I never actually chose to learn Japanese.
Wait – you probably say – you’ve been studying that language for more than six years now… surely you had a choice!
Well, I suppose I never did have a sumo wrestler threaten to tackle me should I not master the causative-passive form but what I mean is, I never sought out Japanese, rather it came to me. Here, let me explain.
I don’t really know why, but I remember as a small child, I was always fascinated by languages. I think there were a few reasons for this. For one, I thoroughly enjoyed codes. I remember in lower school, my friend and I would use codes or make up codes in order to send messages to each other that no one else could understand. I suppose we thought we were pretty clever doing that, although we never actually had anything secretive to say except maybe “Let’s go to the playground for recess”.
Also, I found the chic factor of knowing a foreign language quite stunning. I’m not sure if I ever actually had this experience, but seeing someone who spoke just like me and who acted just like me who was able to suddenly turn around and start speaking in something I could not decipher at all seemed like the coolest thing ever. And after all, language is sort of the ultimate code since it is much more complex than my simple “a” equals this and “b” equals that codes.
Feeling the wave of interest in languages rise up in me, I began to reach out as a small child. On Sesame Street, I listened in awe as circles rolled across the screen and a cheerful woman’s voice counted “¡uno!, ¡dos!, ¡tres!, …” I remember asking my parents on long car rides for vacation how to count in Spanish and French. I don’t know why but I could never remember how to count past the numbers 13 or 14 in any language. Thankfully that problem did not continue or else I would have never made it doing a double major in Economics and Japanese. I probably would have been kicked out of both departments for my idiocy.
But later on after Sesame Street, when I was in middle school, online services were starting to gain popularity. Thanks to a friend of mine who passed on his interest in computers to me, I was finally able to convince my parents to buy me one. We had Prodigy at one point, which was sort of like the shorter, less popular brother of AOL. Because we were all on 28.8kb modems (imagine that! No mass movie or software pirating! Not even music pirating!), the biggest activities at that time were reading e-mails and chatting in chatrooms since both of these required only text which was about the only thing 28.8kb modems could handle properly.
While I was growing up, I always lived in the house’s “library” which was basically the room where we stored all of our books once my parents had finished reading them. I never had much wall space because the walls were covered with book shelves and I blame that for my inability to decorate any room properly that I stay in today. That aside, I was sort of haphazardly looking at the neighborhood of books one day when I noticed some books at the bottom, within my reach, that were old Spanish workbooks that my Mom must have used some 20 years earlier.
I felt as if I had uncovered some ancient map to great treasure. I looked through the book and realized that it showed the way to this mysterious foreign language! Of course, I decided I had to have a taste of its power right away, so I grabbed it and ran to my computer. After waiting many minutes for my dial up connection to call the correct number and then log in, I finally found a chatroom for Spanish speakers.
I flipped through the workbook to the back where there was a dictionary and began to piece together the first sentence I would ever write in a foreign tongue to foreign people. Although I didn’t realize it then, thinking back now, I probably did more butchering to that sentence than the lone open Jewish deli does to meat for gentiles on Christmas day.
As a child, I had no concept of conjugating verbs or anything like that so I assume I came out sounding something like a Chinese waiter, “I take you order. He want coca-cola?” I can’t remember exactly what I wrote but I think I said things in Spanish like “How are you?” and of course, I had to explain how I possessed this secret knowledge of Spanish without being Spanish myself, so I wrote sentences like “I use Spanish book”. Thankfully, I could not understand what people wrote back otherwise my fragile child ego might have been shattered by the flaming I undoubtedly received.
However inane it was, that was my first taste of using a foreign language. Despite the fact that I did not really have anything to say, the mere use of the language summoned all sorts of feelings in me similar to what secluded Mexican tribe members must feel at the first sight of civilization. So it came to be that I could not wait to receive actual language instruction in the form of language classes at my Middle School.
At school, I had the choice between Spanish and French in 7th grade since those were the two languages taught. They started teaching Latin later but even if that were offered the year I had a choice, I would not have taken it. It would be like choosing to eat the old moldy banana over the pizza. Life’s too short to study dead languages.
