Adjusting my Japanese reception

It may seem a crazy notion that living in Japan I feel the need to further surround myself with things Japanese, but this is the situation I feel I’m now in. Having had to seriously apply myself to learning Japanese these last couple of weeks, I now am slowly starting to feel things come together in ways they haven’t before. Sure enough, I have miles to go before I sleep, but the future is starting to be paved more in emeralds than it has been up to this point.

One problem I have had is that in general, I’m a poor listener. Not just with foreign languages, but in general I have a hard time concentrating on what’s being said to me (or around me) and my mind tends to wander, or skip over what it considers non-essential information. (Admittedly, we all do this to some extent, but perhaps I tend to think of more input as non-essential than others might). With foreign languages, I tend to let pass over my head or through one ear and out the other any words or phrases I haven’t heard before, only putting up the stop sign when a familiar face rears its head. (Sorry, I seem to mixing metaphors left and right). Eventually I hear certain words or phrases enough that either by context I derive meaning, or I ask someone (usually Naoko) to explain them to me.

Now that the grammar structures I’m learning are getting more complex and starting to incorporate plain forms to a greater extent (for lack of a more extensive grammatical explanation, lets just explain plain forms as non-polite or casual speech), almost overnight I’m starting to make greater sense of the conversations I hear around me on a daily basis, at home, at work, on television, and on the train.

(On another tangent, the trains and environs are an interesting microcosm of the different speech levels one gets exposed to in Japan. At one end of the extreme are the high school girls with their slang-inflected kitanai Japanese of which “maji” seems to comprise about 50% (roughly corresponding to “really?” or “for real!” depending on intonation). At the other end are the station conductors and train drivers whose announcements are in a humble customer-centered language that for the most part still escapes me. Unfortunately, those in the middle, the salarymen, office workers, housewives, who’s Japanese comes closest to what I can understand and desire to speak myself, are also the ones most likely to be concerned that their conversation might be intruding upon someone else’s aural space and therefore it’s usually at too low a volume for me to hear.)

So now I find myself yearning for even more sources of input, and turning to various media to help satisfy this urge. Of course television is a great at-hand resource, and cheap too, but for the most part the typical line-up of variety shows, food shows, or home-renovation shows is a bit beyond the pale of what I’m willing to tolerate. Dramas are probably best, but I have yet to find one that appeals to me during the time I have available to watch tv (admittedly I haven’t yet searched very hard for these).

Today, however, I borrowed a couple of videos from the library, and watched one of them this afternoon before heading off to work. Boy did it hit the spot of what I was looking for. It’s one of a series of films (about 15 have been made so far, I believe) called Tsuribaka nisshi (roughly “Diary of a Fishing Nut”), starring Toshiyuki Nishida as Hama-chan, a salaryman with an obsessive fishing habit. It wasn’t an unknown commodity, for I had seen one of these videos before on a bus tour. Basically it has all the requirements for me to watch it subtitle-less: a formulaic storyline (in a nutshell, Hama-chan would rather fish than work, and usually through some sub-plot love story involving one of his co-workers which leads to some type of conflict, connives a way to both fix the problem and sneak off to do some fishing) so that even when I don’t understand exactly what’s going on, I pretty much know how the story will end up; a great humorous funnyman in Nishida, whose various mannerisms and facial expressions are enough to send me tittering, and therefore make the whole thing eminently watchable. (I think it goes without saying that if these were American films, I wouldn’t be touching them with a 10-foot fishing pole). But perhaps the best thing about these films is that they’re a great way to be exposed to both casual and polite speech, and indeed much of the humor of the films is derived from this conflict. You see, the owner of Hama-chan’s construction company also happens to be a fishing nut, and outside of work, he and Hama-chan are best friends. But inside work, a strict heirachy is maintained, with the appropriate language that goes along with that heirarchy.

Today’s episode also happened to unexpectedly feature prominently Hama-chan’s wife’s pregancy and subsequent childbirth, so that was an added bonus (particularly funny — and understandable to me without Naoko’s explanation — was Hama-chan’s arguments pro and con for whether of not he and his wife should find out the gender of the fetus).

I also borrowed a video of one of Yasujiro Ozu’s later films that judging from the boxcover I haven’t seen yet, though I’m expecting that this will be considerably harder for me to understand, and that it will probably be more an exercise in analysing Ozu’s film style and techniques rather than a Japanese lesson. One of my benchmarks I’ve set for myself with respect to fluency in Japanese is being able to watch an Ozu or Kurosawa film in Japanese with no subtitles and being fulfilled with it as I would if I was watching it in translation. A long time from now I’m sure, but watching an Ozu now will give me a good idea of how far off that time will be.

My last media item from the library was a CD by Yosui Inoue, a singer recommended to me by my classmate. I was looking for the album of his with some famous song about umbrellas (something like “kasa ga nai…”) but they didn’t have it. Oh well, this one will fill in quite nicely. Stylistically all over the map, and again probably something that back home I wouldn’t give any attention to, but it will suit my language learning purposes perfectly. Actually, I want to start listening more to enka, which I’ve heard referred to occassionally as Japanese “blues” although musically it sounds nothing like blues music. I have a hard time describing it, but from what I gather, most of the songs are about loneliness or heartbreak (it appears to me that it’s a prerequisite to have namida (tears) in the lyrics somewhere), and the singing style is distinguished by a delayed vibrato and the use of melisma.

Naoko hates enka, and most of my students that I ask about it don’t like it either, which I think is a shame. I absolutely adore it, and fortunately so do my in-laws so I sometimes watch one of the few programs on tv that features enka, and listen as they sing along to these old, mournful songs. (These programs always have the lyrics on the screen, so they make a great way to practice Kanji recognition). I want to get into enka more, become familiar with some of the stars, some of the old standards, and now having discovered the library’s CD collection, am looking for a good place to start, so should you have any recommendations, please post a comment.

Lastly, on the productive skills front, Melissa of Nippon Daze, home to some wonderful writing about her time in Japan 10 years ago, has started a blog in Japanese to further advance her learning of the language. I’m officially jealous! But as I posted in a comment on her first entry, I think rather than start my own, I may start using her comments area as a place of writing practice for myself (with Melissa’s permission, and on topic, of course).