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

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Azuki Pie, I found your metaphor of the too-well-known lover very interesting, and it reminds me of a whole third level of the argument against integrating: Rilke's point in the Duino Elegies that unrequited love is so much more intense and creative than requited, domestic love. He refers this to the tradition of the troubadours and courtly love -- an etiquette of love and a creative, idealising projection onto the loved one:

But if you want, then sing of women in love; for their
celebrated feelings are still not nearly immortal enough.
The forsaken - you almost envied them - whom you found
so much more loving than the satisfied. [...]
Have you adequately considered
Gaspara Stampa, so that any girl
abandoned by her beloved would feel of that
exalted example: if only I could be like her?
Shouldn't this most ancient of agonies finally
become more fruitful for us? Isn't it time we lovingly
freed ourselves from the beloved and endured, trembling:
as an arrow endures the bowstring, so that drawn into leaping
it can be more than itself. For there is no place to stay.

(Rilke, First Duino Elegy (http://www.polyamory.org/~howard/Poetry/rilke_duino01.html))

This desire not to be requited, and not to integrate (and I've heard other people make your point that the Japanese like their foreigners to stay as foreign as possible, and hold them at a mutually respectful distance) has a political corollory in the west: I'm always annoyed by politicians, like Jack Straw and David Blunkett in Britain, who stress that immigrants must integrate -- learn to speak English, adopt recognisably English ways of life. This, it seems to me, is the expression of a fear of difference, a fear of 'the otherness in our midst', and a fear of true pluralism. What I value in immigrant communities in western cities is their otherness; I'm perfectly happy for Bangladeshis living in Britain to refuse to learn English, to keep distinct customs and cuisine and religion if they want to. (It's slightly different if they try to force this on their second-generation children against their will, though.)

There is a 'right to be foreign', I think, and there are many arguments why being and staying foreign is a good thing. Perhaps we could say 'All cultures, when you misunderstand them, are equally, and boringly, baffling. All cultures, when you understand them, are equally, and boringly, explicable. But there's a place in between understanding and misunderstanding, between sensing and projecting, where you can get a sense (perhaps it's an illusion) of the extraordinariness of a particular culture, and therefore of all cultures.

It's in that liminal zone that my understanding of Japan is currently hovering. You could say I'm inventing Japan -- for myself, but also for the Japanese themselves, who are fascinated by 'how foreigners see us' -- or you could say I'm seeing the oddness of culture itself each time I go there.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

'All cultures, when you don't understand them, are equally, and boringly, baffling. All cultures, when you do understand them, are equally, and boringly, banal. But there's a place in between not-understanding and understanding: misunderstanding. This allows for some idealisation, some projection, some wish fulfillment, an admixture of fact and fantasy. Now, malevolent misunderstanding becomes the worst sort of genocidal racism. But benign and positive misunderstanding is different: it can actually impact on the projectee's own sense of self, and become a 'virtuous circle'. A bit like when a man says 'I don't know what she sees in me, but whatever it is, that belief is something I'm trying to live up to.'