One of my favorite things about Japan and Japanese is the collection of Chinese characters used in Japanese writing. They are expressive and artsy, yet each is orderly and confined to a uniform space. They can flow freely across a poster, stand alone on a road sign, or cram themselves into impossibly small spaces on a page.
To a person familiar with the nuts and bolts, many of them scream out their meaning while others hide it behind a few deceptively simple strokes. To me, a Japanese learner from the age of 18, they signify events in my life and conjure up people, places, and sensations locked deep within.
Take, for example, the word for “league.” I cannot forget where I learned that word and what was going on in my life at the time.
I was sitting outside Kagami-machi Station as I did every Friday afternoon in 2005 before the dreaded English conversation classes at Okanouchi Preschool. Kagami-machi was twenty minutes away from my house by train, but only one train departed per hour.
That meant that I had to sit at the station for forty minutes because the next train would make me two minutes late for the first lesson. I could have walked to the preschool early, but that would have meant playing with the kids, of whom one enjoyed spitting on adults.
So I sat at Kagami-machi Station and read comic books, which is childish but doesn’t appear so as much in Japan. I had chosen a baseball comic book series, and I learned a lot of words from it, most of them useless in real life.
One useful word, however, was “league,” and it stuck out in my mind right away because it was constructed of easy parts and simply looked like “league.”
So now, every time I see that word in the newspaper or on the Internet, my mind travels back to those sweltering summer days sitting at the station praying for God to make it quick and painless and get me to the weekend.
This happens several times a day, to the point where I could not estimate how many words have this effect on me.
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Names bring about similar feelings, especially if they belong to someone special to me.
I dated a girl from Fukushima Prefecture for over two years, and her first name was expressed by a single character with 17 strokes. The symbol on the left, which is called a character’s “radical,” means “eye.” The rest of it means “child” by itself, but when combined with the eye radical, it means “pupil” or “iris” in English.
It was a difficult character to learn to write properly, but it finally stuck in my mind one day when we were looking at an old photo album of hers. She showed me a picture of herself at five years old, dressed in a ratty, pale blue preschool uniform holding a large piece of paper with her name scrawled on it in crooked, child-like script.
Nowadays, I see the character more often in poetic reference to an eye than to a woman’s name. However, in those cases, my brain rips through three years of memories, happy and sad, and delivers me to that old apartment, sitting in front of the photo album with Hitomi looking at her picture from preschool.
It doesn’t stop there, though. The right side of the character shows up by itself in other words and is paired with other radicals. It means that I get memories of Hitomi when I see words like “bell,” “yearning,” and “child.”
I talk to Japanese people about their perception of Chinese characters and find that few of them relate to the characters the same way that I do. The Bike Shops told me that they just see words. Coach Napoleon thinks that the characters evoke some feelings but can’t come up with any examples. Coach Ken, the baseball head coach, says that words do nothing for him at all.
At the desk next to me is a part-time English teacher who spent two years in Canada and could be the best English teacher at the school if not for the hierarchy and implied unimportance of her position. Mrs. Canada (she is married) nearly jumped out of her seat when I asked her about connecting with the characters; it was as if she had finally met someone she could talk to about the memories that followed her around.
She related to me the story of a fiancée of hers years back who killed himself before their planned wedding. No warning, no note, no explanation. Mrs. Canada is forever scarred by the horrific event, but is also haunted by the two characters that the man used for his name.
We determined through talking to others that people who are otherwise and already introspective gain this extra meaning from Chinese characters, and I must say that I am shocked to find so few who do.
I am in an interesting position in that I am not a native speaker of Japanese. It makes sense that I would attach more meaning and emotion to the characters; I am effectively ten years old in terms of Japanese experience, but I have been an adult with a vivid history for most of that decade.
However, though words play tricks on my mind in English as well, suffixes, prefixes, and halves of compound words do not. That is what is going on here with the characters. They are presented in such a way that their appearance can cause a reliable, consistent reaction completely regardless of the context.
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Until recently, I struggled with one that thankfully proved to be less permanent than the others swimming around in my head. This past summer, I fell in love with a local girl that I had met the previous summer upon arriving in Kochi. I knew her well, got to see her interact with my family, and was perfectly comfortable letting go of inhibition and loving her.
She sported a single character for her name, composed of the tree radical and “spicy” or “tough” on the right side. It depicts a certain kind of tree with very rough, sturdy bark. I’ve only recognized the character since meeting her, and it’s been a woman’s name every time; it does not mean “maple” or “oak” or “pine.” Then I’d really be in trouble.
Avoiding long stories and character attacks, in late August she called things off and did it very disrespectfully, showing a selfish side that I hadn’t known. I have never been done so dirty and it still smarts from time to time.
Especially when I see that “tough” or “spicy” bit. It’s a part of “avoid,” “fence,” and “refuse.” All words on the undesirable side of things, so pleasant memories should be safe, right?
Wrong. Add a single stroke at the top and “spicy” becomes “happiness.” And not happy as in, “Hey, look, I just found ten bucks on the ground!” Happy as in lasting happiness. And the happiness character appears in the word “inform,” so it’s in the news every single day.
It took a long time for the sea of information to drown out the persistent memories of that tree with the tough bark. Happiness has finally won the battle as well, thanks to talking about this with Mrs. Canada and many other Japanese.
I enjoyed the 28-mile ride out to Tree Bark’s house on a secluded bay west of Kochi and did it twice a week while we were dating. A finger of mountainous land stretched out and surrounded the bay, and my favorite place in all of Kochi was on a bridge connecting the end of that finger to a small island facing the Pacific.
I still haven’t been back out to the bridge. I have even been taking the national highway out west instead of the back road that runs by her little town. On the return trip from Kubokawa Town at the end of November, I stopped and took pictures on the coast at a point from which I could see into the bay. I longed for another sunset at the bridge and cringed at the pain I would surely suffer as I rode through the old town that I had loved as much as I had loved the girl.
Then, my thoughts became as clear as the cloudless autumn sky and I realized that I had given that bay, that bridge, and that town to that inconsiderate woman. I had let her have control over something that she couldn’t control. I had given her ownership of all of that, and in my mind, it was stamped with that single, leathery, dessicated Chinese character.
I took the back road for the first time with KCTC last Sunday, and next time I will make it a point to head out to that special bridge. It belongs to Kochi. It belongs to me.
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I wish that these thoughts weren’t so prevalent, that I could think about that decrepit train station once in ten times I saw the word “league,” or that it was easier for me to let things go in general. Unflagging involuntary introspection seems to be one cross I will have to bear as I continue this journey through Japanese language and culture.
The sad memories are hollow, and they are dogged in their pursuit of my consciousness. If I stopped to count, I might find that they outnumber the warm, rosy memories. Studying the characters was not fun, but the frustration and fatigue of learning them were accompanied by a lasting fascination with their power and beauty.
