Seeing the Future in Japanese

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I was in The Japan Times with one of my favorite Bilingual page articles I’ve ever written: “Focus on sentence endings to ‘see the future’ in Japanese.”

This is another product of my now daily NHK habit. I’ve been thinking a lot about listening, which is one of the most tenuous of all language skills. Sometimes the words just slip right through my ears like sand through fingers, and other times I’m able to clearly understand every sentence. It takes a certain level of attention—you can’t zone out—but try too hard and you’ll get caught up on each individual word and start to miss the overall sense of things.

I started to notice that I could anticipate sentence endings and that if I could kind of channel my attention to the content in the core of the sentence, it was easier for me to understand what was being said.

There are a couple of types of sentences that I wasn’t able to cover in the article. The first is the Xです (X desu) sentences, where X is a noun that helps convey expectations or beliefs. The two that are coming to mind now are 見通し (mitooshi, forecast/outlook) and 考え (kangae, belief).

Here’s an example that I have noted:

政府は、 感染を抑え込みたい考えです (Seifu wa kansen o osaekomitai kangae desu, The government would like to suppress the spread [of COVID-19]).

I have to believe that the core part of this sentence (感染を抑え込みたい) was longer in the actual example and that I simplified it as I prepared to write about it. You could use this construction to do a lot of additional work, specifically by noting how the government plans to prevent the spread. It would be easy enough to do this by adding a clause to the front of this “X.” It could get as long and detailed as you need it to be.

The other expression that I wasn’t able to mention was what I’ve previously called “appear-ative.” (Please forgive me for calling it a “tense” in the past; I will always carry this shame, lol.)

You can take these phrases I mentioned:

Xが焦点となります (shōten to narimasu, will be a focus)
Xが課題となります (kadai to narimasu, will be a topic)

And easily create a slightly different impression by turning them into this:

Xが焦点となりそうです (shōten to narisō desu, appears likely to be a focus)
Xが課題となりそうです (kadai to narisō desu, appears likely to be a topic)

Once you start listening for some of these frequently encountered sentence-ending phrases, you’ll find them everywhere. They can be as simple as a single noun and as complex as longer phrases like these:

影響を与える (eikyō o ataeru, will influence/effect)
影響を与えそうです (eikyō o ataesō desu, appears likely to influence/effect)

Have you noticed any others?

How to Japanese Podcast – S02E03 – Jenn O’Donnell – Mindful Study, Translating/Localizing, Job Hunting in Japan

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Jenn O’Donnell is a Japanese to English translator and project manager based in Osaka. By day she works as a Localization Director for a video game company and by night she blogs about translation on J-ENTranslations and studying Japanese on Japanese Talk Online. She also hosts the podcast Recommendations from My Otaku Spouse.

How to Japanese Podcast – S02E01 – Mel Ok – JET Program, Translation, Japanese Whisky

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Mel Ok is a translator and project manager based in Tottori Prefecture. We talked about Japanese study, the JET Program, translation, and Japanese whisky:

How to Japanese Podcast – S02E00 – Season 2 Trailer

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お待たせしました！ It took me longer than I hoped, but the How to Japanese Podcast is back. I’m interviewing another 10 people who have studied Japanese and done work in Japan. The interviews have run long, so I’ll be separating the interviews from my content and posting 20 episodes over the next few months. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you haven’t listened to Season 1, go ahead and give those episodes a listen.

Japanese Stonks

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I’m in The Japan Times with a look at the language of investing: “Put your yen to work with the language of investing.”

Initially I was hoping to find out the Japanese equivalent of “stonks,” but it became clear that while there has been a boom in retail investors, not all of them are tuned in to the GameStop madness. Bloomberg has one report in Japanese (a really good read!) which says lack of English skills limited Japanese participation in the mania, but they just put out a new one in English about a bar for stock pickers that suggests maybe there has been some effect from GME.

