CHAPTER
7
What is the best way to buy a Shinkansen ticket: From a machine? On line? At a university student store? In bulk?
Japanese colleagues wonder too.
“ I travel every week between Kansai and Kanto,” I
told the ticket mistress.
“Buy online and pick up the ticket at a station.”
Our conversation faltered. Vocabulary was lacking “ buying tickets in bulk.”
"Six," she answered, putting the index
finger of one hand on the open palm of the other.
Six, however, did not seem to refer to the number of
tickets to be purchased at one time.
She said in English, "Cheapest, most fast."
By Internet, I used my JR Tokai credit card to buy a
Shinkansen ticket. I wrote down
the four-digit reservation code sent to me by email confirmation. Later, at the ticket window, I asked, “Can
I get the tickets by machine?” thinking to save more money.
"9 and 10," she answered, pointing to the
last pair in the row of vending machines.
I walked across the lobby. I got my ticket, and tried to see how machines 9 and 10
differed from machines 1 through 8. I hoped I would be able to find appropriate
machines in the next match with a forest of ticket vending machines.
This slow meticulous search among symbolic identities
often paid off. The search seemed childish, as if not the real thing, but only
a game among decoys. I was illiterate.
I needed symbols, not letters.
The Japanese language lesson from Mr. Kinoshita was a
great honour for me. The weekly
lesson was irregular because sometimes he had to attend a meeting instead. Once
he had to be at a disciplinary hearing for a foreign student accused of
cheating on a test. I concentrated
too intensely during the one-on-one lesson, while he tried to make me relax,
drawing attention to my coiled posture and locked jaws.
"Breathe deep," he usually said. "Lean back."
I always followed his suggestion.
On day he said, "Don't be afraid."
His acumen!
I could excuse my stress in various ways, but mostly I was afraid of
making mistakes. This
anxiety made him uncomfortable, too.
My desire corrupted the capability.
At a private English lesson I gave during lunch, my
student described a technique in language learning called
"ghosting." A
learner repeats the teacher’s speaking so soon after hearing it that there is
no time for thought or fear.
"The head is empty," she explained.
A very good teacher in a junior high school in Tokyo used
this method of ghosting.
"Don't be alarmed," he had warned. "The students will follow you closely."
------------------
Junior Class Performance Day at the National Defense
Academy. Each English class had to
be on stage for seven minutes.
One of my classes chose to perform Michael Jackson’s
hit, “Thriller.” They appointed a dance
master, and watched the video over and over. They cleared away the desks and practiced.
Another class opted for the Edgar Allan Poe murder
mystery "The Tell-Tale Heart." The students wrote a script. I brought a metronome for the dead man’s
heart beating. But during rehearsal the designated soundman called out in a
loud, flat voice, “To-kunn, to-kunn."
I was delighted. He nodded in modest acknowledgement. I wanted to ask him, “Why ‘to-kunn?’”
But there was something about a language class that prevents questions about
language. There is the existence
of an acceptable classroom level of inquiry beyond which lies confusion.
After
the performance, Ms. Horie asked, “Do you know what ‘to-kunn’ means?”
“No,” I said.
“I thought it was just a random sound. I wondered why the students chose that sound.”
The two Japanese English teachers provided a deluge
of examples of Japanese onomatopoeia.
There was “to-kunn” and its variations; a "sh" sound that
meant tears, but "only a woman's tears".
“Poe is famous for onomatopoeia,” I said. The Japanese English teachers at NDA
are extremely knowledgeable about English literature. One year they banned Shakespeare.
I’d tried to explain the phrase, “’It was only the
wind in the chimney or a cricket chirp.’" My narrator had had a difficult time pronouncing the words
and we had drilled them over and over.
"She's a very good English speaker,” Mr. Horie said.
“I offered to shorten the sentences, but she
protested," I recalled.
Magnificent her performance was.
3. My
cipher lesson at Gaidai accompanied the chapter in the Internet book about
computer security. The assignment was to devise a secret code and send a coded message.
One group of students provided an algorithm to
another group. While the second group
attempted to decode by the pattern, the rest of the students tried to break the
code without knowing the pattern.
"Maybe Katzman loves us," was one message.
A student wrote another message in code on the
blackboard. I noticed the inserts
of "one," “two,” “three," and the disguised word breaks.
