Worse Than Coleslaw

About a month ago I started taking karate lessons held twice a week in a gym near City Hall, about a five minute walk from my apartment. The Japanese style of martial arts that my instructor teaches is at odds with the American Kenpo style that I studied for something like eight years when I was a teenager—the footwork is all convoluted and the only stance we use is too deep and impractical, to begin with—but it’s enjoyable enough and gets me out of my own head for a while, which is important when, on any given eight-and-a-half hour workday, I have approximately eight-and-a-half hours of downtime. Part of the curriculum of this class consists of lots of zen type posturing; my instructor even tried to explain to me the oft-repeated parable of the willow bending in the wind versus the oak tree fighting against the wind and being blown down as a way to tell me to relax my fucking shoulders already holy shit man, which was quite interesting considering he speaks no English and I speak not nearly enough Japanese for something on that level. Most of the other students are elementary or junior high school age, which adds an element of hilarity to the whole endeavor since, for these small town kids, seeing a foreigner is a pretty strange occurrence. They enjoy getting me to play tag with them, and also frequently walk up to me during breaks, hold out there hands, and say “Jan ken pon!” which is the Japanese name for rock, paper, scissors. On one such occasion this one girl, I think she said she was eight years old, eager to showcase her international knowledge, even corrected the other kids:

“Ya ya ya,” she said. “Eigo de ‘scissors paper stone.’” I was impressed.

Also in attendance are a little five-year-old girl and her mother, who started the class a couple of weeks after I did. Since she’s so young, it’s pretty likely that I am the first non-Japanese person this kid has ever seen, so she gets pretty shy around me. She spent two or three classes studiously avoiding my gaze, but one day as we were all gathered around the massive space heater during a break, after a good deal of hesitation and several false starts, she whispered something into her mother’s ear and pointed at me. The mother walked over to me, smiled, and said, “Ninjin wa Eigo de nandesuka?” which means “What is the word ‘ninjin’ in English?” The little girl held back, using her mom as cover.

After six months in Japan I’ve grown used to people asking me basic, GED-level questions in Japanese and having to shrug my shoulders with a meek smile on my face, which doesn’t work as well as it should because the shrug is not a recognized gesture here. Lately I’ve started nod enthusiastically in such situations hoping that the person I’m speaking to will assume I understand even when I don’t; this is a technique I learned from my students, who frequently use it to great effect, cementing in my mind the idea that teaching involves a two-way flow of information between teacher and pupil. So I in this case I actually had to blink a couple of times before I was able to respond, because, strangely enough, I knew the answer to the question I was being asked.

“Carrot,” I said. The little girl poked her head out from behind her mother, and I sounded the word out more slowly so she could see my lips forming each syllable and hear how it was pronounced. “Carrot.” This is one of the very, very few instances in quite a while where I have been able to display something resembling competence in my day to day life. After six months spent as a cheeping baby bird—stranger in a strange land working at a strange job that I don’t have any idea how to do well—it was nice to finally be able to feel like I was capable of, like, occasionally affecting my surroundings in a positive way. It was a revelation.

I consider this an epic win.

Addendum: I uploaded the Winter Sports Festival pictures as a video slideshow. Also, the pics from Tokyo are up a mere two months after the fact, and can be viewed here on Picasa because Flickr is asinine, and stuff.

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