Lingo

I have spent my entire life obsessed with words.

When I was a kid, I used to get very frustrated when I couldn't convey my thoughts properly, or when people didn't understand me. Miscommunication, or simply lacking the ability to put my thoughts into words, was the worst feeling in the world.

So I decided to spend my life honing my wordsmithing. Never again would I be lacking for prose or precision. People would always know exactly what I wanted to say.

I wanted to be like Shakespeare, man. Master wordsmith!

I think I did an ok job. I got a B.A. in English, I went to grad school for English Education, I worked as a journalist for a while, and I was always, always writing in my spare time. I can put my thoughts into words with relative ease now. Finally free of that pesky nagging feeling of not being able to properly express myself!

Right?

Well... no.

Moving to Japan put that all in a wet blanket and tossed it out the window.

A still shot of my language skills, shortly before their death

I spoke very little Japanese when I came here. Over a year and a half, it's gotten better, but is still very broken. Communication has been one of, if not the hardest, barrier to overcome in moving here, made exponentially more frustrating because I spent my entire life working to avoid this problem.

Communication problems have phases.

Phase 1 is what I like to call the WTF Phase. In this phase, every word is a freight train coming at you at full speed, which means a full sentence will leave you floored in seconds. You're essentially made into a mute clown, because all you have is your gestures and your gibberish that nobody around you can understand. Nothing makes any sense, and you have to dance to get directions.

Oh, and if you're in Japan, you can't read, either. Every sign might as well be the glyphs on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It feels a lot like being on a tiny boat in a vast ocean in the middle of a hurricane. You struggle and struggle just to stay above water, let alone on staying on your boat, let alone focusing on getting to your destination.

It sucks.

Phase 2 is what I like to call the Drunken Haze Phase. In this phase, you can understand general concepts when people talk to you - sometimes - and the language doesn't sound like a garbled radio anymore. You yourself can utter basic subjects and verbs, so you can neanderthal yourself through everyday life using phrases like "That. Need." or "Go here. How?" Maybe you can read a little.

Things kind of make sense, but also not really. I've never done drugs, but I imagine that it's a lot like being high, or going on an acid trip. The world is kind of comprehensible, but also very twisted, and your window of observation is definitely not accurate. You can stumble your way through life - like a half-drunken mess brute forcing your way through everything, maybe - but you can still sort of do it!

You're still on your tiny boat in the middle of the ocean, but the hurricane isn't there harassing you anymore.

Phase 3 is what I like to call the Fez Phase. If you've ever seen That 70's Show, Fez - a nickname that's short for Foreign Exchange Student - is the token comedy relief character. He's allowed to say outrageous things and be oblivious to cultural conventions and break social rules and generally just be a goofball without anyone thinking about it too much.

This is you when you can speak and read well enough.

Your grammar or vocabulary is still a bit lacking, you have an accent, you can read a decent amount. You're functioning! But you're still not a part of the system. Since you can talk, though, people might not be afraid to approach you anymore. You get to teach people about the way you do things in your country, you get to break rules and societal expectations and be the "fun guy" to be around, and you can finally be a part of society, albeit in a weird and off-beat way.

You're on the boat, and now you have a paddle, too.

I think there is a Phase 4, which I would call the Zeus Phase, because you might as well be a God if you get there. This means perfect speaking and comprehension skills, being able to read everything, and maybe even losing your accent. I know people who have done this, but they are superhuman, and quite frankly I think they are just a bunch of stupid overachievers. Nerds.

I'm not jealous, ok!?

Those people are cruisin', though. Their boat has a motor on it.

While going through these phases, I realized that communication is a lot more than words. Even if you explain yourself to someone with absolutely perfect clarity, they still might not see where you're coming from, because their customs and ideology and whatever else might not gel with what you're saying. And even if you can't say a word, sometimes you can get your point across anyway.

Conveying ideas to other people is a lot more than just stringing words together. Communication is a complicated beast, made up of many different layers. It helps to have the deeper layers mastered, but the outer ones matter just as much. Smiling at people to let them know you're not uncomfortable means a lot, for example, and you can always tell a lot about what people are feeling from looking at their eyes, which I think show more genuine emotion than any words can or do.

Personally, I feel like I almost lost sight of that in my pursuit of perfect prose.

I'm still paddling my boat. I don't think I'll ever get a motor on mine. But that's ok. I like being the goofball anyway.

The few times I have returned home, suddenly regaining the ability to speak coherent sentences has been startling, like evolving from a monkey to a man in the span of a 20 hour flight.

Never underestimate how good it feels to be able to communicate. I love Japan, but that's one thing I'm looking forward to when I go home again.

Other

I'm going to talk about a very uncomfortable topic, which is racism and xenophobia in Japan.

A "skin whitening" booth near my house, created to take your photo and make you look more like a white person.

It exists. It's extremely prevalent. However, most people who exhibit this behavior are entirely unaware of what they are doing. It's the product of an extremely homogeneous, isolated society, where foreigners, despite their recently increasing numbers, are still the VAST minority.

We aren't just black sheep. We're like a God damn dinosaur in the middle of the herd.

Japan is a highly educated, first world country. It knows what racism is. People know it's bad. But because actual interaction with the outside world is so few and far between, people know of it, as something they've learned of in textbooks and seen on television, but have trouble conceptualizing it as something that exists in the real world.

As such, when met with a foreigner, you'll find situations like...

