Magazines

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Welcome to the Eighth Annual How to Japanese Murakami Fest!

With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, I will post a small piece of Murakami translation/analysis/revelation once a week from now until the announcement. You can see past entries in the series here:

Year One: Boobs, The Wind, Baseball, Lederhosen, Eels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year Two: Hotel Lobby Oysters, Condoms, Spinning Around and Around, 街・町, The Town and Its Uncertain Wall, A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year Three: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs, The Library, Old Dreams, Saying Goodbye, Lastly
Year Four: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa, Last Line
Year Five: Jurassic Sapporo, Gerry Mulligan, All Growns Up, Dance, Mountain Climbing
Year Six: Sex With Fat Women, Coffee With the Colonel, The Librarian, Old Man, Watermelons
Year Seven: Warmth, Rebirth, Wasteland, Hard-ons, Seventeen, Embrace
Year Eight: Pigeon, Edits

gunzo

The 自作を語る for A Wild Sheep Chase is interesting. Murakami goes into detail about how drastically he changed his life after publishing his second novel: he moved to Chiba, started taking trips abroad, stopped drinking as much, and basically stopped living the urban social life he’d been living as the owner of a jazz pub.

He wrote the book from the fall of one year to the spring of the next, a pattern that he repeated for Dance Dance Dance. He went to Hokkaido to research sheep, without any real idea of the novel in mind, and he started writing and eventually the sheep fit in to the story. He also mentions how he was driven to write by a sense of competition with Ryū Murakami following the publication of Coin Locker Babies.

One of the things I didn’t know (or had forgotten) was that the novel was published in Gunzō. Murakami writes about that experience:

この作品は『群像』に一挙掲載のかたちで発表されたが、書いている途中で担当編集者が交代し、また編集部の方針も大きく変化したこともあって、作品はやっと出来あがったものの、作品の立場も僕の立場も正直言って—もうずいぶん昔のことだし、状況も変わったから正直に言っていいと思うのだけれど—あまり居心地がいいとは言えなかったように記憶している。なんだか出来の悪い醜い子供を産んでしまったあひるのお母さんみたいな気分だった。もちろん雑誌には雑誌のきちんとした性格なり方針なりがあるのは当然のことで、僕としてはそのこと自体はいっこうに構わないのだが、でもその時、雑誌といういれものは短編やエッセイはともかくとして、息の長い仕事をするには適していないのかもしれないという印象を持った。長編小説を書くというのは本当にデリケートな作業である。それは往々にして骨を削るような孤独な集中力を要求する。そしてちょっとした些細なことで力のバランスが狂ってしまいかねないのだ。

そのせいもあってこれ以降長編小説には全部書きおろしというシステムを取るようになった。まあ人にはいろいろな事情や仕事のやり方があるだろうけれど、経験的に言って、僕の場合は性格的に書きおろし形式が適していると思う。他の仕事は一切はずして、何ヶ月か集中して一気に書き上げ、それからゆっくり時間をかけて推敲するという書き方なので、連載小説というのはどうしてもできないし、かといって雑誌一挙掲載というのも何か二度手間みたいな気もする。そういう自分にいちばん適した書き方のペースを摑んだのもこの小説をとおしてだった。 (VI-VII)

This work was presented in Gunzō in its entirety, but the editor in charge changed while I was writing, and the editorial department’s objectives also underwent large changes, so while I finally managed to finish the novel, I do remember that its position as well as my own could not be called all that comfortable, to put it honestly—this happened long ago and the situation has changed, so I think it’s okay to put it honestly. I felt something like a mother duck who’d given birth to an ugly, misbegotten duckling. Of course it’s only natural that a magazine have its own proper, magazine-like character and objective, and I didn’t have any problem with those things themselves, but I was left with the impression that, at that time, setting aside short fiction and essays, magazines as a vehicle might not have been suited for sustained work. Writing a full-length novel is truly delicate work. It often demands a focus so lonely that it wears you down. And the slightest thing can throw off the balance of your powers entirely.

