4. Metamorphosis. Changing of language.
The Shinkansen made an unscheduled stop at a local station. The June sky was as dark as twilight, although the time was only 1730 on the summer solstice. A typhoon had hit.
It was the first Shinkansen delay I’d experienced in a year and a half of weekly commutes from Tokyo to Osaka. After leaving Kanto (eastern Japan), the Super Express doesn't usually stop until the Kansai (western Japan) big city of Nagoya.
The train announcer said a few sentences in Japanese and then we passengers heard NHK, the national broadcasting network, over the train loudspeakers. Usually we hear only pre-recorded announcements of arrival in English and in Japanese.
I understood the word "typhoon" and go stretch in the vestibule between cars. Many businessmen talked on cell phones in hurried, anxious exchanges. They were re-scheduling meetings.
I heard loud abrupt short statements in Japanese:
"We're still stopped at Shizuoka."
"I'll call again when I know when we'll start moving again."
"Sorry, I'm on vacation next week."
"Tomorrow morning..."
"It's impossible."
"It's difficult."
The train announcer said something about "Tokyo" and I wondered whether the Shinkansen would reverse direction. We were pointed west, into the typhoon.
For two hours, no trains came from the west. A crowd of waiting passengers appeared on the opposite platform. A local Shinkansen bound for Tokyo stopped for them. No other trains came. Our train started moving slowly, making local stops although it has been an express train on leaving Tokyo four hours earlier.
I lay down across three unoccupied seats and slept. A woman tapped my shoulder. She was standing among all the other passengers. Nagoya was to be our last stop, and she and her family advised me to follow them onto the local train to Shin Osaka.
We settled into the local train. The little girl, mother, mother's younger sister, and maternal grandparents were traveling back from Tokyo to Osaka. The child was about three years old. On the windowsill, the little girl played with two yellow puppets: Pluto the Disney dog, and a tiger. I wondered whether the tiger were the mascot of a local sports team.
"Hanshin Tiger?" I asked, referring to the Osaka baseball team.
"No. This is Shima Jiro."
"Shima: stripes," I said. "'Shima Jiro'--that's a long name." Was there a shorter name? My angling towards further conversation with the three-year old hit my wall of ignorance for the Japanese word for “nickname.” And I was too tired to struggle towards a round-about communication ploy; I couldn’t “manipulate the language” to express myself, in the terminology of fluency tests.
The girl was surrounded by weary, resigned adults attention. Mutually warmed. She took the initiative. "Pluto," she said, referring to her other puppet.
"She's speaking English," her aunt said to me.
"Her pronunciation is perfect," I said, thinking, "Pluto" is a very un-Japanese sound.
The girl's eyes roamed among the faces of her family, landing here and there, on one person or another.
"Pluto,” I said. "Pluto." Her eyes jumped to my face. I am happy to be included in the circle of familiar friendly interest, alight with pairs of eye. I wanted to keep her interest and extend the conversation. If she has learned English, I thought, she probably knows how to count. The first lesson is almost always the smallest numerals. I say in please-repeat-after-me English, "One, two, three."
The girl looked interested but confused. The train was very crowded. Girl, mother, and grandmother were sitting. Aunt, grandfather, and I were standing. The man stood behind the last seat in the aisle. He lean forward far enough to hover near his grand-daughter.
"One, two, three," Grandfather said in English, holding up a sequential trio of digits.
I wondered how fluent the Japanese culture was in Disnese. Everyone knew Mickey and Minnie. "How does she know Pluto?" I asked the aunt, the family’s English language ambassador.
"A Disney video."
I talked with the aunt when she wasn’t translating for the grandmother. She translated my English as well as my Japanese.
"I think your Japanese is better than my English," the aunt said in Japanese.
Ah, a standard lingual compliment. "My Japanese ability is not good," I replied. The standard Japanese protest of modesty to a personal compliment.
"I studied English in university," the aunt continued in Japanese.
"Are you in university now?" I asked.
"No, that was four years ago. Then I studied at the Berlitz language school. Where are you from?"
I liked this; she understood my limitations with the language. She would graciously enable a conversation. She would use slightly more complex words and grammar that I could formulate. But I could understand others’ speech where I myself was dumb.
"I’m from California,” I said. “Have you been there?"
"No, I went to Canada to study English at Toronto University,” she explained. “I saw Niagara Falls."
"Why do you study English so hard?"
"I like to travel."
"Where else have you been?"
"Australia, England."
