Japan Syndrome
- Matt
- Feb 14, 2024
- 17 min read
Updated: Feb 15, 2024
1/12/2024
I’m here in Japan to find a rare book called Paris Syndrome. I plan to roam through the used bookstores of all the places I’ll go, from Kyushu to Osaka, with the intention of getting my hands on it.
I must find this book in its original Japanese, as there is no translation. If you’re unfamiliar, Paris syndrome is a psychological condition that was first discovered and written about by a Japanese psychologist. This psychologist noticed a pattern among first-time visitors to Paris, many of whom were Japanese, who experienced psychotic break when the Paris they experienced in real life was dramatically different from the image in their heads.
I wonder how large the gap is between my image of Japan and its reality.
Although I’ve come to Japan before, I am arriving now with intermediate language abilities and a desire to speak Japanese as much as possible. In my ten days, if I don’t end up finding Paris Syndrome, maybe I’ll fall into a psychotic break; in such a case, please feel free to name Japan syndrome in my honor.
The two used bookstores I visited today in Kagoshima did not have Paris Syndrome, but I still found some gems. I’m starting to appreciate the beauty of tankoubon, a staple of the Japanese publishing industry distinguished by its small size and light weight. It’s easy to hold in one hand and rarely exceeds three hundred pages, features which must appeal to Tokyo subway commuters.
One of the books I bought is on historical revisionism in Japanese textbooks, while the other is a guide to keigo, a formal variety of Japanese used in professional settings. I find the concept of the second book fascinating: this is a book written for a native Japanese audience, recent college graduates who need to sharpen their language skills to prepare themselves for a career.
These are the kinds of topics that motivate me to read in a foreign language. When I struggle through unfamiliar transition words, unexpected turns of phrase, and unidentifiable verb forms, I keep reading because I believe these books can teach me things that English books cannot.
I don’t read books on keigo to pick up that language variety myself. Primarily, I am interested in the demands Japanese society makes of its language users, demands so fierce that adults have to continue to learn vocabulary and grammar, that characters frequently come with furigana so educated readers know how to pronounce them. The Japanese don’t need to reach far to feel sympathy for foreign learners: they struggle just as much as we do.
Reading in Japanese reminds me of how the language and its society feel simultaneously strange and familiar. There’s a lot of written Japanese that I can understand because of Chinese, even if I can’t guess the pronunciation. Sometimes, however, characters combine in a way that eludes me, leaving me unable to cross beyond a vague notion of its meaning. Japanese never ceases to attract me.
Sometimes, good things come out of embarrassing public injuries. I might have felt mortified spraining my ankle walking down the steps of Kumamoto Castle, but it also forced me to learn to say “I sprained my ankle” in Japanese. (Besides, the sound my ankle made was much worse than the actual injury.)
That’s what’s so exciting about the intermediate language level. You’re not limited to simple greetings and basic yes or no questions, but you are also new enough that you absorb vocabulary wherever you go. When life presents you with a new situation, you can handle it just by learning a couple of new words.
I remember reading about a character in a Murakami novel who had worked all across Japan, from the tropical southern islands of Okinawa to the frozen wilderness of Hokkaido. When I was young, I thought Japan was small: now, I think it’s very big.
Japan, unlike Taiwan, is an entity hard to wrap one’s head around. While Taiwan is one small island that controls a couple of other tiny, sparsely populated islands because of historical footnotes, Japan contains over 6,000 islands that constitute a land mass approximately the size of California.
Taiwan’s high speed rail system, though just as efficient as Japan’s, is on a completely different scale. Taiwan’s system takes one from Taipei in the north to Kaohsiung in the south in a little over two hours. Japan’s train system, on the other hand, is a dizzying array of different companies and lines.
Japan’s population is also not to be underestimated. Though it inevitably seems small in comparison to its gargantuan neighbor China, Japan’s population stands at 125 million, over a third of the US population. During World War II, Japan’s population was around 71 million, only half of the US.
From a language learning perspective, this means that Japanese has a formidable pull factor. It may “only be spoken in Japan” as an official language, but that one nation has way more people than one could meet in a lifetime. The practical usefulness of Japanese, already a poor way to determine the value of a language, is unfairly compared to Mandarin. Think of it on a global scale: Japanese is the 13th most widely spoken language in the world.
