Learning a Language

Writing calligraphy in Yabuta Yutaka’s seminar room at Kansai Daigaku in 2002. Note the old-fashioned phone in the foreground.

I’ve never been a good language student. I’m too introverted. Basically, I prefer not to talk to people at all. In college Japanese classes, our instructors would drill us by manufacturing conversations. “Stanley-san,” they would ask, “what is your favorite season? What do you like to read? Would you like to vacation at the beach or in the mountains?” I knew it was pedagogically sound, but I could never get past my first reaction: engaging in the conversation was exhausting, and I would rather be asleep. 

During my first years abroad in Japan, I went to Japanese classes at Osaka University of Foreign Languages. I got angry at an instructor of Classical Japanese who said that women in the Heian period didn’t work outside the home (as if that phrase had any meaning a thousand years ago). In that instance, a sudden rush of rage forced me to speak, which turned out to be good practice for my later career of getting angry at men in seminar rooms. Otherwise, I stared out the windows and watched dead cockroaches drift across the linoleum floors.

When I finished my four months of language courses, I walked to the library at Kansai University every day, and when I wasn’t in seminar I spent hours reading Japanese books and articles. I can’t fault myself for a lack of academic focus. But when I climbed the steps of Tarumi Shrine and descended the hills to campus, I was listening to Alicia Keys singing “Songs in A Minor” on my discman. At night, I really tried to watch Japanese tv. But except for a gothic drama featuring the heartthrob Kimura Takuya and a bizarre incest plot line, nothing held my interest.*

This was nearly twenty years ago, before smartphones, and I had no internet connection in my apartment. With nothing else to do, I wrote in my journal — in English — and read novels.

I love writing, but there is nothing - absolutely nothing - that compares with the pleasure of reading a novel when you should be doing something else. It’s even better when you’re reading in your native language and you’re really not supposed to. In my tiny studio apartment in northern Osaka, I read The Blind Assassin and failed to read The Corrections; I re-read Little Women and finally got through Middlemarch. But mostly I churned through books that I’ve now forgotten, paperback British editions that I bought at Kinokuniya for extortionate prices and stashed under my bed like contraband.

I probably should have been buying old volumes of Japanese history at the used bookstores in Umeda Station. But every time I entered one of those places, I felt overwhelmed and inadequate, dwarfed by decaying piles of books. I felt much more at home under the bright lights at Kinokuniya, reading the blurbs on the back of British chick-lit novels about shopping.**

I did manage to improve my Japanese, though not as quickly as I would have if I hadn’t been reading and writing so much English. I still remember exactly how I learned some of the vocabulary I acquired during that year and a half in Osaka. My reading taught me “patriarchy” (家父長制）and “collective” (共同体). My professor at Kansai University taught me “qualifications” (資格). All the undergrads taught me to say “Really??!” (マジで⁈) in a pretty good Kansai accent. On a seminar field trip to Okinawa, my friend Kotaro taught me “hermit crab” (ヤドカリ), which I never use, and “conscientious objector” (精神的参戦拒否者), which I have used exactly once. A young man I met at the Esaka Starbucks taught me “ambition” (向上心) and “regret” (後悔), both of which I use all the time. 

Do I regret my year and half of reading forgettable English novels and throwing them under the bed? I do, almost every day. After all that time in the library, my reading skills are great, but whether for reasons of gender or temperament, I will never be the kind of professor of Japanese history I feel like I should be: the one who goes out for beers with the seminar guys, who has shelves of old books in his office, who sends New Year’s greetings to dozens of Japanese colleagues.

On the other hand, during that year and a half in Osaka, I learned what I was suited to — what I was completely unable to stop doing. And I did immerse myself in a language. It just turns out that it was the one I already knew.

*Apologies for spoiling the plot of the 2002 Fuji television drama “Sora kara furu ichioku no hoshi.” You should really watch it anyway.

** It was 2001-2002. There were a lot of them.