"What do you speak other than Japanese and English?" We had been speaking in Japanese, but here my lack of vocabulary confused her. made great grammatical gyres to express “other
than.” Adjectives like that are difficult; Celsius v Farenheit are noun- cool by comparison, easy.
than.” Adjectives like that are difficult; Celsius v Farenheit are noun- cool by comparison, easy.
Oops- What is the Japanese word for “language?” I asked again, in English, “Do you know any other languages?”
How could I know how to say the names of many languages, but not "language?" Shouldn’t “language” be a priority word in a second language? Even before counting “one, two, three?”
"I speak Japanese and English only," she replied.
The little girl said, "Jump." With this word, she announced interest in English and instructed. Family members pointed at objects whose colors she called out. The girl answered loud and clear: “red,” “green,” “yellow.”
Someone started the game of "What is this?" The little girl named objects.
Someone pointed to English letters winding on a bright band around a suitcase. Challenged by letters, she paused and replied in a hesitant voice.
“What did you say?” I asked. I thought, “Maybe she said, ‘Aee-Bee—Cee.’”
The aunt corrected my guess from the girl’s garble of hesitant English. "'Romaji.'" The Roman alphabet: “Roma” plus the Japanese word for letter, “ji.”
As we neared the end of the train ride, the grandfather made sure I knew how to proceed to my destination.
I asked the aunt, "'Gaidai' is what I should tell the taxi driver?"
""Kansai Gaidai,’" she corrected.
The family talked in Japanese about a car, and I though maybe they considered giving me a ride. I feigned ignorance and independence. It was after 9 PM; normally I arrive around 3 PM at this station and take an express bus to campus.
I stepped out of a convenience store carrying plastic bags with dinner, breakfast, and lunch of sandwiches, eggs and fruit.
A drunken man holding a cell phone to his ear staggered towards the place to cue up for the cabs. I walked fast and got into a cab by remotely opened left back door.
“Kansai Gaidai,” I tell the taxi driver.
The driver repeated the name and said a longer name. I showed him my dog-eared bus schedule.
"It's 30 minutes by bus, this is the bus I usually take," I said in Japanese, pointing at the worn bus schedule.
He understood the pas-du-bus.
He studied the paper, handed it back, and started driving. He turned off the bus route's main road onto a one-lane road. Red construction lights blinked along rolls of plastic and wire. Red traffic cones flashed. The air was light and warm. I opened the window to refresh the taxi’s tobacco-tainted, refrigerated air, and sat forward on the seat to see over the headrest.
The taxi went fast. The windshield reflected the meter reading of 1400 yen. I recalled a school transit information fare sheet estimate of 3000 yen taxi fare, station to school. We went uphill, in a direction that agreed with my sense of university location, a sense easier to come by here than in the endless flats of Tokyo.
The taxi drove besides tall cement monoliths.
"The new subway?" I asked in Japanese.
"Monorail," corrected the driver. The word was recognizable to me even with its Japanese pronunciation, or “English as she is Japped,” in the term of one early observer. Imported words from English sound more or less like English. But better, or at least shorter. Lists are devised to confuse the native speaker, from “air conditioner” (air-con) to “software” (softo).
Up close, the structure of the monorail gave a different sense than from looking down from my 4th floor classroom.
"It can be seen from Gaidai," I said. The abbreviation combines, like “air con,” the essential components.
The driver openes the remote door. We were at the university gate near the police box. No students, no motor scooters, no bikes. The three old seven-story buildings were dark and deserted.
A security officer got the key to the guesthouse and escorted me there. Tree limb littered the road. The typhoon hit at 1 PM. Classes had been cancelled.
The bright clear hot weather, typically day-after typhoon, prevailed with classes in session, students laughing and posturing on the stairs so slowly. Often I wonder how they ever get anywhere.
On the return trip to Kanto the next afternoon, the Shinkansen was a sleek dragon. Falling debris had cut its power cables during the storm. At 7:15 PM, Mount Fuji appeared in clear twilight silhouette.
A few weeks later, I waited for Masuo、the affable 30-something guy who worked in the administration department of Gaidai, for dinner in Yokohama. He was twenty minutes late and did not answer his cell phone. He was staying at his sister's in Tokyo. He'd been accepted for the final round of interviews for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
When he finally arrived, he said he had fallen asleep on his sister’s couch. I suggested we head to Chinatown for a celebratory dinner and started for the subway. But the new subway is in a different direction from the old subway. Lost, I turned navigation over to him, and finally we found the proper subway, where a young couple handed him two tickets. I wondered why he did not offer them money, and he explained that the tickets were day passes. The day passes would soon expire, and the couple had traveled around by subway all day and were finished.
