6 October 2000 (7 Tishrey 5761)
On the evening of Rosh Hashana I went to the synagogue near my apartment in Kobe, which is the only synagogue in Kansai area and one of the two all over Japan. As usual, there was a clear bipartite division among those in their twenties and thirties, who constituted the majority of the people who came to the synagogue: Israelis and non-Israelis. The division is not only visual in that the former are dressed less formally and the latter are dressed more formally, but it also manifests itself in their respective occupations in Japan. It is not surprising any more to find that the majority of the young Israelis who frequent the synagogue are selling accessories on the street. But it was a sheer surprise to find that almost all the people of the second group I happened to talk with turned out to be teachers of English, mainly in the so-called English conversation schools with which the commercial center of any Japanese city with enough population is bristling.
Though this may not be a statistically valid sampling, I had an impression that probably a sizable percent of young people coming from English-speaking countries to Japan are working at these English conversation schools. Then I asked myself again the same questions I had been asking myself, that is, 1) whether Japan really needs so many English conversation schools, 2) whether they can make any significant contribution except for supplying easy employment for not necessarily well-qualified English speakers and helping reinforce the linguistic inferiority complex of the students flocking there, and 3) whether it is really possible to teach how to converse in a foreign language to people who do not make logical and unambiguous use of their mother tongue.
Even if these English conversation schools should prove their raison d'être as a place purely for improving the English speaking proficiency of Japanese students, their number seems exaggerated. You cannot explain such a large number and such a low level of English speaking proficiency in Japan if both schools and students are interested solely in the improvement of the latter's English.
My observation is that English conversation schools in Japan are at large, with some good exceptions, a swindling industry which takes advantage of the linguistic inferiority complex of potential Japanese students and sells illusion as an intangible merchandise. There is no lack of English speakers who seek easy employment and easy money in Japan, which is after all a (relatively) developed country. It is well known that the most difficult language to teach is one's mother tongue as it requires a tedious intellectual task of transferring one's subconscious knowledge to consciousness. The fact that someone speaks a certain language as his or her native tongue does not guarantee automatically the ability to impart his or her linguistic knowledge to speakers of other languages. One week of a crash course in TESOL given to potential teachers at these schools is certainly not sufficient. Those who majored in TESOL at a graduate level are the minority, and they would find a better employment at universities in Japan. As a result, English conversation schools are inundated with "teachers" whose only qualification as such is the fact that they happen to be native speakers of the language they are supposed to teach. There is equally no lack of easy preys to the illusion conveyed through alluring advertisements of the schools. I wish my observation were utterly wrong.
If it is possible at all to teach how to converse, what the majority of the potential students really need to learn first is not how to converse in English but how to have their own thoughts and express them logically in Japanese. Unfortunately, teachers of Japanese at Japanese elementary and high schools are busy teaching kanji and passive analysis of literary works. Students are neither encouraged nor taught in class systematically how to think independently and express their opinions logically in their mother tongue, especially orally. As long as students do not have this foundation in their mother tongue, even the best qualified teachers of English would find it difficult to teach them how to converse in a language which is foreign to them.
Doubly plagued with the lack of linguistic foundation of many of the potential students in their mother tongue and the lack of pedagogic qualification of many of the potential teachers, English conversations schools are doomed to failure in making any positive contribution in raising the level of English speaking proficiency in Japan in spite of their large number surpassed only by that of MacDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken, though they may be successful in securing monetary profits to their owners and employees. Does Japan really need all these English conversation schools? My answer is clearly no.
13 October 2000 (14 Tishrey 5761)
The incident (or to be more precise, series of incidents) that has affected me more than anything else in my life and has made me what I am now is my five-year stay in Jerusalem from the fall of 1988 through the summer of 1993 for my doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The experiences and encounters I had then have had such a profound influence upon my subsequent ways of linguistic and sociocultural thinking and behavior that the period preceding this can even be called the prehistory in my life.
Even before staying in Jerusalem for the first time, I always felt rather uncomfortable with the language, society, and culture into which I happened to be born, without knowing why with nothing to compare with. Living in Israel has shown me that life can be different and more meaningful than the one I knew in Japan, and has given me enough reinforcement for and confidence in being what I am, back in a society which is not especially friendly to those who deviate from its fossilized sociocultural norms, some of which have become purposes in themselves instead of serving the society.
