Channukah

Last year, after years of requests from friends, I held my first Channukah party in Prague. As well as it went, I did that again this year in Japan.

There were some notable differences between the two celebrations. First, no beer bottle menorah this time around. That was a particularly Praguian influence on the holiday. My menorah this year was a group of small house candles - not arranged in any particular holder.

However, there was a distinct Japanese flair to this year's celebration. As last year, I made latkes for everyone to enjoy. And after spending most of my time in the kitchen preparing a second batch, I came to find that some of my Japanese guests had felt most comfortable eating latkes the way they eat most other foods, with chopsticks.


Also, after the party had run its course at my apartment, some people were not done with partying, so we went out. In Prague, as in America, when house parties run their course, people occasionally file to a local bar to round out the night. But that's not how it's done here. So if we don't head to a bar, where do we go to extend the party in Japan? Karaoke, of course.


Certainly a Japanese Channukah.

"Boys Have A Penis, Girls Have A Vagina"

Teaching children makes a language very easy to learn. There are only so many times I can hear a kid refer to a spider as kumo before the word sinks into my own head.

Yes, I have learned much from these very little people. One of the smallest children I teach is a 3-year old named Momo. Momo is tiny. Even for a Japanese person. Even for a 3-year old. She is the smallest student I have, rising to the shoulder-height of most of her classmates. Yet, her character is larger than that of most Japanese adults. With such a lively personality, she has taught me a thing or two. Most recently, she has taken a shining to the Japanese word for penis.
"Momo, how are you?"
"I'm ochinchin."

Teaching a lesson on Christmas, I show a big picture of a snowman. "Everyone, what's this?" I ask.
Some students mutter an unrecognizable answer in Japanese. Others fight the urge to stare at the curly locks on my head. Still others fight the urge to stare at the underside of their eyelids (they've recently been broken of their daily post-lunch nap routine). Momo's voice rises above them all: "O-CHINCHIN!"
"Oh, so very close Momo. It's a snowman."

We get to a big picture of a present, and I ask the students if they like presents. We get them to respond with "I like so-and-so." "I like DS." "I like cake." ("cake" when it's bastardized like so many other foreign words, becomes "ke-ki"). Tiny Momo, all of 3, shouts, "I LIKE O-CHINCHIN!"
"Not until you're older," I reply.

Have I mentioned one of the ups is that they have little to no clue what I say to them most of the time?

Good morning...?

I saw this child, age 3, wearing a shirt this morning with some English on it. As usual, I read the English for both the wearer's and my enjoyment. This morning though, my reaction was more of shock than enjoyment.

This is, word for word, what the shirt said:
My mother
drank,
smoked,
and dropped acid
during pregnancy.

No other words. No "just kidding" or "...and I turned out fine!" What I find most remarkable about this, is that the English is correct. (I suppose you could put "my" between "during" and "pregnancy," but I don't think it's needed)

No witty remark from yours truly. Make your own.

As Foreign As It Still Is...

...some things have grown on me. For example, recently I watched an episode of the West Wing, where characters walked from outside to inside a house. It caught me funny when they didn't stop to take off their shoes.
Then that caught me funny.

And to all my Czech friends, I am sad to report that it is rare when all parties cheers when a new drink comes, and equally rare when everyone makes eye contact during said cheers.

However, there are still some things I can say in Czech a lot easier than Japanese, and some things I can say in Czech but not in Japanese at all, and so there are times when I catch myself saying "Mam jen ..." for "I have only ..."

Slowly internally swapping one culture for another...

Gesundheit!

Given how insanely polite people are here, the first time I sneezed in public, I expected a long string of niceties flowing from everyone around me.
"aaa...aaaaa...AAAACHOOOOOO!"


*crickets*


"eeeeeEEEEHHHHHHH?" Nothing. No equivalent of "God bless you." No "Gesundheit." No "Na zdravi." When asked about the silence, my coworkers said, "Oh yea, we don't say anything."

