「すべての戦爭は內戦である。なぜならば、人類はみな仲間である。」
ランソワ・フェネロン
“All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.” – Francois Fenelon

File this one under “Life in Japan”. And subtitle it: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Gaijin Pass and Why You Should To.

Some years ago now, I seem to remember watching a heavily edited version of “American History X”: we have those in Utah (edited movies, that is…I don’t know for sure whether or not AHX had an edited version; Utah’s more sensitive to sex than violence). And there’s a scene where Edward Norton’s neo-Nazi gets some vicious prison discipline from a fellow neo-Nazi — the head neo-Nazi in charge — for being too “eager” and purist in his, well, neo-Nazism.

At the time I thought it was powerful and brutal and poignant, but also gimmicky; it seemed like too much of a plot device, too convenient, too much of an object lesson. Surely, ethnic gangs in prisons were too busy sticking together to have in-fighting?

But then I thought about it.

Who killed Malcolm X?
Who killed Yitzhak Rabin?
Who killed JFK?
Who tried to kill Hitler?
Who eventually did kill Hitler?

After all these men had been through, all the wars and close calls and early days, they were targeted and killed by their own people (or themselves, leaving behind a real scorcher of a suicide letter).

Let me qualify that. People of all shapes, shades, sizes and appendages will screw you, will be mean to you. But the people shaped, shaded, sized and appendaged like you will probably pull it off more often, for several reasons:

1. You’re likely to live in closest proximity to them
2. You’re likely to spend most of your time with them
3. You’ll never see it coming from them; you won’t expect it; you expect them to be on “your” side
4. You’ll suppress the memory of when it does happen and/or chalk it up to momentary/individual failing
5. You and your society will let them get away with it

Even in the famously ethnically fractured states united of America, violent crimes of all kinds are overwhelmingly committed intra-group, by in-group members, not across ethnic lines. Similarly, most sexual assaults are committed by acquaintances of the victim, not strangers in the bushes on “rape hill”. So, literally, no one will screw you longer, deeper and harder than your own people.

Looking back some 20 years ago now, I don’t think Yitzhak Rabin, decorated IDF veteran, son of the soil, a man who’d spent more than a third of his entire life as a soldier, woke up that morning in 1995 — or any other morning — and thought: “some punk kid who owes his very existence and nationality to me, who’s been alive fewer years than I was in fatigues, is going to pop a cap in my a$$ today”; I don’t imagine that that thought had ever occurred to him; I don’t imagine he ever thought random domestic wingnuts were an imminent and credible threat to his life. Or perhaps he did ¹, but it felt pretty out-of-left-fieldy to me.

Japanese people don’t hate you. You just live in Japan, and there are jerks (even in Japan; Japanese industry hasn’t figured out how to quality control them…yet ). And statistically, probabilistically, because of reason (1) up there, almost all the jerks you meet are gonna be Japanese. But for reasons (3), (4) and (5), you won’t let it slide. ²

Now, I hear you going: “Khatz, you’re just pulling off mental acrobatics to get us to hide from the truth”. And I know it can seem that way. But I’m not.

Firstly, it actually takes a great deal of effort to permanently blanket-hate a group of people (it can be quite easy to start, but maintenance is killer ); if nothing else, you’re forced to suppress and ignore all conflicting evidence; you have to forget and ignore all the good while remembering only the bad; it wears your mind and body down; hate, like language proficiency and talking plants in Rick Moranis movies, has to be fed to stay alive and healthy. So you don’t need my help there.

Secondly, what I’m actually doing is pulling out surprising statistics to get you to see the truth behind the assumptions and stereotypes. There are definitely exceptions and counterexamples: Leopold of Belgium was able to royally screw over much of Central Africa without ever visiting there. Remote jacka$$ery, if you will.

Then again, you could take it up another level of abstraction and come full circle: humans make a big deal about other animals (or extraterrestrials or even ghosts(!)) killing us, but it’s living humans that hate and harm fellow humans the most: “homo homini lupus”, as the Romans ³ said. Man is a wolf unto man. We are the big bad wolf. We are our only true predator.

Like, literally. At every scale. From cosmic to microscopic. It’s self-similar. Like a fractal.

Observe. Some 30,000 Japanese die by their own hand (suicide) every year. Similarly (but much more indirectly), the products of our own metabolism inside our own cells end up causing aging and eventually death for us. ." id="return-note-28824-4" href="#note-28824-4">⁴ Carl Sagan would say that we’re just temporary accumulations of stardust annihilating other temporary accumulations of stardust.

2002 was a terrible year to be a female child in America, with a spate of kidnappings that would not let up, of which Elizabeth Smart was but one datapoint…if you watched the news, that is. In real life, 2002 was a down year for child kidnappings. Not only that, but most child kidnappers are…known to the victim — family, in fact. Blood relatives. Divorced parents and the like. No one will screw you longer, deeper and harder than your own people. And you don’t even know. You turn a blind eye to that because you seem them as individuals. The Smart case was an outlier, an aberration, an exception not an illustration.

We are far more wary and judgmental of biological and sociological outsiders than is statistically fair. Every kid gets the “stranger danger” talk. No kid gets the “watch out for us when we’re drunk: we will eff you up” talk. Not from their parents. Tsk tsk, African immigrants in South Africa got beaten up and killed in a dirty, rough neighborhood and it’s on the news? Dewd, native South Africans in dirty, rough neighborhoods get beaten up and killed by their fellow countrymen all the time and it gets jack-all coverage because, well, nobody cares about kids from dirty, rough neighborhoods. ) in this kind if behavior — it’s scale-invariant. It can go from: “There’s thing wrong with us bombing Europe — they bomb themselves after all”. All the way down to: “There’s nothing wrong with me treating these foster kids like free child labor. After all, I saved them from their good-for-nothing, drunken, drugged up, abusive, useless, incompetent parents — these darn kids should be grateful to me; I’m teaching them good, Christian values; I deserve to get something back; it’s just a few chores.” And, finally, in attenuated form, down to the benevolent “scholarship boy” condescension sometimes directed toward kids from low SES backgrounds who earn themselves scholarships to prestigious private schools. And so one can find oneself in a classic frying-pan-to-fire situation, as one cruelty justifies another in a sort of conveniently framed: “so what we killed a couple Jews? At least we made the trains run on time!” way. The point here is not to minimize, negate, deny or justify cruelty but to identify its most potent source. Unfortunately this source is often (though not always) very close to home." id="return-note-28824-5" href="#note-28824-5">⁵

And the solution is not for the news to change. I would never suggest something so quixotic and stupid. I hate when people go “they should stop airbrushing models in women’s magazines!” ⁶ Why? Because it makes you feel bad? Boo-farking-hoo, how about this — don’t buy the magazine. Don’t pay for the movie. Don’t watch the news; these are private enterprises, not gubmit programs; they don’t have to show population parity and you don’t have to give them your money. Vote with your wallet, not your tears. ⁷

Everybody will screw you. So if you’re going to get upset or start hating, you’d better be ready to spread it around. You’d better be prepared to hate everybody, because the statistics justify it. As fans of the American Second Amendment occasionally point out, history shows that, in general, governments have killed many times more of their own citizens than the criminals against whom they purport to protect us; this has especially been true in the 20th century, where technology and nationalism reached a multiplicative zenith of sorts, allowing power and stupidity to concentrate in unprecedented ways…or maybe I’m just being myopic…we tend to act as if most of history happened in the 20th century, and that simply isn’t true. Steven Pinker, whom I usually find well-spoken but plain wrong, astutely points out in The Better Angels of Our Nature that, while the number of human deaths due to human violence has increased, the proportion has tanked. And that’s including all the tiffs and spats of the last century. So things are getting better.

