Takahiro Kokawa asks me to edit manuscript he's collaborating on with another Japanese scholar of dictionaries. After the bartered dinner in a restaurant near my local train station we trudge over the hill. He carries many bags on his way home after several nights sleeping in his office at the school, for convenience and to avoid loneliness of a Tokyo apartment, he explains. I put one of his bags in the basket of my bicycle.
I rent a 1970 bungalow in Yokohama with straw tatami-mat floors in a neighborhood of otherwise affluent homes with an occasional BMW in a driveway. The neighborhood name “sakae,” means “to prosper,” as my guarantor and boss mentioned giving me a ride home.
During hours of editing, friendly questions initiate breaks.
I ask about the lighting fixture in the room. After four years, the circular fluorescent lamps have begun to flicker. Is the fault the lamp or the small cylinder? Kokawa examines the cylinder, and concludes that the tube needs replacing.
He encourages, “As me about anything electrical.”
"I hate these lights because they are cold," I venture.
“You can choose a ‘warm’ lamp,” he suggests.
He opens a dictionary on my bookshelf called Kanji ABC to the kanji for "cat."
"Cat,” he describes from the book’s information, “has two parts in its kanji. The left means ‘wild animal’ and the right means ‘watch dog.’”
"That's a good description of a cat," I comment.
"But I don't like this dictionary," he continues, blunt and precise. "I can read Chinese, and I know that the right side of the kanji in Chinese is read 'miao.' Therefore, the kanji really means 'a wild animal that says miao.'"
At a home electronics store, I find the light bulb with “warm” written large on the box in English and in katakana letters—phonetic Japanese script for imported words-- for “warm.” Moreover, the box is an orange color to distinguish it from the other bulbs.
I tell the cat kanji story to my students at Gaidai. I am rewarded with surprise, recognition and the searching of electronic dictionaries. A student who majors in Chinese knew about the kanji element pronounced 'miao’ but had not connected it with cat.
When I saw him at NDA, Kokawa wondered jokingly whether cats come from China. Another friend argued that neko - Japanese for cat - must be originally Japanese because the spoken language existed before kanji was imported from China to Japan for writing.
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I edited another research paper co-authored by Kokawa. This paper was about a well-regarded 1915 Japanese-English dictionary. It was being examined for content and compared to dictionaries from the same era.
English words in the manuscript were new to me. I asked Kokawa, "What is a ‘nonce word?’”
“A word used only once,” he explained. “Dictionary makers increased the number of entries by making up words.” Padding a dictionary was allowed in that era, he added.
Merriam Webster online defines “Nonce word” as “A word occurring, invented, or used just for a particular occasion; for example, the word ‘mile consuming’ in 'the wagon beginning to fall into its slow and mile consuming clatter' (William Faulkner)."
Kokawa and I finished editing and went into a Chinese teashop.
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At the sports club, I asked in Japanese where the music came from and could it be changed because of the filthy lyrics.
"It's from a call-in radio show," the pleasant young woman walking the floor in blue shorts and yellow T-shirt said. "Do you hear those words now?"
"No, not now," I said. "But often I hear them after I've been here awhile during my hour workout."
"I'll see what I can do. Are they in Japanese?"
"No," I said. "Only English. I wouldn't have understood in Japanese, so it wouldn't have bothered me."
"Eh?"
"Only English, " I said more simply. "Rap."
The radio was changed to an instrumental-only channel.
I planned to quit the sports club when the monthly payment period ended and start jogging outside. I had found a promenade along The Otter river.
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I met him on the express bus from Gaidai to the train. I was wary because he asked personal questions like, “What do you do on weekends?” He worked at the University accounting office, and I was wary, too, of my surreptitious status at Gaidai, a public university that required teachers to live in the same district, near Osaka. I lived in Yokohama, but wanted to hold on the steady Tuesday class load at Gaidai, and so commuted once a week by the Shinkansen, at my own expense.
But he was guileless; he spoke English well and was charming and clever.
I suggested that I speak Japanese to his English.
Sono wants to be a diplomat. In Tokyo, contiguous with Yokohama, he interviewed for a foreign service job during spring vacation. We met for dinner and he accepted my offer to put him up that night so he wouldn’t have to travel late.
At my house, I asked him to translate directions for sharpening knives using a whetstone I hadn't used yet.
