At the very hour when, a few days ago, Victor Mair was posting his piece about Valentine’s Day in Japan (I Tiger You), I was at ground zero for the event: the candy section of the biggest department store in Tokyo’s Ginza district. I have never seen anything like it. Excited young women by the thousand buying up all the chocolate and other candy that industry could pack into pink and white heart-bedecked boxes and bags. What an incredible coup the candy manufacturers have made out of this celebration of girlfriendhood and boyfriendhood. The ratio of refined sugar and teenage girls to oxygen had reached danger level in the confined space of the department store basement, and I fled from this stampede of candy lust, escaping into the cold afternoon air. I’ll tell you a secret: I simply cannot bear Tokyo.
Sorry, but it’s not my kinda town. I am not ready to {heart} it, {tiger} it, or {chocolate} it. It is a concrete nightmare turned movie. (Ridiculous to say this when in fact we have had the privilege of staying in the wonderful Four Seasons hotel in the gardens at Chinzan-so, I know that; but the cross-town freeways and skyscrapers began to oppress me after the first few days.) And as regular Language Log readers will know, in addition I have a horror of becoming illiterate, and I become illiterate the moment I arrive in Japan.
My schedule here is a busy one, and the Twitter format seemed like a sensible one for the very few linguistic and cultural insights and observations that impress themselves on a simple and illiterate man like me. So the snippets that follow are all 144 characters or less. [Prescriptivists: don’t tell me that should be “144 characters or fewer”. When it comes to my native language, I’ll be the grammarian here, OK? But I accept that I got the limit wrong: texts are 144 but for Twitter it’s actually only 140.]
- Tokyo indescribable in human language: Atlanta concrete and freeway density, super-Manhattan people density, only Blade Runner gives hint.
- Could disastrous Japanese writing system be left here by aliens to make sure human development is held back by a few centuries?
- Friends in Kyoto report counting system also unsuited to human cognitive powers. Numerals vary by what is being counted, and with location of use.
- Neat phonology evidence from monolingual Japanese: “Yahoo!” comes out [yafu] (bilabial [f], unrounded [u]) due to well known allophonic rule.
- Speech act distribution very different here. US sports stars & politicians reluctant to apologise; Japanese do it every few minutes.
- Disaster: took wrong 11:29 Shinkansen train. There were 2. And me illiterate. Went 100 miles in wrong direction. Missed appointment.
- Shinkansen (“bullet train”) quiet, smooth, incredibly fast. Best train on planet. Shame about platform signs written mainly in Klingon.
- Am beginning to BLAME the Japanese for brain-damaged 3-layer unlearnable excuse for writing system. Turning into an orthographic racist.
- School visit to see English class. Not allowed in with shoes. Given slippers 65% length of my feet. Shuffled around like a mental patient.
- Went to Korean restaurant for dinner last night. Menu in Japanese, monolingual staff, no pictures. Could not order anything. Left.
- Got dinner in backstreet ramen/donburi shop. Pictures of food to point to. One guy spoke a small amount of English! Turned out he was Korean.
- Being here is one long sequence of difficulties, mistakes, and small humiliations. NOT THEIR FAULT. Must volunteer for adult literacy.