Taiwan, large in its ideas and what it stands for, is a small island. Out of a nationalistic love that I understand and sympathize with, Taiwanese people construct their land mass in interesting ways that exaggerate its vastness. It’s practically a national tradition to respond “so far!” when naming any two places, no matter whether they are located on different corners of the island or they are twenty minutes away on the Taipei metro.
Taiwan’s location near the equator does cause relatively large differences in climate from north to south, but sometimes this is taken too far. Many urbanites insist that adjacent neighborhoods of Taipei have vastly different climates, as if a distance of one kilometer could turn the tropics into Siberia.
Never mind that Taiwan is smaller than Kyushu, the second smallest of Japan’s four main islands.
1/15/2024
I leave Taiwan, but it stays with me. No matter where I go, I continue to surround myself with its food, its people, its language. I fantasize about using Chinese here, hoping to surprise some Chinese-speaking tourist by asking for directions, carefully observing their expression processing the disconnect between my face and my words. For lunch today, I eat Chinese.
I order a bowl of dan dan noodles, using my newly acquired Japanese word for “extra spicy.” I also ask the server if they can prepare the dish without meat, repeating my carefully rehearsed “Meat without can prepare (question particle)?” I feel a little nervous using the potential verb form in a real-life context, fearing some unidentifiable miscommunication might occur. To my pleasure and relief, the server agrees without any confusion or question.
When I pay the bill, the Japanese grandpa asks me if I don’t like meat. When I tell him I’m a vegetarian, I find out he is too. As I sort through unfamiliar Japanese coins, I tell him “meat without preparing thank you (past stem).” He says a polite phrase that I guess means something like “please feel free.” I feel how my Japanese comes out smoother, more confidently: with each conversation, my spoken Japanese takes one step closer towards my passive understanding.
Sakurajima, Kagoshima’s volcano island, is an introvert’s dream.
There’s something magical about coming to a well-resourced attraction with signs clearly indicating pre-determined itineraries and being able to enjoy foot baths, visitor center exhibitions and magical volcano views without the burden of a crowd. It’s clear that the low foot traffic is not due to Sakurajima’s lack of appeal. How nice that, because I’ve come to the southern tip of Kyushu on a winter weekday, I have the pleasure of enjoying these sights without any crowds.
If it weren’t for the large volcano, the scenery at Sakurajima would make me feel like I’m in Maine or even the beaches of southern Delaware. I don’t have the knowledge or vocabulary to describe its flora and fauna well, but the tall, orange-green trees appear straight out of New England, and the ground brush reminds me of Cape Henlopen, a beach I went to a lot as a kid.
I used to think every place’s scenery was unique, but now I feel like there are more similarities than differences. It would be worth learning more about the science of landscapes to better see what makes a place special. I can say, however, thanks to a display at the visitor’s center, that Japan has the 4th largest number of active volcanoes in the world at 111. Whether they are all as captivating as this one is an open question.
Perhaps it was Sakurajima’s natural beauty that brought me to the inevitable: beginning to feel a fondness towards Japan that set me off thinking about how to spend more time here. Still in the midst of this special, hard-to-come-by journey, I find my mind drifting towards all the places I yearn to see: the Brazilian village in the Aichi countryside, Akita and the wild northeast, Niigata, the largest city on the Sea of Japan…
Although I recognize these thoughts as a normal part of any voyage, I reprimand myself for not living in the moment. I can’t help but feel drawn towards Japan, aching to create a life and a network that might bring me back frequently to these islands. I decide I’ll take the N3 Japanese exam this year rather than next.
On the way back to Kagoshima, I choose a seat facing the town’s modest outline on the nearly empty ferry, soaking in the view of the fleeting sun.
1/17/2024
The first floor of this community center is an overstimulating mess, filled with groups of drunk salarymen participating in the socially ordained nomikai. Thankfully, the third floor is curiously empty. I wonder for a split second how cities can be so dense in some places and so empty in others, but then I restrain the thought, fearing I might jinx myself and summon a stampede.
If it wasn’t for the language exchange tonight, I might not have the energy to leave my hotel at all, as the four-hour train ride from Kagoshima to Osaka was exhausting. But this is not a temple or a “must-see” attraction that I can visit anytime: this is a temporary gathering of people with the opportunities I’ve been craving to speak Japanese.