"These instructions are written for a right-handed person," he said.
I'd been waiting to use the stone until I could understand the directions. That is why a magnet had been holding them on a refrigerator.
He explains the Japanese language better than anyone I've met. He took months off work to study for the upcoming big test for the Foreign Service.
A few months later, we went sightseeing in Kyoto, an ancient capital of Japan near Osaka, on a holiday Monday, and I missed the last bus to the campus where I stayed in the guest hotel. He kindly offered his apartment.
I stood outside in the stairwell of a company-housing complex on a rainy winter night. "Please wait three minutes!" he implored.
We learned each other’s ages on Coming-of-Age Day. We were sightseeing in Kyoto. The January national holiday is for Japanese who turn 20 years old that year. The young women wearing kimonos, the men suits, share the birth year animal of the Asian Zodiac. The 12- year zodiac sorts by cohort: if you know someone’s birth animal, you can guess his age.
Sono told me his sign.
“You are 24,” I calculated.
“I am a cow,” I said, in Japanese, so as not to suffer by connotation.
He peered at me, leaving unspoken the tally of 54 years.
In Kyoto, one chooses among myriad temples. We wanted to see both the Golden Temple and the Silver Temple, but Sono made a mistake on a bus route and we rode in a circle. Changing to a taxi, we tried to get to the second temple before closing.
The taxi driver said, “I ask even Japanese fares twice about their destination because it is so easy to confuse the names of the Silver Temple and Gold Temple.”
Later, Sono found the way to a restaurant recommended by a New York Times article I had copied down; we walked back and forth for the hour waiting for our reservation and finding the place on an alley off a small street. Although he is from the local area, and spent time with college buddies in Kyoto, he didn't know his way around the city. He liked to take taxis and talk with the drivers.
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It is the end of the cherry blossoms along the Shinkansen route from Tokyo to Osaka. The school year has started. Cherry blossom viewing in Japan is when everything starts, from the fiscal year to the academic year. Under the trees, the profusion of flowers and smells generate an exuberance that makes speech superfluous. The blossoms drop within ten days. The shortness of the blossoms on the trees is a symbol of the short, sweetness of life, my Japanese teacher says, explaining the bittersweet essence of this national phenomenon.
The students asked how I plan to use the Internet book required for the course.
"We will start with Chapter 11, the one I contributed to," I said. "I will try to make sure you get your money's worth."
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I talked by phone last night in English with Yuko Saruta, now a high school senior, elder daughter of my good friends. Her favorite subject is the ancient Japanese language.
As I corrected her pronunciation of “ancient,” I could hear her father in the background doing the same.
Yuko loves to talk and her fluency extends to English.
“The kanji for cat, ‘neko,’ derives from Chinese as a pun,” I remarked.
“Yes,” she replied. “The Japanese pronunciation of that kanji is ‘neru,’ meaning sleep.”
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On a Shinkansen, I asked the a train attendant, in Japanese, “When can I see Mount Fuji?”
She consulted a schedule in her pocket. “One PM.”
I could see the famous volcanic mountain for five minutes. Then the train went into a tunnel and on re-emergence, no mountain could be seen.
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The rains come and I buy new brake shoes for my bicycle. I sound out the katakana that reads “brake gum.”
I am under the impression that in Japan, “gum” means rubber, elastic and chewing gum in different contexts. It can be the elastic strap to keep a hat on.
Chieko, a colleague, refines my pronunciation. “’Gamu’ is chewing gum, whereas ‘gomu’ is rubber or elastic.”
The bike shop man was busy, but asked if I wanted him to install it.
I answered, "Jibun," meaning myself.
He took the brake shoe out of the package and showed me the arrows indicating "front."
I was happy he spoke to me in Japanese in complete sentences. He didn’t gesture as a substitute for speaking.
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Between the express bus to the Gaidai campus in Osaka and the Shinkansen, there is another short leg to my commute. It is an eight-minute ride by local Japan Railway train. There is not much time for me to make the connection and when the bus is slow I must run. To save the minute buying a 210-yen train ticket, I buy a bunch of tickets in advance. Ms Sugino showed me now to do this for NDA, and Sono showed me the same automated procedure for Gaidai. The tickets are good for three months, during which time I forget how to buy them from the machine. Another customer at the ticket machine seemed helpful. By mistake, I bought ten tickets only to discover that they were good only for the day of sale. True, I had never said the tickets were all for me, but wasn’t it obvious that I was traveling alone, not with nine other people?
