Is it possible for a person to forget their native language?

Is it possible for a person to lose the use of their native language? Studies in linguistics (which I did a bit of in my college days) say yes, under some conditions. Language is more than a means to engage in communication and commerce: it defines us more than anything else, and acts as our "operating system," to put it in computing terms. After the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, many Iranian students studying in the U.S. at the time were forced to stay permanently. With little hope of returning to their home country, some accepted their new life so completely that they stopped using their native language, until they essentially became unable to speak Farsi properly. During my time in Japan, I've never felt I was losing my ability to speak English, although I did go for more than a year without talking to a native speaker, which meant the English I was speaking was being subtly affected by my ESL students, which was quite a weird experience. It's amazing how hard it can be to recall certain seldom-used words when you live in a non-English speaking country like Japan, such as "potentiometer" or "gynecological," and at times I've been obsessed with trying to recall a word I knew existed but which I couldn't remember for some reason.

Naturally, it's not uncommon for Japan to affect the people who choose to live here in strange ways.

The Traditional Cuisine of Kytoo

The Japanese, of course, love to make meals into something that's beautiful to look at, a concept known as shoku no bi, or "the beauty of food." The ultimate embodiment of this concept is kaiseki ryori, the traditional food of Kyoto in which a great deal of care is taken with the presentation of the food, from the shape and color and texture to the elegant dishes it's served on. Since the Japanese love their seasons so much, what you're served will depend on what time of year it is -- in the fall your meal with have a momiji (Japanese maple) motif, while sakura petals will adorn your food in the spring. Kaiseki meals are served in courses, similar to fine French dining (which the Japanese also love, probably more than the French do), and courses include sashimi, tempura, grilled fish, rice, and various other foods. To be honest, it's not uncommon to have no idea what you're putting in your mouth when you eat kaiseki (at least one dish will contain a flower that you ar free to eat, if you like), but don't worry, everything is good. If you're curious about Japanese cooking, check the J-List site for some cool cooking books.

Tthe traditional food of Kyoto embodies "the beauty of food."

My Trip to the American Shopping Mall in Japan

I finally got a chance to visit the new American-style shopping mall that opened recently, called SMARK. Inside was a mix of Japanese and U.S. stores that offered a huge variety of products for consumers to buy, including Eddie Bauer, Gap clone innovative Japanese clothing retailer UNIQLO, and other shops with names like HeartMarket, Dog Garden, and I's Palace. I smiled at a store called GENKI KIDS, but my daughter thought it was a great name. "Don't you know anything, Dad? It's really cool to write Japanese in romaji [the Roman alphabet]." We made sure to eat at Wendy's, the American fast-food restaurant famous for its square hamburgers, which is making a push into rural Japan in an effort to recreate the legendary success of "Kentucky" (as KFC is called in Japan). The menu was pretty much the same as back home, with the addition of a Teriyaki Burger, and the "regular" size Frosty was so small you practically had to eat it with chopsticks.

I finally got to eat at the Wendy's that recently opened near my house.

Japan's Police Boxes

The subject of Japan's police is an interesting one. Japan's boys in blue are organized under the umbrella of the National Police Force, one of the first areas of society to be modernized in the European model when the country began its transformation from a feudal backwater into an industrialized nation in the 1870s. As with the Ministry of Education, Japan's police are a very top-down organization, and there's little variation between police in different parts of the country, from Hokkaido to Okinawa. One reason often given for the lower rate of crime in Japan is the efficient system of Koban, the so-called "Police Boxes" or small police stations situated around Japanese cities. If you have a problem or need to ask for directions, there's usually a Koban nearby where you can get help at, and I think the system works better than large, centralized police stations. Up til now, these small police boxes have been staffed mainly by men, due to fears that female officers might be in danger if they were asked to work night duty. This policy is about to officially end, however, as police boxes in Tokyo start employing female officers at all hours of the day and night.

This koban in Shibuya is rather famous, since there's a "soapland" right behind it -- so much for prostition being illegal.

