Japan and its paper doors, young people who imitate James Dean, and bilingualism tricks with kids

Japan’s come a long way from the classic image of “paper houses,” but paper is still commonly used in modern Japanese homes. Shoji are sliding wooden doors with paper glued to them, allowing you to separate rooms and provide privacy and insulation. The doors slide sideways, so they don’t take up any room in cramped houses, and they bring a healthy Japanese touch to any room, even western-style ones. Shoji have a tendency to turn yellow when they get old, so every few years you should replace the paper. Tearing the paper off the doors is just about the funniest thing in the world, and our kids are all too happy to help us do this when called upon. The shoji paper market is quite large, with many different companies competing to sell you the best paper for your shoji doors. Variations include shoji that are hard to tear (they’ve got cotton fibers in them), shoji you can hang by just running an iron over the paper, and shoji with various interesting patterns woven into the paper.

When I first got to Japan, I had an interesting experience: while sampling the local “Kentucky” I saw two high school girls standing around smoking and trying to look tough. They noticed me, and one boasted, “We are furyo!” I didn’t know the word at the time, but the joy of kanji is that you can often understand concepts by working out what the characters would mean when put together. Fu is “not” and ryo is “good,” and the combination (pronounced foo-RYOH, in kanji, 不良) means “bad” in a juvenile delinquint sort of way. From the rockabilly boom of the last decade to the more ominous boso-zoku street gangs who drive down the street on motorcycles modified to be extra loud and annoying, a lot of Japanese young people seem to be dedicated to this James Dean-esque idea of acting tough, of rebelling against mainstream Japanese society by smoking, cutting school uniform skirts very high, and (gasp!) dying their hair brown. Another word for these mostly-harmless street punk types is yankii (YAHN-kee), which is often thought to be related to the word “yankee” (because of their “American” colored hair), but it actually comes from a word in Osaka dialect. Whenever there’s a Japanese festival you’ll see these tough-looking kids out in force, standing around in their funny baggy clothes and looking vaguely scary. I used to make a point of approaching them and starting improptu English conversation classes with them, since their shy reactions when asked to speak English were priceless.

It’s funny, the way children pick up language. As my kids were growing up, I spoke English to them, although they’d usually speak Japanese back to me despite my efforts to pretend I didn’t understand. When we’d go to the U.S., my kids would get a real dose of English from the other family members, and (being kids) would double their vocabularies every day. One day when my son was about four, I asked him, “Would you mind if I went to dinner with your Mom tonight?” I intentionally used a phrase using “mind,” which is the bane of Japanese people since you have to answer “no” if you mean “yes” and vice-versa, to see if he understood the question. To my surprise, he knew about this and answered me correctly (“No, I don’t mind, you can go”). Somehow the kid had internalized a difficult grammatical structure that still torments his mother from time to time.

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