I got on the train, and the following week put one of the remaining nine tickets into the wicket. I let the beeping alarm announce my mistake to the ticket master. I explained my dilemma to the ticket master at his booth next to the entry wicket.
“It was the wrong ticket of last week I had bought at that machine,” I tried to say in Japanese. I pointed out the multiple-ticket machine.
“Just a minute,” the ticket master said. He made a phone call, refunded the money, and asked if I understood how to use the machine.
"No, and I need to catch the 5:07 train,” I replied.
He glanced around the station, called another station agent by name, and explained my need. I followed the second ticket agent to the ticket vending machine where she patiently led me through the process.
She pointed at a button in a column labeled in kanji. I could not read that kanji. She read aloud, "Kaisoku."
I recognized the word. It meant something like “many tickets.” However, a similar sounding word on the destination signs of trains means “express train,” as opposed to “local train.” I tried in vain to reconcile “many tickets” with “express train.” I would later learn that the words are different. My ear needed more experience in hearing vowel sounds, and my brain needed to recognize its auditory ignorance. “Express” is “kaisuu.”
Pushing the button revealed the next set of choices. Amount 2100 yen, roughly $21.
I nodded.
She helped me put two thousand-yen bills and a hundred yen coin into the machine and stood aside as I claimed the neat packet of twenty tickets and walked quickly to the ticket gate at 5:05 for my train.
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I thought that "kaisoku” meant a discount for buying several tickets in advance. I arrived at the Gaidai student store with a wad of money--a couple thousand dollars that I had brought from Yokohama. I hesitated when the travel agent showed me a price higher than the tickets I had bought with my Visa card on the way south that morning.
He and an assistant puzzled for twenty minutes.
"Ah, you used Visa!” he declared triumphantly, examining my ticket stub again.
I put my cash away. He agreed there was no reason to buy from him.
That evening, I stood in a long line to buy a single ticket at the “this-day-only” line at the Shinkansen entrance. I knew there was a way to get cheaper tickets for my weekly travel, which was similar in length and cost to the Los Angeles to San Francisco commute in California.
I got a credit card application for a JR travel card and showed it around at the Shin Osaka terminal. Station information agents and Shinkansen experts agreed that a JR card would be the cheapest way. Until I got the JR credit card, I feared I would have to carry $250 in cash every Monday for the roundtrip Shinkansen ticket because I wasn’t sure when my Visa card would not be accepted by a ticket vending machine.
There were no lines by the ticket vending machines. I wasn’t sure the machine would take my card, and neither was the station agent. It surprised both of us that my transfer ticket from the local train worked to start the automated procedure for the Shinkansen ticket purchase. In my hurry, I bought a non-reserved seat.
There was standing room only and conditions didn’t improve after the first stop.
I had boarded late and had to walk through the smoking cars on my way to the three non-reserved cars at the end of the train.
A bilingual conversation including a lot of gestures resulted in information that yes, I could change to a reserved seat—and sit down- by paying an additional fee.
I sat down in a reserved seat. The conductor explained something about Nagoya, twice, and I nodded. My seatmate asked in Japanese if I understood. I shook my head no. He explained in Japanese. This time I understood. I put my purse down. I could stay in the seat until the next stop; the reserved seat had been reserved from the next stop. In 45 minutes I was looking for a seat among a lot of other people. Finally I went into the green car, the plushest, most expensive car.
"Yoroshi?” Is it ok? The conductor asked.
“Yes, yes.” I was relieved.
A green car Shinkansen seat costs about fifty more dollars over the reserved seats. I enjoyed the lush seats, less harsh lights, and acoustically gentler environment of the green car. And I gained confidence in my ordinary weekly use of aids: a hat to shade my eyes from the glare of the interior lights and earplugs. There was not much I could do for the padding of the seats.
In a very unusual situation, the Shinkansen was ten minutes late arriving at my destination. It was Golden Week, the May national holiday.
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I like to write when I am riding on the train. The activity of writing seems to make the two and a half hours pass easily. The momentum also augments the flow of information. Although you won’t hear the train while you read this, or see the clouds move by at hundreds of miles an hour, or feel the other people talking and riding alongside, those activities are a background to the writing of this journal. The train controls the pace of the diary. Rice paddies shine green with young shoots just above the water.
