Ohio, Japan. Chapter 3
CHAPTER 3
I brought jogging shoes and clothes from home to NDA, the National Defense Academy, where I taught English to cadets. The new private student had suggested we jog for his next lesson. I wanted to go down to the seaside from the heights of the NDA campus. I could see the water, but hadn’t been able to find the path down, though I had tried twice. Once I followed directions from a class of my students --"just follow this road"--only to be advised in Japanese by a guard that the turn I contemplated didn't lead to the ocean.
We reached that juncture. "That's not the right way," the cadet said. "We must go a few hundred yards further along the road.”
He didn't speak much English, if measured by long, complete sentences and correct succession of tenses. But he surprised me with communication ease and skill, as in last week’s parting, "I'll see you off," when he announced his intention to walk me to the stronghold’s gate as I left campus for the train station.
We jogged. He approved of my shorts and t-shirt. He described his T-shirt as evidence of his "situation."
I suggest an alternate word. "Status."
"What's the difference?"
His T-shirt indicated his status within the National Defense Academy. "Precision, rank."
Down the steep steps cut into the hillside, and across a road, we left the NDA property. We jogged through a residential maze of streets to the sea, crossed another road and went the length of a wooden boardwalk onto a cement path. We jogged past signs to a lighthouse and to a nature museum. I sweated a lot, as usual. It was a very hot dry day. Dizzy, I slowed to a walk as we ascended the flagstone path. Signs in Japanese pointed to parks and other areas, but I saw no signs for NDA, the kanji for which I was able to recognize from seeing the manifest on busses.
The 20-year-old cadet never took an unnecessary step nor hesitated. He stretched on the grass in a park on the ridgeline when I went into the ladies room to get a drink of water. As we resumed running, I burped. He asked for the word to describe that sound.
He paused only to salute other cadets after we arrived back on campus after an hour through a different gate. I sat where he indicated in the study room of his dorm. He went to get the fee for the running English lesson and liquid to drink. His dorm mates continued working at their computers, in pairs and solo. There were six workstations--desktop computers on old desks against the walls in a small room opposite a bunkroom.
He came back with a can of coffee and a bottle of water. I chose the water. He strolled around the study room. I felt intensity from the group of cadets.
"How do you feel?" he asked me.
"Tired but great," I laughed. "I'd like to do that again." Recalling the signs I wondered whether I would be able to find my way alone. I hoped for another jogging guided tour of the big semi-national park called Kannon-Zaki.
His companions who had been calmly studying seemed to recognize our state of post-exertion exuberance.
We ran back to the field house. "Take a short cut," he announced, and we crossed the track. A coach was instructing students, and I was introduced in passing to the "teacher for physical activity."
I imagined that this long jog might add to my reputation. When I had asked how the cadet got my name, he’d said, "You're famous among cadets." I was curious about this taciturn comment but did not pursue the matter.
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I saw the preliminary itinerary for the China trip--a page of fees, schedules, and small color photos of places. Mrs. Wada, secretary of cadet affairs division and one of my private English students, translated the whole thing word for word. I had only wanted her to tell me the place names. My name, followed by a small question mark, was the only word written in Roman letters. I confirmed my intention to participate with Mr. Maeda, the professor of Chinese.
In a bookstore, I asked to see a book about China. The clerk seemed bewildered. My pronunciation must be wrong, I concluded, surprised because I thought that it would be hard to mispronounce "Middle Kingdom" in Japanese. It began with the same sound as a major train line through Tokyo, one of the first sounds I had learned to say in Japanese.
"China," I said, switching languages to English. "I'm going to China."
A Chinese phrase book for Japanese people included "I like that hairstyle" but I was alarmed at the difference between the Japanese and Chinese kanji. I thought that kanji, literally, Chinese letters, would be standard.
I strolled next to a student in Osaka. I muttered about China, and she looked up.
I said, "I'm going to China this summer."
The puzzled look appeared, as precise as on the bookstore clerk's face. "China?" she asked. "Chu koku?"
"Oh, the 'u' is long," I replied. "You're Chinese?"
"Yes," she said.
I leapt at the opportunity to ask the meaning of the name "Shanghai." In the bookstore, I had recognized the two kanji. "'Shang-hai.' Over the sea? Over what sea?" I asked in Japanese.
"There is a river," she said.
"The river is high?" I blurted in English with confusion.
She offered a tentative noncommittal pleasantry.
"The ocean is north?" I offered by way of an alternative.
Finally she said, "I know but I can't speak English."
I gazed at her round face grateful for the extent of attempted communication.
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On 30-minute bus ride from Osaka University of Foreign Studies to the train station, my seatmates studied Vietnamese aloud.
"It sounds like singing," I said in Japanese.
"It has five or six tones."
"Like Chinese?"
