Hello all. Apologies on posting this late — I plum forgot to post the blog on Friday when I finished the J-List update, because I was in a hurry to take my kids to the onsen (Japanese hot springs) on Friday before it got too late. Boy is my face red!
Today’s J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
When you learn a language, you also learn a lot about how your own brain works, especially how vocabulary words and concepts are accepted by the mind. I’m sure that most people have trouble memorizing Japanese names, as they can have a lot of letters and look strange to you if you’re not used to them. As I studied Japanese I found that this got easier partially because I was able to “store” the names in my mind first as Japanese syllables, and later as kanji. If you learn a name like Matsushima, it looks like a jumble of letters, and this is very hard for the brain to fit into memory. All words in Japanese are made up of syllables, and if you’re familiar with kana writing systems this name goes from ten symbols to just four: MA TSU SHI MA. Once you can read the actual kanji (“pine tree” and “island”), it’s down to two, which is much easier for the brain to file away. So all you need to do to memorize a Japanese name is study the language for a couple of years. ^_^ Here’s an example of how two common names look in romaji (the Roman alphabet), hiragana and kanji.
The Japanese do remove shoes before entering a house, but like other aspects of Japan, it’s not quite as simple as that. Two core concepts in Japanese society are uchi (in-group, or inside a person’s home) and soto (outside of the group, or outside of one’s home); shoes are removed when you enter a house because you don’t want to bring the dirt and mud from the outside into your uchi. Indoors, slippers are usually worn as a kind of “indoor shoes,” but if crossing from a western-style room (with wood flooring, the Japanese can’t get enough of wood flooring) to a tatami room, the slippers are removed, in effect making a Japanese-style room inside a modern house a kind of “uchi within an uchi” or a special place that’s somehow more “inside” than the rest of the home. The toilet is also a special area, and there are special toilet slippers which you put on when you enter the bathroom, usually with little pictures of Cupid peeing printed on them. In Japanese schools, students arrive from home and put their shoes in their assigned shoes box, changing into special shoes for wearing inside the school. At my kids’ school there’s a place where kids must go from one building to another, and to solve the problems of having them change their shoes so often they cleverly covered the sidewalk with a roof, in effect defining the outdoor concrete walk as part of the “inside” of the two buildings. Students who play indoor sports like basketball always have two pairs of shoes: one for walking outside and a pair they only wear inside the gym.
The Japanese language has a great many kotowaza or old proverbs, recounting the wisdom of past generations. It’s fun for gaijin to study these proverbs, because no one expects a foreigner to know archaic Japanese sayings. One of my favorite kotowaza is ningen banji saiou-ga-uma which means “All things are like Saiou’s horse.” This refers to an old Chinese story about a man named Saiou whose horse broke his leg — making everyone say how unfortunate he was. Because he had no horse, though, he didn’t have to go off to battle to be killed, so this was a good thing. The moral of the story is, when something good or bad happens, no one can say for sure if it is truly a good or bad thing in the end. Another proverb you hear a lot is ishi no ue ni mo san-nen which is translatable as “Three years sitting on a stone makes it comfortable.” In other words, if you’re going to try something new, keep at it for at least three years before you give up, so you know if you really liked it or not. If you want to see more Japanese proverbs, here’s an interesting page.