Quite a contrast to all that they do say when someone accidentally bumps into them...

How polite are you?

When checking out of a store - any store - it's damn near impossible to be the last one to say "thank you." I think it goes with the badge and uniform - the idea that no matter what, if you're an employee, you must say thank you after the customer. Under no circumstances is it acceptable to have the customer say thank you to end the conversation.

I've tried to test the ridiculousness of this. Tonight, I went to the local supermarket. A typical exchange at the cash register ensued:
Clerk: "Welcome! Go ahead! Ah, good evening. Thank you." (I get the "I recognize you 'ah, good evening'" an awful lot because there aren't too many people who look like me around here. Far more people here know me than who I know.)
Me: "Thank you." (I chuckle to myself as I wonder what, exactly, I'm thanking her for...)
Clerk goes through all items in the basket, tells me the total.
I hand her the money.
Clerk: "1400 yen. Thank you."
Me: "Thank you."
Clerk: "8 yen is your change. And your receipt. Thank you." Hands me the change.
Me: "Thank you."
Clerk: "Thank you."
Now the "thank you"s turn to the past tense, since the transaction is now complete.
Me: "Thank you."
Clerk: "Thank you."
I wanted to see if I could get the last thank you in. Saying it directly, especially at this point, would not lead to success, I knew, so I bagged the groceries. On my way out of the store, I noticed that the clerk was now tending to another customer, so I said, "Thank you" one more time. Not only did she stop what she was doing - midsentence - to thank me one more time, but two other employees - one stacking the vegetable aisle and one at a different register - chimed in with their own thank yous.
There are certainly times I feel like Steve Martin in "My Blue Heaven" - completely overwhelmed by how (outwardly) nice people are.

I'm trying to demonstrate to some Japanese friends how over-the-top I find their comments. I have friends who have been to my apartment many times. Yet every time, they ask me if they can go to the bathroom. They actually apologize for going. "I'm sorry, can I use your bathroom?" I've started saying no.

Also, I've taken to apologizing for anything and everything. I walk into the office and instead of saying good morning, I apologize 4 or 5 times. "Gomenisai! Sumimasen! Gomen! Gomenisai! Sumimasen!"
Today, I accidentally bumped into my boss, Maki, at the office, and before I said anything, she apologized. She was just standing there, having a conversation with someone else. I wasn't watching all that closely, and the card I was holding grazed her arm. "Oh, I'm sorry," she said. You gotta love a society of people who apologize to you after you run into them.
Then tonight, while co-teaching a private lesson with Maki, I went to the whiteboard to write something. Maki took my pencil off the table and copied down what I wrote on the board. As I sat back down, she put the pencil back. I wasn't sure whether to yell at her for using my pencil without asking, so instead, I just said, "I'm sorry." Fortunately, Maki is super-cool and got the joke.

The reason I put (outwardly) in parentheses above will be the substance of a future post - the way style and substance are treated in this part of the world.

Until then, I'm sorry!

How do you say....?

A week or two after being in Japan, I found myself at a konbini - a convenience store - and I bought a carton of orange juice.
I get to the counter, and the clerk says, "So-to-ra?" I give her a puzzled look.
She repeats, "So-to-ra?"
It's clear I'm completely lost, and so she reaches under the counter and pulls out a familiar-looking plastic tube.
"OHHHHH! A straw!"

So it goes with the Japanese pronunciation of English words. Save one exception (n), all characters in the Japanese language end with a vowel sound. Ka, ki, shi, to, ma, nu, etc. So when English - or other foreign language - words are attempted to be spoken in their native language by someone whose native tongue is Japanese, or the words adopted into the Japanese language, the original pronunciation frequently goes so far out the window, the original word is unrecognizable. On top of that, consider that Japanese does not have the "v," "f," or "th" sounds English does. And of course, the well-documented "r" and "l" problem. The sound made in Japanese for the syllables "lra lri lru lre lro" is in-between the "r" and "l" sounds in English, which makes teaching words like "smaller" quite a task. So "th" is often translated as "s" and "v" as "b."
Red becomes redo, car becomes ka (this one may be easier to understand if you're from Boston), six becomes si-ku-su, three becomes so-lri (notation note: I'm writing "lr" to indicate it's neither an l or an r), and David becomes De-i-bi-do.

