Caught a show on a local TV station (Tochigi TV) warning people against drinking and driving in the upcoming year-end drinking season.

During the report I heard, for the first time, the Japanese word for “designated driver,” which is handoru keepaa (handle keeper).

As is often the case, English words were used to create an expression that probably makes sense only to Japanese people.

After sitting around until 3:00 a.m. waiting for the site to come back on line after it decided to drop off the radar screen for a while, I am simply too tired to post anything.

In the meantime, here is a photo of some models in Taiwan with radishes painted on their legs to promote the 2006 Touwu (Taiwant) Radish Festival.

It seems that the Taiwanese refer to fat legs as “radish legs,” just as they do in Japan (where the word is daikon ashi).

Good night!

I’m often asked what the Japanese think of foreigners who go out of their way to learn the language. I guess the idea is that Japan, with its long and unique history that included 250 years of isolation from the rest of the world, might not always be happy that “foreign barbarians” are taking in their linguistic secrets.

I’ve found that nothing could be further from the truth, and by and large, Japanese are always pleased to meet a foreigner who has learned their language. Most of them have gotten over the silly idea that Japanese is the most difficult language in the world, and they can even handle the idea of “white boy” foreigners being able to write kanji.

Popular variety shows often include a token Japanese-bilingual foreigner who can make witty banter with the other “talents” and add a bit of spice to the show. Some of the more interesting guests include godfather of gaijin Dave “dyes his hair blonde, ha-ha” Spector, the attractive former model Caiya, and Wikki-san, a Sri Lankan who studied so hard he got into Tokyo University using the test that normal students take (not the easier one for us foreigners).

Of course there is one downside to learning “too much” Japanese, that more than few gaijin out there will back me up on, I’m sure. It seems that the more nihongo you know, the less mysterious and attractive you can seem to some members of the fairer gender, and I’ve known foreigners who spoke less Japanese than I do to be more popular with girls than me. Since this phenomenon doesn’t seem to have an official name, I’ll christen it Peter’s Inverse Law of Japanese Learning and see if the label sticks.

Check out the Mainichi Daily News site called Manglish: Manga in English, which displays manga with the original Japanese intact. Simply mouse over a balloon and the corresponding English appears.

Supplementary notes provide interesting background information about expressions, puns and cultural background and enhance understanding of what is happening in the panels.

Great for manga fans and those interested in studying Japanese.

Via Sparkplugged

One Japanese concept that was quite hard for me to get down was aisatsu, which means “greetings” and is quite a multifaceted idea.

Before I started J-List, I worked at our local City Office as an “Officer of Inter- nationalization,” doing things like helping other gaijin who didn’t speak Japanese when they had problems or needed to use city services. The world of Japanese public employees is a very formal one, and greeting everyone with “ohayo gozaimasu” in the mornings was a strict requirement.

Children are raised to greet others too, especially their teachers and upperclassmen, and this symbolic showing of respect is an important part of Japan’s “vertically oriented” social system which draws lines between seniors in a school or organization (senpai), students in the same level as you (dokyusei) and juniors/lowerclassmen (kohai). One concern that many of the parents at my son’s special elementary school have is, because the students are in the first graduating class of the school, there are no senpai for them to interact with, which some fear would handicap them socially when they get out in the real world.

The word aisatsu is applied to some other situations, too, such as when you move into a new apartment and give a small towel to your neighbors as a way of introducing yourself, or the long, drawn out speeches given by the head of any organization at any formal event, like a wedding.

The other day, a neighbor brought us a package of manju cakes (rice cakes with sweet beans inside, which I’ve lived in Japan long enough to love). He was about to start construction on a new house, and had brought us the gift to apologize in advance for the inconvenience and noise that the construction would cause.

One concept you eventually bump into when studying about Japan is Nihonjinron (nee-HONE-JEEN-rone), a word which literally means “theories on Japan.” A collection of ideas that grew out of Japan’s postwar period, the Nihonjinron concepts generally have to do with describing Japan as a unique country, totally unlike the nations of Asia or the West, with a linguistic and developmental history unlike that of any other nation.

