Sunday August 7
Walking home from Hareya, a sushi bar in nearby Hiromi, it finally hit me.
My old football buddy from high school, Dan Oishi, was really Dan Delicious.
Or at least that was how I grossly misinterpreted the meaning of his surname.
And Ichiro, of Seattle Mariner baseball fame, was born into the "seabass" family.
How, I wondered, could a sea bass be such a good hitter? It could have been the ika (squid)
that I ate, or maybe I had spent too much time alone, but it was certainly plain that I was
going crazy. So I went in a bookstore.
And Haruya, as it was called, was nothing like the sushi bar. No conveyor belts, no Asahi,
and no sarada (salad) rolls. In fact, the only similiar thing about the place was that there was
nothing written in English. Now, this was beginning to get to me. After all, my town....village,
really, had no night life to speak of, and yet, there was no bookstore within 15 miles to sell me
an English book. If they were going to make me stay home at night, you'd think they would have the
decency to give me something to read. No magazines, no newspapers, nothing. So, I thought to
myself (in English), I'll fight fire with fire.
And thus began my study of Japanese. Not out of curious desire, or as an idealistic linguistic.
No, out of mere necessity. There was simply nothing else to do. I began reading menus, and
store fronts, even the nutritional specifications on the back of boxes of cereal and
containers of yogurt. I read movie posters, prefectural advertisements for tourism, and the
train schedule. One of the teachers at school even gave me his 6 year old daughters'
coloring book. That really put me in my place.
I soon realized how difficult a game I had entered into; a English-Japanese sumo match, so to speak. I would
have to learn all three Japanese alphabets, hiragana, katakana and the insurmountable kanji,
before even being able to pick up a fourth graders schoolbook. And then, if I got that far, I would face the Yokuzuna: the newspaper.
Many (I hesitate to say most) Japanese cannot read the newspaper, as the task requires
extensive knowledge of hundreds of kanji. Yet I kept muttering to myself (quieter each time), "Fire with fire."
I started pausing the subtitled movies to learn the Japanese version of "Make my day!" and
dumb stuff like that. I started examining restaurant menus at every turn, whether I was
eating or not. And I even picked up a book on Japanese baseball. If I couldn't muster the
energy to study the who's who of the world`s greatest pasttime, here or back in the States, then my
dreams of Japanese fluency were certainly doomed.
But for some reason, for me, it always came back to names. So what if the Hiroshima Carp
slugger could hit 45 homeruns in a season, I wanted to know why he was named after a snowplow. And so what if the manager of
the Orix Blue Wave had once played through pneumonia. I wanted to why he was called "Toasted Rice."
And so it went. From Mitsuibishi to mitsuibachi (bumble bee) and Sony to sonyu (insertion),
it became clear that my genealogical search was anything but logical. But logic
didn't seem to apply to me at that point. I was going nuts over names.
