Ito-ya, Ginza

No one does stationery quite like the Japanese. And here, at Ito-ya’s flagship store in Ginza, there are nine floors of it!

I was tempted to quote Firdausi (If there is a heaven on earth / It is here, it is here, it is here). But in truth, my feelings about Ito-ya are more akin to those of the haiku poet Bashō on beholding Matsushima:

Matsushima ah!

A-ah, Matsushima, ah!

Matsushima, ah!

Notes from Okinawa

Some anecdotes from a diving and snorkelling holiday in Akajima in the Okinawa prefecture, with friends from work.

We saw flying fish from our dive-boat, and this excited me as much as anything we saw underwater. There are no two ways about it: animals that can both swim and fly are cool.

Our diving guide spoke only Japanese. Before each dive, she would brief us about the dive plan, attractions and dangers. I could follow most things she said, but I wouldn’t be able to understand something like “establish neutral buoyancy,” or “the sting of the blue-ringed octopus is potentially fatal.” My friends, who are Japanese, were happy to translate, but it hurt my pride to ask them for help.

After each day’s diving, we gathered in the dining hall of the dive shop to fill our dive logs. It had an extensive library on local fish, coral, shells and reptiles. Everything was in Japanese, but fortunately the encyclopaedias had taxonomic names in the Latin alphabet. So the exercise went like this: each plant or animal we had seen would be identified (occasionally after some debate) by reference to an observer’s guide written in Japanese, then someone would look it up for me in the relevant encyclopaedia to find the taxonomic name, which I would then google to find the common English name and copy it in my dive log. This was almost as much fun as the actual diving.

When cycling to Nishihama beach, the most famous beach on the island, we came to a fork in the road. Shun said “Go right.” I asked him how he knew, and he said “Just feel the beach.” It was undeniably a Quote, but I am not sure whether he could in fact “feel the beach,” or had looked at a map beforehand. His credibility took a hit the previous day after he claimed that he fought an octopus underwater.

We dived about ten days after a typhoon, which is when the water is apparently clearest. On top of that, we enjoyed cloudless skies and an upwelling, which make for excellent diving conditions. Underwater visibility was an incredible 40 metres. Experienced divers were shaking their heads in disbelief, saying they had rarely seen anything like it. Shun, who knows how sad I am to be leaving Japan, said it was Japan’s farewell gift to me.

Shinkansen

I love the Japan Railways Shinkansen (bullet train) network as much as I love the Indian Railways, but the two could not be more different. Indian trains may be late or may make up time. The average annual delay for the Tōkaidō Shinkansen – including all delays due to human error, earthquakes, typhoons and snow – is thirty seconds.

Shinkansen leaving Kyōto station

Shinkansen simply means ‘new main line’ but it is a poetic word. It just sounds... fast.

There are three types of trains on the Tōkaidō Shinkansen line. The slowest (only in relative terms, for it has a top speed of 285 km/h) is called Kodama, the Japanese word for echo. The next faster is called Hikari, meaning light. And fastest of all is the Nozomi, which means wish or hope.

Got Milk?

Let’s say you went to a store and wanted to find out if they have milk. Most people would ask, Do you have milk? In English, framing a negative question (Do you not have milk?) is generally considered impolite.

Japanese is the opposite. You would ask, Gyūnyū ga arimasen ka? (literally, Do you not have milk?) Using the negative form is more indirect and polite, showing that you are prepared for a negative answer.

Singlish takes yet another approach. As Wikitravel notes:

[T]he local dialect with its heavy Chinese influences may appear brusque or even rude, but saying "You want beer or not?" is in fact more polite in Chinese than asking if you want beer, after all, the person asking you the question is offering you a choice, not making a demand.

Tokyo, 4:25 am

I am in Japan only for another 48 days. I will be sorry to leave.

Chiyoda-ku Area Street Map

There is something oddly touching about the translation.

This is Language Log

The folks at Language Log use an amusing phrasal template in some of their posts:

This is Language Log, not X Log.

where X is a seemingly unrelated and often obscure topic.

This is usually employed when, after briefly discussing X, they introduce a linguistic angle. It is used often enough to be familiar to regular readers, but not so often as to be annoying.

As far as I can tell, it was coined by Mark Liberman way back in July 2005, with the innocuous This is Language Log, not Cycling Log. But then Geoff Pullum took the ball and ran with it as only he can.

Here are some examples.

• This is Language Log, not Baltic Tourism Log.
• This is Language Log, not Church Dogma And Sexual Repression Log.
• This is Language Log, not Fruit Bat Sex Log.
• This is Language Log, not Open Marriage Lifestyle Log.
• This is Language Log, not Scottish Soft-drink Industry Advertising Log.
• This is Language Log, not Women's Undergarment History Log.

This is not an exhaustive list; just a few of my favourites. But this is The World According to Sroyon, not the Let’s All Obsess Over Language Log Blog.

木

In the last class, my Japanese teacher reviewed my performance so far, and defined future goals. Her ‘strengths and weaknesses review’ was particularly entertaining. My weaknesses, according to her, are: (a) I am weak in kanji and (b) I have too many hobbies.

(b) of course is something neither she nor I can do anything about, but (a) can be remedied. So my targets, as set by my teacher, are to learn 300 kanji by November 2011, 500 by June 2012 and 1,000 by November 2012.

The Japanese writing system is a combination of three scripts; sometimes all three are used in the same sentence. Hiragana and katakana are phonetic systems with about 50 characters each; kanji is a logographic system with over 2,000 characters in common use. To make matters worse, a single kanji may, depending on context, mean different things; some common kanji have ten or more possible readings.

So far I have got by, knowing only hiragana and katakana. This enables me to read station names, signs written for children, my Japanese textbooks, foreign words written in Japanese, and most things on a restaurant menu.

Kanji is fiendishly difficult, and I am in Japan for only two more months after which I will probably never need to use Japanese. In view of this, a less harsh critic may have forgiven my kanji deficiencies. But my Japanese teacher is not a less harsh critic. Hence, the targets.

Kanji, to me, are like trees. I cherish their existence and I think the world would be a poorer place without them. I appreciate their beauty and their wealth of secret meaning. But apart from a few, very common ones, I cannot recognise them. When I see kanji, I appreciatively say to myself, “Ah, kanji,” and I leave it at that.

But last week, we started on a systematic programme of learning kanji. And pleasingly, the first one she taught me was 木, pronounced ki or moku, and meaning – perhaps you have guessed it already – ‘tree’ or ‘wood’.