Interestingly enough, despite a horrible Spanish teacher for those two years of Middle School, I still held an interest in languages. To be honest, I didn’t really learn much Spanish those two years because the teacher spent most of her time yelling at the class to behave and ended up leaving the school because of us. Of course, this was only after she tried cutting-edge behavior control techniques like crying in front of us in an attempt to gain sympathy and obedience. Let me tell you, 8th graders are ruthless. There is no sympathy.
Apart from that mishap in Spanish during my 8th grade year, the main character of our story steps in at this point. Yes, Japanese entered my life and it has probably shaped my life more than most other forces. Of course, I didn’t know it would have such profound effects then, but I should have marked the day it waltzed into my life like some eccentric mentor. At least then, I could celebrate my anniversary with Japanese every year by consuming mass quantities of sushi, watching anime marathons and wearing a kimono while shouting “I AM ICHI BAN” so that everyone could know I truly appreciate Japanese high culture. But alas, I do not remember the exact day.
However, I do remember how I was lured into my Japanese studies like a small child being offered candy. It started off innocent enough. My friend, “Fish” (as he told people to call him then), developed an interest in Japanese culture. I’m not completely sure where this interest came from but I believe it was due to the fact that he had visited Japan for a couple weeks with his family and also enjoyed Dragon Ball Z anime. I should have known better.
He told me that he had gotten in contact with a Japanese language tutor and asked me and some others if I wanted to study with him so that we could split the costs. As I said before, I had been enamored with languages since a child and would never say “no” to an opportunity to learn a language. So, I accepted as soon as he asked me.
This is why I say that I never chose to learn Japanese specifically. If Fish had come up to me and asked me if I wanted to learn Thai with him, I would have said “yes” just as eagerly as I said “yes” to his Japanese request. So, thanks to a kid named Fish in 8th grade, I began my marriage to Japanese.
And learning a language really is a marriage if you ever want to get anywhere with it. Sure, there are people who studied French in high school (and perhaps you’re one of them) who did only the required homework and attended class every day because it was required. But look where those people are now. They couldn’t even order a baguette in Paris if a French mime stood poised to break out of his invisible box and slap them all silly should they fail.
If you truly want to make progress in a language, you have to marry it because you’ll be spending hours upon hours conjugating verbs, learning grammar, memorizing vocabulary and breathing it. This is not a simple tryst every now and then. If you’re not dedicated, you’ll soon give up and be left with traces of the language which will wither away like tropical plants in Vermont. The reason I am able to speak Spanish today is not because I took advanced level courses of Spanish in high school, it’s because I lived and breathed the language outside of class and sat down with it every night and hammered those words into my brain.
Because you spend so much time with the language, like a marriage, it’s a good idea to get to know your partner first before settling down. I suppose I skipped this step with Japanese but I like to think of my relation with Japanese as a sort of arranged marriage where I happened to match up quite well with my arranged partner.
Nevertheless, I still went through the honeymoon stage with Japanese where I could see no wrong with it and its annoying habits had not yet begun to berate me from overdose.
Fish managed to group together five kids including himself from our grade at school to study Japanese with this tutor he had found. One of these kids, Dreyfuss, happened to be a friend of mine who held the same sort of fascination in languages as I did. He would later get me involved in German but that came later. You have to get tired of one food before you move on to the next.
Six years after this starting point, I read an excerpt from Donald Keene’s biography (one of the most famous translators of Japanese fiction into English) written in Japanese. It was part of the intermediate Japanese textbook we were using in class at my college and I suppose the authors of the textbook put this particular reading in to show all of us Americans that Japanese really isn’t that difficult and that there are, in fact, some non-Japanese people who can write and speak Japanese quite well.
The excerpt we read was about how Donald Keene began his studies of Japanese and our class slowly read over his super literary Japanese style as he described how he was invited to a mountain cottage of some stranger who wanted him to study Japanese with him. It was very fairy-tale like and made his studies of Japanese appear just as magical and effortless as the fairy god mother’s transformation of Cinderella into a girl with designer jeans and an Abercrombie & Fitch top.
