TriumphAnt

Our cultural exchange experience, or
An Occident waiting to happen

Part 1: Getting to know you

As I mentioned, we are playing host for a couple weeks to Hikana, a young woman from Japan who is in Ottawa as part of an 80-person contingent from her high school. The program that brought her here is English as a Second Language (ESL), a program given a very high priority on her school’s curriculum. I discovered this when I did some online reading about the school and its programs. The school, in fact, has been officially designated a Super English Language (SEL) High School by a multi-named Japanese government ministry that even outdoes the Canadian government’s bureaucratic penchant for oddly combined responsibilities: the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

She and her schoolmates arrived by bus… (Oh alright. They flew from Kyoto to Toronto with a five-hour layover in Detroit – a.k.a. the seventh circle of Dante’s hell, I believe. Then they were bussed from Toronto to Ottawa. And no, I don’t know why an airplane capable of winging non-stop from Kyoto to Detroit was incapable of managing a follow-up flight from Detroit to Ottawa. It’s probably something to do with US Homelands Security post 9-11. “Here you go, Mr Pilot. Under our new rules, y’all are allowed only 40 gallons of aviation fuel. Make the most of it.” But I digress.)

At 1:30 am – that’s 90 minutes past midnight – VERY early Saturday morning – my wife, daughter and I were milling around with about 125 other host family members in a parking lot in a school so far out in suburban Ottawa that it probably qualifies for remote access hardship allowances for its teachers. We were naturally quite happily blathering away as only those who have been fortifying ourselves for the past three hours with stay-awake jolts of caffeine can blather.

This school and its parking lot are entirely surrounded by townhomes and I could only imagine what irate residents must have wondered as they glanced out their windows into the night to see a sea of people waving signs festooned with very foreign and very long words (our guests’ names, of course). Were it I, I might have concluded that Local Whatever of the International Brotherhood of High School Caretakers (Night Shift Division) was staging a wildcat strike at AY Jackson High School. Oh, and I probably would have called the police – if only to come and quell the noise.

The noise volume, however, actually rose even further when, at about 1:30 am (2:30 pm the following day in Kyoto – where these kids’ jet-lagged metabolisms were still happily ticking) two enormous highway buses rumbled into the parking lot and swiftly disgorged their travel-whacked, but no less chatty for it, cargoes.

Hikana, our young guest finally located her hastily scrawled name on our sign and cheerily introduced herself with a warm smile, a polite bow and a handshake. Japan obviously is also the source of world-renowned engineering in travel devices, because Hikana was towing an industrial-strength steel suitcase on wheels that weighed a hundred and fifty pounds if it weighed an ounce. She’d obviously read her prep sheet about the North American technique of greeting by handshake just as carefully as we’d read our prep sheet about the Japanese technique of bowing at roughly every third syllable. Neither of which, it turns out, is always true. Or is at least tempered somewhat when carried on at a time of day that one either (a) is normally sound asleep (us); or (b) is still locked into the shape of a seat after having been in that position for probably 30 consecutive hours all told (her).

As we drove into Ottawa along a six-lane highway devoid of all vehicles except those few others with bleary-eyed hosts and travel-wired young Japanese travellers, I happily rabbited on, complete with pointing, about where she’d have been able to see several major Ottawa landmarks if only it were daylight.

We had been communicating by e-mail before her arrival and her messages left me with no doubt whatsoever that her English was excellent. In fact, based on the e-mails, I had the pre-arrival impression that for her, the trip was probably more of a reward than a linguistic necessity. As the next day would reveal, however, her written English had been given heavy support from a completely wonderful piece of technology – more on that follows. Her spoken English (while infinitely beyond my spoken Japanese – I was still trying to figure a way to work my only phrase – “Tora Tora Tora” – into our conversation) clearly would require situations that allowed for much more concentration than that which could be found in a highway-driven car at 2 am when one’s foreign passenger is in the back seat.

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The aforementioned “completely wonderful piece of technology”, as we discovered the next afternoon (she slept right through the morning), is a thin, pocket-sized device that looks like a miniature laptop computer – which is exactly what it is. The keyboard had exactly 36 characters I recognized – our alphabet and the numbers 0 to 9, as well as a couple dozen others that conveyed no meaning whatsoever, because they were labelled in Japanese characters.

But this device is an amazing tool and, in Hikana’s skilled hands, has quickly enabled her to convey to us concepts like, for example, “I have jet-lag syndrome” when I joked about her dozing off at her study desk. Conversely, while I couldn’t read the translations, my entering a simple English word like “professional” would yield a half-screen of Japanese variations on the word, from which she almost always has been able to deduce the approximate context in which I’d used the English word.

So we can communicate, but we do try to minimize reliance on the device. For the simple reason that she is here for a very short time to make the most of an opportunity to learn English, not to practice the use of an electronic translator.