This is among the reasons I adopted the system of writing all my novels after this one as kaki-oroshi (new work published straight into book form). Well, I guess people must have various circumstances and ways of working, but speaking from experience, I believe that the form of kaki-oroshi suits me personality-wise. My writing process is to let go of all other work entirely, focus for several months and write everything up in one go, then take my time with revisions, so I’m totally unable to do serialized fiction, but having said that, I do want to have another go at publishing something in its entirety in a magazine. It was through this novel that I also came to understand this writing pace that most suits me. (VI-VII)

I wonder what it was about the new editor(s) and his/her/their new goals that irked him so much. It sounds like they wanted him to make changes to the work that he was uncomfortable with. I wonder if he was submitting excerpts and receiving feedback as he wrote. (He mentions that he wrote 650 Japanese manuscript pages, which was long for him at the time but nothing compared to his recent monstrosities.)

One final interesting thing to note is that Murakami would break this vow just a few years after writing this commentary. In October 1992, he began to serialize the first half of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle in Shinchō. This went until August 1993. The first and second half were then published in book form in April 1994.

Edits

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Welcome to the Eighth Annual How to Japanese Murakami Fest!

With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, I will post a small piece of Murakami translation/analysis/revelation once a week from now until the announcement. You can see past entries in the series here:

Year One: Boobs, The Wind, Baseball, Lederhosen, Eels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year Two: Hotel Lobby Oysters, Condoms, Spinning Around and Around, 街・町, The Town and Its Uncertain Wall, A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year Three: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs, The Library, Old Dreams, Saying Goodbye, Lastly
Year Four: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa, Last Line
Year Five: Jurassic Sapporo, Gerry Mulligan, All Growns Up, Dance, Mountain Climbing
Year Six: Sex With Fat Women, Coffee With the Colonel, The Librarian, Old Man, Watermelons
Year Seven: Warmth, Rebirth, Wasteland, Hard-ons, Seventeen, Embrace
Year Eight: Pigeon

The Complete Works combines Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 into a single volume, much like the recent new translation of both novels, and Murakami spends most of his time in 自作を語る discussing the first novel. He has a few interesting things to say about Pinball, notably that the incorporation of a “search” was useful for him in terms of plot structure (something the first book didn’t have much of). It’s something he’s gone back to a number of times.

He also says that he didn’t make any changes to these first two novels:

そしてこれが夜中に台所のテーブルで書きあげられた最後の長編小説となった。このあと僕は生活をがらりと変えて、フルタイムの専業作家としてやっていくことになる。そういう意味で、僕はこの最初のふたつの小説に僕なりの深い個人的愛着を持っている。この二冊の本には様々な思い出がしみついている。楽しいこともあったし、あまり思いだしたくないこともある。この全体に収録するにあたって、多くの短編は多少なりとも加筆しているわけだが、この二作についてはまったく筆を入れなかった。入れ始めるときりがないだろうと思ったせいもあるが、あえて入れたくないという気持ちの方が強かった。先にも書いたように、このふたつの作品はある種の不完全さと表裏一体となって成立していると思うからである。読者のみなさんにはあるいは御不満もあるかもしれない。でも理解していただきたい。これが僕だったのだし、結局のところどこまでいってもこれが僕なのだ。

(Pinball, 1973) was also the final full-length novel I wrote at night on my kitchen table. Shortly after, I completely changed my lifestyle and made a go of it as a dedicated full-time writer. In that sense, I have my own personal deep sense of attachment to these first two novels. All sorts of memories are ingrained in these two books. There were fun things as well as things I don’t really want to remember. In the process of putting together this Complete Works, I made minor revisions to most of the short stories, but I didn’t lay a finger on either of these two. Partly I felt like if I did start to change them, there would’ve been no end to the revisions, but I also felt very strongly that I shouldn’t dare change anything. This is because, as I mentioned previously, these two works came into being with a certain incompleteness and became tightly linked. As readers, you may be somewhat dissatisfied, but please understand: This was me, and no matter how far I go, it still is me. (VIII)

I’m still reading through the new translation of Pinball, 1973, and I don’t actually have paperback copies of either novel (which generally have the original text), so I can’t confirm whether Murakami’s claim is true or not, but I have finished comparing the two translations of Hear the Wind Sing. While there don’t seem to be any line by line changes, there is at least one somewhat major adjustment.