A Certain Somewhat Ugly Magical Kickboxer

The most interesting kickboxer in Japan would have to be Yuichiro "Jienotsu" Nagashima, an avid anime fan and cosplayer who happens to be extremely adept at judo and full contact karate. Famous for dressing in flamboyant anime costumes as he fights, the New Japan Kickboxing Federation-affiliated fighter manages to turn every bout into a huge performance, generating plenty of attention for himself from bloggers and the media in the process. So far his cosplay events have included Miku Hatsune, Haruhi Suzumiya, Shana of the Blazing Eyes and Index from A Certain Magical Index. It's enough to make me feel sorry for his opponents -- it's got to be one thing to take a beating in the ring, but totally different to get your butt kicked by some dressed up as the cute Ranka Lee from Macross Frontier. His goal in life is to climb to the top of the Japanese K-1 world and eventually get a studio to let him work as a voice actor. "I want to work hard to be the best anime otaku I can be." Oh, and his favorite cookies are Country Ma'am -- we agree!

Japan's anime cosplaying kickboxer is always entertaining to watch, although a little scary.

My favorite place in the world: The Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo

The other day I took my mother and the kids down to Tokyo to see the Studio Ghibli Museum, pretty much the most excellent place in the world if you love the works of master animator Hayao Miyazaki. Inside, you can see a replica of the desk Miyazaki-sensei worked at while creating his most famous films (right down to his cigarette-filled ashtray), climb inside a giant plush Catbus, and take your picture beside a full-sized version of a robot from Castle in the Sky Laputa. Visitors are able to watch a short original Ghibli film while there, too, and we were fortunate to get to see the best one, Mei and the Kitten Bus, essentially the "sequel" to My Neighbor Totoro. It tells the story of an adventure Mei has with a baby neko bus in which she's taken to a conclave of Totoros and meets the Grandmother Catbus, who she befriends by giving her a delicious Morinaga caramel -- it's quite awesome. Mr. Miyazaki's hand could be seen in almost every aspect of the museum, from the winding staircase that only kids could climb to the toilets, decorated with acorns and wood; when you pay for something, the little tray you put your money in isn't made of plastic, but natural leather cut in the shape of a leaf. Inside the museum there's a cafe famous for selling coffee with Miyazaki's characters drawn over the top in chocolate. Sadly, Mr. Miyazaki decided that he didn't want visitors to the museum "eating" his characters, even in chocolate form, and asked the cafe to refrain from the practice -- bummer.

Tthe Ghibli Museum is my favorite part of Tokyo.

Happy Gundam 30th Anniversary

Today is an auspicious day for anime fans everywhere: the 30th anniversary of the start of Mobile Suit Gundam, which burst onto TV screens on April 7, 1979. Essentially the first anime series in which the humans were more important than the robots they piloted, it told the story of humanity after it had emigrated into space and of the One Year War for independence between the space-based Principality of Zeon and the United Earth Federation, with plenty of drama and political intrigue to go with giant robots destroying each other. Interestingly enough, the show was slow to catch on and was ended 9 episodes early. With the introduction of the Bandai's line of Gundam models and the three compilation movies, popularity began to pick up, and the show went on to become an icon of Japanese animation. Today, characters like the everyman-hero Amuro Rei and the charismatic Char Aznable are as much a part of Japanese popular culture as R2-D2 and C-3P0 are in the West.

Congratulations on 30 years of Newtypes, spacenoids and colony drops.

On Okinawa Lily Princesses, And More

We're back from our long weekend in Okinawa. It was a fun trip, and we got a lot of relaxing in as we explored the cultural differences between the island of Karate Kid's Miyagi-san and the rest of Japan, including sampling the local cuisine. The island's closer cultural proximity to the U.S. has somehow caused Okinawans to love tacos, which would be unheard of on the mainland where ordering tako would get you some delicious fresh octopus. Another local favorite is root beer, which surprised me since almost every Japanese I know thinks it tastes like the muscle cream Salonpas, yet business at the A&W restaurants we saw was brisk. Like many other Pacific islanders, Okinawans love Spam, and I made sure to try a "Spam musubi" type onigiri, a favorite of President Obama's from his days in Hawaii. One bit of culture shock we had was our inability to read any of the kanji names on signs, since they're so different from anything you see in Japan proper -- a good analogy would be a person from Boston visiting California and trying to pronounce the Spanish-derived names there. Okinawa is the poorest prefecture in Japan, and there are definitely fewer expensive cars on the road. They get sweet revenge by living longer and aging more gracefully than anyone else in the world, even the already long-lived Japanese, thanks to diets low in fat and salt, lower levels of stress and a positive, supportive community.

