ONE is the most difficult number

“ONE” IS THE MOST DIFFICULT KANJI

I go to teach at the university by train at 7 in the morning. I scan the advertisements and news and inspirational messages that adorn the inside walls of the commuter train. Here is something I might be able to read. Hmm, I understand the individual words. I conclude it is the Japanese version of the aphorism, “He who travels alone sees the most.”

In class, my students read a newspaper article about the historical difficulty of learning to write. The newspaper commentary says that from time to time, Japan considers abolishing the hard-to-write characters. Not surprisingly, the Japanese sophomores do not want to trade their language’s Chinese characters--called Kanji-- for Roman characters.

Next, I ask the young men and women to discuss favorite and least favorite kanji.

One student claims to hate to write “one” – a horizontal line segment.

I am astonished. “Why? What is challenging about a straight line?”

“One” is hard to align properly, the student says. It tends to crumble into an underscore or a dash. “What is your favorite kanji?” she asks back.

I think of the aphorism in the train. The poem repeated the kanji for “one person”. I ask for the correct pronunciation; the two are pronounced the same. Thus enabled, I garble enough of the poem to achieve recognition.


The poem means, “’Everyone can do one thing uniquely well,’” the students agree. And by implication, they add, the poem suggests, ‘” Find that thing for yourself.’”

I had been wrong about the meaning. But I am very glad for the effective classroom communication. It is a conversational English class.

Way Out

IT TAKES TWO TO READ A MENU

Kyoto--Ah! The reading lesson for the day appears in the form of an exit sign. The square is a mouth, useful for entrance and exit. The top specifies direction. “Way out.”

I am sight seeing in Kyoto during Spring with friends from California. We are at a shrine.

At a restaurant, my Chinese-American friend can read all the Chinese letters on the menu. I can recognize only “bird.” She can read the modifier that specifies chicken.

However, she cannot read the phonetic Japanese script at all. I can. “Curry.”

Naked Magnolia

 

The Magnolia bloomed in March.  I’d been anticipating the opening since noticing the downy buds in a neighborhood shrine on January 1.

 

Ancient, Kyoto is a new city for me.  It is not often that I move to a new city:  Santa Cruz, Tucson, New London, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.    Most recently, I had been eight years in Yokohama. 

 

In Kyoto, I walked the forty minutes to the train station for months before the rainy season, not needing to understand the buses. A family-run fish store sells generous slabs of tuna.  The big street curves to the main post office.  Bicycle traffic converges near the station. 

 

Most surprising, the map of the city was etched in my brain as my cursor feet walked. 

 

After a year’s residence, with the flowering of the old tree, a sense of place is fulfilled in the stony Buddhist garden.

 

It is a naked magnolia, an alluring adjective I learned from my mother driving through Los Angeles.

 

The Kyoto sky is clear enough to see the Big Dipper.  Sleeping on the apartment roof in the elevated northern suburbs on a hill, I imagine the apparent turning of the constellation as a key turning in a lock.

 

 

Piano recital, version 2

Piano recital

The Steinway B in the recital hall is listed on the program. The rehearsal at 1230 goes smoothly, the grand piano living up to its name. But at 4 pm, two hours into the music, a kid in the front row Velcro’ing her shoe shreds my composure. I stop playing and glare in anger until the Velcro noise stops. The scratch of plastic bags also quiets. Even the babies in the room become silent. My fellow performers include many elementary and junior high school pianists and their parents and siblings.

Three days later, at my next lesson, the teacher greets me with effusive apology. She speaks Japanese, but I understand: “I told them to be quiet.”

I speak English; I think she understands: “They are kids; two hours is a long time; I should have been able to ignore the distraction; it was fun anyway.”

The short simple “For Elise” enters my repertory as the fifth memorized piece, to be played every day, worn and walked in.

Darwin's essay on Beetles

To students at Osaka University of Foreign Studies I bring in a Darwin essay. He wrote about collecting beetles as a college student. The students cannot read it. Stony looks meet my apologies. We move on to an alternate plan: short poems in English and Japanese. Their faces warm as the pages rustle in the spring evening. Each chooses a favorite and in English eloquently defends the choice. Why couldn't they understand Darwin, with its correspondence to the Japanese fondness for beetle collection?

Bushie, bye bye

Bye bye Bushie

At the National Defense Academy in Yokosuka, Japan, I got a new private student. He skillfully negotiated a 33% reduction from the rate for professionals, such as director of cadet affairs and a campus librarian. The cadet suggested for his first lesson we walk around the campus, and he would answer my questions. He wanted to improve his English.

I had seen other native English teachers take entire classes on campus excursions. The English-challenged youths would pass my classroom, happily exiting the ponderous new four-floor language arts building. The cadets would walk in clusters of five and six. A retired U.S. Air Force pilot reported excellent results speaking English with his class outside: They talked about the pointy-nosed U.S. jet fighter parked on the well-manicured lawn near the original 50 year-old buildings.

An American civilian, I was curious about a sculpture. I had the impression of a fish or dolphin in an upright posture but could not read the plaque because it was in Japanese.

The private student explained that the sculpture was a samurai helmet. The detail halfway up was a feather symbolizing peace. A person could stand underneath the vast helmet.

He asked very seriously, “Do you know ‘bushi?’” I decided not to joke about George W. Bush. The student told me he had prepared presentation about Bushido, which is the code of the samurai, for an international cadets conference. A bushi is a samurai.

The code of the samurai is also the first chapter of the freshmen English textbook produced at the Academy for its students. I asked each cadet in my 30-member classes to talk for a few minutes, answering two questions:

"When did you first hear of Bushido? Who told you?"

Some of the 18 year-olds had heard of Bushido when they were so young they didn't remember. Some learned the term from the Hollywood movie "The Last Samurai." Most students learned the word from a teacher of kendo, a kind of Japanese fencing associated with warriors.

Samurai do not exist anymore except on movie sets in Japan. Bushi, bye bye.

12 year cohort

We learned each other’s ages on Coming-of-Age Day, sightseeing on that January holiday when the 20-year-olds of Japan share the same birth animal in a once-in-a-lifetime festival. The dozen creatures of the Asian zodiac identify cohort: birth animal targets age—-give or take 12 years. He peered at me in unspoken tally.