Anyway, moving on, so…if you’re Chinese, Mao will “save” you from Japanese occupation — or, at the very least, take credit for it — and maintain the territorial integrity of China, before attempting to destroy your writing system and starving tens of millions of people to death, out of either malice or (worse) an incompetence enforced by violence and untempered by dissent. If you’re Russian, Stalin will also “save” you before turning around and screwing you over. “But he was Georgian”, you say. And the German guy he saved you from was actually Austrian. Same difference.

This whole blog is stupid and overkill — this post especially so: using too much scale and too much history to make a simple point. But so is our emotional reaction to Japanese strangers’ automatically speaking heavily accented English to us. Look back on your life. Look back on all the hurtful things “your own people” (native speakers of your own language) said and did to you…in the schoolyard, in class…is the behavior of random adult strangers in Japan really your biggest problem in life? It’s annoying (potentially), but does it warrant a therapy session? Does it warrant emotional suffering? Are you getting chased through the streets and beaten up in alleys?

Personally, I don’t want it to ever come to the point where Japanese people in general — other than close friends, so, strangers — expect me to speak Japanese well and are utterly unsurprised by it. I like being foreign. I didn’t cross oceans and continents to fit in: I can do that back home. I came here to be an outlier; I thrive on being exceptional. I especially like being selectively foreign — linguistically Japanese enough to produce and consume humor, but a total ignoramus when it suits my purposes. I like my gaijin pass. Being a normal Japanese person is tough like rural women. Social codes are a strait jacket; like ill-fitting clothes, I do not like them on me. Here, I can flout them and not be a jerk — I’m just eccentric.

One time, when I was a teenager, spending a holiday with a relative, I was told that if I didn’t behave, “I won’t take you out; I’ll leave you at home, alone”.
Home. Alone. With a blazing fast computer. And broadband Internet. And a massive-a$$ public library. Within walking distance. With interlibrary loan.

OH NO!!!
ANYTHING BUT THAT!

As you can imagine, I did everything in my power to get left home alone, that day and every other day that summer. Best. Punishment. Ever. ⁸

In Japanese society, the worst thing people can do to you isn’t to harm you: it’s to ignore you, to send you to Coventry, to 敬遠 you. In other words, in Japanese society, the worst thing people can do to you is leave you alone. As it turns out…that’s all I’ve ever wanted.

Nikolai sayeth:
My friends/coworkers even get mad at me at work too when I change the TV to a Japanese channel, and not stupid AFN (Armed Forces Network or something, basically USA channels wherever there is a base).

I get this a lot, too and I’ve never understood it. The active hostility one often sees among gaijin to the sound of Japanese coming from rectangular boxes. They don’t just get annoyed: they get physically agitated; their voices and faces are filled with disgust.

In so violently rejecting and discounting Japanese TV, movies and videos (even stuff dubbed from English) a lot of gaijin seem to me to be going out of their way to prevent “free Japanese” from entering their lives. And then, in their drunken touchy-feely moments, they’ll sit there telling you about how hard Japanese supposedly is, how hard not knowing Japanese (while living in Japan) is, and how they would “give anything” to know it. If only they had “the time” and “the talent” and “the motivation”.

Really, Todd? How much motivation does it take to leave the TV on?

It’s like that guy who wants a clean sheets but absolutely insists on defecating on them ¹ because it’s his “right”. It’s just…weird. And comically self-defeating. Why travel to the other side of the world only to do and see and say what you can you do and see and say “back home”?

And, no, drinking Asahi beer daily and eating sushi occasionally does not count any more .

Anyway.

</rant>

Gaijin? Living in Japan? Feeling repentant? Wanna learn Japanese? Here you go, the 2-step magic formula:

1. Turn on the TV at 9am next Monday morning.
2. Turn it off 2 years later.

That’s right. Even Japanese people have a hard time understanding what anime characters say because it’s such a foreign language to them. They have to take a special course in school called “anime language” which helps them understand it, just a bit. Even then, most Japanese people can only understand about 70% of the words anime characters use, which explains why the dialogue often seems pandering to viewers with small vocabularies.

Instead, OP, you should watch superior Japanese soap operas because they are so well-produced.

</sarcasm>

And with that, the “even Japanese people don’t understand Japanese” meme was put to rest. Hopefully .

We don’t really judge any group of people fairly. Almost all our judgments about entire nations tend to be based on sample sizes of one or two. I am more than willing to ignore whatever increasingly rare BS I get from an occasional random person who is Japanese because I have Japanese friends who look out for me like family.

A friend of a friend recently broke up with his Japanese girlfriend. He was a total Japanophile before. Now he totally hates Japanese people. He still lives here, but he’s suddenly anti-Japan rant-prone.

Who’s wrong? Who’s right? That’s beside the point, really. The point is…make thee a Japanese family. Skew your perceptions, because they’re already skewed anyway. Skew them toward the good, because that’ll help you more. You’ll be happier and feel better.

Methinks that there is no reality to observe impartially when it comes to things like this. There is just your circle of friends. You’re hardly going to go out and meet all 127 million Japanese people. Nor will you meet the few thousand that would be necessary to make meaningfully accurate statistical statements about the whole. So there’s no point discussing the whole, because you’ll only ever interact with a handful of parts anyhow.

Manage the parts. Fix the parts if they need fixing. Construct your world. Fill it with characters whom you like, and make casting adjustments as and when needed. Since they get the most lines and screentime, if the stars are good enough, then a miscast stray extra here or there won’t have much effect either way.

It’s not Japan you need to change, it’s your peeps. Maybe. Probably.

Information on Japan that’s not in Japanese invariably leads one to believe both good and bad things about this place that are simply untrue.

Example the first: Japanese people are deep and Buddhist and Zen-like and uncluttered and value emptiness. And all Americans are Mennonites, right? Yeah…no. Most people here barely even know what Zen is (not to mention the fact that Zen actually originated in China as a sort of mix of this thing from India called Buddhism and homegrown Daoism).

As for uncluttered emptiness, I have two words for you: Yodobashi Camera.
I rest my case.

Don’t get me wrong: those “Zen” ideas do exist in Japan, and they are held in high regard in certain quarters. But, they are just one rather small stall in the marketplace of ideas; they don’t dominate Japanese culture to the extent that well-meaning foreigners might wish they do.

Example the second: so-called xenophobia.