Since I strive to bring my half-Japanese, half-American children up to see things from the viewpoint of both cultures, we visited some of the former battlegrounds from the terrible Battle of Okinawa, a three-month conflict that killed more than 100,000 Japanese troops as well as a quarter of the civilian population of the island, an event that hasn't earned Japan proper any love in the minds of the locals. I was especially touched by the story of the Himeyuri Lily Girls Squadron, 222 high school girls who were mobilized as nurses during a major Allied offensive. The girls were from wealthy families and had led very sheltered lives up to that point, yet suddenly they found themselves tending to hundreds of dying soldiers in makeshift hospital caves. A large number of the girls were killed during the fighting, but many who survived soon committed suicide, so great was their fear of the approaching kichiku-beihei ("beastly American soldiers") thanks to the propaganda that they'd been subjected to. Of course, one big difference between Japan and Okinawa is that there are monuments and memorials at all -- as I've written before, it's very rare to see any kind of reminder of the war years in Japan, for cultural reasons that are difficult for me to fathom. About the only place you can go in Japan to pay respects to the soldiers who fought and died for their country is Yasukuni Shrine, where the bones of Japan's worst war criminals are unfortunately also interred.

A memorial to the tragic Himeyuri Lily Girls in Okinawa; for the record, a castle in Okinawan is pronounced gusku, not shiro.

Japanese Children of Men

There's a strange trend in our prefecture these days: building new elementary schools so that they're "barrier free," a word which I'm pretty sure originated in Japan that means free from physical challenges to disabled people such as stairs. The schools are made so that they're much more accessible to those with difficulty getting around, and they're built on one level rather than on two floors, as has been the norm in the past. The reason for this new approach to school construction is uniquely Japanese and related to its low birth rate: in twenty or thirty years when the schools are no longer needed for children, they can be easily converted into homes to provide care for the elderly. This gave me a bit of a chill when I heard it for the first time -- as a big fan of the book and film Children of Men, which tells the story of humanity that has become unable to create new children, it hit rather close to home. Still, rather than build another dam or cover a mountainside in concrete on the off chance that there might be a rockslide someday, building schools so that they can serve multiple purposes in the future seems like a good idea. Remember, according to current projections the population of Japan in the year 3000 is going to be....just 27 people.

Greetings from Okinawa -- Beach Episode Time!

In just about every recent anime series, it seems there's a beach-centric episode in which the characters visit some "south seas island" where viewers are treated to plenty of fan service involving females in skimpy swimsuits. Well, it's time for such an episode in my life, and I'm writing this update from sunny Okinawa! Also known as the Ryukyu Islands, Okinawa is Japan's southernmost prefecture, which was an independent island nation until it was annexed in 1609. The history of the islands is long and varied, and a very sad chapter occurred during the bloody battle for the islands during World War II, which saw the deaths of 90,000 Japanese soldiers and 150,000 Okinawan civilians. Because of its special status as a U.S. possession from 1945 through 1972 and its current hosting of most of the the U.S. military stationed in Japan, Okinawa acts as a unique cultural bridge between the two countries. While we're here, we'll get in some quality relaxing-by-the-beach time, do some whale watching and take in beautiful Shuri Castle. And I'll probably annoy everyone by making Karate Kid references left and right.

