I had this dream last night:
There was some trouble with Kaika. Naoko was not here, maybe she was still at the hospital. I had to communicate with my mother-in-law, in Japanese. I kept repeating the word shinzou (heart) over and over again, becoming more panicked, and she couldn’t understand me. There was something wrong with my pronunciation. She thought I was saying another word (which word, I don’t remember). I sounded out the word slowly. No go. I pointed to my own heart. No go….Something else must have happened at this point but I don’t remember. My memory fast-forwards to later ranting to Naoko about Japanese and their inability to be flexible in their listening. I then woke up.
Let me explain where I think my dream, and the basis for my rant, is partly coming from: I feel my mother-in-law oftentimes, when listening to me, doesn’t allow for the fact that I’m a non-native speaker of Japanese, and therefore prone to mispronunciation, or not getting a word exactly right. Oftentimes she gets stuck on a word she thinks I’m saying — to use the above dream as an example, let’s say she thought I was saying shinsou (the truth) and not shinzou — and she seems to harden around this thought to the exclusion of other possibilities. And it often seems that the more I try to repeat the word I want to convey, the further apart our understandings become. So much time and energy is spent on these points of linguistic conflict that I often (and I would suspect my mother-in-law feels the same way) have no interest in getting back to whatever the original conversation was.
Obviously this problem is not exclusive to my mother-in-law, nor Japanese. But I like to think that I don’t have this problem, or that I’m at least a lot more flexible. Indeed it would be pretty hard to be a teacher of English as a second language if I wasn’t flexible and imaginative in my thinking, and listening. But this isn’t an ability borne out of being a teacher. When Naoko and I first met and began to see each other, when she couldn’t construct an English sentence to save her life, nor could I do likewise in Japanese, we could still understand and communicate with each other. Context is what is most important. We all use it to form meaning, within our own languages (and it could be argued that Japanese rely on context more for meaning than English speakers do). But perhaps, where my mother-in-law is concerned, I throw my contextual net further and wider than she does, and therein lies some of the conflict of communication. And the conflict of differing expectations. Again, perhaps.
I should finally point out that in Japanese, there are two words for “heart.” shinzou refers to the actual physical, beating heart. kokoro refers to one’s figurative heart, one’s spirit, one’s mind.
P.S. Oops, just remembered something else in the shower (why is it that I always do my clearest thinking in the shower?). It’s not something from the dream, but rather more of the backstory, if you will. I remembered that it was my mother-in-law who first taught me the word shinzou (heart). We were watching the morning news together a few months ago, and there was news of Japan’s Prince Takamado Norihito’s sudden and unexpected death from a heart attack. I could understand that someone in the royal family had died, but of what cause I couldn’t. She kept repeating shinzou and pointing at her chest. I finally figured she must be referring to the heart, but up until this point I hadn’t known that Japanese had a separate word for the physical heart (I had thought kokoro meant both). I went upstairs to look in my dictionary and confirmed the meaning of shinzou.