One nodded and asked in Japanese, "What do you teach?"
"Japanese," I answered.
They laughed. I was confusing "to teach" with "to learn." I corrected myself: "English. I teach English."
They accepted my participation in the Vietnamese study of choral repetition of words on a list. We went from animal names to foods, in Vietnamese, Japanese and English, they often forgetting English. One of them reached in her bag for an electronic dictionary. We continued, sometimes limping and sometimes galloping in three languages.
"Is this your first year?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Is the teacher Vietnamese?"
"There are three teachers,” one girl said. “They are all Vietnamese."
Another girl corrected, "There are four."
There was a sentence in Japanese and I caught the word for teacher, “sensei.”
"Oh, one of the teachers of Vietnamese is Japanese," I say.
"That's tomorrow's teacher."
I was happy to hear my comment absorbed into the conversation.
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I have heard cicadas in the mountains of my native America. But my first summer in Japan I left my office building in Tokyo looking around for a high voltage power line, wondering why I had not noticed the loud sound in May.
I clipped a New York Times article about the emergence of the kind of cicada that lives 17 years underground. I assigned presentations about cicadas in Japan.
"'Shizukasa ya!'" I introduced the lesson. "In translation, 'How extraordinarily quiet!'" Thus begins a short poem by Bashou, so famous in Japan that you can announce it to dead air on a train or in a classroom and elicit the final two lines. The students rendered the last lines into English with the aid of electronic dictionaries. "Permeating the stones, the voice of the cicada."
Students drew cicadas with a big square head, bulging eyes and two triangular wings over the body. They identified the four common varieties, and mimicked the chirps, which tell the summer's progress.
The young men recalled searching temple trees for the sap-sucking insects. "Do Americans children catch them?" they wondered.
"No," I told them. "If you see American children with nets, they are probably catching butterflies."
"We Japanese are irritated when we hear their chirps," a student claimed. "But summer would not be complete without cicadas."
They wrote the kanji for cicada, two squares elaborated with line-segments. I appended two bug eyes. Students laughed. The first kanji classifies insects and worms. The second specifies the bug.
The students concluded that Americans did not appreciate cicadas. I blithely suggested earplugs shaped like cicadas as a fad item for summer.
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I walk uphill twenty minutes from Uraga Station to NDA. The steep grade from the end of the Keikyu train line goes along pleasant narrow streets and stairs. I don't like waiting for the unreliable bus one station earlier. Recently Mr. Nagata and I walk together. The soft-spoken young Japanese worked in the foreign language building office last year. He was the best speaker of English among the administrators, his skill far superior to the other three people in that busy, essential powerhouse of an office. In April, at the beginning of the academic year, he was introduced to the native English teachers by the department head: "He likes to practice English, so please talk to him!"
He called to me a few weeks ago as the train reached the "shuten," the end of the line at about 8 am. Everyone was disembarking and dispersing through the one exit.
"I am taking an English composition class," he told me as we walked uphill.
"Is it something you just started?"
"From April."
He explained the assignments are corrected by email, and read aloud in class. "It's like a speech class, although it is writing."
"I'm writing short speeches for my Japanese class. They have to be written by hand, up and down, with kanji," I told him.
He nodded. "Tate gaki."
"Standing writing?" I guessed the word's meaning.
"Have you done shudo?" he asked, referring to Japanese calligraphy.
"No, but I have a basket, a Japanese paper craft. On the inside, it says 'Asobu:' play. Is that shodo?"
"Yes."
"Can you do Japanese calligraphy?"
"No," he said. "I'd wanted to learn, but did baseball instead."
I told Mr. Nagata the assignment I had just completed: to describe a US city. Then I asked, "What kind of topics do you write about?"
"Capital punishment," he said. "For or against."
I was flabbergasted at the complexity of his class topic.
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At NDA I asked my students about kanji.
--What is a kanji you don't like?
--What's the most complex kanji?
Disliked kanji included morning, defeat, death, and divide. Complex kanji included a campfire and depression.
Disgruntled agreement greeted "morning" as an unkind kanji, with the students' desire for more sleep.
Death earned disrepute by the fear it engendered.
I felt a friendly tap on my shoulder. A student who had presented a hated kanji held an electronic dictionary opened to "nervous depression." It was that kind of depression the student had disliked.
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Visiting my friends, the Saruta family, I noticed the DVD of "The Last Samurai." Hiroko was preparing food in the kitchen as Kazushi lit the barbecue in the front yard.
Yuko came downstairs from the big room she shares with her younger sister. She said that she had seen this movie twice already, and gestured that she therefore understands the plot. She set the language to English
At dinnertime, the sisters tuned in to a regular hour Sunday TV broadcast similar to The Last Samurai, for a Japanese audience. The time period and characters were similar to the American feature film, although I could not follow the plot.