“Damn him,” I thought. Here he is writing in his fancy, super-literary prose that I can barely understand about how he began to learn Japanese with an untrained teacher and a lack of a Japanese-as-a-second-language textbook somewhere in the mountains of South Carolina, no less. He even went as far as to talk about how he was even more distinguished than others learning Japanese because he started his studies off with “sakuranbo” which means “cherry” whereas most people might start off with the word “sakura” meaning “cherry tree”.
Apparently, when Donald Keene arrived at the magical mountain cottage with his entourage of other soon-to-be Japanese learning cadets, they spied their Japanese teacher standing in the orchard, probably much like how European hunters in Africa pulled aside the jungle leaves to spy a rare, yet ferocious animal of the jungle. The Japanese man, turning and seemingly not caring for formal introductions, simply pointed at a cherry and said “sakuranbo”. And so, Donald Keene’s first word in Japanese became “sakuranbo” and he would later write about it in his book (written in Japanese, no less) so that even later, hopeful students would read an except in their intermediate Japanese classes and envy his Japanese ability.
I think I can beat Donald Keene for most interesting Japanese words first learned. It was decided that all five of us would have an hour long lesson each Sunday at our tutor’s house. Our tutor turned out to be a Japanese woman who lived 40 minutes away from where most of us lived. Due to the distance, we all overestimated the time it would take and ended up well before the scheduled time, nervously speaking amongst each other outside her house as if we were SWAT team members preparing to break down the door of a suspected terrorist at o-four hundred hours.
Eventually the time for the lesson rolled around, and we all huddled in a group and walked to the front door. Fish was the only one who had ever had contact with the woman, so I believe we got him to ring the doorbell. He rang it. We waited a long while during which I wondered if this had been a long wasted drive. Fish rung the doorbell again and this time the door flew open.
“Kutsu nuide!”
Inside the door stood a small, older Japanese woman screaming this phrase at us. I think we were all slightly shocked and definitely nobody moved.
“Kutsu nuide!” she screamed again.
“Oh, God,” I thought. Fish was a slightly strange kid (but then again, how could someone who decides to take on the name of a common aquatic animal be normal?) and I wouldn’t put it past him to have arranged lessons with a woman who could not speak a word of English.
“Kutsu nuide!”
At this point, my teenage nervousness began to change to embarrassment at the whole situation that was unfolding before my eyes. She continued to shout these words at us and I wondered how anyone in his or her right mind could think that shouting one phrase over and over again to students who had never taken the language before was an effective method of teaching.
I suppose our teacher grew tired of looking at stunned Americans and so she revealed that her vocabulary consisted of more than just one phrase.
“Kutsu nuide! Shoes! Take off! Kutsu nuide! Shoes! Take off!”
She began to inject this bit of English into her chant and alternated between the original phrase and this Engrish translation. Before any of us knew what was going on, she had stepped outside and was pushing us into her house. I struggled to take off my shoes quickly before being trampled by my friends behind me. This would be one of many non-language skills that I would need to master in my pursuit of Japanese.
Nonetheless, the first Japanese words that I learned in my formal education of Japanese became “kutsu nuide” which means, of course, “take off your shoes”. Now, that’s more interesting than “sakuranbo”, isn’t it?
For the next five months, we learned Japanese each week at Batta-sensei’s house. As you can probably tell from my first encounter with her, she was extremely energetic which is good for a language teacher. My four companions and I all agreed that we learned a great deal from her and when we moved on to other teachers, we would look back and wish that we still had Batta-sensei as a teacher. These days I realize that the “great” amount of Japanese that I had learned from Batta-sensei was merely a drop in the bucket of fluency. This is not to say Batta-sensei was a bad teacher, but rather, Japanese is complicated and I had no idea what lay ahead of me.
It turned out Batta-sensei was the principal of a Japanese school that had two parts. One part was to teach Japanese students who were temporarily staying in America so that they would not be too far behind their peers when they returned to Japan. I felt bad for those kids. Due to the fact that the American educational system was not as good as that in Japan, they had to have an extra day of school on Saturday, no less. But besides them, there was another part which was dedicated to the teaching of Japanese to Americans.
