manko I was expecting it to taste like chocolate, and it just didn’t at all.” I screw my face up into a look of distaste. “I was so disappointed. Because, really, what’s more delicious than a creamy, chocolate-filled doughnut?”
The students are still in shock about something, and a few of the ladies cover their mouths and giggle, red-faced. Things are clearly getting a little uncomfortable, so I do what I usually do when this happens. I walk out of the room and let the other person deal with it.
A few minutes later the bell rings and Bob comes into the teachers’ room looking redder than any Welshman I’ve ever seen.
“Oh my God, oh my God!!” he bellows in his resonant baritone. “I’ve just made an awful, terrible, horrible mistake! I can never go back into that room again! I want to die and be buried immediately. Immediately! Shit! Fuck!”
Between his exclamations of “Oooooooooh, I wish I were invisible” and “Aaaaaaaaah, I want to go back to Wales,” we get his story.
In class, they’d been discussing Japanese food, and the students had asked Bob what food he really doesn’t like. Bob answered that he really doesn’t care for bean paste, a perfectly reasonable answer. It’s the answer I would have given and, in fact, had given when I’d stuck my head in. Unfortunately, he’d used the wrong word for bean paste. Instead of “anko,” which means bean paste, he’d said “manko.” Manko means pussy. He’d just told the class he really didn’t like eating pussy.
And I had too.
All the teachers squeal and cover their mouths.
Right on cue, in walks Jill with a smirk on her face, oblivious to the atmosphere of confusion and despair engulfing us all and still intent on bringing the American empire down, colloquialism by colloquialism.
“You know my least favorite American word?” she squeaks. We are dying to know, absolutely can’t wait for her to tell us.
“Mom. Why don’t you just say mum?”
I wrack my brain trying to think of a good reason why we Americans refer to our mothers in such a venomous and disrespectful way. But I’m too appalled right now to take this bait.
I flop into a chair and look sadly at my Japanese book, wondering if there’s a handy way to politely apologize not only for saying the word “pussy” at least four times in a ten-second period, but also for expressing that I don’t really like eating it.
I decide maybe I should go down to Burger King and get some fries. I’ve got a really horrible taste in my mouth.
# of kanji characters studied: 40
# of kanji characters forgotten: 34
# of sexually inappropriate things said to Tokyo’s cashiers when just trying to be nice:?