Across the Pacific--Cerebrally

THE young Japanese scholar and I were seated in the Museum study room looking at Ukiyoe prints. In the picture before us half-clothed hairy demons were engaged in a fierce battle with picturesque warriors. My companion pointed to one of the demons.

‘ Shutendōji,’ he said. And, indicating the warriors, ‘ Yamabushi.’ Then he rapidly inscribed the two names in Japanese calligraphy on two slips of paper, added the English definitions, ‘demon chief’ and ‘itinerant monks,’ and handed the papers to me. ‘It tells there,’ he explained further, pointing to the Japanese characters showered over the top of the print.

I had an inspiration. ‘Mr. Shigimoto, could you teach me to read it? I need it in my work, you know. Sometimes I have to catalogue prints. If you could be kind enough to give me lessons! ’

‘But I am very glad — if you will help me with my English,’ he said. Thus lightly I stepped into the linguistic labyrinth of the Far East.

‘We will start with the alphabet,’ said Mr. Shigimoto when we met for the first lesson. I smiled faintly at the simplicity of the thing after all ‘Still it is not exactly an alphabet,’ he pursued, ‘ but you must learn fifty letters, and then fifty more — and still that is not exactly the true language. But then you will be ready to begin the ideographic characters, which must be learned separately. As a start you will study the four hundred commonest ones, but, in order to read, one must know several thousand.’

I dismissed ugly doubt from my mind and eagerly reached for the first home assignment. The page was enchanting to look at. Dotted lines marked off little squares. And there, each in a separate square, in vertical columns ranged from right to left, were the fifty first letters! Beside each one was its English transliteration in red ink. At a glance it was plain that here was no ‘alphabet’ of letters, but a syllabary — each character representing a combination of vowel and consonant sounds. As Mr. Shigimoto read it aloud, I was confronted with a confusion of sa, wa, ri, ko, and the like.

These sounds were indicated by a series of symbols so different from any familiar form that I wondered how in the world I should ever memorize them. Well might I wonder! I copied them. I studied them. I took them in columns and pairs. I wrote them on scraps of paper and stuck them in my mirror. I learned conclusively that memory is an act of association. If only those tricky little characters looked like something, it would n’t be so bad. I began to see the most farfetched analogies; began to recognize ‘the one like a bird track,’ ‘one like a knotted rope,’ ‘one like an anchor,’ and so on. Then it was just one more step to learn the name — and I had it.

At this stage came the bright idea of inscribing the separate characters on individual cards with the pronunciation on the back. Deal them out, guess, and turn over. The rightly named ones stack in one pile and the stumblingblocks in another. Then shuffle the hard ones and repeat. It worked; at last I learned them. But wait. The reading changes if two dots are placed beside the letter. That is something else. And something else again if a circle is added instead. What an inconvenient idea! But I could learn those too, and did. It was a proud day indeed when I could say a-ka-sa-ta-naha-ma-ya-ra-wa and write it too. It was disappointing to discover it was only a word for drill and had no meaning, but here was a small victory anyway.

The lessons were semi-weekly. At first my teacher inclined to the conversational method. He taught me to say ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good-bye,’ ‘I understand,’ ‘I don’t understand,’ ‘Thank you,’ and ‘You’re welcome.’

I decided to try one of my new words on Miss Ayame, a Japanese tsuba expert, who was a frequent visitor to the study and who was sympathetically observing my efforts from a distance. At my first opportunity I essayed a ‘Thank you’ in her native tongue. Immediately she was convulsed with merriment. ‘That’s what Mr. Shigimoto says,’ said I, defensively. When she could stop laughing long enough to speak, she explained, ‘That’s man’s language. He says it, but ladies must say different way.’ And of course the ladies’ way turned out to be three times as long. I reproached my teacher for subscribing to a double standard in language and he only beamed, ‘That is why we must admire ladies so much. Their language is much more difficult.’ I suggested that as an American girl perhaps I could get away with using the masculine style, but I saw I had shocked him, so pretended I was only joking.

