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

[dragonmonkey.livejournal.com]

For me, the biggest objection to learning Japanese is the immense difficulty of it, although I'm only speaking from my experience and my brain, which may or may not be especially rigged for learning languages like others people's brains may be.

I distinctly miss the bracing 'ostranenie' that enveloped me the first few months I was here, and I recall having decided to retain it forever. However, I didn't really know that there might be a relationship between my being blocked out of the signified and my delight in estrangement. And it certainly was delight: everything at once unknown, curiously complex, and seriously cute or cutely serious.

I wanted to learn the language, to make a full-blown project of it. I had hoped that I might be able to acquire new thoughts in Japanese that I couldn't have in English - and of course I also wanted to smooth everything out; all my relationships and daily situations. I also wanted to be able to explain myself, or more honestly, give my carefully edited version of myself to people I meet. This requires rhetoric, feedback, all the linguistic and cultural machinery that goes into the production of white lies.

What ended up happening is that 1. The initial forms of delightful estrangement were threatened, both by my knowing some of the language. Also, the flipside of "some of the language" is knowing what I don't know. So, I gained a newfound paranoia about what I think I know, need to know, and what I’m possibly overhearing being said about me. Now that I could understand in part what was going on around me, the part I didn't know began to loom. It was dense, suggestive, and not delightful. This passed, but it was a bit of a trial to begin with. I'm still not fluent by any means, but I got over it.

The interesting thing was that as I began to get better, I began to also Anglo-fy my spoken Japanese. I would insert subjects, scramble around in my dictionary for unnecessarily precise terms, repeat what I thought was essential in a redundant way. Basically, because I think in English, I was forcing the Japanese language to serve my terms and my aims. By this I mean I didn't feel secure without employing a heavy Western clarity, the thudding concrete. I didn’t know how to communicate with shadows. I would desperately and needlessly reiterate my terms. I wanted to be sure, to get across above all WHO was acting, and WHAT was acted upon, and for what reason - and all in the 'right', that is to say, my English order. This was me failing to get new thoughts by awkwardly succeeding in forcing old thoughts into new forms. I’m still trying to resist my resistance.

So, even by learning pieces of the language, I remained foreign because I was employing those pieces to construct my decidedly foreign discourse. During some conversations, my Japanese friends or employers would ask me to speak English instead of Japanese, because, I suspect, my Anglified Japanese was actually more alien than my pure native language.

I don't think I ever truly lost the positive estrangement. Now, I am estranged by myself in Japan. Sometimes I stand still and grok that some kanji are immediately explicable, or I reflect that I feel comfortable naked in a sauna chatting with a Yakuza fellow, or I realize that I sometimes don't see everything around me as 'Japanese' or 'different', but as basic reality. At those times, I become estranged from myself, or my personal history. I think of my own self-identity next to my being-in-japan. This is equally as delightful as the old estrangement, the being-in-myself next to the japan-identity.

[dragonmonkey.livejournal.com]

The following photo illustrates it pretty well. I first received it when I arrived and I delighted in its absurdity, innocence, and inexplicability. There I was, represented with tiny manga eyes, cute as a button, radiating optimism and childlike vitality - I enjoyed it like I enjoyed a joke.



Now, almost two years later, I can instantly read the katakana. None of it appears strange to me. I find the picture genuinely endearing, and I hope that whatever my students put in that picture was also authentically in my character - that makes me feel pretty happy. Not only do I love Japanese cuteness and the dizzy signs, but it loves me too. That picture is of me being assimilated.

That fun pink elephant-amoeba to the left of me named "Po" is still pretty indecipherable though.

By the way, your article on cute formalism had significant impact on my everyday experience. Thanks for that. It was an unlocking idea.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's a really fascinating account of learning Japanese: both what's lost and what's gained. I wonder if you were referring to Tanizaki's 'In Praise Of Shadows' essay when you spoke of the 'shadows' in the language? I'm vaguely aware of things like the dropped subjects in Japanese from things like web translation. It does suggest a whole other way of looking at self, group, life.

The Cute Formalism (http://www.imomus.com/thought300501.html) insight you mentioned -- and it means a lot to me that my essay impacted your day-to-day understanding of the country -- just 'came to me' one day as I was walking down Omote Sando. I don't quite know what it was that triggered it. Probably visual things: the way people were dressed, the visual language of posters and shop window displays. I think, though, that if I'd spoken Japanese a lot of the things I was seeing as 'form' would have skewed more in the direction of 'content', and it's quite possible that I wouldn't have had the insight that I did. Because that insight is an exaggerated and stylised take on Japan, and a more 'inside' understanding of things might have lessened the drama of my impression by lessening the exaggeration (and certainly giving me less room for projection). The language would have made the strangeness of things seem more 'natural', as language tends to do (unless it's poetry).

[dragonmonkey.livejournal.com]

Tanizaki is spot on what I was thinking of. I had attempted to construct a metaphor using his `oppressively hot` floodlights and `ruined moon-viewings` to describe the reformatting liberties I take with the Japanese language, but it came out sounded forced and inelegant so I scrapped it. Also, I didn`t want to inadvertently borrow any overtly negative associations with that might be present in Tanizaki`s laments - not that he was actually that pessimistic about Western influences himself.

Perhaps more closely related, but less metaphorical, would be the super-popular Marakami Haruki`s appropriation of English as a tool to strip down and reconfigure Japanese into more direct, less oblique form. His first book was brought out in Japanese only after he had written it first in English, and then translated it himself. `I wasn`t really setting out with the idea that I would write a novel in English. It`s just that I wanted to try coming up with a different way of writing in Japanese.`

But where he was reshaping Japanese syntax with English in the spirit of play, I do it out of knee-jerk habit.


I still have not warmed completely to Murakami - I`m not sure about his insistence that language must be a `tool` alone, and that the `beauty` of Japanese can get in the way. He likes to streamline and strip down - but I only know this from reading what people who have read him in Japanese have to say. I`m not at the level at which I can read Japanese literature yet, so I can`t really make make a judgment about that. It`s just stuff I picked up, polished little opinions. I`m still plugging along with menus, memos and notices.

Also, I think, even with literacy in place, the visual-language-landscape you are talking about is still very potent, internally coherent-seeming, if not objective. I don`t think that it is all an illusion that belongs to the outsider. For example, your Design Zen cartography of Tokyo, I think, is present with or without ostranenie. Isn`t it present for the Japanese, as well. With or without Japanese ability, I believe that much of the form will still remain its own content. Especially in Tokyo!