The new translation ends with Chapter 40, which feels much like a postscript because Murakami spends the short chapter discussing the fictional writer Derek Hartfield (or “Heartfield” in the Birnbaum edition). Birnbaum’s translation, however, has an additional postscript which is labeled as such and is not numbered. Here is what may be the original ending:

Heartfield, Again
(In lieu of a postscript)

If I hadn’t encounter the writer Derek Heartfield, I probably wouldn’t be writing novels. While it’s not for me to say, I surely would have taken up a completely different path from my present one.

When I was in high school, I bought up a number of Heartfield paperbacks that some merchant marine had left in a Kobe secondhand bookstore. Fifty yen apiece they were. If the place hadn’t been a bookstore, I’d hardly have thought them books, they looked so strange. The garish covers were all but torn off, the pulp pages discolored to orange. The books had probably logged on some cargo ship or cruiser along with this common crewman, then rode his bunk across time and the Pacific to wind up on my desk.

* * *

Some years later, I went over to America. A short trip just to visit Heartfield’s grave. Thomas McClure, the enthusiastic (and only) Heartfield scholar, had written me the location. “It’s a small grave,” the letter read, “the size of a high-heel point. Be careful not to miss it.”

From New York I caught a casket of a Greyhound bus and arrived in that tiny Ohio town at seven in the morning. I was the only passenger to get off there. The graveyard lay across a field on the edge of town. A graveyard bigger than the town itself. Overhead the skylarks were singing as they traced circles in the sky.

It look one solid hour to find Heartfield’s grave. I made an offering of some dusty primroses I picked in the surrounding fields, put my hands together in prayer, crouched down, and had a cigarette. There, under the even May sun, life and death both seemed equally cheap. I stretched out face up and closed my eyes, just listening to the skylarks for hours and hours.

The beginnings of this novel are there. Exactly where it has all led, even I have no idea. But as Heartfield would say, “Compared to the complexity of the universe, this world of our is like the brain of a worm.”

I only wish it were so.

* * *

In closing, I’d like to thank the aforementioned Thomas McClure for letting me quote several passages from his magnum opus, The legend of the Sterile Stars (1968), for the sections on Heartfield.

May 1979

(129-130)

It feels like Murakami overwrote his ending, and maybe he realized that when he put together the Complete Works. Perhaps this doesn’t really count as a revision—Murakami isn’t tinkering here but rather just drawing back the tape so that it doesn’t include that last little bit. I wish I had a 文庫本 copy to check the original text. Any readers have one handy?

Pigeon

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It’s that time of year again. Time for me to build up my hopes and dreams for Murakami to win the Nobel Prize for Literature only to have them dashed by some Norwegian guy.

I don’t actually get my hopes up anymore—I feel like I have a more objective view of Murakami’s work now, so I see why there’s just as good a chance that he never wins—but I am a sucker for tradition. So on that note…

Welcome to the Eighth Annual How to Japanese Murakami Fest!

With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, I will post a small piece of Murakami translation/analysis/revelation once a week from now until the announcement. You can see past entries in the series here:

Year One: Boobs, The Wind, Baseball, Lederhosen, Eels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year Two: Hotel Lobby Oysters, Condoms, Spinning Around and Around, 街・町, The Town and Its Uncertain Wall, A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year Three: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs, The Library, Old Dreams, Saying Goodbye, Lastly
Year Four: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa, Last Line
Year Five: Jurassic Sapporo, Gerry Mulligan, All Growns Up, Dance, Mountain Climbing
Year Six: Sex With Fat Women, Coffee With the Colonel, The Librarian, Old Man, Watermelons
Year Seven: Warmth, Rebirth, Wasteland, Hard-ons, Seventeen, Embrace

passenger

This year I’m too short on time to continue my Hard-boiled Wonderland project for the whole month (I’ve gotten mired in an awfully long chapter which I will hopefully complete at some point), so I thought I would take a look at material from the 自作を語る pamphlets that Murakami included with his Complete Works. He used these to provide commentary on his writing process. Jay Rubin has used a number of excerpts in his book, and Murakami has rewritten many of those stories over and over, such as the baseball origin.