Sentence structure was our next problem. We considered the possessive case. ‘You say “leaves of the trees,” yes?’ began Mr. Shigimoto. ‘We say “tree of the leaves,” or maybe “tree of leaf.” We have no plural — that makes it easy?’ he added hopefully. Then, ‘No article, either. Only’ — he waved his pencil over the paper in an intricate pattern of scratches and waited for my approbation of the utter simplicity of it.

‘That’s very easy,’ I managed bravely. Mr. Shigimoto rose to go. He murmured a farewell sentence in Japanese. Joyfully I came back with,

‘Doitashimashite’ (‘Don’t mention it’), for I thought he was thanking me for something. It turned out that he had said, ‘It has begun to snow.’ But another Japanese student had arrived just in time to hear my response, and, misapplied as it was, I felt it was amusing him excessively. ‘What you said means, “What is the matter with you? ”’ he told me. For I had given the final e the sound of a and there was the resulting change in meaning. ‘Even the monkey sometimes slips from the bough,’quoted my professor, consolingly.

I had promised to be vigilant of Mr. Shigimoto’s English and to correct his mistakes and help him all I could. Imagine my surprise one day when, with his usual dignity, he asked me to show him a dictionary ‘by the other guy.’ I was so astonished that I smiled broadly, and this brought out, ‘Don’t laugh, kid.’ I nearly fainted at these words from a formal diffident Japanese gentleman whose English words were always few and well-considered. It was extremely difficult to explain that he had used the words correctly as slang, yet they were not correct English. Some student companions had undertaken to interpret colloquial English to my teacher, and from then on I was busy excusing to him the irregularities of American speech. Not only slang, but also the commonest idioms began to seem monstrous.

My own language betrayed me unexpectedly. Why not a ‘trifle bit’? Why not ‘quite many’? If ‘lamb,’ why not ‘ramb,’ and given ‘myrtle,’ why not ‘tyrtle’? I was amazed to discover that l and r sound identical to a Japanese ear. My friend transposed them freely with very entertaining results. He was even able to silence me when I complained of the difficulty of the Japanese ts and nasal g sounds. The English th and v are as diabolical of their kind.

But he had no comeback when we came to ideographs. Then analogies with English were forgotten entirely. Then developed the necessity of becoming artist and poet in order to approach penmanship. Although much more interesting than the cryptic hiragana symbols, nevertheless ideographs seem a hopeless tangle to the beginner — this notwithstanding the fact that now you are given ‘something to remember them by.’ Moons, suns, trees, people, and animals may be detected in graphic representation in the characters. A woman under a roof is ‘peace.’ Three women means ‘to make noise.’ The sign for ‘purity’ evolves from ‘blue water.’ Even the word for ‘horse’ has four legs.

Still, it’s a long reach from the naïvetés of picture writing to the abstractions of the radicals. A single brush stroke means so much that when you name one meaning in translating you suspect a dozen others. You are only spurred on by appealing to your pride and remembering that Japanese school children learn all this somehow — the plucky little things. However, in the course of time, the day came when I could peek into a handbook of colloquial Japanese phrases.

Picture my delight at the prospect of actually grasping some usable conversation! After all the theory, I was about to try to operate this complicated mechanism. I opened the covers of the book. I turned the pages. I scanned the English translations beside the clauses, anxious to seize upon some serviceable material. I saw: ‘There are many cranes in Korea’; ’It snows in Lapland all the year round’; ‘Does your dickey bird sing?’ — and on and on. I stared at these atrocious sentences. Impertinently they stared back at me. With a sardonic smile I flipped the pages of my notebook. Then finally I saw myself, as inarticulate as at the start. Who wants to hear an American recite the Japanese hiragana?

I turned to my friend, the tsuba collector. ‘My Japanese is awfully funny, is n’t it, Miss Ayame?’ I said bleakly. A gale of laughter shook her. ‘It is too pity,’ she admitted cheerfully.

‘ But,’ — here she summed it all up, — ‘I get so kick of it!’