Part of this is the belief, held by almost all Japanese, that their language is one of the most difficult in the world, with its mixture of Japanese words and grammar overlaid by Chinese characters with readings that shift by context and region, with a heavy borrowing of foreign loan words for good measure. Another part of the reason Japanese is so hard, supposedly, is that it is so subtle, with so many shades of grey and information that’s implied rather than being specifically stated.

Although some of the ideas seem like they could possibly be valid, there’s a high amount of voodoo in most Nihonjinron thinking, and overall it seems to be nothing more than coming up with ways to feel good about your own country, since everyone feels that their country is special.

Photo found in Typical Japanese Scenes, by Carlos Noboro.

I found this brief lesson on the web here:

“Jaрanese contains many abbreviated and contracted words, and there is
a strong tendency to shorten and simрlify words. This also takes рlace
with gairaigo words. For examрle “remote control”, when transcribed to
Jaрanese, becomes rimooto kontororu, but this has then been simрlified
to rimokon.

For another examрle, deрāto stand for deрartment store. Portmanteaus, such as
wāрuro for “word рrocessor”, are common.
Ordinarily, Jaрanese takes the first рart of a foreign word, but from
the English words “flannel” and “blanket” they took the second
syllables, to form the gairaigo neru and ketto.

Jaрanese рeoрle may use words like teema(from German, meaning “toрic”) in English, or rimokon, not realising
that the contraction of “remote control” to rimokon took рlace in
Jaрan.

Also, sutōbu from the English “stove” has multiрle meanings in
English. Americans often use the word to mean a cooking aррliance, and
are thus surрrised when Jaрanese take it to mean a sрace heater (such
as a wood-burning stove).

The Jaрanese term for a cooking stove is another gairaigo term, renji,
from English “range”—a gas stove is a gasurenji.

Additionally, Jaрanese combines words in ways that are uncommon in
English. As an examрle, left over is a baseball term for a hit that
goes over the left-fielder’s head, rather than uneaten food saved for
a later meal.

The student government at my junior high school had been putting little postcards with inspirational aphorisms all over the school. Most are broken record variations of “Believe in thyself,” “Reach for the stars,” or something equally hackneyed. Though here’s a thought-provoking one:

jibun ga tatteiru basho o fukaku hore
soko kara kitto izumi ga dettekuru.

Which roughly translates as:

Indeed.

British word maven Philip Gooden has written a useful book for the evolving global village we are all living in now, and it’s titled Faux Pas: A No-Nonsense Guide to Words and Phrases from Other Languages. Japanese words and phrases make it into his book, too, of course, and hara-kiri (Japanese ritual suicide) is one of them.

However, most the context statements are taken from British papers, as illustrations, and some of the references are hard to understand for readers not familiar with the world of Britishisms. Case in point: Gooden cites a piece from the Guardian newspaper in the UK for his hara-kiri entry, and the sentence from the UK paper goes: “Politically, any school remaining bog standard nowawdays in committing hara-kiri.”

Question: what does ”bog standard” mean?

It’s Greek to me! We now might need another guide to some of these Britishisms! In the meantime, this book is worth checking out.

An interesting blogsite at languagehat.com, which discusses all things related to the world’s many languages, from Japanese to Swahili, links here to “The Digital Library of Modern Japanese Language” which presents nihongo dictionaries from way back then — 1860, 1863 and 1867.

Via No-Sword

Tired of looking at pages with reams of indecipherable kanji? Frustrated by the length of time it will take you to learn all 2000 characters required to read a simple dirty comic book? Why not use these web-based tools to make your life easier?

Jim Breen at Monash University has created an incredible web reference for learning and understanding Japanese. For example, download these buttons onto the toolbar or bookmarks folder of your browser to translate between English and Japanese.

If that’s too technical, check the portable dictionary site here. Simply cut and paste unknown kanji into the dictionary and get an immediate translation. Here’s the link to the JE dictionary, and here’s the link to the EJ dictionary.

Rikai XUL is probably the coolest Japanese language learning tool, although you’ll need to be running the Firefox browser to make it work. After installing the program onto your browser, just right-click on unfamiliar kanji to get a definition.

Rikai XUL was developed by Todd Rudick, who runs an interesting website here.

If you want to Japanese ability to your operating system (and you’re running a variant of Windows XP), click here to download the MS Japanese language pack.