Recently Murakami told this story again as an introduction for the new, official translations of his first two novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973. This intro has been published in The Telegraph in full.

I read it without really noticing anything until a friend said to me, “Aren’t passenger pigeons extinct?” Yet Murakami claims to have encountered a passenger pigeon on the day he learned he was a finalist for the writing competition that he eventually won. I went looking for this passage in the Japanese. Obviously this isn’t identical to the one in The Telegraph; it’s a different version, one Murakami wrote 25 years ago for the Complete Works, but he’s writing about the same moment. Let’s take a look:

『風の歌を聴け』が最終選考に残ったと『群像』編集部のMさんから知らされた日のことをよく覚えている。それは春の始めの日曜日の朝のことだった。僕はもう三十になっていた。その頃には新人賞に応募したことさえすっかり忘れていたので（原稿を送ったのは秋だった）、電話がかかってきて、最終選考に残りました、と言われたとき、仰天してしまった。それからとても嬉しくなった。僕は作家になってからいろんな喜びを体験したけれど、あれほど嬉しかったことは一度もない。新人賞そのものを取ったときですらあれほど嬉しくはなかった。その電話を切ってから女房とふたりで外に散歩に出た。そして千駄ヶ谷小学校の前で、羽に傷を負って飛べなくなった鳩をみつけた。僕はその鳩を両手に抱いたまま、原宿まで歩いて、表参道の交番に届けた。その間ずっと鳩は僕の手の中でどきどきと震えていた。その微かな生命のしるしと、温かみを僕は今でも手のひらに鮮やかに思いだすことができる。それはぼんやりとした暖かな春の朝だった。貴重な生命の匂いがあたりに満ちていた。たぶん新人賞を取ることになるだろうな、と僕は思った。何の根拠もない予感として。

そして実際に僕は償を取った。

I remember really well the day that M-san from the Gunzō editorial department called to say that Hear the Wind Sing made it to the finalists. It was a Sunday morning in early spring. I had already turned 30. At that point I had completely forgotten that I submitted to the contest (I sent the manuscript in the fall), so when the phone rang and they said, you made it to the finalists, I was shocked. Then incredibly happy. I’ve experienced all different sorts of joy since becoming a writer, but never have I been as happy as that. I wasn’t even as happy as that when I actually won the New Writer’s contest. After getting off the phone, I went out for a walk with my wife. We found a pigeon with an injured wing that couldn’t fly in front of Sendagaya Elementary School. I walked to Harajuku with the pigeon in my hands and brought it to the police box in Omotesando. It shivered nervously in my hands the whole time. Even now I can vividly remember that faint sign of life and its warmth in the palms of my hands. It was a vaguely warm spring morning. The area was filled with the smell of precious life. I thought to myself, maybe you’ll win the New Writer’s prize. A sort of premonition without any basis.

And then I actually won the prize.

As you can see from the Japanese, he uses 鳩. Passenger pigeon is リョコウバト or 旅行鳩. Makes me curious to see what word the original Japanese for the piece from The Telegraph uses. I wonder whether the editors at The Telegraph lodged any complaints or even noticed (or whether the translator, Ted Goossen, did). I imagine that the Japanese editions may get rereleased in Japan, maybe even in a combined text, along with this intro essay, so we might be able to check at some point.

Other than that the story is almost identical. Murakami is not as emphatic about how “bright and clear” the day was in this version, although I’m not sure if I’ve rendered ぼんやりとした correctly. Is it modifying the kind of heat on the day?

Next week I’ll try to take something from the Pinball, 1973 section, and I’ll continue on through his works all this month. Check back next week!

Cool Greeting – おす

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osu

I’m in The Japan Times this week: “Jiko-PR gives job seekers a rare chance to brag in Japanese.”

Ostensibly I introduce some 自己PR verbiage, but I really just wanted a chance to talk about エール, which is one of my favorite Japanese words because it feels kind of funny/awkward as a Japanese version of “yell.” (Although not so strange when you think of it as “ale.”)

(This would also make an excellent entry into my series of inequalities: エール ≠ yell, not really.)