I take a deep breath and enter the room. Three Japanese women greet me in Japanese. I don’t respond immediately, as my day has drained me of the energy to respond with a confidence that would dispel their doubts in my language ability, so naturally they switch to English. “I don’t know if I should respond in English or Japanese” I say in a crazed, anxious tone, feeling I’ve let my crazy mask slip.
I’m placed at a table with a Japanese woman in her 30s. The best way I can describe her is as the Japanese do, as a burikko; in Chinese, a “green tea bitch,” in English, a basic bitch. She tells me about the outfit she wore to the Barbie movie, about her divorce from her husband of 11 years, about the gay friends she wants to make. She speaks only in English, giving off vibes that she would be quick to rebuff my foreign Japanese. This leaves me disappointed, wondering if I’ll have any space in our conversation to speak in Japanese.
When she asks me if there are a lot of gay people in Taiwan, I respond coyly “how would I know?” I guess she’s picked up on the fact that I called Tony my “partner,” purposely avoiding the word “boyfriend.” I wasn’t sure how my gayness would be received in Japan, but maybe I underestimated young, urban Japanese attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people. I guess the gay best friend stereotype has gone international.
I feel relieved when halfway through the event the hosts switch our tables. I end up sitting with a US-Japanese “hafu” (Japanese for “mixed race”) military child named Nancy and a Japanese guy named Ryuta. Though Nancy was raised with Japanese and speaks fluently, her Japanese is laced with English words like “awkward silence,” and anytime she says a foreign word like “North Carolina” it’s in a heavy Southern drawl. She gives short answers to all of my questions, leaving me wondering why she’s here.
Ryuta, on the other hand, is my ideal language partner. Talkative and friendly, he speaks only in Japanese. I thrive with people like this who invite me into a conversation in their native language, where I don’t have to worry that they’ll switch to English. I’m grateful that people like this exist in the world, people who give language learners the room to try things out and remove the complicated social politics that stop a learner in their tracks.
Ryuta coincidentally has studied abroad in Taiwan to learn Mandarin. When I ask him which university, I am so surprised to know that it’s Feng Chia, the university whose main entrance was directly in front of my Taichung apartment. From there, we have a lot to talk about. He points out astutely and hilariously the Taiwanese obsession on wiping down every surface they use at a restaurant or café with tissue paper. I laugh, realizing I’ve picked up the habit myself.
As we talk about stinky tofu and night markets, I feel comfortable knowing that Ryuta’s knowledge of Chinese can fill in my Japanese gaps. When I pronounce the Japanese word for “night market” as “yoshi” instead of the correct “yochi,” I use the Chinese word to clear things up.
As the event winds down, the organizers invite us to go out for an udon dinner. I get chatting with a friendly Indonesian guy on the way. When I ask him his name, he introduces himself to me with his Chinese name: Han Wei. In Mandarin, he tells me about his Chinese studies in Malaysia. He is surprised that I’ve come to Japan to learn Japanese, telling me he’s never met an American in Japan who can speak both Chinese and Japanese. I pretend to be less flattered by this compliment than I truly am.
At dinner, the conversation jumps rapidly from Japanese to English, English to Japanese. I find this hard, not because my brain is unable to switch gears but because I can’t process the social politics of it all so quickly. My Japanese isn’t good enough to assert itself in this environment, and it reminds me of how much room I have to grow.
I feel a bit insecure about not being able to participate as much as I would like. Han Wei keeps translating for me when I don’t want or need it, and the burikko asks me if I can understand what everyone says. I can, but listening and speaking are two different things.
This event has brought me a mix of success and failure, but it’s only one step on my journey.
1/18/2024
I go to yet another secondhand bookstore in Osaka. Compulsion drives me to look for Paris Syndrome wherever I can, despite the fact that my confidence in finding it dwindles with each visit. I ask a store employee if they have the book in stock, having learned that this is the most efficient way to check the store’s inventory. He jumps from floor to floor, checking inside of locked shelves tucked away in corners I didn’t know were there.
What is the Japanese social protocol when a used bookstore employee has to perform daunting acts of cardio just to confirm what you already suspect, that your rare book isn’t there? Should I hit him with an otsukaresamadeshita to recognize his effort, or will pointing out his effort seem belittling? Poor young man.