"'I am hungry but I have no money and I am about
to die,’” I soon read. "Explain the code in English."
The group explained with a word in Japanese. “Numbers ‘toru’,” a group representative says.
"'Toru?'" I asked.
"Toru," he insisted.
""Does that mean ‘fly away?’” I asked.
"No. ‘Toru.’”"
"What does it mean?"
"Take away."
"Oh.
In English, we say 'garbage numbers.'"
------------------
My ticket card did not have enough. I inserted a new card,
too. But the wicket rejected
both. The ticket master opened the
gate and put my train cards through a computer in the small office.
I asked in
Japanese, "Why doesn't it work?"
He shrugged and said, “Sometimes the machines do not
work.”
------------------
By Internet shopping, I gave my San Francisco sister
and family warm slippers and a throw blanket.
"It’s been cold, really cold," she thanked
me in email on getting the package.
I checked the weather in San Francisco and looked for
the Celsius in order to assess how cold it was before I checked the Fahrenheit
display. Is this a kind of bilingualism?
------------------
I looked at the train schedule posted on the doors
between compartments. The 1113 train
will be fine. But when I reserved
the ticket by Internet, the train time is 1109.
At Shin Yokohama, “ticket” flashed on the machine.
“Isn’t the next move yours?” I thought, short of time.
But the machine was directing me: It meant to say, "Put in the ticket."
I put in the transfer ticket from my local train. The machine gave me a ticket to the Shinkansen. I ran through the turnstile and up the
stairs just in time to board.
Shin Osaka held one more train transfer to negotiate.
I descended to the local train platform.
“Arriving trains at 1330 and 1346,” the sign said.
1333, said my watch,
I approached a woman, and asked, "Late?”
She nodded.
Sometimes the fault is in the clockworks.
------------------
I blew off my anger when passing smokers whose fumes
offend by saying, "Gan-man."
"Gan" is Japanese for cancer.
I had a chance to check my joke for accuracy and
reaction in a class at Gaidai.
Some students chose to discuss the law that required
health warnings on cigarette packets to be worded more strongly and placed on
the front of the packages.
I recounted my furious joke. They laughed, although many of them
smoke. One guy whose attitude I
liked but who smells strongly of tobacco, explained, "Tobacco should not
be illegal. Not like drugs. I can work. It doesn't stop me from working."
------------------
In Tokyo Station, I bought a Shinkansen ticket at the
huge raised dias, and went
into a sushi place, sat at the counter.
Below the revolving sushi, a second conveyor belt held big teacups.
In front of me there was a tray, wooden chopsticks
soy sauce, and a dispenser with green powder. On my tray there was small sauce bowl.
I put a teacup under the spigot. Hot water poured into the cup. But where was the tea? Looking, I lifted
the top off a bowl; there were long white strands, which I assumed were noodles,
and serving tongs. I was surprised that noodles seemed to be provided free as a
condiment.
With a tapping motion on a can, I poured green powder
onto a small bowl, and with a chopstick mixed in some hot water.
I remembered my Uncle Morrie, an independent food
chemist, and my mother, making wasabi from powder they got from a small tin. It was important to wait for five
minutes after adding water. This
procedure seemed unusual in a quick food restaurant, but I congratulated myself
on knowing the correct way to prepare Japanese horseradish.
I dipped the sushi in the green liquid. The liquid was no thicker than water. There was neither sharp taste in the
mouth, nor pungency in the nostrils.
I dipped a chopstick into the bright green goo. It tasted like tea. I looked at the container of green
powder and recognized the kanji for “tea.” (This tea kanji had clear symmetrical top upper marks that
symbolized “plant.”) I realized my
mistake. My embarrassment went
unrecognized.
I tapped what I knew to be powdered green tea onto
the now lukewarm water in the teacup.
The powder remained on top of the water. It would not dissolve.
I took another teacup from the revolving belt. I moved in slow motion, at teacup-speed, slower than the
sushi dishes. I gestured a question
to a waitress. The young woman
assured me, yes, first put the tea into the cup, and then add water.
------------------
On the weekend, I had a long phone conversation with
my nephew, Max, 16. He assumed
that I could speak Japanese. This
was the first time anyone had assumed that I could speak Japanese. I did not object.
