I had been playing basketball for the entirety of my stay in Japan, both in Mima and
also a nearby town called Yoshida. I wouldn't say I played because it was fun
per se (it often wasn’t)
or that I loved playing against small Japanese men with spiky hair. Nor was it altogether
an example of international exchange, though I did yell at the referees a lot. At first,
I simply played because it was something to do, something to keep me busy when talking to people was a virtual
impossibility. At that point, a chat about the weather in Japanese seemed as
likely to happen as the mountain behind my house erupting sake from its peak.
After a while, though, when I could eat all sorts of Japanese pickles and,
by extension, felt content living in the Japanese
countryside, the funny haircuts started to grow on me.
One teammate had shaved his head entirely, leaving only a patch on the top of
the head in a sort of post-modern response to balding. It was as if his
razor had broken mid-shave; he later told me it was the Japanese
soccer star Nakata who had introduced the hairstyle, but no matter
how famous Nakata was, it was an absolutely terrible looking coiffeur and no self-reflective
individual with a mirror should have copied him.
Yet, having myself been called Lloyd Christmas (after Jim Carrey's
character in Dumb and Dumber), because I rarely combed my
hair, I was in no position to judge people based on their haircuts.
Instead, I decided, I would unfairly judge them based on
their ability to communicate ideas without ever speaking a word.
I made this decision at basketball practice one day.
My diminutive, porcupined teammates, slowly becoming friends,
shouted as I walked into the
gym: “Isssssssss!!” I laughed and smiled and wondered what the
hell they were talking about.
To this day, I have never really found out what “Isssssss!” meant.
It seemed to mean "Hello!" or "What's up?" but I couldn't find
it any of my eighteen
Japanese-English dictionaries.
The thing was, in Japanese, many words
had no meaning; they just seemed to be arbitrary sounds that people used.
And they used them all the time,
like they only had so many words they could use in one sentence before
an Orwellian oral police force would
come over and say, “You’re out of words for this sentence. Use
some crow sounds, will you?”
So while the proper thing to say would have been “Ohayo” or “Konnichiwa,” or “Konbanwa”
(depending on the time of day) Japanese men often just muttered “Isssssss!”
And though women were
usually more polite with their greetings, they were certainly on the
same regimented word
count at other moments in a conversation.
The sound Japanese women made that I loved the most
(get your dirty head out of the gutter)
– a sound whose lack of meaning I
had corroborated by many friends – was
“Hora!” (One person said the word meant "See, I told you!" but I
didn't believe him) “Hora!” often seemed to communicate some
level of surprise, but that threw me for a loop. There were plenty of
other expressions for
surprise in Japanese: “Ara!” “Are!” “Eh!” “Ehhhhhhhhh!” the latest
being pronounced with a
quick rising tone, so that by the end of the sound, the person was actually yelling in your
ear. It made you want to say, “Yeah, you’re right. What I just said wasn’t really true. If
I had known you were going to yell in my ear I never would have lied to you.”
These sounds and the people who made them seemed crazy at first, like a dehibilitating disease
had stolen their ability to control
the volume of their voices. But after a while, having
either become hypnotized into
assimilation or enamored with the unconventionality of the language, I began
to find the sounds humorous. Even words that had been stolen from other languages and had become
merely bird squawks in Japanese; even these words became humorous, though at first they
made me want to scratch myself to death. At basketball, teammates would shout “Don mai!!” (from the English “don’t mind”)
when someone threw a bad pass, or “Nigh shoo!” (from the English “Nice shot”) when
someone made a basket.
In softball, captains would say, “Get your voices out!” to
which all the players would reply: “Weeeeeeeigh!!!” (origin and meaning still a mystery)
The tennis team at the middle school impersonated Monica Seles impeccably,
grunting “Iyaaa!!!” (Was Seles German?) with every serve.
It didn’t seem important what was said, either in sports or for that matter, in everyday
conversation. What was important was that an idea was communicated. In sports that
idea was often camaraderie and “chiimuu waaku” (From the English "teamwork"). In everyday
life the idea was usually
surprise. It was almost as if you were telling them that a meteor had hit your house the
night before, because the shock on their face always outweighed the reality of the situation.
And, not surprisingly, the Japanese picked up the word “shooooku” (From the English "shock") a few years back as yet
another way to express disbelief.
“I have two sisters.”
“Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Shooooooku!!!!”