At the National Defense Academy in Yokosuka, I got a new private student. He skillfully negotiated a 2000 yen per hour fee, down from my asking price of 3000, quoted from the rate for professionals, such as Nanako Wada of Cadets’ Affairs Division, or Midori Ishikawa, a librarian. The new student had my name from a student I had coached the for an international cadet conference hosted by NDA. Cadet O. suggested for his first lesson we walk around the campus, he answering my questions.
I had seen other native English teachers take 30-member classes on campus excursions. They would happily pass my room at the end of the hall near the door, exiting the ponderous new four-floor language arts building. The cadets would walk along the road in clusters of five and six. I imagined that class management would be difficult for me in that situation. But one retired U.S. Air Force pilot who was among my colleagues reported excellent results speaking English with his class; they had stood around talking about the pointy nosed jet fighter parked on the well-manicured lawn near the older, original 50 year-old buildings of the Defense Academy.
Photo: U.S. jet fighter displayed on lawn of the National Defense Academy, Yokosuka, Japan
I was curious about the campus.
“Let’s go first to a sculpture,” I suggested. We went to a broad raised area, which is the roof of the new library building and meeting hall dedicated to the 50th anniversary of NDA. The sculpture has flowing lines. I had the impression of a fish or dolphin in an upright posture but could not read the marker.
“It’s a samurai helmet,” Cadet O. said.
“What’s that?” I pointed to a detail halfway up.
“A feather symbolizing peace,” Cadet O. told me.
A person can stand underneath the sculpture with head underneath the vast helmet.
The ICC student who had recommended me to Cadet O. had prepared for a presentation about Bushido, which is the code of the samurai.
He had asked very seriously, “Do you know bushi?”
I bit my tongue so I would not joke about then-US President George W. Bush.
The code of the samurai is the first chapter topic of the freshmen English textbook produced at NDA.
I had asked each cadet, "When did you first hear of Bushido? Who told you?"
Some had heard when they were so young they didn't remember. Some heard from the US movie, "The Last Samurai." The largest number of students had learned of bushido from a teacher of the popular sport kendo, a kind of Japanese fencing associated with warriors.
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Three of my classes at NDA are third year students. These juniors like political cartoons from newspapers around the world published in the Wednesday edition of The Japan Times.
A student in the group assigned to explain the "Mideast peace plan" cartoon stayed after class to explain to me the Japanese pronunciation of “Jerusalem.”
I had asked "Huh?" in the class, concluding that he had been saying the name of a city that I didn't recognize. I was impressed that he took the time after class to explain.
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Helwig, another native English teacher at NDA, rides the same train as I from the academy. An American citizen, Helwig married a Japanese as his second wife. Our conversation often turned to technology. We were talking about computers and email. I had said I was interested in research, had an MA from Stanford, and wanted to pursue communication research in Japan, but the Japanese Internet remained mostly beyond my reach due to my limited reading ability in Japanese.
I complained that my English language Yahoo hot mail account freezes when I receive email from Japanese friends in Japanese.
Helwig explained, “Explorer, the browser, can't handle the subject lines and they go on forever."
Helwig said the browser called Netscape didn't have this problem of not recognizing Japanese in its hot mail display.
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I edit the English language parts of the revised military encyclopedia of security affairs for Japan's Defense Agency and Foreign Service use. Mr. Imaizumi asks again when to use the definite article, the. The book project is private, he told me, adding that no government agency initiated the revision.
Articles perplex the writers of the encyclopedia. One of the writers takes them out, and another puts them back.
Is it "The Constitution" or "Constitution?"
Mr. Ito, a Japanese teacher of English at NDA, showed me four possible titles for his research paper to be published in the academy's journal.
“NDA has a rule: there will be no ‘the’ in the title of the Academy. It is ‘National Defense Academy.’ Please choose the best among four possible titles.”
I selected the title that named the academy as "...at Japan's National Defense Academy."
This satisfies the policy and the ear, albeit by evasion.
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For Japanese lessons taught by Mr. Kinoshita, I wrote a theme about the train in Japan.
“The best part of your essay is the end,” say both Midori and Kinoshita.