At the Chinatown exit, we didn’t know any restaurants so we changed plans and strolled along the waterfront park and up to foreigners' cemetery and ate at a beer garden. Speaking mostly in English, he asked which language I would suggest he study if accepted into the foreign ministry, French or English. I thought he should begin French. His English already has wings.
He appeared slighter and younger in jeans and casual shirt than in his workday suit. The leave he’s taken from work, studying since March for the interview and written test, have softened his surety and brashness. Next month, he'll either be accepted to start next April, or declined but with an option to apply again.
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A man on the Keikyu train line wore a short-sleeved seersucker shirt. Amid morning commuters to schools and offices, he seemed to be retired. His Hawaiian shirt had a dozen small pictures and descriptions in English: Deck shoes. Palm tree. An alcoholic drink called "blue Hawaii." Flamingo.
I studied the inscriptions. He was sitting across the aisle and did not acknowledge nor protest my attention. The shirt contrasted with the train notices of ads for consumer electronics, schools, and news magazines.
Public English catches the eye and ear in Japan. On the train, I hunt fathomable phrases compulsively, as if for a recognizable face. English is an oasis.
The Hawaiian shirt was unusual. Public messages more frequently jut from T-shirts forlorn for literacy by their wearers.
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I wrote my question on the white board. "Do you like Shakespeare? Why?"
Only students with top English scores study English with native teachers their first year. The lower scoring students study English with Japanese teachers during the first year at the national defense academy, NDA.
“It is ok to not like Shakespeare, or never to have read him,” I encouraged.
“He wrote about murders,” said one student, literally translating a memory-aid Japanese number pun. The word for “murder” is pronounced the same as the year of Shakespeare’s birth.
“I like Shakespeare because there are a lot of quotes from him,” said another student.
"Not all of Shakespeare is dark," I said. On the white board, I wrote a sonnet's first and last lines.
"'When to the sessions of sweet, silent thought,
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought.
But when I think of you dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.'"
I pointed out the rhyming couplets. I had a very good feeling when I finished because instead of only listening to opinions of students, I took the trouble to give my own.
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Kinoshita, who teaches the Japanese language to non-Japanese cadets and to me, was delighted with my written Japanese theme about flowers. I wrote about dinosaurs and flowers: Although flowers appeared when dinosaurs lived, the dinosaurs probably did not like the flowers very much. I used the simple Japanese equivalent for “not like.”
After I read my theme aloud in Japanese, Kinoshita rushed into his adjoining seminar room and got a book. He showed me the Japanese book about dinosaurs. He suggested I say "to care about" instead of “to like.”
I used simple expressions to try to say that dinosaurs could probably see the colors of flowers and smell them, but that flowers were not their favorite food.
He said that knowledge of the overlapping eras of dinosaurs and flowers is unusual. To conclude my little essay, he added a phrase indicating that insects lived also at the same time with flowers.
He had learned this from a TV program, he blurted in English. I told him that I learned about flowers and dinosaurs from a surprisingly informative movie, Jurassic Park, while substituting for a junior high school class in California.
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I rented movies to show the last NDA classes before summer. I needed English with Japanese subtitles.
At the video rental store, forgetting the Japanese phrases the students had taught me, I communicated by pantomime and short sentences.
"It's an English class," I said. "English language movie." I gestured, "Japanese subtitle."
The three clerks in matching blue plaid short-sleeved shirts exchanged knowledgeable glances. They enunciated the phrase I recognized from my students.
I followed a clerk as he strode through the store aisles and picked out “Last Samurai,” “Sixth Sense,” and as we neared the counter, I added “Roman Holiday.”
"Same?" he asked in Japanese, carefully repeating the requirement of bilingual audio with subtitle.
“Yes."
I cursed my lack of courage. It was within my ability to have said in Japanese a variety of correct sentences, for example, "hear English, read Japanese."
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I jogged along a river that winds through Yokohama. Some apartment buildings have been demolished. Young warriors practicing kendo? As I approached, I saw the baseball bats.
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Kinoshita strongly criticized my written theme for using complex words unlikely to be employed in conversation. Such a conversation would require a dictionary and encyclopedia. He reorganized it, and after I stumbled through a re-read, he extemporaneously paraphrased it.
