Tune in Tokio

by Tim Anderson

  Since I’ve already done a little studying on my own in preparation for my lessons, I decide I’ll be clever and thank them for buying me the books and explain that I have some money to pay them, all in Japanese. I practice a few times silently before taking the plunge and adding some vocal cords.

  “

  ,” I say to Yoko when she walks into the room. “Thank you for the books. I’ve brought some money.”

  “O-

  ,” she corrects me, wincing and giggling.

  It’s amazing the difference one little omitted syllable can make. She shakes her head and waves her hand like she’s sending away a bad smell.

  I read in one of Ewan’s books that the syllable “o” is an honorific, placed in front of some words to make them softer or more polite. I’d omitted it in front of the word “money,” and this omission had drastically altered the sound of the sentence, judging from Yoko’s reaction. So instead of saying, “Thank you so much for the books. I’ve brought some money,” I’d actually said something like, “Here’s your money, you greedy bitch. Thanks a fucking lot.”

  It is this kind of tiny but pivotal error that seems so easy to make on a regular basis when trying to communicate in Japanese as a foreigner. When learning a new language, especially one completely unconnected to your mother tongue and filled with such contextual nuance, you’re naked, totally unprotected, walking blind in a brambly and treacherous terrain full of colloquialisms, multiple meanings, varying levels of politeness, and double entendres. I am terrified that one day, while trying to tell someone they look nice, I’ll instead end up saying I want to lick their daughter’s underarms. I’m about to learn what it’s like to be the student crying over his textbook and not the teacher laughing up his sleeve.

  Here’s the thing: if you’re going to learn a new language, you’ve got to be unafraid to make mistakes, relax, and have fun. What I tell my students, in other words. I’d thought I’d been blowing out a bunch of useless hot air, but turns out I was wise beyond my own understanding.

  During the lesson, I sit at the dining room table with my notebook and books in front of me while Yoko and Fumiko team-teach me. They stand on each end of a dry-erase board that they’ve wheeled into the room, and both hold large wooden pointers for easier gesturing. Fumiko, a giggly gal with a frizzy bob, proves herself quite the opposite of her exceptionally put-together mother. She dresses in sweats, doesn’t bother with makeup, and laughs loudly with her mouth wide open-a no-no for women in Japan. Once, at Yoko’s prompting, she covers her mouth and nearly succeeds in knocking a tooth out with her large wooden pointer.

  She drills me on basic pronunciations of the phonetic characters and some simple words and phrases, playfully jabbing me with the pointer whenever I make a mistake. Yoko then takes the reins and corrects my mistake, making me repeat after her until I get it right or I feel like I’m losing my mind, whichever comes first.

  Yoko: KonNIchiwa

  Me: Konichywa

  Yoko: No, no. Konnichiwa

  Me: Konichywa

  Yoko: Kon-NI-chi-wa

  Me: Konichywa

  Fumiko: KON-NI-CHI-WA!! [jab with wooden pointer]

  Me: Konnichiwa!

  Everyone: [applause]

  The ladies escort me through the wonderland that is basic, bottom-rung, just-off-the-boat Japanese, from the different greetings for the different times of day, to expressions for politely leaving work before someone else, expressions for politely refusing more food, expressions for politely asking where the toilet is, expressions for politely requesting something in a restaurant, expressions for politely saying no, you would rather not eat pizza for dinner because you had that shit for lunch, and about what seems like hundreds of different ways of apologizing for what seems like a hundred different things I didn’t realize I could do wrong. We cap things with a session about useful expressions to use when riding in a taxi: saying where you need to go, where to stop, giving directions to a driver, and such. All in all I do pretty well, with a few minor exceptions hardly worth mentioning.

  Yoko/Taxi Driver: Where would you like to go?

  Me: Can you please take me to the park? First, drive straight. And then take a left at the next stoplight. After that, go straight.

  Y/TD: OK, I understand.

  Me: Now please rent a room on the right at the next stoplight.

  Y/TD: Um, I don’t understand.

