TriumphAnt

There’s a TV commercial that is quite popular at the moment. It’s for fruit-flavoured Chiclets gum. In it, two highly-charged Japanese schoolgirls, their school uniforms being worn in end-of-day casual mode with ties loosened, are in a karaoke bar vigorously singing (in Japanese) the old KC and the Sunshine Band disco classic, “That’s the Way (Uh huh; uh huh) I Like It.” In the lower left corner, a translator is bravely trying to keep up and provide the viewers with a “translation” of the lyrics the girls are belting out. But his lines are more like, “Oh yes… something, something… it is very good… um… Uh huh, uh huh…”

I laugh every time I see that commercial, but this entry is not about my deep-seated psychological problems. Rather, I’m citing it here because what follows are four messages I have so far received from our guest’s parents back in Kameoka City, Japan, and because the hapless translator in the gum commercial represents exactly how I felt as I read them… about two bars behind and struggling gamely along on probably an entirely different path.

Disclaimer: The correspondence below is most emphatically NOT reproduced in order to mock. I can only imagine what I would wind up sending by way of reply were I to attempt to correspond in Japanese, the internet’s Babelfish translator notwithstanding. So please adopt – as I did – an attitude of gentle amusement, combined with a genuine admiration for the effort, as you read the e-mailed lines repeated here. As I mentioned above, they were sent either by, or on behalf of Hikana’s parents and in English, exactly as they appear here, from a point on the Earth half its circumference, 13 hours of time zones and a universe away. (A couple days after she arrived, Hikana first spoke to her mother by phone and then passed along a message to us verbally – that neither of her parents can figure out how to effect the necessary internet connection to send or receive e-mail. But someone’s been helping them out, because four messages have since landed.)

1.
Nice to meet you, we're her father and mother. Thank you for having ahomestay accepted.Hikana was looking forward to this homestay very from before.Please tell her various things of Canada in large numbers.
I need your help well for two weeks.

2.
t becomes hikana caring.
As for? Kyoto, only it is raining about whether or not Canada is cool compared with?
Japan about whether or not it makes fine.
The school goes, being pleasant and breaks the house from September 1st.
Don't hang inconvenience not to think as the family.
Careful so as not to eat too much and to injure a stomach
At the what time time is the telephone to be good if being?
All and relation well
Good-by

(By the time we received the second message, Hikana had been with us for a couple days. She had already phoned home once and told us her parents did not know how to use her computer. So it came as a complete surprise to discover that someone in fact had been able to open her e-mail.)

As an aside, we asked Hikana what she does to get to school and home, and how long her school day is. The reply was simply boggling. She gets up every weekday morning at 5:30 am and travels two hours by train to a completely different city to attend high school. (The time and distance is comparable to what it would take were we to pack our own offspring off from Ottawa to Montreal by train every day – to attend high school!) Most days, she has extracurricular activities like lacrosse, or one club or another, and typically gets back home at 9:30 pm, after another two hours on the train. Only then does she have her dinner.

3.
Hello
The first e-mail reaches and is to be affected.
The e-mail came after returning from the work or became pleasant.
Of the neighborhood to be great it is moved.
Meat well, it made (a single Japanese character appeared here) or a lot of meat to like?hikana ate about what of?
Canada was delicious.
It takes a photograph to the full.
This time, it calls.

Re: “Canada was delicious.”: I’m sorry, but I can’t make myself think outside any box bigger than – This sounds just like something Godzilla would say.

Re: “It takes a photograph to the full.”: I had earlier asked if they can receive photos by e-mail. This is clearly a reply in the affirmative.

And re: “This time, it calls.”: In my second reply to Hikana’s parents, I included our “snailmail” (regular mailing) address and telephone number. Coupled with the fact that they asked in message 2 what time is good to call, this simply seems like a misplaced pronoun (“it” for “we”) to tell me they will call her next time. (Which, as it turns out, they did. And Hikana told us her Mom actually cried at the sound of her voice.)

4.
Hello and it always becomes caring.Does it make hikama fine?? Homework is left about summer vacation's, too, being an end and taiga and,hikana breaks a house from doing studying OK of the school and September 1stof use of Japanese and thank you in all of the family

A “taiga” is a forest, specifically – according to one online dictionary – a “moist subarctic coniferous forest that begins where the tundra ends and is dominated by spruces and firs”. The dictionary’s misused modifier clause notwithstanding, this sure sounds Canadian to me! What it’s doing in _this_ message mystifies me, but it somehow lends an almost poetic air to the entire missive.

I’m thinking of sending some Frederick Windsor (“The Space-Child’s Mother Goose”) by way of reply:

“Probable-Possible, my black hen,
She lays eggs in the Relative When.
She doesn’t lay eggs in the Positive Now
Because she’s unable to Postulate How.”

That oughta just do wonders for international relations!

(But are we having fun? You bet!)

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Next: I say potato; you say jagaimo – Adventures in eating