They point out Satoshi Uehara, and I found another Twitter account X1_droid who is also investing in popular U.S. stocks. I found the term ジャンピングキャッチ (“jumping catch”) initially from their account. I also found an account/bot that translates Elon Musk tweets, and there seems to be a contingency of Japanese followers shadowing some of his moves. However, as the Musk-followers might suggest, these are all fanatics, not the Japanese public more broadly.

In terms of explaining what’s going on, there’s a blogger over at Note who’s been providing some solid Japanese language explanation of “stonks” and GameStop. There may be some other useful posts if there are any slang terms you’ve been trying to communicate to Japanese friends and family.

Intermediate Reading Recommendations

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Reading Japanese is hard…until it isn’t. Finding the right material for that period of time when you’re moving from advanced beginner to intermediate is critical. You need to find something that’s not going to make you want to defenestrate the text itself or the device you’re reading it on but that will at the same time push you to learn new words and phrases.

Looking back on my own experience, I read the Murakami collection “Dead Heat on a Merry-go-round” while I was on a spring break trip. I think that was the first real book I read on my own, and it was just about the appropriate level. I could basically understand what was going on, and being on a trip meant I often just read past things I didn’t understand fully, trying to get a sense of the meaning from context. This is an important skill to practice, something you’re likely doing in your native language without realizing it.

I jumped into a couple of novels after that with the help of a professor, and I’m glad I had that help because there’s something about the first few pages of Japanese 純文学 (junbungaku, “pure literature”) that’s fairly dense and difficult. The text often settles down after this.

There are places to find the texts you need, online and for free. Here are a few reliable resources:

NHK’s Easy Japanese News

The news! But easy! For example, instead of 少数民族 (shōsū minzoku, minorities), the headline for this article uses 人口が少ない民族 (jinkō ga sukunai minzoku,people with a small population). There’s also a feature to turn furigana off and on. The bonus is that you’ll be keeping up with the latest news from Japan.

Ogawa Mimei

Someone is determined to upload all of Ogawa Mimei’s writing to Aozora. His stories just keep on popping up on the list of newly added works. They all have furigana and are written in a fairy tale/children’s literature style, so the grammar and vocabulary is relatively simple. We’ve been reading one for the Japanese Reading Group that’s been a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

Itoi Shigesato’s 今日のダーリン　

You might recognize Itoi Shigesato as the mind behind Mother (EarthBound). He was also the editor who got Murakami to write the series of super short stories that were collected in 夜のくもざる (Yoru no kumozaru, The Night of the Spider Monkey). He maintains a website ほぼ日刊イトイ新聞 (Hobo nikkan Itoi shimbun, Nearly Daily Itoi Times), which has a short essay on the front which self-destructs each day and is not archived (although it does look like he makes the previous day’s essay available now?). They’re relatively short and pretty casual. The title of the series is 今日のダーリン (Kyō no dārin, Today’s Darling). Worth a read!

Ameblo

Ameblo is Japan’s largest blog network. Recommendations on the top page usually point to active and often illustrated blogs, but you can also search by topic and interest. The best part about these blogs is that you’ll be getting casual, living Japanese, which won’t always be easy to understand but will be useful. Explore! And while you’re at it, why not try creating your own blog?

The real key for any of these is ensuring that you get the repetitions. Having the right reading material matters very little if you’re not actively getting through it. Do whatever it takes (be ruthless) to get those repetitions.

How to 告白

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I’m in The Japan Times with a look at how to 告白 (kokuhaku, confess): “Confess! Dating in Japan requires short set phrases to spark the fire.”

I was surprised this article hadn’t already been written, to be honest. There are a few Bilingual articles that have Valentine’s Day themes, but none are a comprehensive look at the 告白 practice.

I have this vivid memory of some one-off reality TV show episode I watched in Japan at some point. It must have been early on in my time on JET or while writing for a travel guide after my third year of study. I remember basically being able to understand what was going on: A group of men, the subject of the show, all got together as a sort of support group and decided to confess to their partners.