Okinawa is unique among Japan's 47 prefectures in that it's got its own separate culture and language that's notably different from the mainland. While pretending that they're a completely homogenous, unified people despite the many differences from individual to individual is almost a national pastime in Japan proper, no one can pretend that Okinawans are cut from the same cloth as everyone else, which ends up being quite refreshing in a way. Every time I've met a Japanese who seemed "different" -- they spoke their mind more than most people, they've lived abroad or speak exotic languages -- it turns out they're from this part of the world. Okinawa serves Japan's more boring, white-bread culture the same way black music culture or (dare I say it?) Japanese animation provides an alternative choice for mainstream America, and dozens of Japan's most famous singers hail from the islands, including the red hot Amuro Namie (iTunes link), who has brought the world such tunes as "Body Feels EXIT" and "Chase the Chance." As a result of these big-name successes, Okinawa has many "talent schools" teaching voice training, dancing and other skills to the next generation of JPOP stars.

The Recession, as Seen from J-List

It's interesting to observe how Japan changes during a recession, from our somewhat unique viewpoint running J-List. Right off the bat, the various distributors and suppliers we deal with on a daily basis start treating us extremely well, eager to secure a closer relationship with a company that has customers all over the world. When we comment that the flow of information about what products will be released soon could be improved -- my ultimate goal is for all Japanese companies to discover RSS feeds as a way of easily publishing information efficiently -- they listen intently to our suggestions. Before the last recession in Japan in 1998 or so, foreigners trying to do business with distributors or import companies here weren't always treated as warmly as they might have liked, and we had to work extra hard to get them to do business with us. It wasn't discrimination, but a natural reaction by extremely hidebound companies who knew that overcoming the linguistic and cultural barriers involved with working with foreigners would be extra work for them. Nowadays, though, companies in Japan are a lot more flexible and open to international business opportunities. I wonder what changes and benefits will come out of the current downturn?

Dealing with older Japanese companies can be a challenge, which recessions actually help with.

April 1st is the Season of New Beginnings in Japan

Today is April 1st, famous in the West as April Fool's Day, a custom that's been imported to Japan in limited form. While some smaller companies or kawatteru (unique) individuals might go out of their way to create April Fool's jokes for the amusement of all, it's unthinkable that a larger organization would engage in such tomfoolery in straight-laced Japan. When I told the Japanese staff of J-List about the legendary 1957 news report the BBC did on the Swiss spaghetti crop that featured farmers "harvesting" the pasta they had "grown," they were shocked -- you'd never catch NHK doing something like that. April 1st is also the beginning of anything official in this part of the world, for cultural reasons that I can't quite fathom, although knowing Japan it's probably a cherry blossom thing. The Japanese fiscal year starts today, so if you live in Japan, I hope you got your taxes filed before last night. Also, new laws usually kick in on April 1st, like the near-total ban on smoking in many JR train stations in Tokyo which went into effect this morning. The school year also starts in April, and the blooming of the sakura create a powerful image of new beginnings for misty-eyed parents as they watch their children start the first day of school.

April 1st is the season of new beginnings in Japan.

Perception Mistakes, or, Would Barbie Date a Japanese Guy?

I've written before about how people's perceptions can easily get confused when dealing with other cultures, like how millions of Japanese think that "motel" is a euphemism for "love hotel" in English, or that ice cream cones are so called because they're made of corn, which has the same pronunciation as cone when rendered in katakana. Impressionable Brits growing up thinking that spaghetti is grown on trees might be another example. My own Japanese language education at SDSU erred on the side of polite language enough that when I actually came here, the actual speech entering my ear seemed quite rude to me, although it was just normal colloquial Japanese. I remember being surprised that stop signs used the informal command form of the word stop (tomare, toh-mah-reh) rather than some of the more polite-sounding verb forms I'd studied -- a very silly thing to think. The other day I was watching a Ken Burns documentary about Thomas Jefferson with my wife, and she remarked on how amazing it was that a Japanese person could make such an interesting film about American history. "He's not Japanese. He was born in Brooklyn." She was surprised: "You mean Ken is an American name, too?" Somehow she had gotten it in her head that the name of Ken was exclusive to Japan, and anyone with that name must be of Japanese descent. When she read Ken Brown saying "Is this a church? Yes, it is" in her junior high English textbook she pictured him as a half-Japanese or nisei man living in America, and had carried that impression with her all her life. It follows that that she thought Barbie's boyfriend was also Japanese, and she took some pride that a nihonjin had bagged himself such a famous American girl.