Japan simply doesn’t have real, deep-seated, I’m-going-to-tie-you-to-the-back-of-my-truck-and-drag-you-to-death-and/or-gas-you-with-insecticide xenophobia. It mostly has xenophilia tinged with a bit of…xenonervousness.

This is very much a live-and-let-live society. If you’re not emotionally needy, if you don’t crave approval, if you’re calm, articulate and persistent, you can basically do and be whatever you want here. Materially, there’s no door or substitute window that an even moderately determined person cannot open in Japan.

Any actual animosity is directed exclusively (and quite inappropriately ) toward fellow northeast Asians — Koreans and Chinese. Many Japanese people I’ve read and talked to are surprisingly cognizant of this 同族嫌悪(どうぞくけんお) — this self-hatred/sibling-rivalry thing with the other members of what right-wing conspiracy theorist Takahiko SOEJIMA ¹ (of all people!) described as: “the wider Chinese civilization of which Japan, while culturally unique, is simply a part” ². Nobody hates like family, right?

Japanese people are much nicer and messier than they get credit for. I have visited too many bedrooms and woken up with my head nestled in too many people’s dirty laundry to think otherwise.

Learn the language. Anything you do without knowing the language is about as accurate as those times on MST3K or Whose Line Is It Anyway? where they watch a foreign movie with no subs and make up the lines based on what they presume to be going on. In fact, people who don’t access information about Japan directly in Japanese would be better off going to MST3K than to the usual verbal sewers *cough*gaijin forums*cough* they seem to frequent. That way, at least they’d pick up a sense of humor .

Those are the two yen I brought with me. ‘Could be wrong.

Image credit: Kotaku | Metal Gear Solid 4 Japan Launch – Osaka bit.ly/horNJz

Our professor, Dr. L., was and is a totally cool guy, the perfect combination of fun and on the ball, if that makes any sense. The perfect balance of fun, fair and straight-laced. So fun that he’s fun and you have fun with him, but not so “fun” that he’s irrational and unpredictable and never grades any of your work.

So it came as pleasant shock to us when he went: “Class. Guys. I believe that all (networking) sockets code is descended from the same source. So there’s no point you going out and re-inventing the wheel. Feel free to take some base code and copy that and then work from there”.

That’s right, Dr. L had a refreshingly open attitude to copying. In college. The ultimate plagiarism-phobic (and, by extension, imitation- and copying-phobic) environment. Mind you, what Dr. L was suggesting was not the same as plagiarism; it was simply a frank and matter-of-fact acknowledgment of the reality that all learning begins with imitation ¹. That other people’s experience can be a valid starting point. Looking back now, as an “adult”, it seems obvious enough, but in the hermetically sealed school environment, it took a great deal of courage and candor to admit that kind of thing openly.

What does this have to do with writing a Japanese resumé (curriculum vitae) and cover letter?

Everything.

You see, a resumé is not supposed to be original. Don’t believe what people tell you. If it were supposed to be original, there would be no conventions; it wouldn’t even have a name. It would be more like a portfolio, just unique and “out there”. No, a resumé is supposed to be roughly the same as everybody else’s in order to invite comparison — that’s (unfortunately) what it means to compare and compete with others: it means to make yourself the same as them (and thus comparable by common criteria — because only things that are similar can be compared)…while making yourself different in small, structured ways (that still fit into the overall sameness) and not doing anything stupid like making annoying, obvious spelling (kanji) and grammar mistakes.

From my time as an IT consultant, when I evaluated Japanese resumés of IT professionals for a non-IT company, I can tell you that orthographic errors were instant kill material for us. That tells you right there that uniqueness and standing out are not instantly welcome by any means. In fact, in the early stages, we were looking for any reason to reduce our workload, and typos were one of the best excuses for that — a simple, straightforward and unambiguous exclusion criterion.

The point of a resumé is to not distract with any unwanted uniqueness while injecting a tiny, almost imperceptible amount of “permissible uniqueness”. But by far, the sameness is the main, the bread and butter of the document. ²

And how are you supposed to produce this sameness? Well, by copying. That’s right, copying. There’s nothing wrong with copying as starting point. It’s not like you’re simply taking someone else’s document and putting your name on it. That would be plagiarism. That would be lying. That would be falsifying your background.

No, you’re taking the existing conventions of the culture (which matter, to a lot of people anyway), imbibing them and making them your own, and, yes, maybe even innovating in the tiny, “permissible” ways that are welcomed in resumé innovation — but you first need to know precisely what the conventions even are before you innovate beyond them. Otherwise, you’re just shooting in the dark. It’s like the difference between a writer who breaks grammar rules knowingly, and one who breaks them out of ignorance. Big difference.

One of the aims of AJATT.com, in addition to giving people all the tools and advantages I had in getting used to Japan and Japanese, was and is to give people the tools I did not have, but wish I did and that would have made my life easier. When I was starting out in the world of Japanese work, there was very little for me to go on in terms of online help, and my impression is that this is still the case. So I enlisted the aid of friends and acquaintances and pros and friends of friends to help me write my own resumé and cover letter.

Many friends. Many experts. Many perspectives. People with international experience and people without. Hundreds of hours and thousands of edits. All of their advice injected and distilled into a single, gleaming package:

The work.JP Starter Pack

What is the work.JP Starter Pack? It’s canned success is what it is. It is a fully loaded sample Japanese resumé and cover letter correspondence for you to use, based on the very resumés and cover letters that successfully got me work at and with places as diverse as Sony (programming), NEC, Toyota, Honda and Konami (translating) and all that good stuff, all without a single Japanese language test certification to my name.

Presumably you have native-level English. I’m just gonna assume you do. If you wanted to know how good someone’s English is, would you look at their TOIEC and TOEFL test scores? Do you even know what the TOIEC and TOEFL are? No, you would look at their writing and then talk to them for about 30 to 300 seconds. And from that, you would know all you need to know.

So if you need to write a Japanese resumé and cover letter, but don’t know how, if you need a document that is totally native-looking and native-structured in its Japaneseness but that also takes into account the fact that you grew up and were schooled overseas, that you aren’t Japanese but that you can darn well function like it if you need to, then the work.JP Starter Pack is for you.

That’s it. Simple. Of course, it’s all been checked to gleaming perfection by real Japanese people. And it all takes into account the specific needs and situational peculiarities of non-Japanese people/residents.

100% Refund Guarantee

Some people love a product, some people just want to be friends. So, as always, the AJATT Fo’ Shizzle Refund Guarantee remains in effect. If you don’t like, you can get a refund any time. Just be like: “Refund” (to refund and ajatt dot com), and AJATT staff will come at you all like: “Take your money! But tell me it was real…tell me you loved me…”. Emotionally charged, but brief .

No matter where you live, it’s fun and useful to make friends fast, and one thing that helps friendships form is accurately remembering people’s names (and then saying them a lot).

Here in Japan, because I stand out so much and look so radically different from everyone else, it’s usually quite easy for other people to remember my name…but I don’t frequently get the same benefit of a “lone statistical outlier” in physical appearance to help names stick in memory. Until recently, I often found myself in situations where everyone knew my name, but I was drawing blanks. And I felt bad about that; it just made things unnecessarily awkward.