Some did so over the phone, others in person, and one by one they were all rejected. It seemed like some of them weren’t even dating the women at the time, like they were maybe just acquaintances? It was a weird show.

The last guy, however, arranged to meet the woman he was dating in the early evening at a fountain in a park (I think?!). They met there, stood about 10 feet apart from each other, and he did his 告白. He gave an intro saying he had something he wanted to tell her, told her that she was important to him, confessed his love, and then asked her to date him. It was a textbook 告白.

I remember being struck by what happened when she said yes. What happened was this: nothing. No hug, no kiss. Maybe a bow? But I’m not even certain about that. For me this was a striking realization about how different dating and love were in Japan.

So maybe it’s not a surprise, then, that a Japanese website called “Love Hacks” is a completely ingenuous and perhaps even healthy guide to dating rather than a site written by pickup artists, which you might expect from a similarly titled site in the U.S.

Some of the recommendations do seem tailored for seduction, like the rating of 告白 locations:

But then they’ll have a line like this in the section about confessing over the phone:

なお、いきなり電話して告白すると相手もびっくりしてしまうので「話したいことがあるから」と、事前に電話していいか確認するようにしましょう。

Note that confessing suddenly over the phone will surprise them, so make sure to check with them beforehand and ask if it’s ok to call them: “There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

Everything seems calculated to make the person feel comfortable and special. I haven’t read too deeply, so I’m sure there must be at least a few questionable suggestions on the site (the topic is just too fraught for there not to be), but I’m kind of impressed. The page even includes guidance for elementary school students! Not sure how to feel about that one, but it does seem kind of innocent.

Keep an eye on the February How to Japanese newsletter for more on this topic from a grammar angle!

I regret to inform you that I’ve also started posting on TikTok:

@howtojapanese

How to 告白 (kokuhaku) – Dating in Japan #japanesestudy #日本語勉強 #japan #japanese #love #valentinesday #バレンタインデー #恋愛

♬ original sound – Daniel Morales

Radicalization

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明けましておめでとうございます！ And Happy New Year, as well!

I’m in the Japan Times this week with a look at the 創作漢字コンテスト (Sōsaku kanji kontesuto, Created Kanji Contest): “Radical recombinations: Capture the moment with created kanji.” Tip of the hat to my editor Shaun who alerted me to this fascinating and fun contest. Also, HUGE thanks to the JT production team which turned my scribbles into actual fake kanji:

I think there’s a point at which it would be too early to introduce this contest to JSL students—you need to give them time to build up a familiarity with the language before they’d be able to do anything clever with it—but I can imagine it taking up part of a lesson for some teachers out there (nudge nudge, any of you Japanese teachers looking for lesson content) or at the very least an extra credit assignment. Maybe second year of study would make sense? It’s helpful to have students thinking about the role of radicals early on.

I found a couple interesting blog posts on the kanji for Nihonium, which is apparently not exactly a new kanji? I will admit to not fully understanding the connection between 鉨 and 璽 noted in the posts, but the archived original post on Yuwen.jp clearly explains how radicals are involved in the Chinese kanji for elements:

金へん：金属
石へん：常温で固体かつ非金属
气がまえ：常温で気体
さんずい：常温で液体

金-hen: metals
石-hen: non-metal solids at room temperature
气-gamae: gas at room temperature
Sanzui: liquid at room temperature

Wikipedia has an excellent rundown on the Japanese names for radicals of different orientations:

There’s an English explanation here. I don’t think I ever got these names for radical component locations formally in a class! At least not all at once in a list. I’m sure we looked at each radical at some point and talked about them, but I wonder if it would be useful to do a big drop at some point and force students to learn them. Then again, that might fall under the category of too much too soon.

