ADVENTURES IN JAPANESE
an educational history
1.
After finally making peace in my heart with the fact that I am not actually capable of going to a local community college Japanese class for six hours a week, I downloaded Duolingo1 a few months ago. Continuing to study Japanese after my poor AP test showing in my senior year of high school has long been on my to-do list. A few months ago, I was looking through my old Instagram messages and came across a conversation I had in Japanese with an international friend. I could no longer read what I wrote, and this scared me.
The last time I participated in a 36 Questions to Fall in Love exercise, I remember my answer to number 12: If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
I said it would be language – to wake up fluent in something other than English.
The only other time I’ve ever felt remotely close to this desired fluency was at the end of high school, after four years of practicing Japanese each day. Now, every night I sit in bed and whisper sentences into my phone, chatting with an animated bear and striving to be the best competitor in the Emerald league. Practicing ridiculously specific hypotheticals – describe a cruise ship, shop for electronics, cancel social plans – to some unreachable end.
2.
Deciding to learn Japanese to meet my foreign language requirement in high school set me on a path full of bizarre friendships and adventures pivotal to my entire educational and social history. This statement sounds dramatic, but sometimes random choices we make at fourteen actually do have significant consequences.
There was only one Japanese teacher at my Southern Californian public high school, so many of my language classmates and I shared the same exact schedule for four consecutive years. My class was generally full of kids of Japanese ancestry as well as Anime fans, these groups of course having considerable overlap. In senior year my friends and I would leave our Japanese classroom in a block together, traveling upstairs to make up a sizable contingent of third period physics — a classroom whose vibe we completely hijacked.
Because it’s impossible to accurately convey the energy that inhabited our Japanese classroom: for four years I witnessed bizarre sketches including a Jeb Bush and Simon Cowell debate featuring recent vocabulary words, I bought into the most abstract and convoluted mnemonic devices for drawing kanji characters, and I sang along to the Japanese Zootopia soundtrack instead of ever, ever prioritizing conversational skills.
Studying Japanese for four years does not necessarily result in learning Japanese effectively. This was made apparent by my showing in the Southern California Japan Bowl, an academic team competition which tests the achievements of high school students who are studying the Japanese language.
For two years in a row my team — consisting of two boys that were a year younger than me and insisted on calling me senpai to my great disdain — and I whispered over our qualifying round test in a dingy classroom at Loyola Marymount University. In the weeks of practice leading up to the event, we split up topics — I would become an expert on cultural holidays, John would brush up on current pop culture, Mike would learn geography. While this trivia made up a portion of Japan Bowl content, we neglected to delegate to anyone the task of actually understanding Japanese.
Both years, this trivia knowledge carried us to the final round of the competition, in which we were brought up in front of an audience with two other qualifying teams for a live quiz show. I cannot describe the humiliation of being tasked with responding individually to a Japanese idiom, grabbing a microphone in front of an audience, and completely blowing it. A local magnet school and a team bussed in from Silicon Valley mopped the floor with us. We walked away with two third place trophies.
3.
My mother’s maiden name, Uehara, means “upper plain,” but it was changed to WeHara a few generations ago. I guess it’s sort of similar to how my father’s family changed the pronunciation of my surname — changing the hard ‘k’ sound to a ‘q,’ removing a pesky umlaut.
4.
On the last evening of my high school exchange program to Numazu, Shizuoka in the summer after sophomore year, I had plans to meet my mother’s cousin, Yuko, for dinner. Aunt Yuko is my only remaining relative in Japan with whom my mother is in contact. She stayed with my mother’s family when she came to the states briefly for college. Earlier in the trip, she had taken me out in Tokyo, to a private room in a shabu shabu restaurant, where she periodically checked her digital English dictionary and her husband showed me his nature photography. They told me I (5’2”) was very tall. In the shabu shabu restaurant, when I caught a glimpse of the check, I felt horrified.
Before my trip, my mother requested that her cousin take me to dessert bars; she wanted to recreate for me the magical summer of ice cream and custard that she herself experienced with her aunt as a girl in the 1960s. “After my summer in Japan, I came back ten pounds heavier, with a bowl cut.”