Commentators in Western countries have lamented the dumbing down of educational standards for some years now. This phenomenon also is occurring in Japan and has accelerated since educators were successful in shifting the curriculum towards the Western model and implementing the five-day-a-week school system.

This decline is particularly noticeable in the Japanese language skills of today’s young people, whose ability to use kanji properly continues to deteriorate. The Japanese language has traditionally been a favorite topic of discussion here, so this deterioration has provided a lot of grist for the mill of those who wish to return to a more solid education in language skills.

One of these people is Yasushi Mieno, the former governor of the Bank of Japan, who participated in the formation of the Association for the Promotion of Kanji Culture. He was recently interviewed by the Nishinippon Shimbun. The following is a translation of part of that interview. It provides a glimpse of how some view the state of contemporary Japanese education and how the language—whose structure and hybrid writing system is unlike anything in the West–is commonly discussed in Japan.

Ironically, Mieno bemoans the inability of today’s students to think for themselves–the very reason educators urged the introduction of Western-style reforms to begin with.

What are your perceptions of the state of language ability today?

The ability to think for oneself is lacking. After stepping down as governor of the Bank of Japan, I decided to render a service to society and taught on the subject of the Japanese economy at a university. The examination papers of most students were filled with nothing but parroted ideas. They had little ability to express themselves or to communicate. I suspected that education in Japanese and written composition had gone astray.

Since the end of the war, the Japanese language has continued to lose lucidity and precision. I think the reason is the reduced class time for language studies and composition in primary and junior high schools, which is said to be half that of other developed countries. The aliteracy resulting from the spread of television and the atrophy of composition ability due to Internet use is causing the Japanese language to lose its luster.

How did the Association for the Promotion of Kanji Culture begin?

Volunteers from the economic and educational sectors established it in 1995 to overcome the lamentable state of the Japanese language and ensure the proper transmission of the kanji culture, which is the foundation of the language. We were worried about education in the language, which had been neglected. The association is involved in unpretentious activities in every area of the country to hold lectures, symposiums, and study meetings.

What meaning does kanji culture have?

Language is the foundation of culture. The Japanese language is comprised of the Yamato kotoba (indigenous Japanese language) used in the Tale of the Genji and other works, and kambun (words derived from Chinese). The commentator Shuichi Kato believed that Japanese have expressed themselves emotionally through Yamato kotoba and intellectually through kambun. The Japanese language is a marvelous combination of kanji, which is the basis of kambun, and the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, which the Japanese invented.

Many words from kambun express symbolic concepts, enabling the accurate perception of conditions. A major achievement of kambun is that it has enabled us to incorporate aspects of Western civilization since the Meiji era. I studied the Confucian analects in high school in the former educational system, and even if I didn’t understand them entirely, I got the feeling that I understood their essence and became familiar with the world of kanji.

Are there any problems with the approach to Japanese language education?

Education in English and IT is important, of course, but the most important thing is to develop the ability to think for oneself. This requires education in one’s own language. We should place the strongest emphasis on Japanese language study and composition at the primary school level. This requires more than just teaching manuals—it is important for the people doing the teaching to have spiritual depth and passion.

What is important for the Japanese people to do?

In the analects, there is a homily that says we should think about whether we as people have strayed from the path we should follow. My wish is that more people should have the ability to think for themselves and to consider their conduct in life. Other countries will accord us greater respect as a result. I want to see a return to a richer Japanese language to achieve these goals.

It’s interesting how some Japanese words and terms get around overseas, from tsunami and kamikaze to anime and manga.

Now a Turkish online newspaper headlines a recent story about German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s current political problems: “Schroeder Commits Political ‘Hara-kiri’”. In India, a politican says: “If you are ready for a national hara-kiri, then this is the correct path.” And in Australia, coach Grant Thomas tells a newspaper reporter: “I don’t think there is any reason, when you see the results this year and the 15-point defeat against Essendon, which has been in reasonably good form, to commit hara-kiri.”

Is hara-kiri the new, hip Japanese term for overseas consumption?