-Long stares
-Visible desire to avoid you
-Awkward smiles
-Refusal to acknowledge your Japanese (often accompanied by "I don't speak English" or scattered English phrases)
-Conversely, the compliment "Nihongo jouzu" ("your Japanese is very good") after saying something super simple, like "how much is this" or "where is the bus stop"

And such.

Some of my favorite personal examples have been people telling me my nose is huge, children pointing at me and screaming "foreigner!!!", other teachers openly talking about how they find foreigners scary because they don't know how to talk to them (thinking I couldn't understand them), my students asking me if my eyes are real and if I see differently from normal people, and, the biggest of all, sitting in on a world history class about the physical and cultural differences between Japanese people and the rest of the world.

That lesson was something else. The teacher mentioned how black people love to eat watermelon and dance before singling me out as the "white guy" example, asking me to stand up, pointing out my nose, eyes, and hair as different, all before saying Americans tend to be louder and care about their own opinions a lot.

In the west, we call these things microaggressions. They aren't hostile in nature - often quite the opposite - but they are offensive because you are being compartmentalized, dehumanized, and put in a very different space from "normal" human beings.

Gaijin is a slang term for foreigner. It can be considered offensive.

It's not a good feeling, being put in a different zone like that.

Of course, not everyone is like this. If I were to make a generalization like that, I'd be doing exactly what I'm complaining about. There are loads of nice and understanding and wonderful people without a hint of this behavior. But it would be disingenuous to say that it wasn't very prolific here.

So what can we do to combat this?

The answer is - not much.

The best we can do is learn Japanese, get involved with the community, and make friends. You can't tell someone they're being slightly xenophobic - you need to show them you're a normal human being. Then they hopefully realize the error of their ways, in retrospect.

Since I'm a white guy, I normally don't experience this stuff in America. I know a lot of people would probably say something along the lines of "cry me a river" for the soft-racism I experience here as opposed to the real, dangerous kind back home.

I suppose they wouldn't be off base in saying something like that. One of the only ways to experience what it actually feels like to be a minority is to become one.

And, in many ways, it's been enlightening. I would actually go so far as to say that all non-minorities should experience it in their lives at some point. It drives home how important it is to really see other people, their hearts and not their face, to respect them and talk to them, not at them.

It's been interesting. I really hope that, as Japan continues to globalize itself, that the problem can diminish over time.

Prism

An article about China in a blog about life in Japan. What gives?

Well, I've been exposed to all sorts of cultures here, and Chinese is one of them. Ironically, most of the people I've met with Chinese roots here speak English. Go figure.

JET is useful for more than one form of cultural exchange, it seems.

Today is the start of the Chinese New Year. I know because many of my friends are making lots of Chinese food around this time.

Food motivates me to do a lot of things.

I'm probably one of the least qualified people to talk about the Lunar New Year. I have never celebrated it before. The extent of my knowledge is in its food, and from what I have read and heard about secondhand. All I can do is talk about it from the window of an outsider.

But that has its own value, right?

This year is the year of the pig. Of all the twelve Chinese zodiac animals, I always felt bad for those born in the year of the pig or the rat. Especially when you have tigers and dragons as an alternative.

Supposedly, though, people born in the year of the pig are blessed with great fortune and prosperity, destined to be cared for for the rest of their lives.

I guess that doesn't sound so bad.

I love how each Chinese sign can be further divided into its own element. There's Water, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Wood. This is the year of the Earth Pig. I was born in the year of the Earth Dragon, apparently. That sounds so cool. It's like something out of Harry Potter, or Naruto, or Power Rangers, or any other kid's series where they get powers based on their individual personalities.

Maybe that's why some people are so drawn to this stuff. It has a fantastical twinge to it, something magical that makes you feel special by fitting into a particular, specialized category.

I've always found zodiacs and horoscopes tangentially interesting, on a surface level. I think most of it is nonsense, personally. I'm sure as hell not gonna let a cluster of stars determine my day or week or year or life, but it is fun to see how some people try to draw meaning from these cosmic things.

It's even more interesting when you compare it between cultures.

Under the western zodiac signs, someone born today would be an Aquarius, the sign of the future.

Someone born as an Aquarius is said to be:

-Unique
-Popular
-Ambitious

As well as strongly motivated by things that they want, ways to fulfill their ambition.

Meanwhile, someone born in the year of the pig is said to be:

-Materialistic
-Enthusiastic
-Realistic

As well as value positions of leadership, and be a person of action rather than words.

Those sound pretty similar, don't they? They can certainly co-exist. But still, they each have their own vibe to them, their own perspective. It's the same concept being viewed through a different window, each window having its own tint to it.

Zodiac signs may be a bunch of fluff, but as a form of cultural comparison, they're pretty neat, I think.

Seeing the different ways people interpret concepts like this is incredibly interesting. Celebrating a new year is a singular idea, but like all things on Earth, passes through a prism before being interpreted into something of cultural significance.

The western New Year I grew up with, the New England celebration of chip dip and miniature hot dogs and the ball dropping, is only one color of that rainbow, with dumplings and egg rolls and lantern festivals being another.

I would love to see a lantern festival in person someday.

Like an instagram photo with different filters, for a modern analogy.

One of the better parts of life is getting to see those different rays of light, to go from place to place and take in all of the colors coming from that prism.

And to eat the food under each ray of light.