After a lazy day yesterday drinking Wendy’s cream sodas and feeling overwhelmed, I feel readjusted to Osaka’s rhythms. I decide to go out to a bar called PokaPoka.
The bar is small and intimate, with only six or seven seats. I feel nervous and somewhat awkward arriving at the same time as a regular customer. I exchange the usual greetings with the bartender and the Japanese bear: how long are you in Japan, how do you like Osaka, where are you from etc. I feel them welcoming me in warmly, a kindness I am so grateful for in this foreign place.
The Japanese guy asks me if I can speak Japanese. I strategize. If I say “yes,” I fear setting expectations hubristically high, but if I say “a little,” I might imply discomfort with the language and an unwillingness to practice. I choose “somewhat.” As he continues asking me questions in Japanese, I often struggle to understand, but when he repeats them in English, I often feel capable of answering in Japanese. I sometimes pull back a bit from the conversation, listening to the bartender talk to his regular customer and trying to think up relevant replies quickly enough to fill in short lulls.
It surprises me when the bartender tells the couple that comes in after me that I speak Japanese well, as I am somewhat embarrassed by my difficulties. One day, people will compliment my Japanese in Japanese and not in English. The couple consists of an older Australian and a Taiwanese guy in his 30s named Kevin. They’re easy to talk to, despite the fact that I keep miscalculating when the Australian is finished with a point, “hmm”-ing or “oh”-ing just a tad too early each time.
The dynamic between the two of them is interesting. I look away politely when they commit PDA, but the more grievous offenses better suited for the privacy of the home are harder to ignore. Kevin puts bar snacks in his mouth and makes weird gestures, like having them poke out to look like shark teeth. He always holds the pose for many seconds too long. His partner laughs every time; I could do without it.
Perhaps I would feel the serendipity of meeting a Taiwanese person in this Osaka bar if Kevin wasn’t such an Anglophile. He complains about Japanese people’s inability to speak English, a complaint that irritates me from anyone. As if it would do everyone on Earth some good to submit to Anglicization, erase our differences until we have nothing left to celebrate. He, of course, does not bite when I mention being a master’s student in Chinese literature.
I take solace in the fact that earlier today I made a dream come true. At a museum, I excused myself in Mandarin to a Chinese couple, relishing the slight gasp and turning of the head I sensed as I walked away. The Sinosphere always returns to me, embracing me like a warm blanket wherever I plant my feet.
1/19/2024
I was about to write a diatribe about how rude it is to respond to someone in English who begins a conversation in Japanese, but then I had a positive interaction at a café and my frustration melted away.
To be fair, ordering a coffee in Japanese is not such a daunting task. It involves the direct use of a lot of English words modified to fit Japanese pronunciation, so that half of the interaction is words like “hotto” (translation: hot Americano) or “medium-u roast-o.”
I was proud, however, to whip out my newly learned phrase kekkou desu to politely decline ordering a dessert, wielding it triumphantly like secret code.
I sip my petite, Japanese-sized latte with a sense of achievement, feeling my Japanese catch up to me.
As both my Chinese and my Japanese progress, I see the close, sibling-like relationship these two languages share. When I first began learning Japanese, I necessarily thought of the two languages as two concretely separate units. I had to think of Japanese vocabulary as possessing a distinctly Japanese character so as to distinguish the two languages in my head.
I assumed that Chinese characters in Japanese were more fixed to their vocabulary pairs, unable to be combined, deconstructed, and flipped like their Chinese counterparts. When I learned a Japanese vocabulary word that contained different characters from the modern Chinese equivalent, I assumed the meaning of the Chinese word would be inconceivably foreign & strange to a Japanese eye. But this, I am more and more convinced, is a misconception.
Let me provide an example: in modern Japanese, “highway” is often rendered as “高速道路,” while Chinese typically uses “高速公路.” In my early days of Japanese study, I might have made the wild conjecture that this implied a fundamental difference in each language’s understanding of this concept. Now, however, I am convinced the two languages could swap words and nothing about it would seem strange. As my Chinese grammar professor put it, Japanese & Chinese share a common system of written meaning in a deep way that overcomes differences in grammar and phonology.
After all, Japanese wasn’t always written in the modern patchwork of three scripts that intimidates beginners today. There was a time when, like Chinese, it was written completely in Chinese characters. This is an idea that is hard for me to wrap my head around: these days, the hiragana phonetic script allows verb endings to be written in a way that clearly distinguishes them from their root concept.