Eleanor Morris Wu is writing as fast as she can. An English teacher at Chinese Culture University in Taiwan, Wu has written a 4-part series of adventure novels set in Taiwan, China and Japan, with assorted side trips to the USA and Europe included. Reviewed in the Taipei Times and the China Post, with review submissions also sent to the New York Times and the Washington Post, in addition to the International Herald Tribune, Wu novels encompass the best that there is in modern Asian adventure romances.

LINK: http://www.eleanormorriswu.com

The longtime Taipei expat has completed her fourth
romance novel in a series of books
set in Taiwan, and the new book — titled “East by Northeast” –was recently published by New World Media in
the US and is now available via online order sites.

A popular teacher at Chinese Culture University in Taipei, Wu has written
another long page-turner of romance, intrigue and
adventure that will surely captivate readers interested in Asian
culture. She knows her history and has an uncanny knack at getting
inside her characters’ emotions, from priests to spies, and she once
gives readers a bravura performance. The new book takes place in
Canada and mainland China, with stops in Taipei as usual as well.

“It’s a story that tries to intertwine the destinies of several
nations and cultures in Asia and the West,” says Wu, who previously
published ”Losing Plum Blossom”, ”The Black King” and ”A
Conspiracy of Nations”, in 2003, 2004, and 2006, respectively. The
four novels each stand alone as separate books, but for readers who
have been following the series, there’s a group of characters who
surface in each book and tie all the loose threads together.

The rather racy cover of “East by Northeast” features a handsome Asian
man and a scantily-clad Western woman pictured amid a colorful collage
of the Great Wall of China and Niagra Falls along the U.S.-Canadian
border. Although Wu claims in the forward to her book that it is a
work of “fiction,” she has obviously used her personal life
experiences and adventures in Taiwan and other parts of Asia to fuel
her vivid imagination.

“Some people have told me the new book might be perceived as a bit
scandalous, beceause of the nature of the story,” Wu says. “But my
publisher in America said the novel is not libelous and won’t get me
on any blacklist in China, since it’s a mere fictional story. I hope
to visit friends in Beijing on my next trip to the mainland, so I hope
the new book doesn’t cause any problems with my travel plans.”

Wu graduated from Harvard University and studied anthropology in
graduate school in Canada. She married an Asian man surnamed Wu, and although her
husband passed away more then ten years ago, Morris Wu has remained in Taiwan
for her work. An adult son, Jonathan, lives in the U.S., she said.

Wu’s novels have reached readers around the world. One
reviewer in Taipei, commenting on the author’s style, noted: “I am very
favorably impressed by Wu’s prose style. She likes to dwell on
images and incidents for pages at a time. And in her case, she can command
the reader’s attention throughout. It takes a particular talent to do
that.”

Wu said that she usually writes her books in Taiwan, sends the
manuscript to her publisher in the U.S., and then markets them online
using the Internet and literary blogs to reach her audience. She said
she feels that the books have been worth the effort she made
to get them published and she enjoys writing them. Will there be one
more novel in the series? The professor said she is writing the next
book in the series right now!

They say that humor is untranslatable between cultures, and while that is often the case, it is by no means a hard and fast rule. Japanese usually don’t tell the story jokes that are told in the Anglosphere (at least), but they understand and appreciate a lot of them when they are translated.

There are still some people who think the Japanese lack a sense of humor, but they don’t realize their humor takes a different form. In fact, most Westerners have no trouble appreciating Japanese humor, which can be wickedly clever, particularly when wielded by women. For example, for some years now women in Japan have referred to the comb-over hairstyle utilized by some balding, middle-aged men as the “bar code”.

This article in the Daily Mainichi goes one step further by reporting on the latest slang used by women in the sex industry. Most of this will be understandable even if you don’t know any Japanese. One expression that needs a bit of explanation, however, is soku-shaku. Soku is a prefix that means immediate or on the spot, while shaku is short for shakuhachi, the Japanese bamboo flute, which is also used as a term for a certain other activity, as you will see from the article.

I particularly liked the irony of the last one, but you’re sure to have your own favorites.

One of the first things my new boss told me after I came to Japan to work as an English teacher in the early 80s was that “all Japanese are bilingual”. By that, he meant that every Japanese was fluent both in hyojungo, the standard language used for television, radio, books, and magazines, and in the local dialect that people use to varying degrees to conduct the business of everyday life in their communities. I soon found out that he wasn’t exaggerating; despite taking three years of Japanese language courses at university before coming to Japan, in the first months after my arrival in Kyushu I often had no idea what people were saying in the local dialect.