I had started studying Japanese in San Francisco, in
the living room of Max’s parents while I had stayed for two weeks waiting for
my Japanese visa to clear. He had
been eight, studying baseball stadiums and games as I drew Japanese
letters.
I in Japan, we talked about languages. San Francisco
public schools exposed Max to teachers and students speaking Chinese Spanish,
and Japanese.
"I still find it really hard to believe that
there is more than one language," he said on the phone.
"I feel the same way," I replied. I was happy to hear someone express the
feeling that I have had for a long time.
Max asked, “Can your read a Japanese newspaper?”
“No, Newspapers have more kanji than I know.”
“Do you talk to your friends in Japanese or in
English?” he asked.
At Tokyo station I ate again at the revolving sushi
shop. I sat in the place of the
man last week who had made requests of the sushi chef. I noticed a sign taped to the counter
with the names of the sushi colour-coded to match the plates on which they
arrived.
The writing was hiragana, not kanji, so I could
pronounce it. Silently.
The man next to me ordered something; the chef
prepared two dishes; I took one.
It was tasty.
I pointed at another of the same kind and the
waitress got it for me from the revolving belt while the sushi chef walked
towards another part of the counter.
I resolved to try a request for that kind of sushi
next time I was in the shop. I noticed that the long white strips provided
gratis were not noodles, but strips of fresh ginger.
At Gaidai, I ate lunch with the student in my third
period class who is about my age.
She asked about my Japanese language study.
"My current lesson is about cherry blossom
viewing," I said.
"Not this season."
"No, it's not, " I agreed.
We talked a little in Japanese, but it was difficult
for me to understand her.
------------------
------------------
I wrote
up the meeting notes of an international meeting of NGOs from Tokyo and
India. A diplomat suggested that I
figure out what the speakers say and how they say it, even when I cannot
understand their speech exactly.
------------------
In my Japanese language lesson, lesson 8 from the
intermediate reading textbook, a grandmother appeared at her eighty-eighth
birthday. The lesson explained the
88th birthday was called a "rice celebration" because of the
pun on the kanji for “eight” and “eight” looking like the kanji for "rice."
/\ eight
\ | /
-----
rice
/ | \
米 rice
I showed this to a Japanese with an interest in
ancient language, who said the pun was strange because you have to use the old
kanji. In the old kanji, the lines
were slanted at an opposite angle from the modern kanji. This visual pun worked best if you used
both the old and new kanji.
\/eight, old kanji
/\ Eight, new kanji
The birthday ninety-ninth was said to be "white
birthday."
百 hundred
minus 一 minus
one
becomes 白 white equals
ninety-nine
Mr. Kokawa, a teacher at NDA whose specialty was
dictionaries, agreed that word play on kanji was very popular in Japan. I edited his comparison of editions of
a Merriam Webster dictionary. We
talked about thesaurus, and he told me that those word books have only been
around in Japan for a couple of decades.
At lunch he answered my question about punning
birthdays.
“Double numbers are…” He searched for the word.
“Auspicious?”
“Yes, auspicious. The kanji for eight is not necessarily old; it is simply an alterative
form of eight.”
He also explained about the pun of the 90th
birthday. A visual pun on the
kanji for nine and ten, which formed a slang kanji that meant graduation or
completion.
“Lots of people like kanji, as you do, and make up
these games,” he said.
------------------
Mr. Nagata took a computer programming class and showed
me the class project when we commuted on the train to NDA in the mornings. He got on the train to which I transferred
about half way to the campus. For
his computer lesson, each class group had to depict the action of going through
a curving tunnel.
He showed me his small notebooks, which had sketches,
diagrams, and instructions. Some
of the programming schemes had English words, like "goal."
This programming was on an environment called
"brew" which he explained is a multi-platform like JAVA to display
graphics on different operating systems.
He was writing programs for DoCoMo brand of cell phones.
------------------
This year was the year of the rooster in the Eastern
calendars. I got a New Year's card
for 2005 from a friend whose hobby was drawing pictures on computer. A chicken on a weathercock saw a flying
bid, and puzzled, expressed something in kanji.
I guessed that the bird was thinking, "Flying
drunk?" because the kanji looked like "sake," "alcohol
beverage." And I could read
the first kanji "fly."
A friend came to my house for a New Year's visit, and
I asked about the card. This
friend, Midori, bewailed her English ability.