When I returned to Japan after five years of stay in Israel, I felt as if I were in a foreign country. The subsequent few years were an incessant struggle with a series of linguistic and sociocultural shocks about those ways of thinking and behavior which were supposed to be familiar to me prior to my stay in Israel but suddenly seemed so foreign to me. Ironically, the subject about which I read most since my return to Japan was the Japanese society. I just wanted to know what went wrong with me, or with the society. Even though I have come to readjust myself to the fact that I cannot readjust myself to the Japanese language, society and culture on the whole, there are nevertheless certain bothering things I cannot avoid facing on a daily basis.
One of the most important lessons I have learned in Israel is that if I do not defend my own rights, no one will defend them for me. I also believe that the accumulation of voices from every citizen who speaks out when he or she finds something unreasonable is what can change the society in the long run. So I put this belief into practice every time I find something unreasonable. I am not only angry with but also sorry for those people who try to have recourse to easy solutions by avoiding the problems they are facing and keeping silent without even trying at all. Unfortunately, this is not restricted to individuals but is also the case with companies, organizations, and even the government.
What really disturbs me physically here in Japan is the incessant noise in all the public places including railway stations, stores, etc. It is difficult to find a store where the same stupid announcements, advertisements, or songs are not repeated. If I just happen to be there and know that I will not revisit there, I can simply go out as soon as possible. But when it comes to stores I have to visit almost daily to purchase my physical and intellectual nourishment, such as nearby supermarkets and bookstores, I am not ready to be forced to hear the same repetitive noise while I am there. Some time ago I could not stand it any longer, so I called the supermarket and bookstore I frequented and asked them to stop the prerecorded advertisement-cum-song repeated every few minutes. To my surprise, the supermarket stopped it after a couple of days. But as for the bookstore, I simply stopped going there. Several days ago I happened to be there again and, to my great surprise, the repetitive song was not there any more!
Am I selfish? I am almost certain that I was not the only person who was bothered by the incessant noise in these two places. But the problem is that no one dares to protest to the stores. Of course, I cannot stop all the annoying noises even in my neighborhood, let alone all over the country, though I have already succeeded in making three neighbors take away their furin ('wind bells') hanging in their balconies and making a noise in the whole neighborhood 24 hours a day.
The fact that Japan is flooded with all kinds of incessant noises seems to have a negative effect upon the auditory perseption of people in that as a kind of natural defense mechanism they stop listening to anything, however important it may be, even though they, of course, hear it; it simply passes from one ear to the other. I see this clearly in my university classes, especially if they are large. In a large class students can be anonymous, and for them I am like a loudspeaker in a public place. In one of my English classes I have been telling my students not to forget to leave a space after periods and commas. Actually this is such a simple thing even elementary school students know, but after several months of weekly warnings there are still students who fail to do so.
As a linguist who respects uttered words at their face value I find the linguistic landscape of Japan quite unhealthy. On the one hand, people prefer to keep silent when they should speak out, but on the other hand, the whole country is flooded with meaningless vain words. My parents always tell me that as long as I stay in Japan, I cannot avoid the noise in all its ramifications, so I should learn to live symbiotically with it. But every time my ears catch any repetitive noise in public places, my body cannot help reacting instinctively and making another Quixotic fight.
20 October 2000 (21 Tishrey 5761)
Although the outer appearance must not be neglected all together for its importance as a show window to advertise what is inside, it will be absurd if it becomes the purpose in itself and the inner essence is neglected totally. Unfortunately, I seem to belong to the minority in the Japanese society in this respect, at least in practice. If you step aside and observe it from a little distance, it turns out to be a treasure house of all kinds of the above phenomenon, whether in language, customs, or fashion. There is nothing intrinsically bad in caring about the outer appearance if the person or thing in question has enough inner essence. But to busy oneself in decorating oneself only outwardly as a superficial means to hide the inner emptiness is like putting the cart before the horse, and it will not take long until the false decoration peels off though people may pretend not to notice, especially in a society like Japan where they are "sophisticated" enough to say nothing explicitly even when they see a naked king.
It is a well known sociological phenomenon that many people in Japan buy certain things solely because of their brand names without even appreciating their value. Once a certain company joins the selective club of famous brands in the consciousness of consumers, its name starts to live a life of its own. Big-name brands owe their fame and prestige not only to their high quality, which not everyone can discern, but also to their high price so that not everyone can afford to buy them, especially if you are still young. Japan may be the only country in the world where high school students go so far as to get involved in prostitution for the sole purpose of purchasing expensive products which they are not worthy of.
