Good Will Ambassadors

When our daughters were little, an acquaintance of ours came back from a trip to the U.K. with a disturbing story. Her half-Japanese daughter had gone to a birthday party with a relative and another child there had mocked her and called her 'Jap'. I was shocked by this and I wondered how our daughters would react if they heard this term. They got called gaijin -- foreigner -- occasionally, mainly whenever they were out of the neighborhood where they were known and accepted, but they had never heard the word ‘Jap’, though I had told them what it meant. I wondered what their reaction would be if they heard another child called this.

“What would you do if you heard someone use that word?” I asked our eldest daughter. She eyed me narrowly. “I'd call them gaijin,” she spat.

My jaw actually dropped at this; it was the last thing I was expecting to hear. “Why would you do that?”

She stuck out her lower lip. “Because if I'm a Jap, they're a gaijin.”

For the record, my eldest daughter doesn't look even remotely Asian. She has blue eyes and blond hair.

“No one would call you that,” I assured her. “I meant what would you do if someone called one of your friends that?”

“They'd better not call us that,” she sniffed. “Because if they do, I'll tell them they're a gaijin.”

This was the first time I truly realized how strongly my daughter identified with being Japanese. She'd grown up in Japan, played with Japanese children, spoken Japanese as a first language. She knew she didn’t look Japanese, but she couldn’t help feeling Japanese. And how she felt was everything. I remembered visiting a Caucasian Canadian couple and their little boy in Nagasaki, years earlier, before I even had children. One day the mother was walking through a supermarket with their five-year-old son when he saw a Japanese classmate and his mother in the next aisle. “Don’t say anything in English, Mom,” he whispered, “because they don’t know we’re not Japanese.” I’d thought that was pretty funny at the time, but at least her kid knew he wasn’t really Japanese.

When we first moved to Scotland, our daughters had a terrible time understanding people’s accents. At a classmate’s birthday party, our eldest sidled up to me when I came to pick her up. “I don’t understand a word they’re saying!” she hissed -- in Japanese. They spoke to me in Japanese a lot during our first weeks in Scotland.

I smiled when I first heard my girls developing Scots accents, but it broke my heart when they stopped speaking to me in Japanese. When they stopped wanting onigiri, rice balls, in their lunch boxes. “You don’t get it,” the eldest one told me when I asked. “They make fun of us at school. They call us Japs.”

I didn’t believe this until one day when I saw them walking home on the opposite side of the road where there is no sidewalk.

“Why are you walking on the opposite side of the road?” I demanded. “It’s not safe!”

They screwed up their faces and exchanged a look. “Because we don’t want to walk by Gavin’s house.”

“Why not?”

They wouldn’t look me in the eye. “He and James are always hanging out there. We don’t like them.”

“I don’t care if you like them or not, you stay on the safe side of the road!”

The eldest gave me an exasperated look. “They call us Jap girls.”

I may well be the only non-Asian mother in Scotland whose non-Asian kids have been called Japs. Who has had to go knock on the door of a stranger’s house and persuade her to make her kids stop using this word. Now, the term 'Jap' carries a whole generation's worth of historical baggage that I can only guess at. I’m not daft enough to claim I know how it feels to be heckled and bullied as an Asian minority. But I do think I've at least had a little nibble around the edges. And thanks to our situation, my kids and I have had the interesting experience of being called both gaijin and Jap.

For the record, Gavin’s mother was lovely. She agreed that it was an ugly word and an ugly thing for her son to do, and she got Gavin to stop doing this. James’ mother was nice too. Amazingly, we became friends.

Not long after this, both daughters started speaking Japanese again, even when we were out in public. They started asking for onigiri in their lunch boxes again and writing Japanese sentences on their hands. I would come into the kitchen and find them showing their friends how to write kanji, the Chinese characters used in Japanese.

Five years later, James started walking our eldest home from school and hanging out in front of our house. When questioned about this, she shrugged. “He’s okay, but I don’t want to go out with him.”

“It’s not the Jap thing, is it?”

“No.” She smiled. “He’s crazy about Japanese now, especially Miyazaki movies. He’s got more anime and manga than I do.”

Our eldest never went out with James, but she did tell him a lot about living in Japan and he could hardly get enough of it. The last I heard, James was learning hiragana and katakana. By this time, he might even have moved on to kanji.

Three Years On A Rock

A few years ago, I had to tell a midwife in Lockerbie how to offer someone an enema in Japanese.

