Do I Need a Crystal Ball?
or a Magic Eight Ball?
This weekend, June 22nd, in particular, has been very busy. And the weekend after that is Pride Weekend in Seattle, and I will be even busier.
I wanted to look ahead and see what I might want to share since I started writing this newsletter before the weekend, but I am terrible at prognostication. I’m not even a good augur. Show me the signs, and like as like not, my predictions are wildly incorrect.
Case in point: At the beginning of 1997, I was set in my career. A project manager for a small localization company called Pacifitech in Shin-Yokahama (a ninety-minute commute from my home in Tōkyō’s Shinjuku Ward), I had good friends, Hiro at my side, and a job that included the best business trip ever: a month in Budapest finalizing the Japanese Macintosh version of architectural software.
Nearly a year later, I was getting on a Northwest flight to Seattle to start an unexpected new life at another small localization company called Encompass in Kirkland. No friends or family awaited me, and the running joke whenever I got Hiro on the phone or, less expensively, on CUSeeMe (a low-res black-and-white video-call-over-Internet-protocol software) was Hiro’s failure to understand why I, an American, was suffering from culture shock in America. tl;dr: People in the Pacific Northwest are NOTHING like New Yorkers (or Tokyo-ites, for that matter).
If I have any predictions for the week ahead, it will be this: Thailand's move toward marriage equality will strengthen the impetus for people fighting for that same equality in Japan.
And segue to…
Learning Japanese
I studied Japanese for three years in college.
But not everyone will either want to spend three years learning this beautiful, poetic language or have three years before their first journey to Japan.
For the past few years, the Pacific Northwest Japan Exchange & Teaching Alum Association has asked me to share tips on why and how to study Japanese in Japan.
On June 22nd, I presented some of this content to a group heading to Japan for, in most cases, their first time. And I thought I’d share some of it with you, too.
Why Learn Japanese?
After studying French for six years and Latin for four, the biggest sell for me was that there are only five irregular verbs in Japanese. Three of those five—gozaru, ossharu, and irassharu (of the sushi bar’s irasshaimase fame) are used in polite language, so their applicability is limited.
Do you know how many irregular verbs there are in French? Heck, irregular verbs are legion in English, too. Swim, swam, swum, anyone?
And then there’s the onomatopoeia. We have a middling amount of it in English. Still, you only realize how limited English is at conveying the sounds of things when your Japanese husband has a side gig translating gay erotic Japanese comics into English. Both of you are struggling to find sonic equivalents for the sound of someone engaged in onanism, shall we say, or the different sounds that different muscles make as they contract and release.
Heck, there is even an onomatopoeic expression for silence in Japanese. シ〜〜〜〜ン (shiiiiiiiin)!
Another cool thing about Japanese onomatopoeia is that you can muddy the consonants to get very different effects. (Of the Japanese pure consonants, k, s, t, n, h, m, y, and w, some have muddied variants. K becomes G, S becomes Z, T becomes D, and H becomes B and P.)
Korokoro is the sound of something small, dry, and thin rolling around. A pencil on a desk, for example. Muddy those consonants to gorogoro and we’re still rolling around, but now the rolling thing is larger and heavier.
That’s not always true. My favorite sound words in Japanese, the sound of ordinary trains passing by on their tracks, is either katan-koton or gatan-goton—the muddying doesn’t change much.
(Bullet trains have different sounds. The sound of the pantograph, the metallic zig-zaggy thing that connects the train to the powerlines above it is kaka kaka kaka, and the sound of the train slicing through the air is shwooooon!)
And this week’s trending topics brought an exciting update to my knowledge of onomatopoeia. Hawk tuah. The sound, in a Southern American inflection, of spitting. (As a child, I pronounced it huck tooey.)
I blanked on the Japanese equivalent for a moment. Hiro was also baffled—and explaining the context (wherein a young woman in Nashville explained that the best thing to do in bed was hawk tuah; “spit on that thang”) included lots of shared laughter and a reprise of my imitation of Robin Williams’ imitation of a country music song.
My friend Doug, who has lived in Tōkyō since the late 1970s, I think, reminded me that pe is the sound for spitting in Japanese. Still, I countered that the resonance of hawk tuah or huck tooey is profoundly different and captures all the effort made into both the production of the saliva and the launching of it (whether onto that thang or elsewhere).
