In particular, what I’m burning to tell Duo is the following: Did you know? When you immerse yourself in a very different language as a total beginner, not only do you not have goals! You also have no system within which to conceptualize what those objectives could be - discounting, that is, overarching goals like ‘learning to read; or ‘becoming fluent’, which themselves start to seem less and less meaningful the more you poke around beneath their smooth surfaces!
Immersion in a foreign language is a bombardment of sounds, until you decide that you are going to actually do this thing and learn, and then it becomes a bombardment of imperatives: learn this, learn this, learn this. Just start from the basics, sings a voice in your head as you are tossed around in the waves of incomprehensibility. Yet as you continue to live in a language you don’t know, it becomes increasingly obvious to you how much this category of ‘basics’ could theoretically encompass. Greetings and everyday interactions are of course basic, and there is always something embarrassing about not knowing basic forms of verbs. Everyone knows numbers are incredibly basic, as are colours, clothes, the subjects you study at school, animals, anything to do with weather, and adjectives for describing people. In fact, we could go ahead and say that every object is also basic, and there is something particularly alarming when you don’t know how to say the first words you would have learned in your language(s) as a child: teddy, buggy, shoelace. And then there is the most fundamental-seeming vocabulary of all: abstract nouns, like justice, friendship, pleasure, evil, and vanity.
I could attempt to describe why it now feels to me that this sort of onomatopoeic language is where the beating heart of Japanese lies. Why, from a certain point in time, I ditched my previous ambition to master the bewilderingly complex web of honorifics that even native speakers routinely get wrong, and which always seemed to distinguish hardcore Japanophiles from those whom Japanese society merely humoured, and set my sights instead on being able to use mimetic language properly, naturally. Why, to the extent that I still have a linguistic ambition, it is to speak the kind of Japanese which takes mimetics as its beacon: a Japanese of gesturing and storytelling, of searing description, of embodied reality.
Which is apposite here, because giro’ is a sound very much concerned with drama. Giro’ is a sound of utter attention on the part of the giro’ter, so you can almost hear the heart of the giro’tee skipping a mini-beat. A google image search for giro yields an array of animals - dogs, cats, bears, owls - glaring; this is the sound of not softening the ferocity of one’s look for the sake of social nicety. Giro’ is about letting your eyes fulfil their natural, most aquiline potential. It is about using the assets biology and society have granted you to make immodest demands of people.
Saturated, so that even when I receded from it, it was there, ringing in my ears like nothing had ever done before: min-min min-min. It feels true to say that before I properly spoke or understood Japanese, certainly before I was properly fixated by it, it assumed the role of constant internal soundtrack. My body was alive with the sounds it had collected up throughout the day. When I shut my eyes in bed at night I was souped in them, sounds that hovered between known and unknown, as if comprehensibility were not in fact the currency in which my brain dealt any more, and what was being processed was rather the rhythms. And then snatches of it found their way into my dreams, hovering there tersely, like life-rafts above the flow of images.
I was aware at the time that speaking of freedom in the context of foreign escape is a sticky notion, particularly as a white person from a dominant culture with a colonialist legacy, and these days I’m even more aware of it. It’s all too easy to conceptualize the rural paradise you move into as a blank canvas for your personal growth, and ignore the existing community; to feel yourself free from the tug of social conscience as you trample across the needs of others, flout social mores, and cause those around you discomfort and labour that you are perfectly unaware of. I tried my best not to act in those ways; at times I succeeded, and at others I failed. But whatever my intentions, the intense feeling of liberation I began to feel was undeniable, and the liberation was mostly from judgement. No longer surrounded by pronouncements that I understood, I let the critic in my head float away and suddenly I found I could do and say things simply because I wanted to. More, as if the obligations clouding my vision washed away, I was far clearer on what the things I wanted to do actually were. It was as if what had been watching me all the time was my language; I had clung to it as the thing that shaped me, but now I was finding that a looser relationship with the language, perhaps having a looser shape altogether, was profoundly healing.
