Japanese: Day 16

Okay, so maybe self-teaching myself Japanese wasn't the grandest of ideas. Certainly, it enables me to learn at my own pace, no matter how slow or quick that pace might be, but it's very hard to actually apply it. You try to learn Spanish in California, and you'll be ready to speak it conversationally in just a few weeks. There are fluent Mexicans everywhere if ever you need help or just want to try your hand at it. In fact, it's almost to the point where Spanish is influencing California lingo.

But trying to learn Japanese in California? Not quite so easy. I don't know anyone who speaks the language, despite the fact that everyone I know has been permanently influenced by Japanese culture, and a decent percentage of those people do nothing but watch anime, read manga, and eat sushi whenever they can. Weird, that.

Almost everyone I've talked to over the course of the last few weeks have kinda winced at me and said, "I hear that language is impossible to learn," or something to that effect. Kinda is, but certainly no more so than any other language, with the outstanding caveat that Japanese isn't very applicable outside the very small island of Japan. Learning the Japanese language doesn't necessarily mean you can read or write any of the nearby Asian languages - Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, etc. Whereas, if you know the English alphabet, then there are a lot of doors open to you, since most of the western world uses the same thing.

And good luck finding many Japanese people where I live: one of several towns that at one point played host to a Japanese Internment Camp during World War II. Good luck, indeed.

Fortunately, there are at least a few, since we do have three (exactly three) sushi restaurants in town. My plan was to go to each of these places and see if they had fostered a good Japanese-themed environment, with the hopes of perhaps honing my abilities...to put it in creepy terms.

The first one, I had been to a few times already and it had made an impression on me. The food was good, the waitresses dressed in traditional attire, space was limited (as all good sushi bars should be!), and everything was served with wasabi, pickled ginger, and Kikkoman soy sauce. The second one...I wanted to destroy the place. Our orders were taken by a nice lady, but everyone else was Mexican. In fact, the guy who checked up on us was some bald guy with tattoos running up his arm. Not only that, they forgot my order and couldn't take credit cards that day.

By that time, I had almost given up, but was definitely making progress with my Japanese. Random words would pop up over the course of the week that I could suddenly recognize as Japanese. For instance: tsunami. It just clicked and I was able to write the word out in Hiragana. Same with words like "mochi" and "miso" and "nori." I was excited.

My sister and I checked out the last restaurant and were just instantly excited. Confined dining area? Check. Actual Japanese running the place? Check. Wasabi, pickled ginger, and Kikkoman? Also check. But there were so many other little things that caught my eye, such as the katana (Oh shit, I can spell that!) on the wall, traditional art pieces, and a real life banzuke. Also, the food was spectacular.

So, the week really did a lot to perk my spirits over the whole thing. My mind can actually apply the language, albeit in little ways here and there, and I have a little place to go to so that I might improve bit by bit. But I did learn something kinda unsettling. "Chopsticks" in Japanese is written as "ha-shee", but it's often written on the paper slip covering that the chopsticks come in as "o-te-mo-to." They have a completely different word for "chopsticks" when its printed on the covering!

I'm scared again.