  We stop the lesson after thirty minutes and prepare to have our meal. I stand nervously, wondering what I should do, while Fumiko sets the table with plates, chopsticks, and teacups and Yoko finishes the yaki soba and salad in the kitchen. Fumiko looks at the job she’s done setting the table, tilts her head in consideration, and goes back into the kitchen and whispers something to Yoko. This prompts Yoko to come survey the table, tuttut, and do some rearranging. She asks me to sit, and she and Fumiko bring out the food: a heaping pan of yaki soba and one whopper of a salad.

  “

  !” Yoko says, prompting me to repeat this standard phrase one says when receiving food.

  “Itydikimasoo!” I beam, and we all dig in. The ladies enjoy a few giggles over my use of the chopsticks. Don’t get me wrong, I can use them, but since I’m left-handed, I have a special way of holding them, just like we southpaws have a unique way of holding pencils and pens. We don’t hold them, per se, we grab them, as if we were trying to strangle the life out of them. I can feed myself with chopsticks, but I prefer to do it alone in a dimly lit room and not in front of a peanut gallery of Japanese critics.

  After dinner, I make my way to the toilet, while Yoko and Fumiko clear the table, clean the dishes, and presumably argue about when the hell Fumiko is going to find a goddamn man and move the hell out of the house. I am delighted to discover in the bathroom a Washlet, one of those high-tech toilets you find in the nicer Japanese restrooms. It has a slew of useful functions, like a butt sprinkler, a heated seat, and a dizzying selection of sound effects to muffle the user’s unseemly emissions.

  Toilets are a national obsession in this country of 100 million people and, if all goes well, 100 million daily turds. But the sheer volume of human waste isn’t the main reason these Washlets are so necessary. It’s the waste of water resulting from the tendency of Japanese women to flush repeatedly in order to mask their own excretory noises. These toilets solve that problem, allowing you to have a seat, choose a rushing water or an oscillating fan sound (a laugh track might be fun), sit back, and let it loose, giving yourself a sprinkle afterwards. And even though I’d gone in there just for a piss, I’m unable to leave without sitting my bare bottom on the heated seat (ahhhhh) and giving myself a little splash. I’m sure I’m blushing on the way out.

  I return to the dining room table to see it set again for the dessert course. But this is no ordinary dessert. Yoko and Fumiko stand by their chairs until I come back to the table, then gesture for me to sit down. They join me, and Yoko begins an elaborate and carefully executed procedure of making and serving the tea. This here, I think to myself, is a Japanese tea ceremony. Just like I’d seen in The Karate Kid Part II. With any luck, this particular tea ceremony will not end with one of the ladies letting her hair down, reaching across the table, and kissing me full on the lips.

  I watch as Yoko performs every action with a studied yet poetic grace. When it comes time for us all to partake, she instructs me on how to turn the cup with three (or is it four?) short, controlled movements and bring it back around to its starting position, at which point she indicates, with nods in my and Fumiko’s directions, that we should now raise the cup to our lips and taste its delicious greenness. We do and then place the cups delicately down onto their saucers.

  We also enjoy some small cakes Yoko had picked up from the local bakery. She slices each in half before passing them to us on saucers and providing us each with a fork the size of Homemaker Barbie’s spatula. I see that the cakes are filled with a mysterious thick brown substance and hope to God it isn’t one of those Japanese con
coctions that looks to be filled with chocolate when actually it’s stuffed with a semisweet bean paste. I bite into it with a smile and, my fears totally confirmed, swallow it as quickly as possible. Lying through my teeth, I proclaim it “

  ” or “Delicious!”

  No sooner have we finished our tea and cakes than Yoko turns to me and asks, “Do you want hear Japanese harp? Maybe I can play for you now.”

  Wow. I’ve had a free Japanese lesson. A delicious free Japanese meal. A front-row seat at a free Japanese tea ceremony. A free Japanese bean paste cake thingy. And now she’s offering to play me music? Of course I want to hear the Japanese harp, that goes without saying. But I have a sinking feeling that I’m setting myself up for some bad karma, accepting all this free stuff without giving anything back. I mean, I had offered her an ear to vent about how awful her husband is, but surely she’s overcompensated me by this point. Let’s see…I could stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, follow this with my famous rendition of “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee,” and finish things off by doing that thing I can do with my left eyeball, but it always takes me so long to uncross my eyes after that.