And besides, as good as it is, it’s only as good as the information the user feeds in. (Remember the old acronym “GIGO” – "Garbage In / Garbage Out”?) For example, very early after her arrival, I found myself trying to explain the difference between movie "dubbing" and movie "subtitling". In this case, even after my miming speaking vs writing, including a beautifully sensitive rendering (if I do say so myself) solely by hand gestures in the air, of the pivotal battle scene in “Godzilla vs the Smog Monster”, it was still apparent that I had not fully conveyed the difference between the written “subtitle” and the spoken “dub”. So I enlisted the support of her electronic translator. At one point, she nodded vigorously as she read one of my fumble-fingered keystrokings, and began tugging on her arm hair so as to raise her skin. I was completely baffled until, on a closer examination of the device's screen, I discovered I had entered "dubbin" instead of "dubbing".

I don't think I was completely successful in undoing the impression she will now be taking home -- that Canadians package all their foreign movies in leather preservative.

(The interpretation does give an interesting turn to the term "skin flick", though.)

Sidebar note: I have since learned (Disclaimer: I’ve been wrong before; I’ll be wrong again; I may be wrong now.) that written Japanese (Nihongo) uses one of two character sets. In Hiragana (which translates literally as “ordinary syllabic script”), 48 Japanese characters / syllables convey exactly what its name suggests – ordinary writing. (It is also employed to illustrate pronunciation, because each character has its own sound.)

The other, Katakana, is also 48 characters long, and consists of characters borrowed long ago from the Chinese. Katakana also has an extended list of sounds made up of the original 48 in different combinations. Katakana is used to assemble the sounds required to give the Japanese a word for foreign-sourced words. To take just one example, the English word “hotel” is rendered in sounds that the Japanese pronounce as “hoteru”. So suddenly the apparently mangled “Engrish” in which we in the West find so much humour makes a great deal more sense. (And yes, at least one Japanese CD pirate has produced – and advertised online – a disk of the greatest hits of “Eric Crapton”, but I digress.)

Writing is done using a whacking great list of up to 10,000 Chinese characters (“kanji”) approved for use in written Japanese. Compare the age at which Canadian kids are expected to know our alphabet – what? 3? – with the expectation that Japanese children should have learned at least 2- 3,000 characters in the kanji set by the time they graduate high school.

And I don’t even want to think of Japanese secretarial school, whose top graduates probably have achieved a modest typing speed measured in words per hour! When those people talk of a desktop keyboard, they mean a keyboard that completely covers the top of your desk! (Boom badda bing.) Seriously, there’s a great website, complete with illustrated examples, if your interest should go beyond my meagre – and no doubt misunderstood (by me, not you) – efforts to explain: www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese_language.htm .

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Finally, here’s an Olympic update: At this writing, Canada is in the midst of another national handwringing crisis because one of our Olympic athletes has committed the almost unpardonable crime of failing to fulfill a nation’s hopes. Perdita Felicien, a sprint hurdler, was designated before the Games by adoring media and her fans as sure to win her event. When her principal competition (American Gail Devers) re-aggravated a muscle injury and failed to finish her qualifying heat, Felicien’s coach confidently predicted that only an “act of God” could deny Felicien the gold medal now.

God, it turns out, accepted the dare, said, “Oh, OK,” and made Ms Felicien lift her leading foot just a hair’s breadth below what she needed to clear the first hurdle. The resulting collision wiped out the hurdle, Ms Felicien’s medal hopes and, almost incidentally, Irina Shevchenko, a competing runner in the next lane, representing Russia.

Well coach, when you get back home, I heartily suggest you hike off to your local public library and borrow a book by Walter Lord entitled “A Night to Remember”. It’s about the Titanic and includes a reference to the (probably apocryphal) quote attributed most often to White Star President Bruce Ismay: “Even God Himself could not sink this ship.”

Don’t mess with God, people. Whatever name and incarnation you might ascribe to Him / Her / It / Them, one of the cardinal lessons that always seems to come down from On High is the lesson of humility.

Of course, that hasn’t changed Canadian sports officials’ policy of immediately responding by looking for someone else to blame for the calamity. In one especially creative account, a learned observer noted that the replay showed Ms Felicien’s “explosion” from the blocks at the starting gun was weaker than her best, and showed her already in second last place as the runners just began to hit their strides. Faced with ground to make up even before the first hurdle, Ms Felicien, he surmised, elected to “crowd” the barrier, but miscalculated. So in this case, it’s not really her fault. It’s all those other runners who sprang off their blocks as though… well, as though the race were for Olympic gold.

Ms Felicien clearly felt she had to apologize to the entire country immediately after picking her understandably devastated self off the track and walking morosely into the footlights and the footnotes of Canadian Olympic history.

My wife, reading about this the next morning, said she really should have apologized to Russia!

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Next: But for one little touch of the space bar, “man’s laughter” would be “manslaughter” – Adventures in correspondence.