Whenever I meet people from the kanjisphere, all I ever do is talk about kanji, starting with their names. I’ll get them to write down all the kanji; we’ll talk about variant characters and name distributions — South China has lots of 呉s and Kansai has lots of this and Okinawan names have lots of syllables and all that good stuff. But for all that talk and writing, I was having a really hard time actually remembering those names…

At times, the happier the encounter, the worse it seemed . You know how it is. You’ll meet someone really cool and you’ll have this great conversation, and then you’re like “I’m sorry, what was your name again?” Or, the conversation went so well and you had so much fun, that you actually feel bad about asking their name, so you tell yourself you’ll get their name through the person who introduced you in the first place (so you don’t look bad), and then you and the cool person part ways, but then you meet this cool person again another day and they’re all excited to see you, but you didn’t get around to asking their name and to ask now might imply that they were forgettable and you don’t want to hurt their feelings and…

…yeah, awkwardness…

For a while I thought I must just be a cold person. Indeed, Kenyan women often describe Kenyan men as cold, arrogant, boring and poorly dressed [particularly in comparison to Zairean men, the lords of the earth. And by “Zairean men”, I mean Kanda Bongo Man ], So…I figured I must just be fulfilling the national dream. Maybe I was just a cold man who only loved kanji. And toys. And tall women.

And Ann Coulter. Ann. It’s like…there’s so much hate, the only response left is love. Kind of like when you’re so happy that you go over the edge and wrap right back around to crying. It’s integer overflow, but with emotions. Incidentally, being a real man, I never cry…except when I’m in your mother’s arms….

Where was I? Oh yeah. But the thing is, Kenyan or not, I do like people and hanging out with them and playing ultimate frisbee with them, so…I knew that wasn’t the problem. I realized that all I had to do was turn learning people’s names into a fun game, just like learning kanji. So I came up with an SRS card format to remember people’s names. Here’s the basic structure:

Front

Any relevant details about the person that I feel like adding. Even pictures (if convenient) are OK. Usually I fill in the more salient features of their body/gestures/persona (e.g. “buck teeth”, “hoarse voice”). It can be quite blunt, but no offence is intended. Having said that, given the lack of tact in these descriptions, offence would be taken, so…I don’t exactly go around showing these decks to the people in question. Besides, they’re probably happier that way: they get to think that their names were remembered only because of their good looks and charm and not because of clever memory games.

Back

Full Name [and nicknames for reference]

Objective and Structure Details

Pretty much anything goes on the front, but the name (and any nicknames that are too much of a giveaway, which is most nicknames) is only allowed on the back. The object of the game is to say the person’s full name, given all the details on the front. Nicknames are for reference only. IMHO, one principle of good SRS cards is that there be one and only one correct answer, and that this answer be short, clear and concise (BTW lazy kanji cards kind of violate this principle to some extent, which bugs the side of me that wants a simple, straightforward game with a clear, unambiguous objective…but we’ll leave that for another post).

Actual Sample Cards

Here are a few actual sample cards. Observe that while these cards are in English, most of my actual cards are in Japanese.

FRONT

Big nose. Incredibly loud laugh.
Dad looks like Don Knotts.

BACK

TANAKA Taro

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

FRONT

TANAKA Taro’s girlfriend.
Looks like Jane Doe from OmniCorp, but somewhat taller and with less chest (hey — I’m trying to remember names here…anything goes)

BACK

SUZUKI Sadako

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

FRONT

Spikey hair.
Likes to tell jokes.
Looks just like the kid from Battle Royale/Death Note

BACK

SATOU Saburou

Grouping

I arrange these cards into decks grouped by location/situation. So for example, my frisbee buddies are in one deck, my bookstore buddies are in another, people I met at a certain wedding are in yet a third. The decks have names like “rolodex-frisbee”, “rolodex-taroswedding”, “rolodex-hokkaidolads” and so on…

More Amateur Sociology

I find that people don’t mind details about their lives being forgotten, but they do mind their names being forgotten. Put another way, if you can only remember one thing about a person, remember their name, because this will make them really happy. If you have their name, you have the key to their…whatever…heart…or…chastity belt…I dunno. As Dale Carnegie famously discussed in How To Win Friends and Influence People, everyone loves their name: it’s their favorite word.

In RL, people walk around with their faces, voices and personalities in full view, but very few walk around wearing nametags. At the same time, we can only really call people by their names, at least if we want to be even moderately polite. “Hey, you, whatsyourface-that-looks-like-the-kid-from-Battle-Royale!” can be pretty hit-and-miss in terms of “winning the hearts and minds”, to put it mildly. So memorizing names is important. And thanks to SRS, it’s now easy as well. So even if you’re a cold, distant, arrogant, poorly-dressed, self-absorbed geek, you don’t have to “get social skills” in order to work well with people…you can just geekify the process itself.

When you’re living in a new country, like I am, remembering names can speed up and smooth out the process of making new friends. And as we all know, good friends can really make any place amazing.

実はネ、拙者を含めて多くの外国人がホザいて来た「ニッポンの人種差別」というのは、事実無根の愚痴に過ぎない。「『外人』は差別用語」だの「人に見られている」だの弱音を吐くより、先ずは全面的に自分達の日本語能力をレベルアップした方が遥かに得策。他人の国に住んでるのにその言葉をちゃんと学ぼうともしない我々外人＝差別用語を語る資格の無い、迷惑的な存在だけだ。せやから、理不尽な主張を抜かす前に責任を取りましょう。何よりもここは日本で、国の主は日本国民（俺らも税金払ってんだけどね（笑））。そんなに辛い想いをしてるなら、他に200カ国ぐらいの国家がそこら辺に轉がってるし・・・

っちゅう事を、僕とYouTubeのTkyoSamが英語圏の皆さんに、今回のビデオを通して伝えたいと思った譯。殘念ながら内容は英語のみなんだけど、まあ、ターゲット層も英語圏の奴らだから或る程度合理的な選択かと存じまする！因みに、ワイは「植物中心食生活」（←関係ねえだろうがよ！^_^）のお陰で結構減量してるので、興味のある方は是非ご覧あれ！・・・やっぱり無いか・・・

Not really. In fact, not at all. In fact, people need to shut the truck up, learn Japanese (especially reading and writing), and stop overanalyzing every interaction they have in Japan like some kind of sociopathic girlfriend. As much fun as it is to try to demonize Japan, certain highly vocal countries which shall remain nameless have more racism between the cracks of their pinkie fingernails than Japan does in all 120 odd million of its bodies put together. We all need to give the people of the J-land a break (they’re busy at it is), and learn to have the finesse — I’m one to talk — to discern “racism” from misunderstanding from culture from just being a jerk. If you must hate something, hate individuals.

That’s the basic idea of the video was very kindly put up by TkyoSam. TkyoSam’s like “Konnichiwa, motherlover! I want sushi!”, and I’m like “No! I implement Fuhrman! Look how I’ve regained my girlish figure!” and he’s like “Like I give a truck! You don’t have to eat, just come! We’re recording video!”.