This Japanese school met every week on Saturday mornings on the campus of my high school. When we made the transition from Batta-sensei to this Japanese school, we lost one of the five original students and so our group was reduced to four. This transition would mark a period of about four years which corresponded roughly with my time in high school. Nearly every Saturday morning, I would wake up and dutifully go to Japanese school while my non-Japanese learning schoolmates slept soundly like all teenagers should before noon on the weekends.
I learned a lot of things those Saturday mornings and much of it was not Japanese language related. While we attended Japanese school, our teachers entered and left their positions quicker than fast food employees and I assume that they were not paid much more than fast food employees, either. Some teachers only stayed for a couple weeks and some for a few months. It was hard to make real progress when we had to continually teach new teachers how much Japanese we knew. The fact that we met only once a week for a few hours was not much help either.
So it’s no surprise that I received only a basic grounding in Japanese during that time. Besides, I couldn’t spend too much time focusing on Japanese since I had other things on my plate, as well. I had absurd amounts of homework from high school and was also learning Spanish and French. At that time, Japanese was nowhere in my line of sight for the future. As a high school student at a top private Quaker high school that may as well have been a prep school, college was a goal marker so wide and high that I could not see past it.
Instead of learning lots of Japanese, we spent a great deal of time on the required school events. These events included such things as the school play. The school play meant our class had to come up with a skit, something which was always strangely reminiscent of elementary school. It usually ended up with our class making fools of ourselves, either singing or dancing or simply speaking poor, heavily-accented Japanese. These days I’m almost positive that we had the school play so that the real Japanese that were part of the other half of the school could enjoy themselves as they watched silly Americans making themselves look like idiots and displaying just how poorly we could speak Japanese.
The other main event was the speech contest. I don’t know why, but Japanese really enjoy their speech contests. In American high school, we had activities like the debate club and were always encouraged in class to disagree and attack each other about our opinions. Not here in Japanese school though, here we all took turns standing up and reciting some carefully thought out non-confrontational piece of writing that we wrote, like what we did last vacation. Or, a speech about our cat or our favorite television show.
In any case, nobody found the experience very enjoyable. Most people do not enjoy the idea of standing up in front of others and giving a speech without notes or written material of any kind. Now, imagine standing up in front of a room packed full of strangers, giving a speech in a language that you don’t even have a very good grasp of in the first place, for people who have spoken it natively for decades. I will tell you one thing though, after having done these Japanese speech contests for a few years, I never had a problem with any other sort of presentation again. Really, nothing can compare to the deadly Japanese speech contest.
There is one thing of note from those Japanese speech contests, however. One year I won first prize. My speech topic was the difference between normal schools and Quaker schools. I mostly recited some facts about the Quaker religion and threw in some of my own personal experiences from going to a Quaker school since Kindergarten for good measure.
Maybe I won first prize because my speech was about something of more substance than the “why I like anime” speeches. Either that or I was the best at controlling the shaking of my body from the fear for the duration of my speech that year. At any rate, you can be sure that I put that little award on my college application. I wonder if any admissions officer looked at it and thought, “Wow, this kid not only made it through the deadly Japanese speech contest but actually won first prize?? Forget this straight-A war orphan applicant over here, we have a real survivor!”
After my freshman year in high school, I decided that I wanted to devote part of my summer to learning more Japanese. I had Japanese flashing brightly in my eyes and I needed to become more proficient. Originally, I wanted to go to the world-renown language schools at Middlebury College but unfortunately, they only took college students and adults. Because I was a high school student, they pointed me in the direction of Concordia Language Camps which are a bunch of summer camps for middle schoolers and high schoolers out in the middle of nowhere in Minnesota.
The camps are affiliated with Concordia University and had a strong advertising campaign with a flashy website and a large glossy, color picture filled booklet. They advertised month-long courses where one would come out with the equivalent of one year of high school learning in the language. So, the camps had to be pretty serious, right?
I recruited one of my friends, Dreyfuss, from school to go along with me since he had an interest in Japanese as well and had made it through the Japanese classes we had taken with Fish. After we registered for the camp, I looked around on the Internet to find some pictures of past years so that we could get a sense of what we were getting into. We saw pictures of dirty buildings and even dirtier kids. Dreyfuss told me to stop showing him the pictures because it was making him not want to go anymore. In retrospect, I guess I should have continued showing him the pictures so he would have made the decision not to go because I don’t think Dreyfuss will ever forgive me.
