Japanese

“Studying Japanese” is something that can feel omnipresent as a foreigner living in Japan. I would think no matter how fluent you become, this does not really change.

I haven’t studied Japanese in many years. I play video games in Japanese. I talk to my wife in Japanese. As part of my job in HR, I talk to many external vendors and government offices in Japanese. However, I don’t really study Japanese.

Since I changed from working at a Japanese university to working as a foreign company, I have been using Japanese a lot less, but a lot more externally. However, as the only HR person in my company, for whatever reason I have been a lot less shy about my lack of natural fluency. When I worked in a Japanese university, most people’s Japanese was really quite mindful and well constructed. I don’t really find that is the case in my current situation.

What I am trying to say is that I use Japanese a lot in daily life, but I haven’t really been studying it, or trying to improve it. There are chances that what I am doing that works is incorrect, and everyone around me just gets used to it. Sometimes when I speak with people I haven’t met before about complex topics, they have a hard time understanding me. I of course blame them for their blatant racism and oppression of me, but perhaps if you’re not used to how I speak Japanese, then I am very hard to understand?

I got up early this morning, and instead of being mindless on the old phone, I decided to turn on the TV. (Amazing to be in a world where turning on the TV is seen as the non-mindless action!)

They were analyzing poems and tanka, which my dictionary tells me is a 31-mora Japanese poem. (I didn’t look up mora).

In this non-business world, where people are playing with language for the expression of something in the soul, as opposed to the functioning of administration or accumulation of capital, language (perhaps obviously) becomes very different.

It makes me think about all the shortcomings of my Japanese, and how having better Japanese can enrich my life so much. Not just in this poetic sense, but this obvious shortcoming allows me to understand more the shortcomings in talking with my wife, my Japanese at work, and in other instances where it is “good enough for a foreigner” for sure, but let’s not shit ourselves, more fulfillment and meaning can be had.

(Note for my longtime readers: my wife appears to be getting better all around, which is allowing thoughts to spill out of me.)