So we’re there, getting around like 寿司 on a 回転, recording a video while I eat peanuts out of my bag…Anyway, yeah — here ya go. Two parts.

And to the housing thing, let me add, you will never ever be prevented from living in nice places or from making PILES of dough in this country. And isn’t that what really matters? There’s really nothing to complain about. I mean, what, are we babies that need everyone around us to smile and applaud whenever we expel waste (グー！)? Is that it (for the record, I would actually like that, but this is early 21st century Japan, where most people simply have-no-time-for-you)? Extreme example…but it hints at something: namely, that what most people are really missing may be a loving family environment.

Remember: no likey = no havey to stayey. There are about 200 countries in the world, no use getting itchy haemmorrhoids over 1 [that’s smaller than California!].

さて、此間テレビに関する記事（嘆き？）を書いた僕（はい！吾輩は一人称の選べない人間である）なんだけど、ネットサーフィンがてらにこのブログにて「テレビ番組の低俗化に関する一考察」という、テレビをジャンクフードに準えるカナリ興味深いポストを見付けちゃった。僕的には、日本語の勉強に役立って来たテレビはもう完全に見て居られない。今では面白いドラマとか有ったら、DVDで観れるまで待つぐらいだ — 大事な思考力が馬鹿馬鹿しい番組に衰退させられないように。だからこの記事を読んで大同感しました。皆ちゃんも読んで見てね。

テレビが低俗しているのではなく、元々低俗なモノだったという考えもあるみたい。確かに今までパッと見た昭和時代のテレビから判断すると、当時でも特に高尚な番組があったとは限らぬ。どっちみち、俺はもうテレビを見ないけど。

最後に、テレビジョンの悪口を散々言って来た私も、繰り返しだけど実はテレビっ子だった — テレビのお陰で日本語が解る私が居る。なんつーか、語学と地理学の最適無敵な道具なんだ、テレビってのは。あるレベル迄ね。なので、どんだけいかほど低俗な番組でも、その内容をまだ理解できない人には、拒否・批判する資格は無い。テレビを批判するのは、語学的にちゃんと理解できるようになってからの特権なのだ。だから、或る言語を勉強中の方には、その言語でのテレビを大量無差別に見る事を是も非もお勧めしたい。そして、理解できるようになったら、番組を真剣に選んだり、テレビそのものを全面的に否定したりしても構わない。

まあ、恐らく真の問題はテレビの低俗化より、低俗化と面白くない化の同時進行。面白くて低俗ならしょうがいないし、面白くなくて高尚でも受け入れられるが、低俗で面白くないは到底赦せぬ！

1. Bad Company
Foreigners who don’t know Japanese have a rough time meeting Japanese people. So they hang out with other foreigners. Result? They get great practice at everything but Japanese. They form their own communities, visit foreign-centric websites, watch movies from back home. Dude, you can even go to a karaoke bar and only play American or Chinese songs. They essentially do the reverse of all Japanese all the time — “anything but Japanese language and people wherever and whenever possible”. They ghetto-ize themselves, creating a foreign enclave in Japan, an enclave that comforts and accepts them for not knowing the language of the country in which they have chosen to live.

2. Getting By
You can get by in Japan without Japanese. Emphasis on the “get by”, as in “survive”, not “succeed” or “thrive”. You can make it. It’ll suck — you won’t know what most signs mean, you won’t be able to negotiate or search for cheaper housing, you won’t be able to search the Internet for the best deals on electronics, you won’t be able to have meaningful conversations with people. But you’ll muddle through. You can take trains, go shopping, point at pictures in restaurants, and learn basic survival phrases. And anything you really can’t do (like go to government offices), your bilingual Japanese girlfriend can help you with.

3. School
Sorry, school. But Japanese language school is about the worst thing that ever happened. Part of this is because a lot of the teachers are either..

4. Condescending Japanese People
A lot of Japanese people, I’m told, are basically taught nihonjinron (日本人論) in middle school (I don’t know whether this is true or not). And what that basically says is that Japan and Japanese are unlike anything else in the world, no foreigner could ever “get it”, and even you Japanese kids will barely get it without years of formal education. Anyway, where the belief comes from is irrelevant, the point is that people go into adulthood believing this. If you don’t know Japanese but have Japanese friends, coworkers or teachers, then a lot of these people may not believe that you can learn Japanese to a meaningful level.

Thanks to the suckiness of school, a lot of Japanese people have “learn” English — that is, if habitually spelling and saying “sorry” as “solly” can be constituted as learning English: they “failed” at learning English; they expect you to fail at learning Japanese. That’s a poisonous attitude to be exposed to. Having said that, there are many Japanese people who will encourage you and give you the benefit of the doubt, so you still have the responsibility to overcome this.

Or…

5. Well-Meaning, Do-Gooder Native Speakers
Now, you’d think that I’d be all for native speakers. And I am. But there’s a proviso — I focus on what native speakers do, and what native speakers say, but not on what native speakers say to do. Native speakers have no freaking clue…how they did it. They don’t remember being babies because they were babies. You and I get to be babies as adults, so it’s different. Anyway, so, these native speakers perhaps try to figure out how they did it, and they figure it must have been due to school, since, after all, they spent all this time there, right? Wrong. For one thing, they knew Japanese before they went to school — all “normal” toddlers can talk quite fluently. OK, but what about reading and writing? You can’t deny the effect of school on literacy, can you, Khatzumoto? I can. Two points. First, lots of Americans go to school, and look at what that did for their literacy, even with an allegedly “easier” writing system. Second, and more importantly, the way most Japanese kids learn to read is the very embodiment of inefficiency.

Apparently, after WW2, the day they were going to decide the new kanji policy, they locked all the smart people out of the Monbukagakusho/文部科學省 (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology=MEXT) building, and by coincidence the village idiot was left locked inside the ministry building — and so he wrote the kanji policy — and when the smart people finally got the spare keys for the building, they didn’t have time to change the policy because the US military occupation government had set a firm deadline, so they just handed in the document that was there (the one the village idiot wrote), with the result that kids in 5th grade (in Japanese public schools) learn “幹”, “版”, “導”, “刊” and “容” BUT HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL 6TH GRADE to learn “干”, “片”, “寸” and “穴”.

Now, the initiated will have realized that kids in Japanese government schools are routinely learning structural-composite kanji before learning their structural components; like building a skyscraper and then building its foundations, or eating a banana and then attempting to peel it, or attempting to run a program before turning your computer on. It’s as if the village idiot wrote the school policy — oh, wait, he did! The village idiot was like “hmm…what is the most illogical, inconsistent, ridiculous way I can do this so that it makes kanji seem difficult?”; he was one malicious motherlover of a village idiot.

Fortunately, the Japanese kids who were and are victims of this policy were just that — kids. And as we all know, kids know how to be resilient even when presented with bad logic; they’re persistent like that. And so, the Japanese school system takes it’s sweet-as-poundcake time teaching 1-2 years’ worth of kanji in 10-12 years; all because of one village idiot. The system stays alive because most kids do make it through — they may not understand how the kanji system actually works, but they can read and write and function. Hey, it’s good enough for government work, right? Besides, neither the kids nor the teachers have anything better to do than, oh, take the longest, hardest, most confusing possible road to literacy, do they?