The Wikipedia post doesn’t include the kanji for the radicals, so I’ll give those here:

偏 (hen): left component
旁 (tsukuri): right component
冠（kanmuri): top component
脚 (ashi): bottom component
垂 (tare): component hanging over the top and left
繞 (nyō): component component running from left under the bottom
構 (kamae): component surrounding the character

These are the main component names, but according the Wikipedia post, there are a couple of other positions that don’t seem to have specific names (although each radical itself still has a specific name):

– Top and bottom as in 亘 (Wikipedia gives this radical as 一, but dictionaries say 二?)
– In the middle like 一 in 日
– Open bottom like 間
– Open top like 凶
– Open right side like 医
– Right and left side like 街

Anyone know what’s the deal with these components? Could be that some of these have only one example, like 凵部 (kanbu), which also seems to be referred to as うけばこ (ukebako), and 匚部 (hōbu), which gets called はこがまえ (hakogamae).

How to Strike the Dockside Pose in Japan

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I’ve been listening to NHKラジオニュース (NHK Radio News) more regularly as an end-of-year resolution of sorts, and I have two strategies to pass on:

1. Listen to a bunch in a row.

Many of the news updates are just 3-5 minutes long, so you can steamroll through them. Most will include the same top news stories for the day, so you get a ton of repetitions with the same vocabulary. Always a good thing.

If you’re living in Japan or working with Japan, now feels like an especially good time to be tuned into what’s going on.

2. Make sure you don’t miss the hour-long ジャーナル (jānaru, journal) episodes.

These have meatier (meteor?) content. Longer news blasts, more analysis, and some random content sections. Like on December 10 when they discussed 筋肉のつり (Kin’niku no tsuri, muscle spasms) during the ジャーナル医療健康 (jānaru iryō kenkō, Journal Medical Care and Health) section.

I learned a lot about how to express muscle spasms in Japanese. Not only is it a noun as shown above, you can say things like 急に筋肉がつった (kyū ni kin’niku ga tsutta, My muscle suddenly spasmed) or つってしまった筋肉 (tsutte shimatta kin’niku, Muscle that spasmed).

Based on a few Google searches, it seems like the word is most often expressed in hiragana, and not the very cool kanji 攣る (tsuru).

In addition to vocab, you often gain access to different cultural concepts through the show. Including meme-ified bits of the culture.

In this case, the expert who was discussing muscle spasms was explaining how to prevent them, including how to stretch your ふくらはぎ (脹脛, fukurahagi, calves). This involves putting one foot up on something 30-40cm high and then stretching the calf of the other leg. He likened it to a famous pose:

石原裕次郎さんが波止場の船のロープを____くいに片足を乗せて決めるあのポーズのようなイメージですね (Ishihara Yujiro-san ga hatoba no fune no rōpu o ____ kui ni kata-ashi o nosete kimeru ano pōzu no yō na imēji desu ne, It’s like the pose that Ishihara Yujiro struck where he’s ___ing the boat rope on the wharf, with his leg up on the post).

As you can see, there’s one word I couldn’t quite catch—this happens—but I got the gist from context. (It sounded like ひっかくる? Anyone have the answer?)

It’s pretty easy to imagine what this pose looked like, but I was curious so I tried to track it down. This is about the closest I could find:

This is a scene from 赤い波止場 (Akai Hatoba, Red Quay) from 1958. (On a side note, Yujiro was also in a movie called 波止場野郎 in 1960. I love this title, and nothing would please me more than to translate it poorly into English, but I will resist this temptation.)

There’s also this “Forever Yujiro” set of Zipang sake which has Yujiro in a similar pose?

Whatever the origin of the pose, Yujiro, who is basically Japanese Elvis (full credit to the graduate assistant who made this comparison when I was an undergrad), has effectively made this the pose to strike when you find yourself dockside. Do a quick Google Images search for 波止場　ポーズ. Kind of amazing, no?

We also have confirmation from Chiebukuro where a guy asks “What are those things on docks called? You know, those little fuckers that Yujiro puts his foot up on?”

This is clearly a cultural phenomenon.

At any rate, I now have a new goal in life – to stand on a dock in Japan striking this pose. Montrose Harbor in Chicago may have to do for now.