The assignment “write about your hometown” was three perspectives of Fairfax Street in Los Angeles during Spring Vacation. I drove with my cousin and on another day I drove along the same street with a retired friend of my late mother. I saw the Jewish neighborhood from the current 2004 point of view of cousin Barbara on her way to teach at a now-mostly Korean-American kindergarten; and then from the point of view of 80-yearold Evie, who had moved into that neighborhood as a refugee from Europe in the 1940s. I myself knew the street from childhood drives in the 1960s on my way to visit my grandparents. The area was familiar to me, although I would get lost there by myself. Barbara talked about the day’s necessities: where to buy lunch, where a student lives, how the neighborhood is changing. Evie, suffering from the beginning of Alzheimer’s disease, recalled her arrival in Los Angeles and narrates for me as we pass the houses of people who helped her as an orphan, but Evie cannot find the dry cleaner’s for which she searches to take some curtains to be hemmed.
I don’t know whether to structure the theme by time periods or by characters or by the latest chronological order in which I saw the street. So I am delighted to hear the clear version of Mr. Kinoshita.
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My Gaidai students read "The Magi," the short story by O. Henry. I asked them to draw pictures of the story. I shortened the story to four pages. I assigned a group of several students to each of the four pages.
A student asked, "Do you want us to draw a four- panel manga?"
"That's a good idea," I responded.
The first panel: the heroine cuts her own hair and sells it.
The student returned to the white board to make corrections: The heroine had gone to the hair salon, where the hair had been cut and sold.
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I planned to show the Gaidai students the feature film "The Hours" for the last class of the semester before summer. At the video room of the university library, I searched for the DVD.
"This list is the alphabet title, and this list is director, right?" I wondered at the Japanese-only display.
But I could not find the movie in the folder that lists the library’s holding. I scanned the shelf of DVDs and videos of recent or notable acquisitions, looking in vain for the fairly easily recognizable kanji that means “time” or “hour.” It is pronounced “jikan.”
I pulled out DVD boxes to look at the picture on the box, and stumbled on the movie called in English “The Hours.”
I asked the students to translate the Japanese title.
“It starts with the word for ‘encounter’ and ends with ‘time.’”
But “time” had a plural ending. I’d seen that plural –“tachi”--only for “children” and other living things. The movie title in Japanese: “Meguriau jikan-tachi.”
"It's a strange phrase, isn't it?" I asked.
Silence.
“Why do you want to see the second part of the movie?” I demanded.
"I want to know the story," an enterprising student said.
I edited for choral repetition. "I want to find out what happens."
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Because of potential holiday crowds, on the weekend I went to my local train station to buy a Shinkansen ticket for Monday. I commuted from Yokohama where I lived to Osaka, where I taught on Tuesdays. I couldn’t reserve seats by computer because my computer was too outdated navigate the density of the Shinkansen web page.
At the station, a young woman in a red shirt emblazoned with ticket vendor helper insignia was helping someone buy a Shinkansen ticket at the recently installed machine that I had tried unsuccessfully to use despite its English language option.
The red shirt soon showed me the screen with the price.
"No," I objected. I wanted the cheap summer rate. I had seen a poster for it on the train. The cheap rate was 100 dollars instead of 130 one way.
"Ah" she apologized, "I'm sorry. My English is too bad."
She got a form and wrote down my request. You can't get the discount from the machine, she explained. She presented the completed forms to the ticket vendor behind the window over a marble counter.
The red shirted attendant moved on to help the next person. The man behind the marble slab punched numbers into the computer. There was a problem. He consulted with the red shirted woman. She drew me aside and opened a phone book sized directory with schedules and fares in small Japanese print. She opened the directory to a section about the cheap summer tickets. I could read the kanji "before" and a time period of several days.
"Oh, they have to be bought a week before use," I exclaimed in English.
"Yes, yes," she verified.
We proceeded to draw up a second sheet for a ticket request, because I commute every week. The next week would be my last Shinkansen trip before summer vacation. Just in time for one round-trip cheap summer ticket. I bought two round trip tickets at two different prices.
I sweated in the 90 degree Fahrenheit heat. My mind calculated automatically; ticket fares and discounts summed relentlessly like the summer chirps of cicadas.
"Only so many new details can be absorbed at once," I said to myself under my breath. There was no way I could've known about the prior date purchase limitation.
The red shirted attendant again apologized, "I'm sorry. I need to study more English."
In the evening, I saw the metamorphosis of an underground grub into the flying, seeing, singing cicada.
I had imagined the insect burrowing out of a small underground tunnel. But I had never imagined the metamorphosis. I looked outside at dusk after dinner. A pale white form lay on the cement of the patio. A brown-shelled hulk moved over it. Were they locked in battle?
Insect legs waved forcefully, stopped, and waved again. The process repeated itself several times: Wave. Stop. Wave. Stop.