  Plus, I remember something I’d read in the welcome packet that MOBA had sent me before I’d left the U.S.:

  If you should lose a personal item, such as your wallet or purse, cheer up. It is highly likely that it was turned into the station master or the nearest koban (local police box). Simply show up and make a clear identification.

  No, not that one. This one:

  The Japanese are very preoccupied with maintaining the status quo. It is of utmost importance not to offend anyone, and they are generally uncomfortable saying a direct “no” to a request. So instead of saying “no,” often they will utter a noncommittal “maybe.” This should be construed as “no.”

  Yoko had said the word “maybe.” So does she really want to play the Japanese harp for me, or is this just her Japanese way of saying, “OK, Tim, look, I’ve given you a lesson, I’ve fed you, introduced you to my daughter, hell, I even did a dang tea ceremony for you, which I’ve never even learned to do properly. What’s next? Need a haircut?”

  What to do? I really want to hear that harp. I’d also been hoping that later she would bring out her samurai sword and kendo sticks.

  I finally decide that I’ll bring my viola and washboard to the next lesson and give Yoko and Fumiko a little show. I’ll also get Jimmy to send me some Pepperidge Farm Sausalito cookies and S’mores Pop-Tarts so I can impress the ladies with some sweet, sweet Americana.

  “That’d be great,” I reply.

  Yoko and Fumiko promptly stand and move into the living room, where they start rearranging the furniture. They shove the coffee table against the far wall, open one of the sliding doors and chuck a sitting chair into the bedroom, and move a bunch of potted plants out onto the balcony. The gaping hole left in the middle of the living room is soon filled with the arrival of a humongous Japanese harp-a giant ocean liner coasting into a harbor. Yoko and Fumiko bring out the four-foot-long instrument, place it on two stands, one on each end, and start positioning little white plastic pieces under the strings in order to tune it.

  I’d never known the Japanese harp was so massive. I’d seen old drawings of men and women sitting cross-legged on the floor strumming them, but in contemporary Japan, everything seems to get smaller and smaller with time, from cell phones to computers to cameras to paperback books to quantities of breathable air. Seeing the ladies drag in this bulky and unwieldy piece of polished wood with dangling strings and begin to transform it into an instrument, I think how, in Japan, size reduction of modern obsessions is one thing, but respect for tradition is another.

  “Shrink everything else,” I can hear the old Japanese samurai say as they collapse their swords down to something the size of toothpicks and place them in their back pockets. “But let the harp remain large enough to demand its own room.”

  Yoko finishes setting the harp to the right pitch, grabs some sheet music off the bookshelf, and then brings a chair over and sits down with the harp before her. She slides the little string picks on her fingers, bends toward the harp, and begins to strum and sing along to an old Japanese ballad. It’s a vaguely familiar melody, yet I can’t figure out why.

  “I’ve heard this before,” I say as Yoko continues singing and Fumiko starts picking her cuticles.

  “Sakura…Sakura…Sana denchi to o-mo-u…”

  Yoko stops. “You want play?” she asks.

  “Oh, no, I can’t. I…” I can’t think of a decent reason not to. So Yoko stands and allows me to take her place in front of the harp. She instructs me briefly on how to read the notes of the Japanese score she’d been playing. Then she gives me the picks off her fingers so I can put them on. But I can’t. They’re too small for my fingers, naturally.

  “No ploblem,” Yoko assures me as she goes into the other room. “More large size I have.” She reappears, bringing a few more picks for me to try on. As I attempt one after the other without success, I decide that big Western men were not meant to play this instrument.

  “You can play no picks.” Freestyle.