It can be easy to get the wrong idea about other countries.

The $50 Melon

The other day my wife gave me a treat for dessert: a delicious slice of honeydew melon. It wasn't just any melon, but one of those mouthwateringly good melons that costs $50, which always seem to amuse my mother when she's visiting. Of course, the point of a $50 melon isn't the price but its value as a gift and the warm feelings it generates when the recipient and his family eat it, which is what Japan's highly developed culture of gift giving is all about. This melon was a "return gift" from Asami, the talented J-List employee who keeps us supplied with bento boxes, fun traditional products and our trademark "Wacky Things from Japan." She recently got married (congratulations, Asami!), and as an employer we naturally gave her a small "congratulations gift" to help her get started in her new life. When you receive a gift in Japan, you always give one in return to say thanks for the first gift, and while this practice can sometimes lead to "gift wars" with endless volleys of gifts and counter-gifts going back and forth, in moderation is a nice aspect to life in Japan.

Japan's gift-giving culture is deep and complex, and occasionally delicious.

Learn about Japan Through its Resume Forms

One interesting way to compare Japan's more structured society with the U.S. and Europe is to look at the standardized Japanese resume form, called a rirekisho (ree-REK-sho), the "employment history form" that serves as both job application and a personal resume here. When you want to apply for a job in Japan, be it for a truck driver or sushi chef or computer programmer, you get one of these standardized forms from the stationery store and fill it out by hand. Virtually everything that's important about you is recorded on the form: name, address, school and career history, what special certificates or qualifications you've got, as well as your hobbies and interests. Some information isn't recorded, of course, such as anything related to religion or political affiliation, and there's no space to fill in your blood type, so that companies can't discriminate against sloppy type B people like me. The strict, straight-laced employment history form is very different from the open-ended way job resumes are prepared in the U.S., usually 1-2 sheets of paper that succinctly describes a person's school and work history and career goals. Unlike the Japanese resume form, there's no set format for a resume in the States, and there are thousands of variables that could affect how yours might look. Plain font or fancy? Colored paper? Traditional layout or something less orthodox? What level of information to include? It can boggle the mind, and I'm sure that Japanese who have to write English resumes for any reason have lots of trouble knowing where to start. Although the rirekisho forms are intended for Japanese people to use, I've been asked to fill one out for every job I've held in Japan, so learning how to write one is probably a good idea for students of the language. Conveniently, we've got them in stock.

Japan's version of a resume/CV says a lot about the country.

Japan and the Atomic Bombings

Japan's history is unique in many ways, for example its decision to close itself off to outside nations for 235 years, allowing it to develop in near-complete isolation. Japan is also the only country to experience an atomic bombing of its citizens, an event which has affected the nation in ways that are difficult for outsiders like me to accurately perceive. The subject is an extremely delicate one of course, and even after 18 years I can't remember having a conversation on the topic here without things becoming very uncomfortable. Survivors of the two atomic bombings are known as hibakusha, and such individuals are eligible for financial support from the government to help with related medical care...although they often aren't interested in accepting it due to the stigma that's grown up about them in the postwar years. Recently the interwebs have been chatting about the incredible experience of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, an engineer who was in Hiroshima on business on August 6 and whose body was badly burned when the bomb exploded at 8:15 am. With the city in total chaos, he did the only thing he could think of and got on a train bound for his home in...Nagasaki, where the second atomic bombing took place three days later. "I thought the mushroom cloud was chasing me," he said. Mr. Yamaguchi is currently 93 years old, and his status as the only known double atomic bombing survivor was recently recognized by the Japanese government. I don't know whether to think of the guy as unlucky or lucky, but I'll raise a glass to him nevertheless.