Apparently the Japanese native checker at the JT wasn’t sure about my description of the エール, which is a pep rally-type cheer for a team/individual, and after sleuthing on YouTube a bit, I’m starting to realize that エール are different everywhere. I also realized I left out an important element of the cheer at the school where I worked.

The word I left out is おす. Kotobank has a great definition:

道などで出会った時の挨拶（あいさつ）の語。男子学生など若い男性が，仲間内で用いる。おっす。

When I was at the propeller company (search: propeller), I remember all of the factory guys saying おす/おっす in the morning (when I 出会ったd them on the 道, clearly) and me having no idea what they were talking about. I didn’t have the confidence to imitate them, so I just went with the standard おはようございます and vaguely thought that maybe おはようございます = おはようございます? Which was exactly right, if this dictionary is to be trusted:

osu2

It probably would have been fine to use おす with the factory guys, but not with my coworkers in the design section, who didn’t have to sweat nearly as much as those guys.

The おす in the エール also acted as a greeting of sorts. The エール went like this:

1. おす! (Deliverer bows to receiver.)
2. これから＿＿＿＿＿(team name, individual surnameの/のために)エールを送る!
3. フレー(right arm extended diagonally into air)! (Audience claps three times.) フレー (left arm extended diagonally into air)! (Audience claps three times.)
4. __ __ __ / __ __ __ __ (three- or four-syllable identifier: school name, individual surname/given name, team name; arms bent from elbow in multiple directions along with syllable)!
5. (Deliverer lowers arms to middle of body and then raises them slowly as audience yells, rising in volume, kind of generally in anticipation of the core part of エール)!
6. ウィンウィン__ __ __ / __ __ __ __! (repeated three times by all)
7. (Primal scream with lunge and arm extended forward)!
8. おす! (Deliverer bows to receiver.)

The おす was bread for the エール sandwich, as it were.

So I’m curious about what kind of エール you have witnessed. What were the procedures? When were they used?

In addition to pep rallies, エール were given for departing teachers in the privacy of a 送別会. Generally a fellow teacher in same subject/department was called upon to deliver the cheer. It was a lot of fun to participate by chanting ウィンウィン along with the deliverer, and I secretly always wanted to have the chance to try one but was also relieved I never had to.

Alas, such is the life of an extroverted introvert. Japan’s codified rituals, including エール, can make this easier for some of us, I believe, because they provide more clearly coded social actions.

I Heard That – 別件

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bekken

The new guy at work is a loud talker, and he often powwows with the guy in the office next to mine, which has been a huge boon for my I Heard That strategy. It’s difficult to tell exactly what they’re talking about, but I do get the drift of some conversations, and it’s impossible not to take in (at least subconsciously) the rhythm of the language.

I caught a great piece of language the other day. The two of them had been talking about something and then the loud talker said 全然別件なんですが to change the subject.

This is a great little phrase, one that I would categorize as a type of Airbag Phrase. The original Airbag Phrases help cushion requests, but on their most basic level they act as preparatory transitions that help the listener understand what is going to happen next in the conversation. I always feel like a Jedi when I use them: These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

別件 (べっけん) is a nice compound that follows the Na-nominal + Noun pattern: 別 a separate 件 topic.

Readers should recognize 全然 (ぜんぜん) as an adverb that usually precedes negative adjectives and verbs and implies “not ____ at all” or “completely not ____”: 全然おもしろくない (not interesting at all), 全然おいしくない (not delicious at all), etc.

In casual situations, 全然 gets attached to positive adjectives and verbs to express a good totality: 全然大丈夫 (totally okay), 全然平気 (completely fine), etc. When I was studying abroad, one of my Japanese friends told me that she knew my Japanese was getting good because I used 全然 in this context. It sounds very natural but is relatively casual, so I’d recommend not using it with superiors. Loud talker happens to be the superior to the guy in the office next to mine, so it works out okay, but I doubt that he would use it with his own boss.

In this case 全然 gets attached to 別件 to imply how drastically different the next conversation topic is. I think this is an especially useful phrase for Japanese as a Second Language students; phrases like this will make your speaking seem more natural and less like surrealist poetry, jumping willy nilly from one topic to the next.

