Why all this Engrish?

Pretty early in my five-week trip to Japan, I realized there’s something I have to get over.

Lunch at Minami Junior High

I kept finding myself wanting the Japanese to be more Japanese.  I was continually disappointed when things seemed too Western:  like when the sixth grader I was eating lunch with at Minami Junior High School handed me a fork to eat my yakisoba, which went along with what looked like a hot dog and oddly shaped bun.  Or when I saw the words “Fruits and Vegetables” in huge letters on a supermarket wall.  Or when the Obu High School kendo club practice was drowned out by the cheers of pom-pom wielding cheerleaders. Or when I saw a plate of chicken nuggets making the rounds at a kaitenzushi restaurant. Or when my hosts in Obu pulled out a Weber grill for a Japanese style barbecue.

I learned that the Japanese like to barbecue croissants.

Why does everything have to be so familiar?

So much of the West has seeped into Japan in the last 160 years that it seems inescapable.  Everyone knows how adept the Japanese are at emulation and adaptation.  There’s much about their society that suggests a quirky (in some ways retro, and in other ways futuristic) interpretation of Western habits and technology.  Like all the white-gloved taxi drivers and their doily-adorned seats, and the late-model Toyotas that ask you if you’re feeling tired when you turn off the car.

Two Japanese who know how to dress properly.

Now, I’m well aware how ridiculous this must sound.  It’s as if I paid all this money to go on an expensive Asian amusement park ride so they damned well better put on their yukata and geta and do a Noh dance for me.  Sometimes I think I’m being like Adela Quested in A Passage to India who’s always going on about seeing the Real India. 

I just want them to do their job and be The Other.

I think one reason I’m continually reminded of this compromised exoticism is that the Japanese vocabulary is so lousy with English words.

So many words are Japanese versions of English words!  Everyone knows sarariman and biru,  but there are zillions more:  the Japanese play gorufu and tenisu  and eat suteeki and sunaaku and then ask for the chekku (they also love hamu and weenah which they buy at a suupaa). Even basic things like sunglasses (sungurasu) don't seem to have any native Japanese term.  OK, so conceivably, the Japanese didn't have sunglasses until American dudes showed up wearing shades.  But surely, a culture that sealed itself off from foreign influence for hundreds of years had an indigenous word for glasses?  I asked my homestay father, “No,” he said, “Just gurasu.  (Later he corrected himself:  there is a native Japanese word, but to use it is to sound like someone's grandmother. )

I mean, I can understand why they call coffee koheee, but why is milk mirku?  Didn’t they drink it before?  Even when it comes to what is arguably the most quintessential of Japanese foods, rice, the word is often not Japanese.  They have a perfectly good word for it:  gohan.   (In fact, words for the three meals are versions of it:  e.g., hirogohan=lunch).   But when it comes to ordering a bowl of rice in a restaurant (a/k/a resoturan), it’s often raisu.

The Japanese just seem too willing to discard their native language for English. 

I guess there’s only one explanation for it.  The West, and English, must be cool.

At the Obu City Hall cafeteria.

It’s clear that they’re fascinated with Western food, Western clothing and Western sports.  And they also seem to love to use English for more than purely practical purposes.  I see it splashed on advertisements and on business signs in locutions that twist my brain into knots, as if for aesthetic reasons. Hence the proliferation of what some affectionately call “Engrish,” specimens of which I’ve been happily collecting on this trip (and which will be discussed further in another blog post).

It finally occurred to me that I’m judging them by a double standard. I don’t own the hamburger or baseball or hot dogs or English.  They can have all of those things, just as I can have my own Buddhist mala beads and my own woodblock print and my own cast iron teapot.  (Hell, three of my favorite Japanese foods – katsu, curry, and ramen – aren’t really Japanese anyway.)

And just as some Japanese disappoint me by not being Japanese enough, so I must disappoint some Japanese by not being American enough.

I’ve met several Japanese people who are mildly surprised that I know how to use chopsticks, or that I’ve eaten okonomiyaki and sushi before. People will burst out laughing when they hear me say ohayo gozaymas or hajimimashite, as if they’ve just encountered a talking horse. (At least I flatter myself to think it’s that they’re surprised by my ability and not amused by my poor pronunciation.) My co-traveler Tom clearly disappointed his host in Wakayama prefecture when he reported that despite living in Austin, Texas, he owns no horses at all.