You are on holiday from the disingenuity of language. You cannot express yourself except in the most basic terms, but through that infantile mode of expression you glimpse what could have been. It seems to you that you can express yourself, plainly, with terrible grammar, and a kind of deep profundity, for ever and ever. You have become Yoda, and you embrace the transition. Your very incompetence, it seems, has liberated you.
What was perhaps, in the final analysis, the most difficult to deal with was that the English-inspired elements of Japanese were not a temporary, makeshift insertion, but a legitimate, rule-bound part of the language. Embarrassingly, this fact took a while to fully sink in, and in my first few weeks I sustained the belief that if, while speaking Japanese, I said English words in my normal accent I would be understood, and would in some sense be ‘righter’, because those were the ‘real’ pronunciations. Eventually, of course, I reached the realization that gairaigo were a bona fide part of the Japanese language, and were spoken with authority as such; if I wanted to communicate properly in Japanese, that was how I would have to speak. I would have to say howaitobodo instead of whiteboard, and shitoberuto for seatbelt, and if I didn’t then I’d be wrong. If I wanted to talk about a film star, I would have to know how to say their name in the correct katakana pronunciation, otherwise I’d be met with incomprehension. That was just how things were.
Even in the midst of my fixation with katakana, I sensed there was something boringly predictable about dwelling on this aspect of Japanese. Certainly I feel it now. I think about all of those people from Anglophone cultures who have visited Japan and have regaled me endlessly with examples of the nonsense English they’ve seen splashed across T-shirts, pencil cases and signs; similarly, I’ve conversed with any number of Japanese people whose first comment on their adventures abroad, before any reflections on how the country or the people were, was about the sushi restaurant where the lantern reading irrashaimasse was hanging upside down, or where all the employees were Chinese or Korean. Come on, I want to say, what about all the other stuff? Surely the ways in which your language or your culinary culture has been used or misused is less interesting than almost everything else about that nation, and the experience you had there? Whoever was doing it, this cultural navel-gazing seemed to me to reveal an inner miserliness, a horrible pedantry of the soul.
Your language is what is missing in me, that tantalizing body of knowledge which I do not have, which keeps me from what it is that I want. Namely, you. Namely, intimacy. Namely, the other, and the impossible merging of my self with theirs. That which prevents whole, unadulterated attachment is no more than language - or so we tell ourselves. Ultimately, it is this lack in us upon which we fixate. ‘Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.’
[T]o fall in love with someone in another culture is like finding a language parent. It is to reproduce something like the relationship that most people have in early childhood with their parents, not just in terms of the time spent with the person or people who first taught us language, but the intensity, the physicality, and maybe above everything the need for approval that is likely to make the endeavour succeed. I had relied on my parents and they had taught me to speak; now I had found someone else upon whom I relied, in various senses, albeit to a lesser degree. I had not consciously taken up with Y for that reason, and when I talk now about the chronology of my Japanese learning I tend to cast this the other way round, saying that one of the reasons I kept going was because I happened to fall in love with a Japanese man. And yet when I think about how much I hung on his words, how much the thought of irritating him bothered me even if I pretended otherwise, and how much that encouraged me to ingest not just his words but also the cultural obligations surrounding them, I can’t help but think that maybe I, like goodness-knows-how-many other people, had hit unwittingly, almost as if through biological reflex, upon a strategy that would see me into something approaching fluency.
The conventional, monoglot sense of what it means to be bilingual, trilingual, and beyond does not permit of difficulties in self-rendering, let alone existential crises or identity trauma. We prefer to believe unthinkingly that what it means to be yourself across different cultural-linguistic contexts is clear-cut: you say the same things translated across your various languages. That the reality is often hugely different is something to which the majority of those who speak another language with some fluency will testify: a survey of over a thousand bilinguals found that two-thirds attested to feeling ‘like a different person’ when speaking different languages. To imagine a language means to imagine a life-form; to assume that you would be the same person in different languages, when not only the norms and rules but most likely also your social status and domains of experience and proficiencies within those languages are likely to be at least slightly if not fundamentally different, seems, when examined, plainly bizarre.