"Who's he?" I asked of a character in the TV show. "Samurai?"
"No. He wants to be Samurai," Yuko answered.
The two daughters did homework at the dining room table after dinner. Chikako showed me the English workbook lesson from her junior high school. Yuko read an essay about gun control in the USA for a high school class. She marked in green the words she didn't know. It was Sunday evening.
Chikako's English questions were about a couple of "its" in a class exercise which should have been "he," and a passive she understood when her mother re-stated my explanation in Japanese.
I brought out my Japanese language homework. Chikako helped me edit a short essay. Her father, Kazushi, hovered around the table and offered suggestions. The conversation was a new kind of bilingual conversation.
Kazushi asked about a sentence as Chikako held the red pen aloft.
"I'm writing about my hometown. That's the assignment," I said.
He replied in Japanese. I'm pretty sure he said, "I'd figured that" because of his body language and tone.
The dual language rhythm was comfortable. I wondered if this ease marks the end of my bilingual learning, or if it is a door to a higher level.
My Japanese essay used an adverb of time incorrectly. Chikako corrected “not yet” to “already” ("mada" to "mo"). I often confuse the terms in Japanese and was buoyed to see the same confusion plagues Japanese people learning English. Chikako repeated the rule for remembering the difference between "already" and "not yet." As she cackled happily, I wished for mnemonic devices for an English-speaking learner of Japanese.
For Yuko's reading about gun control, I offered definitions for "subversive" and "burst," but ran out of time before "caliber."
Driving to a hiking spot, the parents had played a CD of Yuko's. The Canadian singer Avril Lavigne’s love songs had simple rhymes with long words like "hesitation" and "procrastination". Kaz asked the meaning of "bounce back."
Frowning, Hiroko said the elder daughter's English level had tested the same as hers. Hiroko had recently obtained a doctorate in biochemistry.
I told her the assessment seemed accurate: The teenage Yuko was learning English faster than her mother.
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I brought the Sarutas a present from America: a deck of playing cards with drawings of mushrooms. The family of biochemists were knowledgeable about mushrooms. Kaz fetched his field guide and compared the cards and the book.
"Death Angel" matched the Japanese name. He also fetched sketchbooks that included a drawing by Yuko ("at age 10!" he exclaimed) of mushrooms.
I related students showing alternative kanji for cicada, and the Sarutas explained that one was the "old kanji". Furthermore, they said the category of insects includes snake. I objected that snake isn't an insect. They said ancient people didn't distinguish between snakes and six-legged crawlers.
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For one day I achieved a high level understanding of kanji. Instead of plodding slowly, my comprehension leapt nimbly between remembering, putting things together in new ways, and using dictionaries.
I checked the Piano room schedule book at Gaidai. Had I signed up for practice time of 1730 or 1930? I saw I had written my name at the 1930 blank. A name was crossed out for a two-hour time slot preceding mine. Had I been bumped?
Once I had asked the keeper of the piano schedule book about appointments. He had said something like, "You don't speak my language, and I don't speak your language. Let's keep the transaction simple."
A person appeared just then at the window with a helpful smile.
"Daimon has one hour only," the person informed me.
I gave my thanks. I got the key for an hour.
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My Japanese homework about my hometown was written in vertically. It had been edited and then corrected.
I had written about driving in Los Angeles. I flipped through the dictionary, found a word (not easy when the dictionary is not alphabetical), and I could read the examples in Japanese:
--"Has the train passed Shinagawa station?"
--"The man just passed through this street."
--"I got along this street every day."
I walked past a restaurant. I shouted, "Aki moto" because I could read the name.
This has been one of those occasional peak experiences of a time when I enjoy being able to just walk around reading kanji.
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Opposite the exuberant feeling of "I walk around reading kanji" is the confusion of missing connections or seeing the answers too late.
At a train station exit, the wicket rejected my fare card. The bell sounded, the plastic bars came up, and I couldn't go through the barrier.
Mr. Nagata had already gone through and turned towards the campus.
"Wait for me!" I thought of yelling, but couldn't see him as the crowd dispersed. I was stuck between the adjust fare machines and the store with hardboiled eggs and rice balls. I had a new 5000 yen train card in my wallet. I needed 10 yen. My fingers raced and I found ten yen first. The machine obligingly dispensed a small pink fare ticket and the depleted card.
I should have put both the old and new card into the wicket. But I had forgotten at the crucial moment.
This kind of learning sequence --- learn, forget, and remember -- may have a theoretical name. I have grown fond of the delay and release of skill acquisition. The learning process cannot be argued with, or willed. The feeling is like being in a current that is sometimes fast sometimes slow.
I caught up with Nagata. The stationmaster may have deplored my slowness but must have been relieved when the bell did not sound or require explanation.