I didn’t have so bad of a time but apparently the poor conditions, strange nature of the kids there and mass amounts of work got to him. We did the one month long course which meant that we would receive a year of high school Japanese credit if we successfully completed the course. One month doesn’t seem like a long time when talking about it or when one spends it in the best of conditions, but when one has to endure a month, it stretches endlessly like the flat plains I witnessed while driving from the airport to Mori No Ike, the Japanese language camp.
The camp was placed on hilly land which was an anomaly for Minnesota, it seemed. I’m sure that these odd hills meant that the land was sold for pennies since no farmer would want to deal with it when there were endless acres of nice, flat land. At any rate, the camp used to be a basketball camp and this was evidenced by the fact that there were three basketball courts. I guess Japanese people aren’t really interested in basketball because the paint on the basketball courts was destroyed and peeled. It looked more like someone had let a class of kindergarteners loose on the courts with buckets of paint in hand since various, different coats of paint showed through giving it a psychedelic appearance.
The whole camp was pretty run down, but I guess that’s the sort of treatment you get when you’re just a high schooler. Although the camp tried to make the atmosphere just like Japan, such as only allowing you to pay in yen at the camp store, really the only visible Japanese objects were the Japanese flag which was raised every day and a red-painted quickly-constructed torii gate which normally appears in Japan outside of Shinto shrines. It looked a bit out of place at Mori No Ike, seeing as it was never used for anything and additionally, nobody made any reference to it. It just stood there like a sarcastic reminder that we were not in technological wonderland Japan, but rather, a run-down, oppressive “Japanese” camp in the middle-of-nowhere, Minnesota.
Interestingly enough, the month before I went to Mori No Ike, I had actually spent a month in Spain doing a homestay program with a friend of mine from high school. While there, I lived in the city Salamanca. Outside of my three hour class time and one hour activity time in the afternoon, I was free to do whatever I wanted, wherever I wanted. Imagine my shock when I learned that I had less than an hour of free time per day at Mori No Ike. Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but I’m pretty sure even death row inmates get more free time than that.
If all this scheduled time had been devoted to hardcore Japanese studying, then maybe I would have been fine with the lack of free time because I would have received the gift of Japanese language enlightenment. I mean, the camp was affiliated with a university, right? It was about learning languages, right? It was supposed to give me a year’s worth of knowledge of Japanese in a month!
However, this was not the case. The rest of the time was spent either in class or doing “fun” events like singing children’s songs. They even threatened to lower our grades if we didn’t sing. Of course, we had to obey if we wanted a good grade to be sent back to our schools after the month long period. Yes, they were clever, those oppressors.
The classes at the camp were a mess. At the beginning they told us to take a short placement test and then they roughly lined us up on a piece of string in the order they thought we should go in. Then they told us to talk with the neighbor in front of us and the neighbor behind us to get a sense of where we were in our Japanese knowledge in relation to them. If we knew more, then we should go ahead of them. If we knew less, then we should go behind them. The final order was supposed to be accomplished in five minutes. Yes, this was a very carefully thought out class selection, indeed. After people had moved somewhat, they then went down the line and selected the first seven or eight people and made them one class. Then they did it for the next group and that was how classes were formed.
I found myself in the highest level group and while there were kids in my group who had more experience with Japanese than me, I was able to hold my own. The same was not to be said of many of the other kids. With such an almost arbitrary grouping of classes, kids bounced around classes like pachinko balls for the first week of classes which is a problem considering that there are only four weeks of class in total.
One kid stayed in one of the higher level classes that the teachers placed her into through the infamous rope system until after the first test, when she realized that the class was way too advanced for her and that she had failed the first test. The teachers let her move down a level but we still found her one evening crying. She told us that the oppressors told her that her grades from the first class would remain since she had already completed some of the work there. She calculated that even if she were to get 100% on the rest of the material for the next three weeks, she would still fail because there weren’t that many tests to be given in the four weeks and the failure on the first test meant her average could never achieve a C level. Now I realized the definition of “screwed”. They put you in one place and then tell you later that it’s your fault and they’re fining you for it!
(To be continued….)