The subject at hand right now is America, as it often is. I don’t have an American bone in my body, but I sometimes suspect that that fact has gone unnoticed in these discussions, at least by the family patriarch. Ultimately, there is one name for Western nations, and it is America. This is not unintelligible to me as a perception, and nor is the antagonism shown towards this arch-nation. I also know that after the events of the Second World War and the Occupation and its aftermath, the emotional stakes run particularly high between Japan and the States. Besides this understanding, though, it strikes me that there’s something faintly paradoxical at work here: that the very qualities which supposedly form the bone of contention with the States - its size, power, and supposed crassness - are in fact ratified by singling it out as uniquely visible, as if only such places deserve attention. It puts me in mind of a time back in my first year of junior school, when the playground was ruled by a pair of identical twins. At some point, the twins had an argument, and in no time at all, the entirety of the year was split into two factions, with everyone forced to pick sides. I remember how bizarre it seemed to me, even as a four year-old, that such a dynamic had evolved between two people who lived in the same house, and whom none of the teachers could tell apart - and although the situation with Japan and America was clearly different in almost every way, there was some of the enmeshed quality which felt of a piece.
In fact, as time has gone on, I’ve come to see the phenomenon of the ‘endearingly mystifying translation’ as posing more problems than simply that of bringing us no closer to a real understanding - I think it also plays into a wider pattern of exoticizing and Orientalizing that goes on constantly. If our reaction on encountering a dubious translation was to accept that the information provided was insuflicient for our purposes, and perhaps to ask if there was anything we could do to bring us closer to understanding, then all would be well; yet my sense is that there’s a tendency on discovering an opaque phrase to leap to the assumption that we won’t ever get there, because the concept in question is on some level beyond our understanding - too hazy, strange, mystical. In other words, it’s not really about the translation, but rather about some quality in the source language, source culture. It is, after all, very alien.
One way to describe a state of being careless, of not paying enough attention, is uka-uka, which has the same stem as the verb uku: to float, to be happy, for your heart to be sunny. Uku also means to stick out, to stand out, to be different. It is hard not to see this tangle of meanings as brutally indicative: the price you pay for being carefree is to be a social outcast. Or conversely, the price that you pay for assimilating is to have your consciousness occupied by other people’s feelings. I try to steer clear of clichés about Japan as I feel there are too many of them around as it is, but there is a handful of things people say that are, I believe, actually and importantly true, and one of them is this: a key part of being in Japan is that gradually, without realizing, the state of being unlike others comes to seem more and more repellent to you on a subcutaneous level. That this happens even if consciously you totally reject this principle, and even if on a purely physical level you have no hope of doing anything but standing out. Without realizing, you learn to recoil from it.
And how real was he to me? In a way, that is the exact question I’ve come here to try and answer. Excessively, seems like a tenable response. It didn’t take a perceptive genius to see that I’d made a legend of him, a one-man nation. I’d fashioned him into a Japan that was mine, and that wanted me just as I wanted it. In a sense, that didn’t seem like the worst of crimes; it was largely that instinct which I had to thank for my progress in Japanese, and if what I had done had hurt anybody, it was mostly myself. Besides, wasn’t that just what you did when you were young and you fell in love in a foreign country - you conflated person, language and land, and threw yourself at them immoderately? With time, maturity and healing, that bond eventually dissolved and was replaced by a more holistic form of social integration, and you moved on.
It’s strange, really, that such groundedness can exist here, in what seems objectively like an implausible place to find certainty: this in-between place which is translation, this space where you hover spectral between one language and another, where ideas routinely swim, and give way underfoot, and where there aren’t any right answers. It’s not the sort of place that you’re supposed to draw security from, or which is supposed to make you happy or prosperous. As the parable tells us, success is reserved for the man who builds his house on the rock. Nowadays I think that maybe I’ve known always somewhere deep down that I couldn’t live for long on any rock. What took me longer to figure out was that living on the sand didn’t have to be just a running away or an experience of permanent overwhelm. That the topsy-turvy place between languages and cultures, which has been a site of humility and triangulation and self-knowledge, of absurdity and inanity and the best sort of creative fertility, can also offer, paradoxically, a kind of safety. It comes to me that I have built a kind of dwelling here, where I can google gorilla noises all day long, and not worry too much about my productivity; a big, small, crazy dwelling, in which I don’t just work but also live.