Getting Back on Track
Here are some other grammatical and phonological things I love about Japanese.
There are no articles. No the, an, or a.
Nouns are not gendered (as in Romance Languages and German, for example).
For the most part, plurals are not a thing.
No diphthongs, which is when two vowels used together have a sound other than each of the vowels on their own (and not an undergarment for a socially awkward person). Each vowel in Japanese is pronounced independently and is a single syllable within the language. Thence, the word for love, 愛 (ai), is two syllables.
Nouns are not conjugated (as in Latin, to indicate their grammatical function), and verbs are not declined. For example, 寝ます (nemasu) can be all of the following: I will sleep, you will sleep, he/she/they/it will sleep, we will sleep, and they (plural) will sleep.
Speaking of verbs, my absolute favorite verb tense in Japanese is one that I call the suffering passive, which implies that you (or someone else) were made to do the action, AND it sucked for you. Hiro might suggest that the most appropriate example for me might be 小キャベツを食べさせられました。(kokyabetsu wo tabesaseraremashita.) I was forced to eat the Brussels sprouts against my will, and I hated every second of it. The verbal economy of Japanese!
Speaking of economy, a sentence in Japanese can consist of just a verb (no personal pronouns, even though Japanese has dozens of them, are needed unless the context demands it), just a noun (and again, no articles or plurals exist in Japanese), or just an adjective. When translating such brevity into English, we have to tack on phrases like it is or they are.
That economy, therefore, should tell you that conversational Japanese can be highly context-specific. Here’s an example of a conversation Hiro and I might have (and is, therefore, in a more direct manner, without the politeness level I use above—but that’s a conversation for another issue). Content that has been added to the English translation is in square brackets.
Brian, coming in from the garage: ただいま！ (tadaima!) I’m home.
Hiro, waking from a nap at his computer keyboard: あ、お帰り。どこかに行ってきた？ (a, okaeri. doko ka ni itte kita?) Oh, welcome home. Did [you] go somewhere?
B: 買い物。 (kaimono.) [I went] shopping.
H: あれを買ってきた？ (are wo katte kita?) Did [you] buy that thing [that we talked about the other day, and I’m just now hoping you remembered]?
B: あれって？紫蘇？お醤油？両方買った。 (are tte? shiso? oshōyu? ryōhō katta.) [What do you mean by] that thing? [The] perilla leaves? [The] soy sauce? [I] bought [them] both.
H: よかった。忘れると思った。 (yokatta. wasureru to omotta.) Good. [I] thought [you would] forget [them].
I’ll continue with more on my presentation in two weeks. Next week, I’ll share some ideas for traditional Japanese pilgrimages, from the short (just seven temples and shrines) to the long (eighty-eight (!) temples and shrines). But that issue is for paid subscribers only.
Other News
Last weekend, Hiro and I attended Tend, a fundraising event for Pride Foundation. I love the work that they do to support queer young people across the Northwest, from Montana to Alaska. (And where would Hiro be without his plaid shirts?)
Back in October 2023, I submitted a braided essay to a literary journal. The essay was nominated for awards in 2022 (thanks, in part, to the great editorial feedback from my friend Allison K. Williams) but has never been published, and I’ve been hoping to find a home for it.
That literary journal’s editor reached out earlier this week to ask if the essay is still available. It is, and I’m crossing my fingers that the journal accepts it.
Also, please light candles, say prayers, or send good vibes. I’m in the process of applying for a queer arts mentorship. The opportunity to work with one of the three listed literature mentors (and I won’t name them for fear of jinxing everything) would be a crucial next step in my personal evolution (building on the love and empowerment shared by Garrard Conley (
) and , not to mention the fantastic queer writers I am in community with like Paul Michael Winters, August Owens Grimm, Amy Melissa Estes (), Cameron T. Price, Heather Liz, Char Wilkins (), and Suzette Mullen, among many others.)
Best energy for the acceptance of your essay. (Also—90 minute commute. Yeah, no.)
In Rehab this week, I learned the Japanese expression for one’s knee giving out. There is a word for everything here! lol