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.