2nd JLPP Translation Competition English Quotes

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Just a quick post to share some knowledge. I’m working on my translations for the 2nd JLPP Translation Competition. It’s a little late to get started if you haven’t already, but if you’re working on 「昭和が発見したもの」, then this might be useful.

In the essay, there are several quotes from foreign scholars given in Japanese. I think it’s a mistake to try and translate these yourself. The translations really should be provided by the JLPP, in my opinion, because not including them tests your Google skills rather than your translation ability.

At any rate, I believe I’ve managed to track them all down (so far), and I thought I’d share them. Here they are:

Isaiah Berlin: “I have lived through most of the twentieth century without, I must add, suffering personal hardship. I remember it only as the most terrible century in Western history.”

René Dumont: “I see it (the twentieth century) only as a century of massacres and wars.”

William Golding: “the most violent century in human history”

Peter Gay: “It remains one of the achievements of which the dismal twentieth century can rightfully boast: it has raised Mozart’s music—all of it—to the eminence it deserves.”

Hope that helps.

I Heard That – よく出る

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yoku deru

Despite the fact that I work at a Japanese office, I use English most of the time. I do the occasional translation, have the occasional conversation in Japanese, and read the occasional Japanese email, but Japanese language ability was not a requirement for my position. That said, I’m being exposed to much more Japanese than I was when I was in New Orleans, and for this I am thankful.

As a Japanese language student not in Japan, you have to be a collector of sorts, and the less frequent your encounters with Japanese are, the more you have to hoard and delight in those encounters. This can be true even if you’re immersed: It’s easy to turn off your Japanese ears if you’re bored or tired or surrounded by people who are insufferable. Maintain vigilance.

On this note, I’ve been trying to do a better job of collecting these little bits of conversation and force them to roll around in my head a bit. I thought I’d try to post some of those here and give the stories behind them in a new series…I need something to get me going, and sadly my next Japan Times piece won’t be online until the first week of August.

The phrase today is よく出る.

Chicago has been great for Japanese encounters outside of work as well. I recently discovered Conversation Exchange and met up with one language partner already and have another in the works. I’ve also volunteered with JETAA at an old folks home with a sizable Japanese-American population.

We read out the bingo numbers (in English—there are non-Japanese as well), and that’s about it, but they appreciate it and are a lot of fun to see every month. We also have very brief conversations in Japanese with some of the folks. For the first half of the year I was going three times a month to help out a volunteer who couldn’t make it, so they really got to know me.

Because they’re all a bit hard of hearing, we use a big speaker and microphone to do the calling, but even then they have trouble. One woman, who goes by Lillian I think, often double checks the numbers with the others at her table, which includes some younger non-Japanese folks.

One week, I called out a number, and she turned to her tablemates and said セブンティ・フォー? They corrected her to 75, and she said, オー、セブンティ・ファイブ。よく出る—Oh, seventy-five. That one comes up a lot.

The phrase made me smile because it perfectly represents how all the residents think about bingo. Some will come exchange their bingo cards between games because they got an unlucky card. Others grumble conspiracy when a certain number happens to pop up multiple times in a single night.

Volunteering has helped me understand the meditative, hypnotic appeal of bingo, but this is the benefit I get. It’s an hour where I can turn off my phone and call numbers, focus on being in the moment, but I’m not sure if it’s the same for the old folks—they are pretty competitive about it. I guess the thrill of winning is also appealing, as is the benefit of community.

It doesn’t feel like any numbers get drawn more frequently than the others, but you never know: We use a tumbler that spins bingo balls, and none of them are perfectly spherical, so in theory some could be shaped in a way that would make them よく出る.

Pre-JET Japanese Triage

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I gave a short crash course on Japanese for departing JETs at the Consulate-General of Japan at Chicago yesterday, and I thought I would post the handout I gave everyone and add a few links and explanations. The goal of the presentation was to prepare the JETs for schools and classrooms, give them some ideas about how to make requests and say no (two notoriously difficult and delicate things), and to put them in the right mindset to study Japanese.

