Half-term Report: Must Try Harder

How time flies - we've been in Japan for six months already!

I've been taking Japanese lessons now twice a week since October and while I feel I'm beginning to understand the basic structure of the language, I have reached that tricky phase where the act of proffering a tentative sentence elicits a return volley of Japanese that I still can't quite comprehend. It was much easier when we could just gesture pathetically, with a look of compete gaijin incompetence. People would then feel honour-bound to speak perfect English for our sole benefit.

Learning Japanese is hard. Harder even than finding out that you can only buy trousers at Gap, not just because they can accommodate your gargantuan waist size, but because they offer 'easy fit', which is marketing-speak for 'fat arse'.

Japanese is actually relatively paired down, as you might expect from a culture renowned for an aesthetic of simplicity. There are far fewer tenses than English. There are no possessive forms of nouns or pronouns. There are no plural forms. But their absurdly complicated numbering systems more than make up for this. On the face of it, Japanese numerics are commendably straightforward - eleven is '10 1', twenty is '2 10s' etc. But the numbering system is different when it applies to objects, as opposed to people. And age. And small things. And long things. And flat things. There are zillions of them, and there are no rules, you just have to learn them.

My particular favourite is the fact that the counting system for rabbits is the same as for birds (itiwa, niwa, sanba...). Allegedly this is because Buddhists are forbidden to eat anything with four legs. Evidently partial to a bit of rabbit stew, the enterprising monks of ancient Japan classified rabbits as birds.

The Japanese will counter with "well, you have collective nouns'. Which we do indeed, but these terms are just for pub quizzes, they are not in common usage. You might see a bloat of hippopotami or a coalition of cheetahs at the zoo, but it's a bit different from ordering two bottles of beer (ni-hon, onegai-shimasu, in case you're wondering). Thankfully, there are still some things we can stick two fingers up to, and for...

As if learning the lingo wasn't difficult enough, learning to read is another thing altogether. There are three character sets - kanji, hiragana and katakana. There are around 4,000 kanji characters, of which I know about 10, like river, mountain etc, which isn't too much use frankly. Hiragana is an attempt to simplify kanji using around 40 or so syllables, and katakana uses a phonetically identical syllabary, but describes what the Japanese call 'loan words', which are typically English words that have become commonplace in daily language.

Of the three, katakana is the most instantly gratifying for a gaijin, as it is essentially like an 'I-Spy' code. Ha-n-ba-ga, for example, is your Macdonalds staple food, although a little more convoluted is the burger chain name itself: Ma-ka-do-na-ru-do. But Katakana doesn't teach you any Japanese, it just makes you realise how much English has been exported overseas.


Jessica has hit the ground running, and has already memorised the hiragana syllabary, so she'll be handling most of our domestic administration before too long. We've given up all hope of ever understanding enough to read kanji though. People ask us what is the most different thing about living in Japan, and I usually reply that it is having to take our mail to work to have someone explain to me what it is about. Very disorientating...

Anyway, I'll sign off this entry with a summary of my most impressive linguistic gaffes to date, something which I'm sure that I will have to regularly update:

1. Introducing Sarah as 'my crab' to the immigration department official (kanai = wife; kani = crab)


2. Thinking I was telling someone they were a bit drunk, when I actually said that they had done something very rude to a lady (yo chatta = drunk; ya chatta = very rude act with lady)


3. Constantly mispronouncing 'teacher' - a little bit embarrassing as my Japanese teacher is a woman (sensei = teacher; sensai = former wife)

As you can see, the margin for error is pretty small...

The Year of the Boar

Ushering in the New Year was a pretty low-key affair this year, probably because we don't know anybody here well enough to gate-crash their New Year's Eve celebrations, but at least we were spared another year of Hootenanny! and Jools Holland's jazz-been chums on BBC2.

We'd been warned that the New Year holiday is pretty much the only time of the year that Japan actually stops to take a breath, effectively shutting down for a full three days. Certainly only a handful of shops were open, but it didn't seem to deter the crowds from roaming the city centre shopping arcades in a curious, Romero-esque kind of way.

But there was no need to panic because you can always rely on the hyper-industrious Chinese to offer a supporting hand to the inveterate shopper, and Motomachi Chinatown proved to be a hive of activity.

We did manage something more commendably traditional though, when we came across what seemed like a trillion Kobe-ites queuing to enter the Ikuta shine. This event is called hatsumoude, or 'first shrine visit'. The Ikuta shrine is one of the oldest shrines in the country, reportedly dating back to the beginning of the third century. Despite being nearly two thousand years old, it boasts a website with Shockwave Flash. Now there's progress for you.

High up on the gate to the shrine was a troupe of taiko drummers of varying ages - The Partridge Family meets Kodo - whose skilful, metronomic thumping really added to the sense of occasion.

On entering the shrine, visitors queue to purchase a fortune scroll. If it's good, they keep it. If it's indifferent, or indeed bad - and there are apparently some real stinkers - they fold it and tie it to a tree for the gods. So, bit of a win-win scenario all round then. They then approach the main altar and cast coins, perhaps by way of compensating the gods for all the rotten luck they've just sent their way.

There is also the opportunity to purchase good luck charms, arrows - necessary to ward off demons - and have a go on a good old-fashioned tombola, with the chance to win a Nintendo Wii game console (natch..). We won a can of cold coffee and an oversize 1,000,000 yen banknote sponsored by Kobe Sauna & Spa. Jessica was impressed though, even more so when a helpful couple explained that if you pin it to your wall upside down it would ensure that money would fall into your home in the New Year. Jessica wanted to know whether that would be coins or paper money...

Japan uses the same animal zodiac as China, but in the late nineteenth century switched to the Gregorian calendar, so their shogatsu (New Year) kicks off on January 1st too. 2007 is the Year of the Boar, by the way. Although you might be forgiven for thinking it is the Year of the Cheetah here, thanks to the total over-exposure of the Cheetah Girls - an irritatingly catchy, somewhat podgy girl band - on the Disney Channel.