I wasn’t alone. While Japanese know and understand the most common traits of the many dialects in the country, they can get sucked into the verbal quicksand just as quickly when people get down and dirty with the hardcore version of their local language. In fact, the leaders in Kagoshima at the southern end of Kyushu encouraged the use of their arcane dialect during the feudal period as an instant detector of spies from the Shogun or Imperial court, who didn’t have a prayer of keeping up linguistically.

I spent a weekend in Kagoshima about a year after coming to Japan, by which time I had started to get comfortable with my local dialect. But the folks in Kagoshima might as well have been speaking Urdu considering how little I understood them. In fact, I went with that same boss and the other English teachers at the school to visit some people affiliated with his international exchange program. He was angry with me after we returned, accusing me of doing a poor job of socializing by not engaging them in conversation or laughing at their jokes. I protested that I had no idea what they were saying. That explanation cut no ice with him: “None of us understood what they were saying either, but we laughed along with them to be friendly.”

I’ve come to appreciate the Kagoshima dialect more since my first inauspicious exposure to it—middle-aged women have a wonderful, distinctive speech rhythm that sounds as if they are half-talking and half-singing—but it is still deucedly difficult to pick up. (And no one in Japan has a clue about what they’re saying down in Okinawa.) Indeed, I’m very impressed by how the Japanese use dialect, because they are, in a real sense, bilingual.

I remember well an evening spent eating and drinking with two brothers one night not long after my arrival. Both spoke the local dialect, and they used that exclusively when talking with each other. But they knew I could understand only standard Japanese at the time, so that’s what they spoke to me. It was fascinating to subtly detach myself from the conversation that evening and watch how they handled themselves. It was as if they had a valve in their heads; when they faced each other, they spoke in the local dialect. When they faced me, they switched without a moment’s hesitation to standard Japanese. I found out that I could activate this valve by altering my posture at the table with them. If I leaned in closer, they spoke the standard language, but if I leaned back in my chair, further out of their range, they switched immediately into dialect.

This sounds astonishing, but everyone under a certain age can do it. It’s different with the oldest generation of Japanese society today, however. An example close to home is my wife’s parents. It was frustrating in an amusing way when I tried to talk with them after I got married. Both her father and mother were educated before World War II, when standard Japanese was less firmly established than it is now. I suspect they didn’t consider their local dialect as anything but the standard language, because that’s what they had used all their lives (though my father-in-law should have known better because he was in the Imperial Navy during the war and knew Japanese from everywhere in the country.) They asked me questions using the local dialect, and I couldn’t understand them. My father-in-law would turn to my wife and tell her to translate what they said into English for me. That made it doubly hilarious, because my wife knows very little English and has never been particularly anxious to learn. She retorted that they should use standard Japanese instead, which I could understand.

With this almost unlimited stock of subject matter, the Japanese themselves love talking about dialects, either their own or someone else’s. I soon found out that if I had trouble getting an adult English class off the ground, I could easily arouse everyone’s interest if I started talking about dialects. I discovered the perfect question that would set off a lively debate. Browsing in a bookstore one day, I picked up a paperback copy of a recently published play. All Japanese books have a strip of paper that runs from front to back along the bottom of the book, with the ends folded into both covers. This is used to advertise the book’s contents. The strip of paper advertising this book contained the bold statement: “You can’t seduce a woman in standard Japanese.” Toss that bait out to a class full of intermediate-level or higher Japanese adults, and they’ll pick it clean quicker than a piranha dining on a dead fish.

I noticed that particular book because it was written by Hisashi Inoue (top photo), a well-known novelist, playwright, and essayist. I first read his work when the professor for my third year Japanese literature class assigned one of the sketches Inoue wrote for a comedy group called the Tempuku Trio. It was wickedly clever, with a lot of jokes impossible to explain in English, making it all the more appealing to the students. I wound up buying the anthology of those scripts in two paperback volumes and using it for my own study.