That evening Aunt Yuko and Uncle Setsuji had taken the train and reserved a room in the same hotel my class was staying in to see me. An hour before our meeting time, I saw my teacher’s husband by the elevator, and he was not the upbeat, if sometimes stubborn person I knew the entire trip. He stormed into the hallway, yelling.
I can’t really remember everything he said, which is strange, because at the time it happened it was so seared into my mind. He berated me and told me that if my relatives were to show their face to him, they would have a problem. I think the implication is that he would have hit or otherwise threatened my 5’, 60-year-old aunt. I’m not sure what provoked this reaction. There is probably no logical answer for this sort of rage. My teacher stood between the two of us, holding her 8-year-old daughter who also came on the trip. Neither of them looked me in the eye.
Later, when my mother called my teacher and asked what had happened, my teacher claimed full responsibility for the incident and said her husband did not need to apologize to me. I stayed in her class for the remaining two years of high school, always a bit uneasy. When her husband showed up on campus for a special event the next school year, he greeted me warmly.
5.
When I was discussing the content of this essay with another writer, she suggested the possibility of introducing speculative nonfiction: What happens to the story of your high school trip if your teacher’s husband never confronts you?
For starters, my Aunt and I would have had dinner in the hotel restaurant as planned, instead of being banished to an – all things said, delicious – revolving sushi bar in town. I would have had eel, my favorite. She would have seen me off at the charter bus the next morning instead of us sneaking in an early morning goodbye in the hotel lobby, while my teacher’s husband was otherwise occupied. I wouldn’t have spent the next day of travel averting my chaperone’s gaze, waiting for an explanation that never came.
When I would reminisce about that summer when I was sixteen, I wouldn’t immediately think of the hallway and my teacher’s look of shame and inaction. Instead, I would think about how, after two years of feeling depressed and invisible in high school, it was nice to show up as an exchange student and be treated like a small-town celebrity for a week. Or how I sometimes nodded and pretended to understand more Japanese than I actually did. How, ashamed at the possibility of getting the words wrong, I found myself shrinking verbally and finding a new appreciation for gestures and slapstick.
I’d replace the hotel image with something better: My host mother holding my hand with tears in her eyes and telling me “Next time, stay at my house a long time.”
6.
I think I was originally interested in learning Japanese as some way to establish personal cultural legitimacy. Many of my closest friends in middle school were children of immigrants, fluent in Korean or Vietnamese. Now, of course, I know that some of these same friends feel dissatisfied with their vocabulary and reading level in these languages.
No one in my family, which has been in the U.S. since the early 1900s, speaks Japanese except for my cousin, who began to study in college. As a teenager I felt some kind of way about being mixed race and fifth generation that I’ve since worked out for myself. Pursuing language and going to Japan on exchange didn’t really bridge that gap for me. Learning a language is always a meaningful endeavor, which is why I’m still trying, but the value it provided to me was of more an academic nature than my original dreams of diasporic salvation. Instead, taking an interest in Japanese American history and community and finding political legacies I feel aligned with allowed me to stop sweating the details of personal identity. Decentering the idea of needing to be personally “valid” has opened the door to more interesting conversations. Maybe if I keep practicing, some of these will happen in a second language.
7.
A few years ago I had a conversation with my friend who was about to move to Taiwan temporarily. He wondered how it would be to date in a second language. If one’s charm is tied to wit and wordplay — how do you translate a sense of humor?
The only time I’ve ever made somebody laugh in Japanese was when I was 18, participating in a cultural exchange program in Kyoto (the circumstances of which are hard to explain). My roommate, a Japanese girl named Yaoka, laughed when I told my friend, gokiburimitai. You look like a cockroach. I’m not even sure if the grammar was right, but Yaoka and I laughed for minutes, periodically repeating gokiburimitai, gokiburimitai, gokiburimitai.
I know duolingo is kind of bad for using ai. if anyone has some alternative recommendations my ears and heart are open!!
extra notes:
on the title — “Adventures in Japanese” is the name of the textbook I used all of high school lol
i’m feeling a little worried i maybe wrote too freely in this one especially about real events so i hope i don’t regret that later
me in Kyoto when i was 18, with squid and orangina, possibly the happiest i’ve ever been
calves like yaoka’s ♥️