“The rooster is thinking,’Eh? A flying bird?’”
------------------
I went to the dentist for a filling. The dental technician spoke pretty good
English. She consulted with the
two other technicians and with the dentist, but seemed reticent to use the word
"spit." First she checked
its meaning with me by gesturing spitting on a sidewalk or person.
"Yes," I said. "That’s spitting"
"Spit for thirty minutes," she told me,
after a procedure to strengthen the teeth after a filling a week earlier.
As I waited in the chair, mouth open, for two
minutes, as instructed, I pondered.
Later, I tried to expand her vocabulary: "Don't swallow."
------------------
"Squirt," the telephone English client says. She is telling me a story. The doctor had asked if she wanted the
water on her knee extracted.
"It's a very good guess," I said, and
expounded about squirt guns and juicy oranges.
------------------
I substituted for our Australian teacher. His students did a lesson to invent a
new holiday.
One student invented a holiday for “natto,” a fermented
soybean food typically sold in small one-serving Styrofoam packs and eaten with
mustard and soy sauce and infamous for its repugnance to foreigners. The assignment called for holiday
name and date, activity, and importance.
The student made word play on the name to arrive at July 10. “Nana” was one pronunciation of seven;
"to" was one reading of ten.
Therefore he read “natto” to mean the seventh month, tenth day. July 10 would be Natto Day.
Quick to recognise the word play, I regained authority
by correcting spelling of “natto” in English.
His classmates followed
the punned example in inventing a holiday.
11.11 for Pocky Day, after a stick candy
1001 for glasses day
1.5 (January 5) for strawberry day because the
Japanese word was “ichigo,” which by coincidence parsed into the Japanese words
for one and five.
2.9 for meat day, Japanese for meat being
“niku.” Ni means two; ku means
nine.
But the 1.11 for dog day stumped me. "I nu?" I asked, pronouncing the Japanese word
for dog. “One dog?”
"No," the student explained. “Wan, wan, wan," the Japanese sound
for barking.
I liked the results so much, I assigned my freshman
the same task, with these results.
Baseball day.
“Yakyu” was baseball in Japanese.
“Ya” meant eight. “Kyu”
meant nine. Eighth month, ninth
day. August 9.
Shoe day. “Kutsu” was shoe in Japanese. “Ku” was nine; “tsu” was two in
English. Ninth month, second
day. September 2.
The student had used Japanese and English to arrive at
a bilingually derived pun for a holiday's date, a shoe day.
------------------
I tutored a Sophia University freshman
"definition of home."
For the essay in anthropology philosophy, he argued of the impossibility
of defining any word. He wrote of
"fussiness:" stone was defined as a small rock, and thus the
definition was circular. Moreover,
size was elusive; even a hamburger could vary in size.
He meant
"fuzziness," I realized, almost disappointed.
------------------
At NDA, a senior cadet greeted me. I had taught Mr.
Kitai in freshman and junior years.
His English language aptitude was recognised by all. His nickname was Toeic Boy, after the
Test of English as International Communication.
“I’m writing my senior thesis,” he said.
"On what?" I asked.
"Kubrick," he said.
“What?”
I asked, not understanding without context.
“Kubrick.”
“Oh, the movie director. Then you've seen ‘AI’?”
“Yes.”
“I'd like to read your thesis. Let me know if you want any English
assistance. You have my email
address."
“Ok.”
I realised later he would probably be writing in
Japanese.
------------------
I assigned Gaidai students to describe their major
language in English. Arabic,
Mongolian, Russian scripts appeared on the blackboard. One guy wrote Arabic in a flowing hand
with chalk, drawing “oohs” and “aahs” of admiration from his classmates.
The Chinese student whose major language was Japanese
said of the Japanese saying before meals, "I have no idea of how to
translate this into Chinese."
Another idiom is the phrase said to colleagues at the
end of a day, “Shi tsu re shi ma
su. The literal translation “We are so tired!” goes against my cultural grain.
The Gaidai students’ assessment of foreign languages was
practical: “Are the sounds easy for us to make?”
------------------
I read somewhere, "what if English were written
in the Chinese system?”
Chinese call the Chinese system of writing
hanzi. They would call English
written by its own little pictures yangzi.