The name of the play was Kokugo Gannen (The First Year of the Japanese Language), and it debuted at the Kinokuniya Hall in Tokyo in 1986. Being an Inoue fan, I was delighted to see this article in the Japan Times about the play’s recent revival concurrent with the first performances of his new drama. Here’s how the reviewer describes the plot:

The hero is Seinosuke Nango (Bsaku Sato), an Education Ministry official and Japanese language expert. As the play begins, his family and servants are preparing for a party at their home to celebrate the delivery of his new book of Western songs with his own Japanese lyrics for elementary school children.

However, rather than marking the end of his travails, the party is significant for another, much weightier assignment Nango receives; creating a new, homogenized and simplified Japanese language based on the lingua franca in the new capital of Tokyo.

What follows is nothing short of hilarious — as Nango himself, a Choshu dialect-speaker from present-day Yamaguchi Prefecture in the far west of Honshu — strives diligently to fulfil his commission in a household where his wife and her father come from Kagoshima in Kyushu, and speak in a different dialect, as do the servants, who are from places as diverse as Osaka, Tokyo, Tohoku and Nagoya.

With some 10 very different dialects under one roof, Nango’s earnest efforts to find a linguistic lowest common denominator — and metaphorically, of course, a new unified national identity — are the side-splitting stuff at the heart of this farcical tale of nation building.

Indeed, each character speaks in such strong local dialects that many Japanese in the audience have to concentrate hard to catch all the meanings (when the play was screened on television it was heavily subtitled.)

Note that the play is set in the latter half of the 19th century; the suspension of belief required for all fiction would not be possible in a modern setting because of the universal use of the standard language by contemporary Japanese.

I nearly forgot—can you seduce a woman in standard Japanese? The Japanese I discussed this with in class had mixed views. Men in their 20s insisted that it was not possible, claiming that it was essential to use dialect. It was fascinating to hear the rebuttals from middle-aged women, who were equally adamant that men had to use standard Japanese. As one woman explained, if a man used dialect in the clinches with her, she would think he was just playing around and not being serious.

One final note: Kyushu is close to southern Korea, and there has been extensive interaction between that part of Korea and Kyushu since ancient times. One distinctive feature of the local dialect where I live is the tendency to pronounce the “se” sound as “she”. For example, the Japanese word for teacher is sensei, but in the local dialect, it comes closer to sounding like shenshei. (Though it looks more exaggerated in print than it sounds in actual speech.)

It was almost startling when I was told some years ago by a Korean man from Busan that the same tendency to pronounce the “se” sound as “she” is also a characteristic of one of the dialects in southern Korea, just across the strait. But I really shouldn’t have been surprised. Sometimes the ties between us are closer than we suspect.

Click here for a handy reference of Japanese sex slang.

I supported myself by driving a cab when I studied Japanese at university. One rider, a woman in her 20s, asked me my reasons for hacking a cab. When she found out I was a student of Japanese, she quizzed me: “Oh, are you studying the culture, too?”

This was a college town, so I ran into this sort of affected behavior often. It occurred to me to say something like, “It’s impossible to study a foreign language without studying that country’s culture,” but I just let it go and answered, yes, I was studying the culture.

After reading a recent article in the Japan Times, however, I realized it was possible for apparently intelligent people to become fluent in a foreign language without understanding much about the culture. Roger Pulvers, who is otherwise unidentified, writes about the belief among some Japanese that their language is the most difficult in the world. He relates a conversation with a Tokyo cab driver in the mid-80s about this subject.

“Oh. Japanese is the most difficult language to speak in the world, you know. Isn’t it?”

Well, for the 15-minute ride home I strove to persuade my driver that this, in fact, did not seem to be the case. I pointed out the fiendish difficulties of the languages that I had studied in my life, Russian and, particularly, Polish being much more complicated in grammar and pronunciation, at least for a native speaker of English, than Japanese. I finished my discourse as we rounded the corner by my house.

“I mean, Polish, for instance, has elaborate case endings for adjectives, and even has a special one for the nominative plural of male animate nouns!”

Having listened attentively to my passionate, if pedantic, foray into the esoterica of comparative linguistics, the driver stopped the cab by my front gate, turned his head around to me and smiled broadly.

