Why I don't speak Japanese

[imomus]

From mid-July until the beginning of October I'll be in Japan. It's shameful that, although I pass for some sort of 'expert' on, or ambassador for, Japanese culture, and although I consider the country in some way my adopted heartland or home from home, I still don't have any real command of the Japanese language. Sure, it's become second nature for me to shout 'itai!' if I drop something heavy on my foot, or 'kawai' if I see something cute, or 'hidoi!' if I'm annoyed. But these are just phrases I've parroted from the Japanese people I've lived with over the years. I've never made any systematic attempt to learn verbs and declensions and adjectives, or take lessons.

Being me -- someone who's always put a lot of work into justifying my laziness -- I've adopted some rather self-conscious postures on this. For instance, I've quoted Paul Bowles on the joys of remaining a foreigner. Bowles was preoccupied with the theme of 'the expatriate coming up against the incommensurable otherness of the host culture' (in the words of Douglas Shields Dix, who adds 'usually disastrously'). Bowles claimed never to have learned Arabic despite living in Tangier for decades -- in fact he spoke more than he admitted, conversing with his friend Mohamed M'rabet in a mixture of Arabic, French and English.

'Remaining a foreigner' and 'preserving the incommensurable otherness of the host culture' obviously relate to my love of ostranenie -- they are estrangement devices, verfremdungseffekt. The counter-argument, of course, is that understanding might well be a route into a whole new level of strangeness, and that not-understanding one culture is pretty much the same as not-understanding another, and finally rather boring.

This is where my second argument might kick in. It goes something like this. 'Where the housewife is lazy, the cat is industrious'. When the left brain is blocked, stumped or impaired, the right brain takes over. To the non-Japanese speaker, Japan becomes a succession of scents, textures, sounds, colours, lights, experiences, tastes, shapes, emotions. And in fact this is very much the way I experience Japan: as a rush of nonsensical impressions, a delicious regression into the primitive and the sensual, the lower cortex, the right brain, the pre-lingual, and pseudo-babyhood. In Japan I'm a homunculus, a cute and happy sensual monster in need of a mother, preferably with gigantic breasts filled with Calpis milk. Add a bit of jetlag and some de-contextualisation and you get the best psychedelic drug experience there is, a sort of bio-cultural high.

Despite these arguments about 'respect for the otherness of the other' and 'creative disorientation' and the joys of being a 'cute monster', I probably will speak passable Japanese one day. Especially if I can find a language learning system like the Flash cards used by Meguro Language Center.. Some of their course materials are free for download on their website. They're kind of trippy in themselves.

Comments

[azuki-pie.livejournal.com]

Although I wouldn't trade the meaningful conversations with Japanese friends for anything - at this point, after three years here in J-town... I find that knowing Japanese only makes me crazy.

I would give anything to go back to the days when Japanese sounded like music to me - a mix of punk and rap. Now I hear things I really wish I didn't and I constantly struggle between being "Japanese" or being "American". Japan has been taken off it's pedestal for me, it's scuffed white patent leather.

Don't get me wrong, I love Japan... I always will, but like knowing too much about a lover, knowing too much Japanese can really make being in Japan that much less exciting.

Reading your thoughts make me feel happy for you - I would take advantage of your "ignorance" for as long as you can.

Japan prefers it's foreigners to be as foreign as possible - if you get to be too Japanese they get really really freaked out.

I tend to freak daily.

[starofpersia.livejournal.com]

Too true. The down side of speaking Japanese is beautiful jumbles scrambling together to suddenly gain profound meanings such as "Please do not cause an inconvenience by parking here".