Chapter 6
I waited for the Shinkansen.
My large fabric shopping bag held thirty dollars of food for the next
two days. It hung neatly on a
railing near a departing train. My
train would arrive on the opposite side of the platform in ten minutes. A man loaded canned drinks into a
machine.
Over the loudspeaker, I could distinguish the word "…nimotsu...."
The word pleasantly cued the dialogue of my current Japanese lesson:
"That bag looks heavy."
"It is heavy; it's a personal computer."
"Can I help you?"
"Yes, thanks.
Please open the door."
"There you go."
"Thank you."
"Nimotsu!!!"
The announcement repeated with increased intensity. Another passenger broke the static
distance between us, and as soon as she began to move towards me, the announcement’s
meaning also moved into the present time. I lifted the grocery bag.
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I tried to call the Yokohama Jazz Festival to find out where to buy
the 4000-yen one-day ticket advertised on the Internet in Japanese. My phone /fax / copy machine was not
working. In attempts to regain a
phone function, I tried many tactics: I plugged in a plain spare phone. I switched wires. I turned the power on and off. I stared at the row of green and orange
lights on the broadband box, recently installed with upgraded Internet
connection. I was confused and
helpless because I could not understand the lights.
I taught phone English, chatting for twenty minutes at a time with
a Japanese woman.
Yoko, who arranged the telephone English lessons, did not answer
my pay phone call and I left a phone message.
I spoke in English.
Yoko was an English teacher I had met at a fashion college last year
when we were both part-time; the students taught me how to pronounce “Givenchy.” The phone message instructed
me to press "sharp" at the end.
"'Sharp?'" I repeated to the public green pay phone.
Three failures followed.
Finally, I understood. Oh. #
* was the only
alternative.
I pushed #.
The voice did not hang up on me. It instead responded with further instructions. Confronted by three choices again I
suddenly understood. With relief,
I pushed "7" and the voice thanked me.
Throughout all steps but the last, the “answer” to each question
IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE was YES.
But the “answer” to the last question was NO.
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I arrived at the station on time but I did not see my friend. The station was big. She’d seemed confident of easily
finding each other. Train and
subway lines connected to the Shinkansen. I began my question to a station
agent, "I am meeting a friend."
In Japanese, a succinct, "friend meet."
"Go out here, and turn left," she said. "This is the ticket office only
for transfer tickets."
My friend was sorry for being three minutes late.
I felt friendly towards language. Language had helped me solve a problem, instead of being the
problem language.
------------------
I wanted tickets to the annual Yokohama Jazz Festival. At one pm,
musicians were playing in the cool drizzling rain outside the Sakuragicho station
near Landmark Tower and the waterfront in Yokohama I strolled over to the Red Brick Warehouse amid other
weekend sightseers with umbrellas.
"5000 yen?" I protested. "The Internet said 4000."
Two women behind the table exchanged glances. "That's if you
buy the ticket on the Internet."
The fee was worth what the program described as fusion, then
modern jazz. A vocalist sang
standards in English. I was
surprised to hear her speak Japanese between songs.
She asked the audience to sing the chorus of "Side by
Side". She instructed us to
sing as if we were in the shower.
I caught the word "furo" which means bath, the long soak in a
hot rub after washing.
"As if in the bath?" I asked to the woman sitting next to me,
who nodded. The singer wanted
us to sing loudly, she explained, with abandon and joy.
I see the singer in the lobby.
"I could understand all of your English," I said.
She puzzled.
I repeated the sentence, but in Japanese.
"Thank you," she responded.
Outside reminded me of San Francisco. I sang from the
program, "’Nobody here can
love or understand me. Oh, what
hard luck stories they all hand me.’"
------------------
In the campus guesthouse as a regular Monday night resident, the
ten o'clock news showed a photomontage of Christopher Reeve with the caption of
the kanji of death. "Oh, no, he died,” I exclaimed aloud. A movie clip of bidding Superman
"good night" was translated "o yasuminasai" at the bottom
of the TV screen.
At lunch I ate outside in the afternoon with the only student this
year of around my age.
“Do you think the younger students would recall Superman movies?”
she wondered.
“How carefully the clips were chosen for Reeve's obituary,” I
said.
“What was your specialty in college?” she asked.
“I studied smiley face for my master’s thesis,” I replied.
“What are they called in English?” she asked.
“There are many terms, such as ‘emoticon,’ but mostly they are
called ‘smiley faces,’” I said.
“In Japanese they are called ‘e-moji,’ meaning ‘picture letters,’”
she said.
“Are kanji are the original smileys?” I asked. I would like to
discuss why smileys are needed in Japanese writing. But I could not figure out
how to begin the discussion.
“’E-moji’ sounds like an abbreviation, or an imported word, for
‘emoticon,’” I ventured.
“But the similarity of the words must be coincidental,” she said.
In the class, I explained to
students an error message from one of the websites in the cyber book, our
textbook. I had contributed to one
of the chapters.
The incorrectly identified site was Japanese, so the error message
was in Japanese. It was written in
the imported word script, called katakana. For native speakers, trying to understand katakana is like
wrestling with something familiar that is in disguise. My company, on coming to Japan,
distributed to teachers new in Japan a sheet of paper. We newbies struggled with simple
“air-con,”” but we couldn’t guess the super-short “pa-so.” Personal computer, i.e., not owned by a
company.
The students presented websites about job hunting from my book,
"How to use the Internet".
I wrote the word for "error" in katakana on the board, but
forgot where the dash went.
Forgotten dash?! Such a
mistake seemed minor to me. But
the students were confused. Finally one student’s face lit with comprehension and she drew
the dash in the air.
I copied the invisible non-letter onto the board: "E-ra."
"Error," I said.
"There are not many error messages among the websites in this
chapter." I was not trying to be funny.
The class laughed.
Later that night, on my way back from Osaka to Yomohama, I watched
the news ticker on the Shinkansen.
I felt a little disappointed that Superman did not appear on the
scroll.
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