Now, take this idea and try it on an adult. Try to teach an adult an illogical method of reading a logical writing system; try to teach her to peel a banana, throw away the fruit and eat the peel. It will only work if you can get her to keep doing it for 10-12 years, which you won’t — the adult will break.

There is a big bright side: many Japanese people realize the way kanji-learning is being handled by state schools is bunk — I’ve seen private schools on TV that politely ignore the village idiot list. Smart people in the government are working even as we speak, trying to fix the village idiot’s mistakes in various ways. Plus, there’s the Heisig Method.

Anyway, where was I — yeah, so if a native speaker tries to help you with the method of learning Japanese, she’ll probably try to school you. This is NG. Do what she does — watch Japanese shows, spend time with Japanese people, read Japanese books, eat Japanese food. Talk like she does, or her brother does or mother does or her father does, as appropriate for age and gender. But, generally, do not do what she tells you to do; she knows what she’s saying, but she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

6. Well It’s Too Late Now Syndrome
So, let’s say you’re foreign. And you’ve been here 5, 10, 15 years. And you still only know survival Japanese. But you weren’t lazy, right? You tried. You bought all the books and tapes and hired a tutor and went to Japanese school and wrote out kanji. But it didn’t work, you think it’s too late now and it’s just “too hard”. A lot of people think that. They’re wrong, but they think that. Forget about the past, think about now — it’s always the right time to start.

7. Discouragement + Lack of Persistence
Good old negative thinking. Seeing what you can’t do instead of what you can do. People make fun of you, you feel bad, you give up. You three-day-monk it, your water doesn’t boil, you give up. Stop stopping and stop giving up — the hard parts, the days when you don’t feel like doing it, when you want to stop this Japanese act and just go back to being “you”, those are the days when you need to practice even more. You can learn to overcome those days — just see them as part of the legend “I wanted to give up, but by Jordan I kept going!”.

8. Bad Learning Methods…Lots of Bad Learning Methods
Money and resources will not do the work for you (unless you plan to make a neural implant a-la-Matrix, in which case, call me, because I’d be first in line to get a USB port in the back of my head…actually, not first, but as soon as they had a stable version) where was I? Oh, yeah — buying books and materials may feel good, and may give you the impression that you’re “putting your money where your mouth is”, but if you don’t also USE the books, then all you’ve done is spend money.

9. English-language Internet fora about Japanese
This affects people whether or not they’re in Japan. You see, folks, it’s a big Internet out there. And there are lots of cool fora, where you can argue your head off. A lot of people studying Japanese spend a lot of time in these fora, day in day out, petty feud to petty feud, pet theory against pet theory. Talking ABOUT Japanese but not doing it…as if their theories would somehow lead to a solution. These people have confused being obsessed with Japanese with obsessively doing Japanese. The latter gets you good, the former just gets you into heated arguments.

You’re not going to see a forum on this site until we can work out a way to make it truly useful, not just a flamewar arena.

10. Low-A$$ Expectations
“A little bit a day”. “10 minutes a day”. “One or two hours a day”. Forget it. That won’t get you anywhere. You’re trying to learn a language here, not…pick sock lint from between your toes. Don’t get me wrong — I urge, I DEMAND that people have fun and only fun doing Japanese. But, one does actually need to do it. Don’t fear Japanese, don’t be intimidated by it. But respect it enough to give it ample time on a daily basis.

Remember, friends: Japanese is a human language — a learned behavior. It is not carried by blood, it is carried by environment, behavior and lifestyle. Millions of people of Japanese descent — Japanese-Latin-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Japanese returnees abandoned as children in China after WW2 — have zero Japanese skills or awkward, heavily-accented Japanese. Conversely, millions of non-Japanese people have native-level written and spoken Japanese. Zainichis, foreigners on TV, and cetera. There is no magic to it. Change your environment, behavior and lifestyle, and you will change with them.

Are you of the school of thought that a person can only learn X languages to complete fluency? Perhaps that was a bad explanation, but I guess would you say that you can use your method multiple times for different languages or would you advise a student to just concentrate on learning, say only Japanese, to complete fluency instead of learning a lot of language to a pretty good fluency?

Second question is, what would you advise someone to do if they studied a language for a good amount of time but they are reluctant to continue because of… whatever. Bad experiences with the culture and/or people of the language? Or perhaps that is an issue for a psychoanalyst, who knows?

Great questions. These are issues I’ve been thinking about myself for a while now, and especially deeply over the past few months. These just my present thoughts, they may well change in the future; I’ve only taught myself one language so far, and so I cannot and do not claim the right to discuss the issues you’ve raised with any authority or particularly deep experience.

How Many Languages?

There’s a lady called KIN Birei, whom I love and hate at the same time. You see her on Japanese TV now and then. Typical fiery, illogical, right-wing, Japanese woman, right? Wrong — she’s Taiwanese, living in Japan in exile since her college days (1958); back then, the government of Taiwan didn’t like it when you said “Taiwan”, because Taiwan = China and cetera. Her Japanese is perfect — at the risk of stating the obvious, just because someone’s East Asian, that doesn’t by any means give them a free pass to other East Asian languages, so her effort is impressive and as praiseworthy as any other learner’s.

Anyway, in one of her recent books, she discusses raising her children here. They were born and raised in Japan by her and her fellow Taiwanese husband, but since Japan doesn’t presently have jus solis, they are Taiwanese. KIN Birei said that she believes, languagewise, it’s “better to have one or a few sharp knives in your kitchen, than many blunt knives“. To the point that she focussed more on teaching her kids Japanese than Mandarin or Taiwanese; I’m not sure how much Chinese her kids know; they may well know some, although it sounds like they might not know ANY. In any case, she said that the most important and useful language in Japan is Japanese, so she thought it crucial that her kids’ Japanese be spot-on, even at the expense of Chinese. I was shocked…To find that I agreed with her. Like I said, I usually hate this woman [she makes baseless and disparaging marks about Chinese people and civilization that feed into the “Chaana’s gon’ git us!” book circuit on the far right: “Chinese people only care about getting the most done for the least effort”, no kidding, it’s called rational thinking]. But I think she’s right about language and kitchen knives.