The brown form started to shrink and curl. The pale form started to change color, body puffing out. The wings, flat on the cement, remained pale and still.
Scooping what I thought were a pair of creatures onto a sheet of paper, I carried the wrestling inside and watched for hours.
The eyes were bright red dots on the pale form. They became orange. I moved my hand over the eyes. The wings fluttered to first flight. The cicada landed on my shirt. I put it outside on a shrub.
When I saw the cicada the next afternoon, close to where I placed it on a garden shrub the night before, its colors and patterns were more pronounced.
With the summer heat arrived vacations, summer insects and a train posters advertising travel. One poster pictured a wooden structure, green light through trees, and a young meditative woman. Poetically placed words read, if I understood:
"Big summer vacation.
Small temples will be found.
This is happiness."
The privatized railway company wanted travelers during summer vacation to visit such places as depicted with wood patio and green light filtered into the peaceful holy place.
I saw the poster on my way to the temple-rich former capital Kyoto for a sightseeing date with Masuo, who returned to the Kansai area with partial success in his attempt to go into the Foreign Service. He needed to study national politics to pass the interview test. He won't have to take the written test again.
On the bus, we read a kanji.
“The left part of the Chinese character means insect,” I said.
“Do you know the right part of the kanji?”
"No," I said.
"Snake," he said.
"Hebi?" I ask, pronouncing the Japanese word.
"Yes, but pronounced differently."
"Why is snake included as an insect?” I asked. “Surely the ancients could tell the difference, they who lived close to the natural world."
"Maybe it's the size? Let me think about it." A bus ride later, he announced, "I have the solution. Worm is included in the category."
I objected. "That's circular reasoning."
I told him about seeing a boy's summer cotton robe, yukata, with pattern of insects, and my disappointment that the garment was too small for me to wear.
After sightseeing at Nijo castle and at the Golden Pavilion, we went into a department store so he could look at men's yukata.
He showed me an item for sale, size LL, and exclaimed that he was just looking. There were no insect patterned summer kimonos at the stores.
"I hear the number of kanji needed to read a newspaper is 2000," I said.
"1850 is the number junior high school graduates know," he remarked. "The newspapers have recently said that they are limiting the kanji they use to those 1850."
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Ms. Wada, the administrator for cadets’ affairs at the National Defense Academy, sent me a diary entry during the summer. I corrected the English as I read about her children's swim lessons--"Sumireko is a coward"--and barbecues.
She wrote of the heat, expressing the temperature in Fahrenheit at 71.
"Perhaps you meant 91?" I replied.
Her next email started, "I'd heard 32 added to C equals F."
I did the math with the conversion equation with its troublesome fraction of 9/5, and got 89, but thought that the weather seemed hotter than that. I sent her my result of 89 and the equation.
She replied. "'F equals C multiplied by 9/5 plus 32.'
I confirmed this formula by homepage again and I understood but you made a careless mistake! The right answer is 39 times 9/5 plus 32 equals 102.2 F. Maybe you calculated 32 times 9.5 plus 32 equals 89.6 F. Anyway, Tokyo was very hot at that day!"
My body understands Fahrenheit, and hers Celsius. But she caught the mechanical error where I did not.
Laura Heim, a professor of Northwestern University, spoke at Kyoto University. A student of John Dower, historian of EMBRACING DEFEAT recent fame, Heim told about statisticians who reshaped social policy in Japan after World War Two. It was a hot day with thunderstorms.
She spoke in English to a full room of a hundred people.
Several professors asked questions in Japanese, and she answered in English.
I rode in a car back to Gaidai with two other professors and an American graduate student. The student had a kanji handwriting recognition computer. From the back seat, we see a pedestrian sign showing a human figure and a kanji.
"Do you know what that means?" I asked.
"I will in a minute."
The word means "pedestrian," not surprisingly.
The machine was a Sony Clia, 30,000 yen new, purchased a month or so earlier when he had arrived from New York, in need of an immediate way to understand the language of this country.
At the end of the ride, he let me use the input stick. "You know some kanji," he suggested.
I tried easy to write kanji: "car" and “under.”
Then, I wrote an incomplete kanji. Filling out a failing grade form for a student a year ago, I had learned the kanji for “unfinished.” According to a kanji dictionary, “fu” means “not; the negation of condition.” The little device interpreted my scribble correctly.
A student told me that seeing the metamorphosis of a cicada might be rare. The grub is called "uka" in Japanese. Add the common past tense suffix for “to do.” The result "ukashita" means “transformed.”
The metamorphosis of language fascinated.