They both liked the description when I first came to Tokyo. I learned the color of each subway, searched for the best exits, and learned how to read “express” so I would know which trains didn’t stop at my small station.
But they winced when I wrote that riding the train is dangerous. At my mention of gas, and Kinoshita says, "Oh, Aum," referring to the deadly gas attack on a morning commute train by a religious group of that name the year before I came to Japan.
I tell Midori that I want to describe coughing and itching and getting sick with a virus on the train. I want to tell that these things happen to me and I think a gas causes them. The attacks are real daily harassment.
But the topic is not pleasant. Kinoshita revises my theme to say that coughing spreads the virus. I let it stand. Nevertheless, the previous week's entry in this journal is missing because on the train I was choking too much to write.
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A notice of attempted delivery of a special package arrived in my mailbox. I thought it might be the Japan Railway credit card to buy Shinkansen tickets.
I had received postal delivery notices before, and the package always arrived, despite my floundering on the phone or getting all the way through a recorded message only to fumble the last stage.
After each entry by push tone telephone, the recorded voice instructs, “’Press 7’ if the information is accurate.”
Then came last question. What could it mean? It was a question after the easy requests for zip code, date of desired delivery, and code of package type.
What other information could remain?
The automated call terminated.
I called the automated system again. The last question--what could it be? Suddenly I understood, and proudly I pressed "9" for "no."
The question was, “Is there any information you want to add or correct?”
The package arrived at 5 minutes to noon. I had specified morning delivery, between 9 and 12. It was the JR train credit card.
I put the JUR train credit card in the ticket-dispensing machine and bought one ticket, but the cost was less than $50. I knew I had made a mistake; the cost is over $100 one way. I had noticed that sometimes one Shinkansen trip was one ticket, and sometimes two tickets, but I couldn’t be sure what they were for.
A guy at the next machine explained, “One ticket is for the ‘fare’ and the other is for ‘boarding.’"
I put my new credit card in the machine again, and with his help, bought the necessary pair of tickets.
Armed with two tickets and two receipts, I put all four into the wicket, which promptly set off the buzzer. The stationmaster appeared and separated the receipts from the tickets.
There is English on the Shinkansen ticket machine, but understanding requires prior knowledge of the ticketing system. Maybe next time I will succeed in finding the right button in one transaction.
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I attended the first international meeting of alumni from my undergraduate school to take place in Japan. Most of the attendees were Japanese who had studied abroad. I asked two young women about a word I had been seeking.
"Sprouting rice plants sticking up just barely through the water in a paddy: There must be a word for it," I said.
They talked to each other briefly in Japanese. One of them suggested in English that I ask a farmer for the word.
An economics professor was the host of the meeting, attended by graduate economics students who had studied abroad with him five and ten years ago in California.
20 people standing around the buffet table, mostly speaking Japanese.
The young women speaking English recalled recent undergraduate studies. “Queer Studies.”
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On the Shinkansen a ticker above the door in each compartment displays news, sports, weather, and announcements. An English language announcement warns passengers to report immediately any suspicious items or unattended package.
On the street, I hear infamously loud trucks: the kerosene delivery trucks sing all winter and the garbage trucks announce imminent pick-ups. The one that bothers me, however, is a recycle truck that pierces the neighborhood with a high-pitched sound.
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“Is it difficult to learn kanji?” I ask NDA freshmen. “What is one of your favorite kanji? Why?”
I wasn't sure about the kind of response I would get. Maybe the question was puerile, or personal, or pathetic. Happily, each of the 30 students in two morning classes rose and spoke and wrote on the board.
Names accounted for perhaps 25 percent of the favorites. Cadet Sakai wrote his family name, which includes the kanji for sake, the Japanese rice wine.
Another favorite kanji among the students was "one," written with a single horizontal stroke. Why did they like this kanji?
“’One’ is simple yet profound," one cadet stated.
I told a story. “In a restaurant, I couldn't figure out which way to hold the menu. I saw a single line, followed by a double line, and then zeros. But it didn’t occur to me to read the numbers vertically.”
“My favorite kanji means ‘busy,’” said one student. “I like it because it is ‘heart’ next to ‘lose.’
“Kanji is easy and logical,” one freshman noted.
Another student countered, “Kanji is hard if you have a bad memory.”
