Of Speaking Partners and Harmony

The most exciting news of the past few days is that after finals end me and two of my friends, Kate and Ashley (kind of like the Olsen twins) are going to Phuket, Thailand for 6 days. We had been tentatively planning the trip for a while now and finally booked the tickets last night. The flight was a bit expensive – and involves a red-eye return flight to Tokyo – but a combination of cheap lodging ($49 dollars a night for a three star hotel on the beach) and the opportunity to lie on the beach for six days was just too good to pass up. Google Image Search “Phuket” and see for yourself. Be jealous. It’s okay.

Besides that, all else has been fairly uneventful around here. I’m having a super good experience with my three speaking partners, though it’s more like 7 or 8 since they always bring a few friends along. I’m definitely getting to use my Japanese a whole lot more, something that I really wanted to strive for during this second half of my trip here. Also, it’s nice to help them out with their English and actually pretty fascinating to see how they are learning the language. The one main thing that I’ve found with all of the students is that their level of speaking and level of writing are completely unrelated (a correlation coefficient of 0, for you math nerdz out there). One girl, Motoko, usually does most of the speaking while her two friends Akiko and Yukiko (try to tell those names apart) sort of sit around and occasionally ask questions in broken English. Though Motoko isn’t fluent, she’s pretty decent and probably is where I am at with Japanese right now. The other two girls are considerably less fluent and it’s a bit more difficult to understand them.

On Tuesday, they asked me to correct their essays that were going to hand in on the Salem Witch Trials (which one girl tried to describe to me and I think she started describing the story of Thanksgiving before I stopped her and told her that Thanksgiving and the Salem Witch Trials are quite unrelated, perhaps save for the fact that both events involved meat roasting on a open fire – sorry, it was too easy). The weird thing was, Motoko’s essay was by far, for lack of a better word, the “worst” of the three essays. I was a little worried about Akiko and Yukiko’s papers, since they were not too proficient at speaking but was extremely surprised, especially by Akiko’s essay, at how well they wrote. If you looked at the essay by itself and didn’t know the author, you’d easily say that Akiko was the most proficient at English, whereas it is just the opposite case. Very odd indeed. Nonetheless, they are so extremely nice and are helping me a great deal with my Japanese – just by letting me talk – so its been very beneficial. Plus, these girls are in the APP Program, sort of an English TOEFL Exam prep program, and the level of English they are expected to be able to read and write is much, much higher than my current level of Japanese is. I give them a whole lot of credit.

I have two other partners, Naoko and another guy named Takahiro, who are both extremely nice, but are a bit less proficient than the three girls. Both of them try to cop out of using English sometimes by starting to speak Japanese (sometimes I do the same thing in reverse), so I try to force them not to revert back to Japanese when they are stuck. It’s also interesting to see how both the male and female Japanese students interact with me. No matter what, and this is just part of the Japanese culture, none of them will say “Thank You” when I mention that they are all very good at English. Never. Even if they were fluent, I’d expect that they would still go “Iie, iie” – “No, no” or “Sore demo nai kedo…” – “That’s not so…” and bow their heads like they usually do. Japanese culture sees responding to a compliment with “Thank You” as extremely self-centered and breaking the “collectivist” harmony of the group. It’s a bit frustrating sometimes too when you keep insisting that they are good at English and they never believe you. The funny thing is that I’m starting to do the same thing, partly because of habit and partly because I don’t want to seem egotistical at all.

Another unrelated – but at the same time related – part of Japanese culture involves their staunch commitment to non-intervention. Whether it’s a woman not speaking up when she’s being pushed around a train or a man who is clearly annoyed by a teenager’s music blasting through their headphones so that everyone can hear, no one says anything. Case in point, today. I was getting some bread after dinner at Shinagawa and noticed a man with a very oddly shaped coat walking around the bakery. I soon realized that under his coat was no less than 10 sandwiches that had stolen from the fridge in the bakery and was shoving more under his coat as I watched him. At least two or three other Japanese women in the store – not the store clerks, however -- saw him and sort of just looked away and pretended not to see. I was going to say something but then I think he noticed my suspicion and darted out of the store, scot free, with 10 sandwiches he had stolen. I walked up to one of the women and said, in Japanese, “What was that guy doing?” and she replied “It looked like he was stealing sandwiches.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked, and her reply said it all. She turned to me, with a small frown pasted across her face and whispered,

“Because that would be un-Japanese of me.”

So you see, it’s a whole different world over here in Japan. I’m not really sure how I got off on this tangent (sorry, but its good that I did since I didn’t really much else to write about), but I hope it gives you a better look into some of the intricacies of this culture. If that sandwich stealer had been in the U.S. you know something would have been said. But here, that would be the exception to the rule.

Anyways, this weekend I’m (hopefully) going to a baseball game on Saturday (yay!) and then going to the Studio Ghibli Museum on Sunday. Time is flying by here and I hope you are enjoying the ride and will stay with me ‘till the end.

Jaa mata ne.