Recently I have noticed a strange phenomenon among young girls in Japan. Not every one can afford to buy authentic products bearing famous brand names, so they seem to have found a much cheaper devise of immersing themselves in the illusion that by carrying something bearing such a name they themselves will become intrinsically better. The miracle devise that costs them far less money but can give a similar sort of illusion to them and to those around them who evaluate them only by the brand names they bear is to carry a paper bag with a famous brand name together with or without another real bag which does not necessarily bear a famous brand name. When I saw someone on the train several days ago who carried nothing in such a paper bag together with another real bag just to show a certain famous brand name, I could not help looking her in the face to ask myself what kind of thought, if at all, was hovering inside her brain. It seemed to me that this empty paper bag symbolized eloquently what was inside her and by extension inside people like her.
The recent discovery of this vain phenomenon observed among quite a few young girls in Japan has led me to the additional discovery of three correlations: 1) naturally, they always show the side of a paper bag with the brand name to the whole world and not the other side with no name printed; 2) most of them (or probably all of them) have heavy makeup; 3) when seen on the train or bus, few of them (or probably none of them) read books. Having read thus far, you can easily guess what I hint here, can't you?
To carry a paper bag bearing a famous brand name might have originally been intended, though illusionally, to signal a positive message about the inner essence of the bearer, but for me and hopefully for some others it is nothing but a conspicuous symbol that guarantees the inner emptiness of its bearer since by connotation she is busier attending to the brand name of her bag than to what to put inside her "bag". I can say that in a sense these girls are doing me a tremendous favor by carrying such a bag as it can tell me exactly whom I should avoid even without taking the trouble of actually talking to them.
27 October 2000 (28 Tishrey 5761)
Unlike many other people, I have no exaggerated emotional attachment to my own name, especially because I have suffered because of the rarity of my given name Tsuguya in Japan, let alone in Israel, and the appearance of the vowel "u" twice in a single name is just too much auditorily. Furthermore, unlike some other people, I do not consider the relative order of my given and family names as part of my identity. However, I do care about how I am addressed in isolation and in comparison with how others are addressed in the same social context. Those who neither ask nor try to remember my full name even when they see me regularly are out of the question. This demand is not unilateral; I am very careful in remembering the full names of those I meet regularly such as my students.
Many people, including foreigners who are sell-proclaimed mavens of Japan and Japanese, may think that all over Japan people call each other only by the family names plus some honorific titles such as san or sensei. Actually I was born and raised in a rural area in the north of Japan where they usually call each other by the given names without adding any honorific titles except in very official occasions. We used to call even our teachers in school by their given names, though with sensei. In this respect Israel, where they also call each other by the given names without adding any titles, is much closer to what I know from my formative years than big cities in Japan, where you have to be really close to someone to call him or her by the given name. When I watch Japanese historical dramas on TV by mistake (as a person who has been living without TV since the age of 18, I cannot agree more when Groucho Marx said to the effect that TV is very educational because every time someone turns it on, you can go to another room and read a book), I hear common people calling each other by the given names. I am not a historian of Japan, but the custom of calling others by the family names plus san in big cities seems to be of relatively recent origin. Whatever its origin is, I regard this linguistic custom as one of the artificial barriers which make communication in Japanese distanced, together with the use of honorific language called keigo. As the custom seems so deep-rooted that it will surely persist during my life time, I have reconciled with the fact that as long as I live in big cities in Japan like Kobe, where I live now, I must get used to be called Sasaki san or Sasaki sensei.
One of my principles in life is not to have a double standard. Probably except in very exceptional cases I try to be consistent in my behavior toward every one, including the use of language, and naturally I expect the same from others. Therefore, I hate being singled out and called Sasaki san or Sasaki sensei by foreigners when they are not speaking Japanese; if they want to call me by the family name in non-Japanese contexts, they can call me, for example, Dr. Sasaki, using a title not taken from Japanese. The fact that they think they are doing me good by mixing san or sensei in non-Japanese contexts makes the situation worse. It bothers me because they are unconsciously categorizing me according to their stereotype and applying their linguistic double standard, and I feel as if I were linguistically "sterilized" as a totally anonymous standard-bearer of the Japanese culture. If they even called each other with san when in Japan, I would not be bothered so much. According to my experience, those who are learning Japanese or are interested in Japan are the worst as they do not see me as an individual. Therefore, I have learned to avoid students of Japanese in Israel as they make me feel as if I were an ambassador of Japan, which I am definitely not as I am ready to represent only myself. I can even say that this is even a manifestation of linguistic discrimination as they do not apply the same standard to everyone.
It is easy to categorize someone according to your stereotypes about the culture of the country where he or she happened to be born and to have an illusion as if you understood him or her perfectly in this way, but I see this approach very dangerous. As for me, I try to treat everyone first and foremost as an individual, and not as a member of some social or national group, by applying the same uniform standard consistently as I myself want to be treated this way by others.