  I strum the notes of the song, and slowly, pluck by pluck, I get the hang of it. Yoko and Fumiko sit watching me, Fumiko intermittently gnawing on her fingernails and sucking up the blood, Yoko looking at her disapprovingly. There are lots of stops and starts and plenty of foul notes plucked, but I get through it without hurting myself or damaging the instrument, which I consider a victory. Yoko and Fumiko obviously do as well, for their applause at the end of my performance is impassioned and relieved.

  It’s getting late, so after the women dismantle the harp again and dock it in another room, I gather my books and papers and prepare to leave. As I put the books into my backpack, Yoko tells me my homework is to learn to write the first ten characters in the Kanji book and to study the two phonetic alphabets, Katakana and Hiragana. I come very close to crying and begging for her benevolent mercy, but I can hardly say no after the good time she’s shown me.

  So I tell her I’ll do my best, bow, say goodbye to Fumiko, who’s standing with her hands behind her back cracking her knuckles, give Yoko a gentle American handshake, almost fall over trying to put my shoes on while bowing and saying goodbye, and step out into the hall.

  Yoko and Fumiko smile at me from the door as I walk to the elevator, their bright faces flanked by those of Bambi, Thumper, and a half dozen dwarves. All the way home I think of the gloating I’m going to do about all the Japanese culture I’d imbibed in one evening.

  The next day at work, I walk into the teachers’ room and greet everyone warmly, waiting desperately for someone to ask me what I did last night or why I was in such a good mood or how to ask a Japanese taxi driver to drive me to the train station.

  I see Joy and light up, because I know she’s also taught Yoko, and given her current interest in all things Japan, she’ll probably be very interested in hearing about my evening of cultural immersion.

  “I had my first lesson with Yoko last night,” I begin.

  “Oh, cool!” she said. “That’s great! Did she do the tea ceremony for you?”

  “The what?”

  “The tea ceremony. When I went a couple nights ago, she and Fumiko did a tea ceremony for me, and then we all sat around and took turns playing the Japanese harp. It was really fun.”

  Am I just one of many? It can’t be. I am chosen.

  “Oh, and she made yaki soba, and I learned how to give directions to a cab driver.”

  “Uh…that’s cool. Yeah, we did all that.”

  “She also showed me a little bit about Japanese flower arranging, which was kind of cool, because, you know, I was wanting to take a class or something, and now I think I’ll just pay her, you know, because she’ll give me a good rate I think, and she’ll, like, teach me Japanese at the same time. But you know what? To tell you the truth, I was most interested in the beautiful kimono collection she has. Did she show them to y
ou?”

  “No.”

  “God, you should see some of the designs! Oh, and her bonsai garden! Absolutely gorgeous. That woman can do anything, I swear. Oh! And she wants me to teach her Spanish! Que magnifica, no?”

  “Oh, yeah, Spanish, that’s great. And the bonsai garden was…you know, just totally amazing. Very artistic.” The lies just pour out of me.

  I sit down to look at my first students’ folders and pick a lesson, wondering if I should ask if Joy knows about Yoko’s husband’s philandering and her problems getting Fumiko married. I decide not to, figuring I need to hold on to something of the whole Yoko experience that is mine and only mine, even if it’s also everyone’s.

  I pick out a lesson for my class and pull out my new Japanese book, starting in on the first chapter.

  The first bell rings, and the other teachers begin flooding in. Joy tells everyone about my night at Yoko’s, and the questions start flying:

  “Did you have those tiny cakes?”

  “Wasn’t her apartment beautiful?”

  “Did she play you any Disney songs on the harp?”

  “Fumiko is always messing with her fingers!”

  Hmph.

  So my experience at Yoko’s wasn’t my own. That’s OK. The key is that I have begun to break down that language barrier and expose myself to the other side of the world. And I’m eating some great food in the meantime. It will happen brick by brick and stone by stone, but it will happen, and one day, I’ll look straight through to where a wall once stood with my Western eyes and not only be able to give a taxi driver directions, I’ll be able to ask him his opinion of the flat tax and banter with him good-naturedly about how dumb the U.S. health care system is.

  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There are some basics we must cover before shooting for the stars. Like talking about food in the free conversation room, for example.