Japanese have always impressed me as a very stable people, often living their entire lives in the same area and having strong local communities. My wife’s family has been living in our city for as long as records exist, and she grew up knowing everyone in our neighborhood. There’s a word that describes a close friend you’ve had since childhood, osana-najimi 幼なじみ (oh-SAH-NAH NAH-gee-mee) and now our children play with the kids of neighbors my wife used to play with when she was small. When our kids started elementary school, they went to the school that my wife went to 30 years ago…which was also the school that her mother went to before that, something that totally boggles my American mind. I’ve moved many times during my life, living on the East Coast of the U.S., New Zealand, San Diego and ultimately Japan, and the idea of having roots that go back that far is really amazing to me.
There’s nothing more interesting than studying a foreign language, of learning the way its unique grammatical rules work so you can form sentences and ideas and communicate with others. Language is always rule based, and even dialects like Ebonics and Cockney which may sound “wrong” to speakers of standard English are formed around their own suites of unique grammatical rules. The Japanese make heavy use of foreign loan words, usually borrowed from English, but since the grammar of the two languages is different, something is needed to “bridge” the two. Conveniently, there are two such grammatical aides built right into Japanese. The first is the adjective particle na which allows an adjective to be plugged into a Japanese sentence without breaking any rules, and you can hear phrases like surimu na onna スリムな女 (a slim, slender woman), dandii na otoko ダンディーな男 (a “dandy” or handsome man), and torendii na dorama トレンディーなドラマ (the latest trendy drama on television). I’ve even heard the word “epoch-making” used in this fashion — as in, epokkumeekingu na ibento エポックメーキングなイベント (in case you are wondering, the word also comes up automatically in the Japanese input method), presumably meaning an event that is truly Earth-shattering in nature. The other tool to help foreign words be used in Japanese is the catch-all verb suru which means “to do.” Words you might hear in Japanese include getto suru ゲットする (GET-toh suru, to get or find something), doraibu suru ドライブする (doh-RAH-ee-bu suru, to go for a drive), kamingu auto suru カミングアウトする (kah-min-GU ah-OO-toh suru, lit. to do “coming out” or to come out of the closet about something), and of course, sekkusu suru セックスする (to have, well, you know). The staff at J-List uses lots of English in their Japanese, too, and you can hear terms like sukyan suru (to scan something), pikku suru (to pick products in preparation for shipping) being used everyday.
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Hanging around Akiba. This is an advertisement for a pachinko machine company. His hair is a big pachinko ball, see?