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Nagata disentangled from his ears a pair of earphones and the plug from a small canister a little bigger than a pen.
"Is that a CD player?" I asked.
"No, it's an MP3 player."
"Are you listening to music?" I asked.
"No. CNN."
"It is a radio?
"No. I subscribe to CNN." It was part of his ongoing effort to learn English.
"How does the CNN get on there?" I asked.
He explained that it was a digital package. He receives a CD, puts in into a computer and downloads into the small device.
“Can you recommend magazines or articles?” he asked.
"Do you like computers?" I responded.
"Yes."
"How about Dan Gilmoor's column about Silicon Valley. You can access it on ‘Asahi.com,’" I said. "I've tried it because it's published bilingually and I try to learn Japanese. But it is very slow reading for me. Your English is better than my Japanese reading."
He told me his mother recognized the geranium cuttings that I had given him last week.
"Zer-ra-ni um," he pronounced as an imported word--imported from English. "She called them 'zer-ra-ni um.'"
“ 'Geranium,'" I corrected with reflexive officiousness.
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Mr. Kinoshita teaches non-Japanese cadets the Japanese language in an intensive year. A cadet told me he had to learn 1300 kanji before starting freshmen classes. I'd studied 300 kanji before arriving at NDA in 2000, four years ago. When correcting one of my essays Kinoshita criticized my writing of the word for "color" because I had not used the kanji. "You should know this kanji," he scolded.
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Kinoshita also wrote out the kanji for "Points and Lines," a famous murder mystery novel I mention in my essay about trains. He added in enthusiastic detail in English, which is unusual, that it was one of the first novels he had ever read. He talked about technologies of travel. "My mother wanted to go on the Shinkansen for their honeymoon, but my father said it was too expensive."
He said that plane travel was new when "Points and Lines" which refers to travel timetables, was published. "There had been trains in Japan, but domestic flights were new." This plane travel allowed the main character to mastermind a double murder by arranging an alibi.
"'Alibi,'" Kinoshita repeats. "That's an English word, isn't it?"
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Kinoshita criticized my essay about my hometown. He said it is confusing, going back and forth from 1960s to 1940s to the present 2000s. He suggested re-organizing by characters’ stories.
I was happy for his help and vowed to write the next essay -- on flowers -- more clearly.
At NDA, a Japanese colleague asked me, "Aren't they saluting in English yet?" of the freshmen class.
The new directive had been given the previous week. At the beginning of each class, the cadets should say, "Good morning, Ms. Katzman." And at the end of class as they stand, heads bowed, they should chorus, "Thank you for today's lesson, Ms. Katzman."
The formal English salutations make me feel warm, a little shy, and challenge me to live up to their ritual expectations. It's a corny feeling, like saluting the flag, or singing in unison.
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My brother Steve asked, "When are you coming back to the US to live?"
"If I get a job, I'll come back to the US to live," I said. This is an exchange we've had a few times.
I expounded on my answer, feeling a bit edgy.
Finally he said, "Okay, okay."
I said, "Yeah, how about all that Japanese writing," referring to the China itinerary I’d sent him.
"You're not ‘going Japanese,’ are you?" Steve asked.
"No," I protested. "I can't read it."
I read about diaries of slaves in America who escaped, and learned to read and write, activities that were forbidden.
"I feel pulled both ways, and in both languages."
"You have time," Steve told me soothingly after I calculated my social security statement. Ten more years in Japan would qualify me for good social security benefits.
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I went to the Stanford Japan Center in Kyoto in June to seek work. Hiroshi struggled to express himself in English because I could not understand much Japanese.
Later, I visited nearby Zen temples. In a garden at 5 PM closing time, I started back along the path by the carp. The temple guy cried out, "No, no," and motioned me forward. The exit was not the same as the entrance.
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At Gaidai, I presented a lesson about appositives. The Japanese equivalent term's existence assured me of the students' deep comprehension. However, the setting off by commas was not obvious to the students. I told the story of adorning my elementary school essay in random commas. I had the impression that old Japanese writing did not use commas. The students agreed: Japanese uses circles for periods, doesn't have spaces between words, and doesn't use commas.
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Wada spent much of the English lesson making puns on personal names. Visitors from a foreign military academy had just ended a weeklong stay. They attended a class of foreign cadets who study Japanese where their names were transformed into Japanese, Wada explained. In names, one had to avoid meanings or even homonyms with "bad meanings."
When Wada extended her discussion to consider my name I thought, "Why is she wasting her time in this nonsense play?" Certainly name puns come in handy, as when my cousin who teaches the deaf signs Wasserman as a scurrilous WA ass.
Wada parsed my name and severely examined each syllable for punning. I offered that I had been told that my last name punned with a Japanese word for “victory”. She continued her search. In a language rife with puns because of its auditory characteristics, one must be very careful in choosing personal names.
