Conversations From Japanese Class

I’ve written before that sometimes when people come to Japan, they become so overwhelmed with the differences they ignore the similarities. This is true with the Japanese language as well.

At first glance, English and Japanese are nothing alike. Besides the differences in word origins and grammar, even the very manner of speaking is different. As a friend of mine once observed, “It’s not just the fact that they use different words over here, it’s the fact that they talk about different things. If I literally translated into English all the conversation I hear in my office, it wouldn’t even make sense.”

Perhaps a good example of this is the common English greeting, “How are you?”, although it can be literally translated, would never be used in Japanese. For one thing in most situations it is rude to use the second person pronoun. Secondly it is often regarded as intrusive to ask how someone is doing.
The closest Japanese equivalent would be “O genki desu ka?” which literally means “well?”

Being overwhelmed by these differences, it wasn’t until much later that I slowly began to realize how much of Japanese conversation is essentially the same as English. Or, how much of Japanese conversation, like English, is just pretty much people wasting their breath saying stupid things.

My Japanese teacher is one of my favorite examples. I love listening to her talk. During one class, she was explaining the difference between the Japanese words “shorai” and “mirai”, both of which translate into the word “future” in English.

“Shorai means your own future,” she said. “Like when students talk about what kind of job they want to have when they finish school. That’s shorai. Mirai means the distant future. Like when we talk about spaceships and men on the moon.” She paused to think and then quickly added, “actually we have all that now, but you know what I mean.”

I thought it was absolutely brilliant. Although she had been talking in Japanese, it was exactly the sort of thing I could easily imagine saying myself in English. I began to think that a lot of the conversations we have at Japanese class would be fun to write down.

Our teacher is a Japanese woman in her mid thirties. Us students are mostly in our twenties, but even though the teacher is a few years older than us, and married, I think all of the guys in the class have at one time or another confessed to each other about having a secret crush on her. She’s not really beautiful in the classic sense, but she’s got a lot of spunk and a real charming personality.

During class the conversation often gets sidetracked. At one point the teacher was explaining how the Japanese language was changing. We were talking about the words for “nurse” and the teacher said, “Actually the word ‘kangofu’ we don’t use anymore. Some people think it’s discriminatory, because it applies only to women, so now we have a word for nurse, ‘kangoshi’ that can incorporate both sexes.” This caused some confusion in the class, and so she explained further. “It’s the same in English, isn’t it? Instead of ‘Chairman’ you now say ‘Chairperson’.”

“But our textbook uses ‘kangofu’” someone said.

“Yeah, the new word hasn’t caught on yet,” the teacher explained. “But in official publications they do their best to use the gender-neutral words now.”

“Speaking of discrimination words, I have a question,” I said. “This might be kind of a weird question, but…”

“It’s okay,” the teacher replied, giving me the nod to go ahead.

“Is there a Japanese word that is discriminatory against Japanese people?”

The teacher gave me a cautious look. “Why do you want to know that?”

“I’m just curious. It’s something that has been bothering me for a long time. A while back I was reading a Japanese comic book about two Japanese people in China, and the Chinese people start throwing things at them, and calling them ‘Japanese dogs’. So I’m just curious if that’s a standard phrase, or if the author made it up.” The teacher still didn’t seem to understand, so I tried to explain further. “When I watch American movies, and there are discriminating comments made against Japanese people like, ‘fucking Jap’ or something, the Japanese subtitles always just repeat the English. Is there a way you can translate those words into Japanese, or do you always have to use the English?”

“Of course there are no Japanese words for that,” the teacher said. “Why would we invite discriminatory words for ourselves?”

“So you just use the English all the time? But what do you do if you are translating from Chinese? Does everything just translate into ‘Jap’”?

“Really why do you want to know this?” the teacher asked. “You’re not planning on using these words anytime soon are you?”

“It’s just something that I’ve been curious about for a long time,” I said. “So much of Japanese comic books deal with Japanese people being bullied by Chinese or Korean people. How do they translate the anti-Japanese remarks into Japanese? In America we have discriminatory words for everyone. Even ourselves.”

The person next to me, a Polish American, agreed with that remark. “In America telling Pollock jokes are really popular,” he said. “People think Polish people are stupid.”

“It’s true,” I said. “When I was a kid my first exposure to Poland was through those jokes. I told Pollock jokes before I even knew that Poland was a real country.” This produced some laughter and murmurs of disbelief from the non-Americans present, so I just shrugged and said, “It’s bad of course, but that’s how it really was. I really thought Polish people were stupid because all I knew were the jokes.”

“Why do you have those jokes in America?” asked the teacher.

This is something neither I nor the other American could adequately answer. We batted around a couple of theories, such as Poland losing so easily to Germany during World War II, or tensions in America with the Polish immigrant community, but neither of us really knew. Does anyone out there know how these jokes originated? It’s something that I’ve been curious about for some time now.

The teacher eventually answered my question. “In China they sometimes add the Kanji for ‘small’ in front of the Kanji for ‘Japan’. It can be read ‘shonippon’. We don’t ever use it, but we know what it means. If you watch TV, sometimes you can see it on the signs of the anti-Japanese demonstrators in China. But best not to use it in front of your Japanese friends.”
Right about this time my pen, which I have a bad habit of tapping against the table, slipped out of my hand as I was rapidly jiggling it back and forth and flew across the room, almost hitting the teacher. She looked over at me sharply. I tried to put on an innocent face and pointed to the person sitting next to me. “Oh no you don’t,” she said. “That was you. I saw it. You’re such a strange person.”