“Well, anyway,” he said, “Japanese is still the most difficult language in the world!”

. . .Why did my taxi driver at Seijo Gakuenmae persist in perpetrating the myth of difficulty?

Several reasons come to mind after reading this exchange. My first thought was that this guy is writing fiction. I know a lot of foreigners fluent in Japanese, but I don’t know any who can spout such phrases as “the nominative plural of male animate nouns” off the top of their head. No doubt there are a few who can, and perhaps Pulvers is deeply immersed in linguistics studies from a Japanese perspective, but I have my reservations. People who study foreign languages wind up learning a fair amount of grammatical terms, but most don’t bother with specialized vocabulary for grammatical forms that don’t exist in the language they’re studying.

My second thought was: “What is this guy trying to prove?” It’s not unusual in the United States to run into cab drivers with a master’s degree and an ambivalent attitude toward the workaday world, but I’ve yet to run into any in Japan. (Guys like that in Japan tend to open up coffee shops or bars and play jazz on the shop’s sound system.) Does he really think he’s going to have a meaningful conversation about comparative linguistics with a cab driver? Does he think he’s going to change the guy’s mind? Is he one of those flannel-headed academics who doesn’t know what people usually talk about when they’re passing time and exchanging pleasantries?

Then came the third thought: Pulvers may have a superb command of the Japanese language, but he still doesn’t understand the basics of Japanese culture. That’s because the driver wasn’t interested in talking about the Japanese language. He was just trying to start a casual conversation with a foreigner.

Foreigners new to Japan often whine about how the Japanese start conversations by talking about trivial subjects, such as their Japanese ability, their ability to use chopsticks, or the weather. The tragedy is that they’re being given a basic lesson in one of the primary differences of Japanese culture and they fail to recognize it. These people object to the pettiness of this subject matter, and yes, starting off with a comment about the weather is a cliché in the West for empty conversation.

In Japan, however, that’s considered an excellent way to break the ice. Listen to the start of a radio or TV broadcast, and one of the first things the announcer will talk about is that day’s weather. I have even translated training manuals for sales personnel that recommend the sales person create a friendly relationship with the prospective customer by talking about the weather. It seems these complainers aren’t paying attention to what’s happening around them every day in Japanese society.

They haven’t noticed yet that one of the key points in Japanese social interaction, whether it’s in a classroom or a bar, is that people make an effort to get new acquaintances on the same page by seeking the least common denominator. Talking about the weather or chopsticks may be trivial, but they figure it’s the easiest way to create and maintain a pleasant relationship without ruffling any feathers. Getting involved in a discussion about politics or any other subject that generates strong opinions could easily become unpleasant for both parties and nip the potential for a harmonious encounter in the bud.

This is such a basic component of Japanese behavior that the failure to recognize it suggests to me that some people are more interested in self-assertion than in learning about their surroundings. I’d be willing to bet the cab driver couldn’t have given a flying fig about the difficulty of Japanese. He was more likely impressed with Pulvers’s speaking ability and figured the best way to have a pleasant 15-minute chat was by complimenting the guy indirectly on his language ability. But no—Pulvers couldn’t just casually agree and direct the conversation elsewhere. He had to give the cab driver a lecture about Polish grammar. Maybe he needed to take a course in culture after all.

Of course, there’s one other possibility. After listening to some pretentious foreigner butcher his language with an incomprehensible explanation of the nominative plural of male animate nouns in a language he’ll never speak in a country he’ll never visit, the driver decided he was justified in believing that Japanese was the most difficult language in the world after all.

At JAPUNDIT and on other sites around the Web, native speakers of English like to get a laugh out of how English is misused in Japan and other countries.

But just as Japanese people like to use English to spice up their speech and copywriting, people in non-Asian countries like to use kanji characters as design elements. Today Kanji can be found on every from towels and T-shirts, to tattoos.

Over at Hanzi Smatter, you can send in photos of your kanji-decorated goods or body parts, and they will let you know what it means (if anything).

Probably the funniest entry at Hanzi Smatter is a tattoo that looks pretty nice, but unfortunately means, crazy diarrhea.

Here’s a pretty neat little site that contains quite a collection of Japanese emoticons, which are different from those used in English.

\(^o^)/

Wow!