In fact, I believe that the development of the phonetic hiragana and katakana scripts has overwhelmingly enhanced the language’s expressive power. Since Japanese is an agglutinative language unlike Chinese, writing out verb conjugations in a phonetic script is an elegant solution. It creates a neat visual experience, with each element separated into its particular script box. Plus, this richness opens up a world of possibilities for the language to manipulate its writing style for creative effect, a fascinating phenomenon for someone like me stuck on the boundary between literature and linguistics.
This elegance stands in stark contrast to the unfortunate situation of modern Korean. Similar to Japanese, Korean is an agglutinative language that for historical reasons has borrowed a lot of Chinese vocabulary. After the Korean War, however, characters were stripped from the language in both Koreas despite academia’s widespread opposition. The inclusion of Chinese characters that allows me to read Japanese books above my Japanese level is diametrically opposed to Korean’s exclusion, which for me as a hypothetical learner would be very frustrating. Friends of mine who speak Chinese and have endeavored to learn Korean tell me that it’s easy to identify Chinese loanwords, but I find the system inelegant.
Perhaps it’s a good thing that my aesthetic preferences have limited which languages attract me. I have to remind myself of the obvious: that I cannot master all languages. Whereas in college I felt pangs of hungered curiosity towards essentially any language, now I need attractive visual stimuli, a welcoming community of speakers, a new set of unfamiliar vocabulary, the list goes on. When I feel satisfied with my levels in Persian and Japanese, I’ll have two more languages to learn to get to my goal of proficiency in ten languages. Only the Gods know which ones they’ll be…
To the Brazilian friend who invited me to this gay bar so I could meet him and practice my Portuguese, I’m sorry. When I came in and saw a group of people singing karaoke in Chinese, I felt drawn to join them. After spending these last few days stretching my intermediate Japanese, it feels like a return home to speak in Mandarin.
How fun to be in on the action, take part in this special linguistic club divorced from its native soil. I feel it takes a special level of proficiency to maintain a conversation in a language outside of its place of origin. The odds are already against you, particularly as a Westerner: if no one in Taiwan assumes you know any Mandarin, why would Taiwanese tourists in Japan think so?
I feel proud of the time I’ve put in, the years of polishing that have led me to this moment. I know to avoid saying ganbei, the Chinese pronunciation of Japanese’s kanpai, as in Chinese it implies you have to down your entire drink in one gulp. I take pleasure in switching the names of Japanese place names to match the Chinese readings of their characters like someone mastering a complicated game. I know Tokyo must change to dong jing, Osaka must change to da ban, Okinawa must change to the radically different chong sheng, all with the correct tones added on.
It feels good, for a change, to enjoy progress I’ve already made. I have too much fun, stay out until the first subway home at five in the morning, wake up the next day with a hangover and a smile on my face.
1/22/2024
All out of cash, ATM won’t let me withdraw, can’t get on the airport shuttle. I’ve got three hours before my flight and panic is looming.
I figure my only option is to take a taxi. I worry the driver won’t want to drive a foreigner, but when I approach the window he pops out of the car and takes my luggage eagerly. I tell him that the taxi is my last resort and that I worry my foreign credit card won’t work.
He stops at the side of the road to test my card and make sure the transaction will go through: ten seconds of crossed fingers later, the machine beeps with the sound of a successful transaction. I’ve avoided disaster.
When we get to the airport, my driver tells me “take care, be careful.” I don’t know if that’s typical behavior for a Japanese taxi driver, but it makes me feel welcome.
I’ve come to know nihon by its repetitive sights, smells, and sounds: off-white earthquake-proof buildings, cigarette smoke, ambient jazz. I am not deceived into thinking that Japan is a perfect place. Its inhabitants suffer from depressingly similar shopping arcades, boundless hierarchies of polite verb forms, a work culture that exhausts one into obedience.
I never found Paris Syndrome. And yet, I have suffer from a compulsive Japan syndrome: a force that pulls me towards Japan and its language despite the ugly truth, despite the folly of attempting to learn the unknowable.
As I leave, I think of the tipsy Japanese man in the Chinese restaurant who told me welcome to Japan. I think of the customs attendant who told me please come back often. I tell them I will, yes, I will…
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