Shortly after we moved here, we mentioned to the librarian that we had lived in Japan and were all more or less literate in Japanese. Her sister was friends with someone whose cousin's neighbor happened to be a midwife. This is a small town and even the most piddling piece of news tends to spread quickly: when a pregnant Japanese woman with less than perfect English skills showed up in her clinic, the midwife appealed to her neighbor, who talked to her cousin, who talked to her friend, who went straight to her sister, who got in touch with us. The next day, I was flipping through my English-Japanese dictionary, translating such sentences as Are you comfortable? and How often are you getting the cramps? Then, after tearing my hair over spinal anesthesia, thrombosis, and catheters, I grappled with the following sentence for a good thirty minutes: May we shave a small section of your pubic hair?

Just in case you are interested (and even if you are not) here is how you express that in Japanese:

陰毛の１部分を剃ってもいいですか？

I count myself lucky that in all my seventeen years in Japan, I never had to say that to anyone and no one ever said it to me. But you never know what will come in handy and fortune favors the prepared. And since it took me a good thirty minutes to figure out how to say it, I feel the need to share it with someone.

Where we now live, we are virtually the only Japanese-speaking people for miles around, so that serendipitous translation job was something of a fluke. Still, the Japanese language is part of our lives and we use it on an almost daily basis. I am not saying that we always use it naturally or fluently, but we use it all the same.

For instance, it comes in handy when we are in public and one of us decides a trip to the toilet is in order and wants to inform the others in an unembarrassing way. No one else will understand our references; no obviously euphemistic Number 1 or 2 for us when we can say it in Japanese! Or when one of us needs to leave a note to tell the others that we'll be out for a few hours and the front door key is in a certain empty paint can in the potting shed: we write our notes in Japanese, and no one in this town could crack our code. Japanese is what we use when one of us has noticed that someone's fly is open or has a runny nose. Both children used it when jumping rope or playing paper-scissors-stone; and all of us still mutter the obligatory O-jama shimasu -- "I'm invading your space" -- when entering someone's home. We can't help ourselves.

The other day, I took the bus to Edinburgh. It was Remembrance Day, and the bagpipes were shrilling away as I passed the crowds on my way to the bus stop. I was to meet three Japanese women at a bistro and I had in my bag four Japanese sentences that I wanted them to check:

Souten shiro! (Load your rifles!)
Ugoku yatsu wa ute! (Shoot anyone who moves!)
Hoi shiro! (Form a circle!)

I intended to send the sentences to a man I've been corresponding with in the States, a former POW of the Japanese who is writing his memoirs and wants to make sure his Japanese is accurate and natural. The more I thought about it, the more ironic it seemed. Me, an American housewife, walking through a Scottish town with those three sentences in my pocket, off to meet Japanese friends in Edinburgh. It seemed especially weird as I passed the war memorial, a monument dedicated to the Scots who died in both World Wars, some at the hands of the Japanese.

Last night I did my damnedest to explain to my twelve-year-old what the Japanese proverb Three years on a rock means. I'm not the world's best teacher, so it was tough going.

"I don't get it," she said flatly.

"Don't try and translate it literally. Just tell yourself it means Patience wins the day."

"How come it's three years?"

"It just means a long time."

"And how come it's on a rock?"

"It has to do with meditating. Priests used to go and sit on rocks for a long time to try and achieve nirvana. So Three years on a rock means that you find a rock, you sit on it for three years - and that's not an easy thing to do after all - but after you've done it, you've arrived. Gotten what you wanted. " I looked at her hopefully. "Get it?"

She shrugged. "I guess. Whatever."

She was born in Japan, and Japanese was her first language. In fact, she used to speak it so well that I could hardly keep up with her, and I sometimes feel guilty for taking her away from Japan: she has forgotten so much. So every once in a while I sit her down and try to teach her as much as she can bear. I do this with both kids, and it hasn't been easy. I'm probably one of the few parents in Scotland who has read through the first two Harry Potter books in Japanese (with my eldest) but the youngest -- less literate in Japanese and far more stubborn -- was much harder to motivate.

A few years ago, I got a big break. The author Alan Temperley came to our youngest's class to talk about his newest book, Harry and the Wrinklies. Holding up a Japanese translation of his most recent novel The Brave Whale, he laughingly asked if anyone in the class could read it -- almost a miracle, since even the youngest's teacher was unaware of her tenuous bilingual status at that point. My youngest raised her hand and read out the first three lines of the long Japanese title, thus earning the awe and respect of her entire class -- and a free book from Alan Temperley. A book that came in pretty handy for me, too: we had finished Shiro Yamada's Hare Tokidoki Buta -- (Fair, Then Partly Piggy in English) -- and I had been wracking my brains for something new. It took us a good three months to read the Japanese translation of The Brave Whale together. Three hard months that might as well have been years...

Three years on a rock, they say. Sometimes I feel like I've been sitting on my rock for a whole lot longer than three years.