16 Thoughts from Japan

where talk isn't cheap

1. Erasing is as important in Japan as writing, erasing being inseparable from writing for students in Japan. The ever-present eraser. No Japanese student would think of beginning to write anything assigned in a classroom without taking out an eraser to hold in the non-writing hand or set on the desk. Yes, pencils have erasers on top, but most students use a handheld eraser. And most students seem to care, at the end of a class, more for the proper disposal of eraser rubbings, keshigomu, than for anything else they did in that room.

2. The Japanese playing of, if not liking of, the music-box sound. What does that say about the importance of listening in Japan? It says that what is often to be heard in public, commercial, and clinical spaces in Japan is well worth protecting your ears against.

3. Ichi o kiite ju o shiru: “one heard, ten understood.” Or: one heard, ten ignored.

4. Could it be acts of intended misunderstanding? To emphasize English is itself to intend misunderstanding. On the other hand, the Japanese, who don’t use the second person singular pronoun with anything like the frequency English speakers use it with, easily fall in with the use of “you” while talking and writing English. It is a great relief for the Japanese to be able to fall in with the easy, even sloppy and sometimes contemptuous, use of the English second-person pronoun. Similarly, it must be the case that the original English accent was American, given the ease with which a host of English actors drop into American in Hollywood: such a relief from having to perform the English accent at home.

5. “Case by case”: another case of a habitual translation that fits the self-image of the Japanese, but is in fact not indicative or typical of the unpragmatic and non-situational way life operates in Japan, with its unsurprised and well-regarded norms and rules. The Japanese try hard not to have or make cases.

6. The same goes for moreover, for example, and so on, that’s all, topic, and grade. These are now colloquial Japanese, or Japanese English. Today, several of my students found out for the first time that gyaru was originally English—gal or girl. They were unaware of this, taking the word to be Japanese. And they are right, practically speaking. They are certainly right, practically hearing.

7. I realize daily, as a teacher and a citizen, how narrow, local, and under-informed I am—and how deeply, despite this realization, I hold to my little notions.

8. Cover your mouth with one hand while you pick your teeth with the other, but brush your teeth in front of anyone. What remains in the mouth after eating is to be picked out of it discreetly, but may be washed or brushed out of it openly. What remains in the mouth after we speak? In the ear after we speak? In the ear after we listen? After we hear? How can we wash out our ears?

9. Japanese excel at combining bland, neutral, or mild flavors—tofu, cucumber, rice—that vary in texture—tofu, cucumber, rice. Each element in the combination is to have a different mouth-feel, to eat differently, but anything like a strong flavor isn’t welcome. (In the ear, strong tones are not welcome, nor are hot ones.) A slice of carrot, two leaves of arugula, a disc of zucchini—again, no flavor in these of much consequence, but color and texture abundant by comparison, even loud (as the Georgians say, “they eye eats and the eye drinks”). The flavor comes from outside the food, in addition to it, in the ponzu sauce, in the wasabi, in the soy sauce—and much of that flavor is saline or saccharin, salty or sweet. A diagonal of pea unshelled; a slice of sweet potato; a wedge of daikon (radish); a cube of konyaku (hard jello); a rectangle of koya dofu: again, no flavor to speak of in these, but each bites differently, is differently colored, shaped, and textured. And the liquid at the bottom of the cup or dish they’re served together in is sweet. Japanese seem to favor spongy, springy, tensile material that resists the teeth just a little.

10. Americans like individual rice; Japanese like group rice.

11. Japanese is a language you can speak with a smile and nothing else. You can say anything and keep smiling.

12. There’s the belief that a Japanese speaking to others in a classroom-sized room must be amplified. Same on a street-corner or from a vehicle. Overamplified. There’s a high tolerance for noise in Japan (and in China), or for volume, as a sign of energy, if not of sincerity, particularly when it comes to voice. But where the voice isn’t amplified, as among students in classrooms, it is nearly unprojected.

13. The Japanese will cry out in public like town criers, if they’ve been hired to and told to (and sometimes handed a megaphone). I’ve never heard a town crier. Japan has many, though, barking and hawking to passersby. Owners of businesses here make some of their employees stand and cry out their products. But I can sit in a classroom with my head 12 inches from two students in lively, continuous talk with each other and not hear what either of them says, not a word of it, unless I lean in even closer to their mouths.

14. Japanese, if they don’t start an English sentence right, will back up and try again, and again, and again, like threading a needle, until they get the first words right, before they go on. Some of my students might stutter their way into five or six repetitions of the same two or three or four words before they get going. I never hear them do that in their language. I have never done it in mine, or witnessed Americans getting into an English sentence the way Japanese do.

15. Talk isn’t cheap in Japan. A room full of administrators in a university or a city office is painfully quiet. Japanese speech is reticent, careful, inhibited, formulaic. Japanese keep their distance when they speak, but when they take pictures, they’ll put their lens almost on a clump of moss or a cherry blossom.

16. The listening behavior that Laura Miller doesn’t mention in her article on aizuchi—which is really about vocal behavior on the part of the listener—is silence, is pause, is waiting. After a speaker speaks, in a conversation or a faculty meeting, Japanese will sit in silence, having paused to be sure the person has finished. They also seem to be performing consideration, or what some might call deep listening—taking in. In a presentation situation, on the other hand, Japanese will say “That’s all” when they’ve finished.