Japanese has three alphabets - hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Kanji is incredibly complicated and has thousands of characters. Kanji comes from China, and is the root of the Japanese language. Kanji characters frequently have more than one (oftentimes completely unrelated, like "dai" and "o") pronunciation, and there is usually more than one character which produces one particular syllable.
To simplify matters, hiragana was created. Hiragana has 46 characters, with no overlap, and it's a straightforward way to write everything. Any work can be written entirely in hiragana. Children's books are written entirely in hiragana, as that's the first alphabet taught to the younglings.
Katakana came along to identify "foreign" words. A foreign word is a word which was either imported from another language into Japanese (such as camera), or a word which has not officially been made part of the Japanese language but whose pronunciation is being attempted to be written. Foreign company names are good examples of the latter group.
I have learned both hiragana and katakana in recent weeks, but it hasn't done too much to help my understanding of what's written around me. In one sentence it is possible, and frequent, to have four alphabets - katakana, kanji and hiragana, and English. To further slow one's learning curve, there are no spaces between words. So if I get hung up on one particular word, I can't skip ahead to the next one and try to figure out the first one by context, cause I have no idea where one word ends and the next one begins.

Reading katakana by itself has produced similar confusion as the so-to-ra incident. Try your hand at decoding these English words as they are written in katakana. A note on the conventions used for vowels: a is the ah sound you make when visiting the dentist, e is the e in beg, i is the ee in sheet, o is oh in Holy Moly, u is the oo in boot. A helpful hint is that oftentimes the u is softened completely so as to have little to no sound.
1. ku-lri-su-ma-su
2. ma-i-ku-lro-so-fu-to
3. mi-lri-ku
4. ku-lri-ni-n-gu
5. do-lri-n-ku
6. go-lru-fu
7. pa-ka-shi-o-n
8. shi-ni-ma-ha-u-su
9. ku-lri-ni-ku
10. pa-to-na

Some translations are easy to get. Se-n-ta (center) and sha-wa (shower), for example, are pretty close. Ca-me-ra (camera) is spot-on. But often times, it takes me a fraction of the time to read the letters in the word compared to how long it takes me to realize what the hell it's saying. It's become quite a game, and a challenging one at that, to read signs as I drive past them, or as they flash on LCD displays, before the words disappear.

Sometimes with hilarious results, though. There are two episodes of the Simpsons which my recent reading ability has brought to light new jokes. When the "Mr. Sparkle" dish detergent box is found, it actually reads "Mi-su-ta Su-pa-ku-lu." When the family travels to Tokyo, and they see the cartoon which causes seizures, it is called "Shi-zha-ma-n" (Seizure man).

Now, none of the above ranting is meant as a complaint. English spelling is far more complicated than anything I have to learn here. There is one sometimes-silent letter in Japanese, and there is the occasional written "ha" which is pronounced "wa" but for the most part, what you see is what you get. A couple letters look similar, but so do lower-case p, q, b, and d; o and a; h, n, and r. Also, English has upper- and lower-case letters, some of which bear no resemblance to their partner. Not to mention the words tough, though, thought, through, and trough which have wildly different pronunciations, and none of which look as they're written.

The answers from the above words: 1-Christmas, 2-Microsoft, 3-milk, 4-cleaning, 5-drink, 6-golf, 7-percussion, 8-cinema house, 9-clinic, 10-partner.

So the next time you smile for a picture, remember to say "Chi-zu!" (cheese)