In a world where everyone is free to use whatever cultural artifacts or traditions or quirks that strike his or her fancy, it’s foolish to assume that we’re going to encounter an unvitiated native culture anywhere that has internet or cell phone service. 

A street in Edo Wonderland.

Unless it’s in theme parks, like the one I visited today, “Edo Wonderland,” which recreates the Japan of the Tokugawa period.  All the males were wearing topknots, visitors rode in rickshaws, the women ran around in yukata  and geta, and samurais had loud confrontations with thieving ninjas on the streets.

It was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed tasting authentic Edo-style soba and tempura.  But after a while it got kind of annoying:  all the signs were exclusively in kanji and hiragana.

Why all this water?

I was so sure Japan would be boiling (and weakly air-conditioned, post Fukushima) that the idea that my first full day in Japan would be nonstop rain never occurred to me.

But there I was, dodging downpours in Kyoto with a cheap umbrella and no rain jacket at Kamigamo Jinja, the second most important Shinto shrine in Japan. The rain pummeled my malfunctioning umbrella and seeped into my backpack, dampening my post-it notes.  It made puddles deeper than the soles of my Keens all over the shrine compound.

It seemed out to get me.

But the rain also softened the graceful lines of the vermilion tori'i gates; it filled up the little wells of purifying water worn into ancient-looking rocks; it dripped from moss-covered cypress bark roofs; it trickled pleasingly through stone runnels; it hung in pearl-like drops from the points of pine needles.

And on this rainy day, huddled under umbrellas and ponchos,  pretty much the first thing we did (under the direction of Reverend Inui, our blue and white clad Shinto guide) was to get ourselves wet by ritually purifying ourselves with water.

Dip the bamboo ladle, pour water over your left hand, then over your right hand, then sip from your left hand and spit out, then over your left hand again, and then let the remainder drip down the handle of the ladle before you put it back.

Now you're pure.  And wet.  (But if you remembered to bring your little hand-schmatta, it's all good.)   And now you're ready to go summon the kami and bow and clap and pray and wish for a good exam result or a good match or a child or  success in business or good health or a pass on the next tsunami.

All this water.  All this rain.  It hadn't occurred to me that Japan was such a rainy country.

Maybe I should have gotten a clue.  Like the fact that there are umbrella stands at the entrances to just about every house and building (with multiple holes, not just the oversize champagne buckets we have in the U.S.) along with dispensers of  disposable plastic umbrella bags.  And that you can actually buy a telescoping umbrella case. And that many of the solid, workaday bicycles that people glide around on have built-in umbrella clips so that they can ride in the rain.  (Although many are impressively adept at riding through traffic while holding an umbrella upright.  This may partially explain why clear plastic umbrellas are so popular.) And maybe that's why the Japanese traditionally wear geta, those raised wooden clogs.  Duh.

This pair certainly seemed to keep Reverend Inui's socks dry.

Water is indeed everywhere here, in the rain and the shrines and the oceans and the tsunamis.  Even metaphorically, in the raked-sand Zen gardens.

Then it occurred to me that all this water may have something to do with why we typically think of Japan as a kind of green country.  In both senses of the word.

Green like moss and mist-covered evergreens and seaweed and green tea.  (You don't think "desert" when you think of Japan, do you?)

But also green like environmentally aware.  Which is only natural for a land that's always been so much at the mercy of nature.

So it makes sense that water is so fundamental to Shintoism, a religion that's all about the power of nature.  Reverend Inui explained that those beautiful moss-covered roofs must continually be replaced.  And that's o.k.  The roofs decay and return to the earth; it's all part of the cycle of nature, and of the kami that reside there.  And all this rain just helps the cycle along. All the Shinto shrines are constantly being rebuilt to the exact detail. There's a regular replacement cycle of 21 years, so that those who did it the last time can train the next generation.

I used to wonder why they don't do more in stone, why a country so much at the mercy of water, wind, and earthquake builds so much with wood.

But I guess it makes sense:  the past endures through the people, despite the drip-drip-drip of all this water.