False Cognates

I remember when I first learned the Japanese word for "name" -- which is namae, nah-mah-eh -- I noticed the similarity between the two words and wondered if the Japanese could have borrowed theirs from some Western language. It turns out that this isn't the case, and the parallel between the two is purely accidental, a surprisingly common occurrence that's known as a "false cognate" in linguistics. In Japanese you thank someone by saying arigato, which is very similar to the Portuguese for the same phrase, obrigado, but this is another example of unrelated words accidentally having similar pronunciations. Or the word so, which by an amazing coincidence corresponds perfectly with the word "so" in English as in so desu ka? "is that so?" Often words have pronunciations that are slightly shifted but still close, like boya which means "boy," hone (ho-ne) which means "bone," and the Japanese word for road, which is doro, phonetically the exact opposite of the English word.

The word for "bone" in Japanese is hone, which as in sebone (se-bo-ne) or backbone.

Of Cherry Blossoms and Taepodong Missiles

My mother is visiting from the U.S. right now, having come to spend some quality time with the kids in their native habitat. We'll also take her to some beautiful Japanese parks so she can enjoy the sakura, as the timing of her visit worked out great this year. (It can be quite hard to plan a trip to Japan to see the cherry blossoms as you're never sure ahead of time exactly when they'll bloom.) It seems that every time my mother visits Japan she experiences some of the more frightening aspects of the country, like the typhoon, earthquake and minor eruption of Mt. Asama that happened the last time she was here. This trip she might be in for an even more exciting time, as North Korea prepares to test fire one of its Taepodong-2 missiles, er, I mean launch a peaceful satellite, which has everyone here very jittery. North Korea has fired test missiles before, including one in 2006 that went over Japan's air space, and Japan has threatened to shoot down any missile that approaches. Living in Japan is great fun, but being next to North Korea? Not so much.

Japan is nervous about a possible North Korean missile launch.

What Is Normal?

During my time here I've learned a lot about the Japanese. For example, they can be very "boom"-oriented, happy to jump on the bandwagon when something becomes popular only to change their minds soon after, which happened a few years ago when everyone suddenly decided Korean dramas were the neatest thing since microwavable rice. They have a tendency to be meticulous and obsessive, too, like the student of mine who was desperately in love with a boy she knew but was too shy to confess her feelings...over the course of fifteen years. I've also observed that many Japanese want to be thought of as futsu (foo-tsoo), that is, normal, ordinary, or just like everyone else. I had a friend in college who was quite a unique individual in many ways, for example being so passionate about learning English she'd try to memorize an entire dictionary page each day. I once told her my opinion, using the word kawatteru (ka-wat-teh-ru) which carries the nuance of being unusual or slightly eccentric, rather than the word hen ("strange"), which would have been rude. Although I'd meant it as a compliment -- after all, I don't have a "normal" bone in my body-- she was taken aback by my statement, saying, "No, I'm a normal girl, the same as everyone else." In the anime Clannad After Story there's an episode in which Nagisa tells Tomoya she can't go on a date with him because she has to take a "mock exam," a practice test for the coming college entrance examinations. "But you're not going to university. Why take the test?" "I want to take it with my classmates, so I can be the same as them."

More Fun with Japanese Abbreviations We Don't Understand

I wrote recently about how the Japanese often find new and inventive abbreviations for words using the English alphabet, such as OL ("office lady"), what female office employees are called, or 2LDK, shorthand for an apartment with two rooms and a main living/dining/kitchen area. The Japanese have some other innovative uses for the English alphabet, too. The English letter E happens to have the same pronunciation as the word for "good" (as in quality, not as in taste), which is ii, and as a result it's common for advertisers to use that letter to promote a positive image of their products. In a similarly odd fashion, the letter W has come to mean "double" to the Japanese, and Meiji might advertise their delicious Fran brand of double-coated stick snacks as "W chocolate," which would be understood by everyone here to mean there were two kinds of chocolate used. The letter "w" is also used on the net as shorthand for the Japanese word warau (to laugh), and adding "ww" to a Twitter post is roughly the same as typing "LOL" in English to indicate laughing out loud. If you play Japanese RPGs like Brave Soul, you may notice how the highest rank you can attain is usually "S" rank, which seems to come from the English word "special." Of course, one of the most famous (or infamous) creative uses of English letters in Japanese is the "H," which has come to serve as a universal euphemism for anything related to sex.