Too many of us language learners are dabblers, dilettantes, hobbyists. Of course, it depends on one’s goals. But if we really want the maximum benefits of knowing a language, I think those max benefits only come with (native-level) fluency. If you want to be able to actually cut stuff, you need a sharp knife. You want to be able to use your languages to do (cut) ANYTHING. And fast. Understand everything from standard to regional dialects, read fast, speak fast and correctly, write fast and correctly. Otherwise you just have a collection of blunt mental; it looks good on paper, but it doesn’t do anything or it doesn’t do enough. Then there’s the social aspect — again, this is related to language as a social tool — you want to be persuasive. And to be persuasive, it helps to be funny, I think. To be funny takes some cultural plugged-in-edness, and being plugged in takes time — you do have to plug in. Anyway, when I learn a language, I want to know it so well that I would be perfectly OK if it were the only language I knew. Again, it is a matter of goal. At one time, my goal in Japanese was to be able to function completely as an adult in Japanese society, to be comparable to a native speaker in terms of being able to do anything a “typical” Japanese adult could do in terms of language; I reached and passed that goal a long time ago. Now my goal is to be better than most native speakers — to persuade, to amuse and even to linguistically intimidate if necessary for being taken seriously [“how thick is yooour kanji, Mr. Yamaguchi?”]; I plan to live in Japan a long time if not permanently, so this is both my desire and my social responsibility.

Another factor is, personally, I don’t want to spend my whole life learning languages from the bottom up…It takes time and highly focussed energy. I want to spend my time enjoying what I’ve learned, extending what’s already been built. I already get to do that in Japanese; it’s a great feeling just to be able to read or watch anything, talk to anyone, in Japanese. After Cantonese and Mandarin, I’m out of the game, at least for several years…except maybe just enough Russian to travel through Central Asia, if that. Otherwise it’s chill, write, watch, read, talk and just generally “be” — in Japanese and Chinese.

Language skill isn’t only a matter of “get it once, and you’re done”. It’s not catching a ball. The moment you stop using a language, you start losing it. I no longer function in two of the three languages of which I was a native speaker as a child, because of disuse. Last week, after I went for some days without hearing large amounts of Japanese (long story short: hanging out with Americans and their vegetarian Thanksgiving), I knew and my Japanese friends knew — it just took longer to “come out”, and it didn’t come out cleanly. Now, if you are strongly rooted enough in a language, then…you may never experience appreciable loss; I’m sure if I never spoke or read or heard another word of English after today, I’d still be fine. But, such rooting takes time, I think. So, you can get good at other languages, you can acquire several, but neglect may seriously weaken the ones not being focussed on, unless they have deep roots.

So, learning a language is like building and owning a house all by yourself, in that not only do you have to do the construction, but you also have a maintenance burden — a burden that no one else can bear, you can’t get a real estate agent to do if for you — you need to, essentially, live in the house throughout the year, even if not every day. Otherwise, it gets dusty, termites come in and start chewing stuff up, and eventually the house may fall. Technology may one day solve this problem (stimulating the brain directly? I dunno), I think SRSes are a step in that direction, but for now you’re on your own.

I don’t think anyone has the right to say what’s impossible, anyone who does is generally asking to be embarrassed by future generations. I’m just saying there’s a price to be paid for everything, including true multiple-language fluency.

Bad Experiences and Abandoning a Language

As for bad experiences, the International Society of Jerks and Richardheads (ISJR) is a worldwide organization. Wherever there is a language or a culture, ISJR members can be found in it now and then. But good people, lots of good people, far more good people than ISJR members are there, too. Be sure to surround yourself with them. Be sure that you’re not letting individual richardheads represent/taint a whole language and culture for you. And if you still don’t like it, then, yeah, drop the language. But be really sure you’re sure, because it is a large investment of time and resources both mental and physical; it’s not something to throw out lightly.

You know, every now and then, here in Japan, I’ll meet someone who’s a jerk, and I’ll think “what am I even doing here? why did I even bother? Japanese people are so X”. But…that’s unfair; it’s unfair of me to slam all of Japan and Japanese people because of the occasional drunken middle-aged man, or housewives who stare, or even the lady at immigration who is, in fact, a retard [you can talk to her in keigo, and she will respond in baby talk; she is clearly a first-degree retard], or whatever. As it turns out, these people are (1) ISJR members and (2) tend to carry out ISJR activities on Japanese people, too. There are entire creative works more or less dedicated to the things Japanese ISJR members do to Japanese people in Japan (Obatarian about selfish old women, Densha Otoko about drunken men in trains). In the vast majority of cases, it seems to me that if someone is a jerk to you [for being a foreigner], they are generally jerks to fellow countrymen, too — this is a fact. When Momoko and I were trying to get married here (looong story), there was this…creature…at city hall, and I had my Japanese friend T-star talk to him to see if City Hall Creature could be tamed, and T-star calls me back after attempting to negotiate with City Hall Creature and says: “Khatz, that guy…he’s…a richardhead; I have never had to deal with someone so unreasonable. Japanese people aren’t supposed to act this way, and don’t take him as an example for the whole country”. ISJR people aren’t picky.

Most of the time here, old women are telling me that I’m a “nice young man”, more than once older guys have randomly said: “Khatz, you can’t leave Japan! You know so much about it now, it would be a huge waste. You should just stay here forever; you’d be a good Japanese person.” One time, a schoolkid came up to me and went “Harro (hello)” and I said “欧米かっ？！[stop trying to be American!]” and we had a huge laugh about it. I’ve only bought rice twice since I came to Japan because T-star’s family sends me HUGE bags of fresh rice and vegetables from their fields. People will *thank* me for speaking Japanese because they were worried that they were going to have to use their rusty English. The taxi drivers by my train station always take the time to say hello, and update me on what’s happening in Prison Break. The people at the Japanese Consulate in Denver processed my visa with incredible speed, and then said “good on ya, kid; ganbatte in Japan” to me. The other week, I was pausing from a walk to read manga, and a random man stops his minivan and goes: “[You can read Japanese manga?]” and I’m all “…yes?” and he says: “Good job!” and then drives off. So…if you really put your negative experiences into perspective, you’ll probably find that they are easily cancelled out by the positive. Perhaps it’s time to recall what made you want to learn the language in the first place. No matter how many retards get employed at immigration, one person like T-star trumps them all.

You know, I never thought anyone would be interested in what my life is like in Japan. That is, until someone named Jim who shall remain nameless asked me like three times to write about it. Haha.

It’s been just over a year since I moved here. It’s weird…this country has been a part of my life for such a long time. Whether it was owning stuff from here, or the three Japanese roommates I’ve had (one at high school, two at university), or watching anime, and just generally wishing I lived here. And then of course there was the immersion environment. But still, it can be quite surreal. When I first came, every moment felt like “wow…I’m here? I’m here!” — to this day, whenever I walk into a bookstore filled with low-price manga, I almost have to pinch myself because it’s just so cool.