------------------
Monday night at Osaka, I stood with Masuo waiting for
a train. Green marks on the
platform said only women could ride on those cars during certain hours.
“Are there were such gender restrictions notices for
trains in Tokyo?”
“I don’t remember seeing any. Not that they do any good,” I said. "I mean, I hope they do some good, but I don’t think they do."
------------------
At Sophia, a student attended an hour-long writing
tutor session. Her assignment was
"technology." Her four
pages were titled, "Horror of Meru-Tomo" about herself as a 14-year-old
with her first cell phone answering the calls of a "stalker."
"Meru-Tomo" is slang for "email friends"
who know each other only by email, and never meet face-to-face.
The essay described randomly accessed phone numbers.
Having an email friend was fashionable, she recalled,
and so she had responded to an unknown caller.
The email friend stalked her home, and alarmed
parents put him off.
------------------
Sometimes I shared with my juniors the Japanese
lessons with which I struggled. My juniors translated the Japanese lessons I
read aloud. They puzzled together
and then deputized a speaker to render the translation. Japanese lessons took a
new perspective after I heard five university Japanese students puzzle over a
sentence, make false starts, search for a term, confer, and compete to offer an
acceptable translation to English.
There was intelligence in the language itself, and
practitioners sought meaning energetically.
Translation is the practical curriculum from early
Japanese learning of English, and my juniors were eager.
Their efforts, by turn, honed my translation ability.
Respectful reciprocity.
------------------
On my last trip to Osaka for this academic year, snow
powdered the mountains near Kyoto.
It was February.
In Yokohama I met Alvin, a Filipino NDA student. My friend Midori has been his host
mother during his stay in Japan and she brought him on a visit of a Sunday for
a very pleasant afternoon of three or four hours. We sat outside in the sun
enjoying coffee. Midori dozed, in
a relaxed incomprehension of the English conversation between Alvin and me
about learning Japanese. He talked
about the so-called “zero year” of intensive language learning; after 9 months
he and another cadet passed the Japanese proficiency test with a score of two.
Alvin waited results of a December test, hoping to achieve a score of level one,
native fluency.
NDA required no minimum language proficiency score.
He described feeling lost during the first few weeks in
Japan in the zero year of intensive language study. He did not understand much at first, and then there had been
a sudden rise in comprehension after which things--new words, kanji--fit into
place quickly.
With kindness he offered me a boxful of textbooks
from those classes.
I asked he and Midori to translate the New Year’s
card from a friend.
I had a copy of my current Japanese lesson. Every word required me concentrated
minutes to read. Alvin read aloud, slowly. He didn't know the Japanese word for "inside bath"
and so mispronounced the kanji as "nai," which is the alternative
form. Most kanji have two
pronunciations, a Chinese pronunciation and a Japanese pronunciation.
On the other hand he knew many more words in the
dialogue and taught with smugness. I had been his teacher of English for a
year. He reminded me of my nephew instructing me in trigonometry, with
no idea that I knew what a cosine was.
We went inside, and Alvin logged on and showed me
website of friends called “Friendster” which is a social networking site, and
his "blog." I'd heard of
blogs and read about them because they were in the news a lot lately, but I'd
never seen one of someone I knew. Filipinos who criticised his English read
Alvin’s blog.
------------------
On the way to Osaka, a young woman slept on a seat
across the aisle. She folded her
legs as if on the floor and covered them with a coat. Her head lagged to one side and she seemed sound asleep.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“How long should the essay be?” students asked during
finals.
“How do you say, ‘both sides of a piece of
paper?’" I asked.
“Ryou,” they said.
“Like ‘ryoumen?’” I asked. “Parents?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Ryoumen means literally ‘both people?’”
Yes, yes.”
------------------
The freshmen class at NDA talked me into showing a
movie. They accepted the choice of the movie called “Ronin,” starring Robert de
Niro, which was among a handful of videos donated in the foreign teachers’ room. The video was troublesome to
start. A student helped, but there
was no audio. English subtitles sometimes appeared.
We all realised the subtitles only appeared when
French was spoken in the scenes, which were in Paris.
The cadet tried again for audio. Whenever the subtitles appeared, I read
loudly, encouraging the class to follow suit.
A cadet seated behind me said softly, "We
understand, Katzman. So shut
up."
The right cable was connected and we sat back to
enjoy the movie.
END
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