We have a rule at our house: in order to help our kids become bilingual, we only watch DVDs from the U.S., and never bother with Japanese versions of American films released here. Right now my kids are in love with the movie Madagascar, laughing at the antics of Alex the Lion, Marty the Zebra, Melman the Giraffe and Gloria the Hippopotamus at least three times per day, as children are wont to do. My kids learned English in a very “natural” way, spending summers in the U.S., interacting with me and watching movies in English — quite different from the memorizing of grammar and vocabulary that Japanese students must do. I’ve noticed that the two languages sometimes aren’t as “cross-mapped” in my kids’ brains as in my own, and it’s quite common for them to know a word in English but have no idea what it is in Japanese, or vice-versa. I sometimes hold “who can translate this word the fastest” competitions when we’re going somewhere in the car (trying to beat one’s sibling at something is a great natural motivator), and it’s interesting to see how difficult the act of moving a word or phrase from one language to the other is for them, even though they’re perfectly functional in both languages. Recently I saw a news article that said that bilinguals who use two languages on a daily basis have a lower chance of getting dementia in old age due to increased blood flow through the brain. Hopefully we’re doing some long-range good for our kids as we raise them to be a part of both countries.
Any loss of life is a tragedy, and the murder of a human being is especially bad. The number of homicides each year in Japan is low — around 0.9 per 100,000 compared with 7.4 in the U.S. — and out here in semi-rural Gunma murders are so rare they’re talked about for weeks when one occurs. Despite the comparative rarity of homicides here, somehow it seems that the number of uniquely tragic or bizarre killings in Japan is much higher, at least subjectively. Currently Japan has been galvanized by the story of Kaori Mihashi, a 32-year-old Tokyo woman who murdered her allegedly abusive husband by hitting him with a wine bottle while he slept. The body was too heavy for her to lift, so she had the bright idea of taking a saw and carving him up into sections, depositing his torso, legs and head in different parts of the city (they’re still looking for his arms, poor guy). She tried to throw suspicion off of herself by filing a missing person’s report and replying to emails from her husband’s mobile phone as if he were still alive, but the authorities found holes in her story and eventually uncovered the truth.
It’s interesting to observe how kanji functions in society on a daily basis here. In written Japanese, kanji characters are used to write the major nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in a sentence, with hiragana characters added for grammatical elements like the markers for subject and object, past tense, and so on. Names are also generally written using kanji characters, and just as there are alternate spellings for many names in English, there are many choices for writing a name like “Takeshi” (健志、武志、武史、丈志、丈史, たけし, well, you get the idea). When you learn someone’s name, it’s important to learn how to write it properly, and it’s the height of rudeness to write someone’s name with the wrong characters, especially in a business setting. (J-List’s Yasu once changed suppliers because they wrote his name wrong on an invoice.) Part of becoming functionally literate with kanji characters involves learning to describe the kanji for a person or place name to someone over the phone, referring to other words that are written with that character, describing the radical (the part of a kanji used to organize it in a dictionary), and so on. The part of our city J-List is located it in is called Hashie-cho (波志江町, Hashie Town), a rather rare place name, and I’ve had to describe how to write this address so often I’ve got it down pat. “The ‘ha’ is ‘nami’ (波, wave), ‘shi’ is ‘kokorozasu’ (志す, meaning to aim for a goal or take on a challenge), and the ‘e’ (eh) is the first character from ‘Edo’ (江戸, the old name of Tokyo).”