Kindness

All the Japanese people I know well are the kindest, coolest people I know. ‘Nuff said. And even some of the people I don’t know are some of the kindest, coolest people I know. My roommates helped me immensely both before and after coming here. One roommate’s mother used to send clothes for us both. His grandma still sends us her homegrown rice and vegetables. And then there was that lady (a total stranger), who gave me an umbrella on my second day here. It was pouring rain (and I, in the ignorance learned from 5 years spent in Utah thought that a raincoat would cover my bases); she walked out of her shop to hand me portable shelter: “here, keep it”, she said. My clothes were soaked through, but my heart was warmed. And then there are all the other nice ladies I’ve met on trains, who started conversations about random stuff. And the nose-picking bureaucrat who knew that the reason I didn’t understand him wasn’t because I didn’t know Japanese but because it was 6am on a Monday morning and he was both mumbling and covering his mouth with his gold-digging hand. Nice guy. The businessman who let my friends use his cellphone to call me when I forgot to go pick them up at the station; the store lady who said I was handsome (she probably got a fax from my mother telling her to say it, but it still counts); the cashier at the bookstore who dropped everything she was doing to put a band-aid on my bleeding finger (I had a hangnail and/or a papercut) — seriously, if I weren’t married already, I might have fallen in love right then and there; the many other shop ladies who have handled my dirty kleenexes when I ‘ve had a cold (that’s almost too nice — I hope they didn’t get sick). [Explanation: there aren’t many public trash cans in Japan, so I’m always giving people like shop clerks stuff to chuck away]

This level of kindness is normal in Japan. People are going to be good to you. I’m going to say some bad things about Japan in a minute, but those bad things absolutely pale in comparison to the good things — and it’s easy to forget this; I forget it, too sometimes. But, really, the worst things that have happened to me here have been condescension and impolite curiosity — which, when you think about it, are not world-ending events, although they may feel like it at the time — especially the third time a cop stopped me and asked for ID — I was ready to sue somebody, and 有道出人/Arudou Debito had to suffer through reading a whiny, late-night “this cannot be happening to the great Khatzumoto” email from me…poor guy.

Expectations of Ignorance

I learned Japanese very, very hardcore for almost 2 years before ever coming here. In my own self-centered ignorance, I thought Japan would somehow “know” that. I thought that somehow Japan had “gotten the memo”. But, of course, it hadn’t. So, it surprised (and, I guess, continues to surprise) me, how little knowledge of the Japanese language that some Japanese people expect me to have. It’s weird, because I actually thought that Japanese ability would be considered quite normal in Japan, regardless of ethnicity. And I was actually mourning what seemed to be the inevitable loss of the sort of “prince of Japanese” status that I had enjoyed at college. At the same time, I was looking forward to having straightforward human interactions since I had made it my task to nuke any language barrier between me and a native speaker of Japanese. By the time I came to Japan I had more or less achieved that.

Anyway, to make a long story short, a large minority of people are still shocked whenever I speak Japanese to them. But, unlike my college friends, who got over it and accepted me more or less as a member of the Japanese community (a miserly, tight-fisted member who never gave gifts, but a member nonetheless), some Japanese people never get over it. And so, they keep looking for the thing I can’t do; they keep looking for the ceiling. They accept I can speak, but don’t accept that I can listen and comprehend. Until I listen and comprehend. Then they accept that I can listen and comprehend, but don’t accept that I can read. Until I read. Then they accept that I can read, but don’t accept that I can write. Until I write. Then they accept that I can write but don’t accept that I can write that kanji, you know, “the hard one”. Until I write it — “harder”, older (pre-US occupation), bigger, more strokes. And then it starts to dawn on them that maybe, just maybe…I am a full human being; it takes a while, but they eventually stop talking to me like I’m a retard — they go to normal speed, and stop trying to mix in badly pronounced English as if it will help me understand better. If I sound bitter, by the way, it’s because I am — especially because some people, despite all this, despite the fact that I am almost never without a Japanese book in my face (it is not for freaking decoration, my friend), still just never get over it; there are people who still seem to think I’m a retard; who still talk loudly and slowly and mix in random English words; who still stop every twelve seconds to make sure I understand what they’re saying; who still preface their statements with things like “I know this will be hard for you to understand, because it’s in Japanese, but…”; there are even people who incorrectly correct me (like the guy who tried to tell me that “機嫌” should be written “気嫌”, which would make sense given the meaning of the word, but is completely wrong; I didn’t have the heart or guts to tell this chap that he was an egit, but I quietly refused to correct something that is…correct).

It shouldn’t bother me. I should be bigger person than that. And lately, I just let it go. But it used to bug the heck out of me. Maybe it only bugged me because I was actually insecure? I don’t know. Until recently, most native-level users of Japanese have been ethnically Japanese, 30 years from now I imagine it will be a totally different ballgame. Till then, I’ll just keep letting wide-eyed curiosity and stupid questions slide.

Don’t get me started on nurses. Just don’t.

Including veterinary assistants. I have seriously never met a more condescending group of individuals. Dewd, words like “gall bladder” are really not all that complex; I can read the flaming form. And stop questioning me on my decision to feed my cat raw food. Hello? “Land predator”.

Directions

You know the romantic image of adventurous-but-prudent tourists asking directions? It’s a myth, friends. In Japan, at least. Because in Japan, no one knows where the heck anything is. Even in their own neighbourhood. The combination of not having a grid system or street signs, and being densely populated makes for a high degree of “don’t have a clue what’s around me”-ness. Any country in the same situation would produce the same results. So don’t bother learning how to ask directions in Japanese. No one can answer you. I’m seriously only 10% joking. Not even taxi drivers know where stuff is — they’ll ask you how to get there.

What you do need to know is how to read. So that you can use a GPS unit. I have GPS on my phone, and it’s gotten me safely home from my adventures (on foot and by taxi) many a time. The next time you think that asking someone how to get to Sesame通り will be a great way to start a conversation, remember that you will probably only scare that person (I mean it; she might freak the heck out at the mere sight of you). Repeat after me: people=no, machines=know.

Religion

A lot of people are excited about coming to Japan, all starry-eyed with visions of how great Japan is for not really having religion, they’re all: “wow, Japan, is areligious but safe, clean and ethical”. These people are wrong. I hate to burst your precious little humanist bubble, but Japan has a national religion; almost everyone practices it and there’s no escaping it. It’s called “food”. On TV, in the morning, in the afternoon at night, and in the commercial breaks, there is food. When people meet you, they ask “what do you eat?”, “how do you like Japanese food?”, “have you tried 納豆 (nattou)?”. When people like you, they take you out for food. When people visit each other, they bring food. When people go somewhere, they bring back food as a souvenir. On shows that have nothing to do with food, there is a food section. Food is sacred here. It’s not for snacking on casually on the train and dropping to the floor, no, that would be immoral; that would be 勿体無い(wasteful). Food is for planning around, cooking lovingly, decorating lavishly, garnishing gently, and bowing to gratefully with your chopsticks between your thumb and your forefinger, before making slurping sounds (well, with noodles) as you partake (not “eat” — “partake”) of it. Maybe there is this collective memory of the starvation after the loss of WW2?

I could get started on a more serious rant at people — especially (dis-empowered?) women — for believing in horoscopes and fortune-tellers, but we have things like skepdic for that…then again, I just realized that I am skeptical about some things in skepdic, which I guess makes me recursive skeptic at some level…OK, my inner editor is telling me you don’t need to be reading this.

There’s a lot more to Japan than I just covered, but that should do it for now. It’s really cool here and if you haven’t come, do! In fact, why not just learn Japanese and come live here? No, please, really, please do — and be sure to have kids as well, because if we get more fluent immigrants here, people will stop asking me dumb questions; you’d be doing us all a favour…LoL. Seriously, it’s a wonderful country — come on over!