conversation and food, mostly food

I have a pretty jaded sense of humor but Nagao never fails to crack me up. He giggles his way through the story of his Japanese student who, with typical difficulty teasing out the phonemes /r/ and /l/, recited the first line of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” thus: “I wandered lonely as a crowd.” In his own days as a student Nagao benefited from an English instructor who drilled him with tape recordings of the phonemes: “rice, lice, rice, lice …” Nagao’s mnemonic for the distinction: “We live on rice; we are lived on by lice.”

My pleasure in Nagao’s company seems mutual, as I too manage to put him in stitches at least once every conversation, but this is easy when you’re an American in Japan. He was especially taken with a story from my first visit to the sento. I was about to enter one of the baths when an older gentleman called out to me, “Ereki, ereki!” while pinching his lower arm demonstratively. “What?” I asked. He repeated, “Ereki!” This charade went on for awhile until I finally pointed at the bath and said, “I’m going in there,” and he gave me a kind of “it’s your funeral” wave-off. I dipped a foot in and was shocked, literally, as the bath was equipped with steel plates that emitted a mild electric charge. (I’ve since ventured further into the “denkiburo,” literally “electric bath,” and found it quite relaxing.)

What amused Nagao was the man’s exhortation of “ereki,” a coinage that combines “electricity” and “denki,” the Japanese word for electricity. The term is more commonly used to describe a musical instrument (electric guitar) and genre (post-60s electric rock), but by using it to describe the bath the guy actually thought he was speaking English. Japanese borrowings from English are always a bit tortured, mostly because of the phonetic rule that every syllable consist of one consonant and one vowel. Sometimes the result is a lengthening of the original term: the three syllable “credit card” is doubled in length to “kurejito kado.” Other times, apparently when people couldn’t be bothered to work out all the consonants and vowels, the result is a shortening: “electricity” becomes “ereki,” “family computer” becomes “famicom,” and “orchestra” becomes “oke” (as in “karaoke,” or “empty orchestra”). Still other times, the neologisms are wonderfully creative hybrids, as when young people here describe their culture’s relatively rare moments of physical intimacy as “skinship.”

To the degree that I’m learning anything about the language here, it’s mostly from fellow foreigners. Ironically, given how much is done for my benefit, among natives I’m almost always a non-person in conversation. My companion Hideki, though a stellar Man Friday, is a less effective translator: he talks to others present in Japanese and to me in English, and gets so engrossed in conversation at both ends that he neglects to play go-between. This works surprisingly well for me, as I’ve always been a daydreamer and never very good at following conversations even in English; here, I have an excuse to zone out.

My ignorance of the language becomes especially propitious at meal time as it allows me to focus on my food while others yammer on. Staples here include sashimi, yakitori (little skewers of meat and vegetables), yakisoba (noodles and vegetables), and okonomiyaki (cabbage pancakes). Food is typically doled out in a cavalcade of small portions from a common platter or grill or Lazy Susan. This plays havoc with my eating habits since, like a dog, my stomach has always failed to send signals when I’m full and I therefore rely on my sense of sight to regulate my intake. At restaurants at home I’ll often mentally allocate a part of the oversized American serving to a doggy bag before I even start eating, yet here despite the dainty little plates I end up overeating. I’ve been especially profligate with the sushi and sashimi. Good fish is so taken for granted here that it’s common for a forlorn plate of kampachi and squid to sit unfinished or untouched while people gather around the grill slavering over skewers of the most routine wieners and chicken nuggets. The upshot is that I'm engorging myself on pretty much a nightly basis. I tell myself that I'm prepping for my role here like De Niro in Raging Bull and do my best to maintain my ignorance of metric weight conversion (I only weigh 86 kilos!). But in Japan one squats on a low stool to shower, and in front of the shower there is always a mirror, so I’ve had the privilege of watching my body grow in a very special way.