Pre-JET Japanese Triage Notes.docx

(I can’t get the embedder to work, so here’s a link to the file for now.)

A couple of notes:

I was asked after the presentation whether お+stem+になります is still viable keigo. It absolutely is. The only reason I didn’t include it in the presentation was to simplify things. I think one of the reason keigo seems so difficult at first is because noobs (including myself, long ago) sometimes have difficulty remembering whether to use お+stem+します or お+stem+になります at the moment when you are finally asked to use your keigo. Knowing that passive is an alternative is an easy way to not mess it up. But obviously お+stem+になります is also handy and should eventually be incorporated into your repertoire.

I also shared a few thoughts on teaching at elementary school, so I wanted to be sure to include the link to my videos over at danierusensei on YouTube. 33 different videos for activities you can use in the classroom. Hopefully this allows you to go into the elementary school classroom more prepared than I was.

Karaoke Kotoba – あなた

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I’m in the Japan Times this week: “Keep pounding away and eventually Japanese will reveal its secrets.”

It’s just a little piece about how I finally figured out 使役 (しえき, causative). I mention the Yoshi Ikuzo karaoke song と・も・子, which I learned thanks to one of my host families in Fukushima. My host dad used to sing this song all the time, and he was great at imitating Yoshi’s Tohoku accent.

I mention in the article that the narrator is singing the song for his lost love, but I didn’t have space to introduce what makes this song so special. It starts with a slow, spoken rap about Tomoko, a woman the narrator loves until she goes shopping one day and never returns.

The rap is given in Tohoku-ben as the narrator chases her through the region only to find her pregnant in Hakodate. Somehow she dies between that point and time when he when he pens the song. After the rap, he sings the song, which he terms 遅かったラブソング – Too-late Love Song. The song itself is pretty standard and culminates in a The Boxer-like repetition of ラーララ. The narrator addresses Tomoko directly using あなた, which reminded me of this tweet:

Conveniently it links to my previous Japan Times article about dropping subjects. Beginner students often have trouble understanding why あなた shouldn’t be used (or at least I did), but karaoke is one of the few places where it’s acceptable to use the word because the love songs are often dialogues between two people who are intimate. If you have that intimacy, you can use あなた. Otherwise, stick to surnameさん or nameさん when you want to say “you.”

It’s worth checking out the long rap. There aren’t many good versions on YouTube (check this link as a permasearch for the song), but this one has an imperfect subtitling of the rap:

https://youtu.be/AvDfSnIMcGQ

I haven’t mastered it yet, but on a good day I can make it through the rap without embarrassing myself too much, and then the rest of the song is pretty easy. I do think there is something to be said for memorizing long stretches of spoken Japanese this way. In my experience, it kind of imprints your brain in a way that comes in handy in the future.

This live version has a great example of the causative keigo right at the beginning:

https://youtu.be/RamoeQqhgDE

今日は私の好きな曲を歌わせていただきます。Go ahead, Yoshi, sing whatever song you want.

Cool Word – 場合

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baai

I’m on the Japan Times Bilingual page this week: “In Japanese, mastery of the space-time continuum is just a few words away.”

The intro is inspired by my first ever trip to Japan—an internship with a propeller company. I was taken along on a visit to Misawa Homes, one of the big prefab housing companies in Japan. (Of course the propeller company did business with a modular homes company.) I also got to see model homes in a yet-to-be-populated subdivision. It’s impressive stuff.

The article is a bit heavy on the timing words, so I feel like I gave 場合 short shrift. It is the ultimate hypothetical word, one that can sit in for conditional verbs ending with たら or ば and one that doesn’t require you to perform any mental gymnastics with the verbs. Not that it’s all that difficult to construct the たら or ば forms, but 場合 only really needs the past or present tense.

The easiest way to think of it in English is “In the case of X,” where 場合 means “case.” This also works with constructions (suggested by this site) such as 外国人の場合. (The only proper response to which is “break glass,” I assume?)

I feel like I’ve tweeted out this Chiebukuro link before, but the pronunciation of 場合 is one of those few Japanese words that can vary a little. My first sensei pronounced it ばわい, which always stuck with me. I’ll use it every now and then.