Before you read this, please make sure these Japanese letters 文字化け appear. If they don’t, then let me know because in that case this story will just be gibberish.
During the cherry blossom season of 1998, I moved to Japan. I had received a scholarship from Monbusho, the Japanese Ministry of Education, and was secure in the knowledge that it is the absolute best way to tap into a culture that even a dozen years later remains somewhat impervious to Westerners. With all expenses paid and a generous salary to boot, all I had to worry my 22 year old head with for the first six months was making friends and learning the language.
Cherry blossom
The first task proved easy enough and eventually helped with the second. For while the Japanese people are notoriously shy and weary of making mistakes (and hence reluctant to speak foreign languages), they’re also extremely curious. And since I was (by Monbusho’s count) one of only about 60 Lebanese in the entire country, I must have seemed exotic (or odd) enough to young Japanese for them to want me as a friend. Soon enough, I was able to tell shampoo from laundry detergent (all labels are in Japanese) and so by my second week my hair stopped turning green and my plates stopped smelling of chamomile. And thanks to my friends, I acquired a decent command of spoken Japanese in a month.
Written Japanese, however, was another matter altogether. You see, their grammar is Verb-Object-Subject (which means that you would say “Love you I.” However, it’s actually much simpler than English (or indeed Arabic) to pick up because there’s almost no such thing as verb conjugation or even tense (“Today I love you, before last month only you love me, we both would have love tomorrow.”), no plural (“one boy, two boy, one million boy”), and no gender (“boy love girl love boy same same.”) — all of which make speaking the language a breeze. However, when it comes to writing, there’s a major stumbling block called: Kanji.
The Japanese language uses three types of letters:
- Hiragana (used for simple words like pronouns), and looks like this: あいうえお
- Katakana (for words and names of foreign origin like Internet, hamburger, Obama), and is a little more angular: アイウエオ
- Kanji (used for the vast majority of words), and looks like (yikes!): 原宿
Now it doesn’t take much to see that kanji is much scarier than the other two. Well, wait till you hear this: While the first two systems each consist of around two dozen letters, there are more than 10,000 kanji in existence. Yes, that’s 10 with three zeroes after it.
Luckily, though, the Japanese Ministry of Education (yes Monbusho again) has limited the number of kanji recommended for daily use (i.e. taught at schools, and used in newspapers and other non-specialized publications) to around 2,000. That still is quite a steep learning curve for a foreigner who must cover in a few months what Japanese children are taught over the span of their entire school education. Since back then I was a mere 22 and very hot-headed, that’s where I drew the line. While my Japanese fluency was increasing almost by the hour, I stubbornly refused to do my kanji homework. And in the kanji sections of my exams, I’d just draw smileys and other doodles in the blanks where the letters were supposed to go.
However, all that changed when I discovered the secret.
Our textbooks (and most Japanese teachers I know) refer to kanji as pictographs: letters that resemble the objects they describe. For example, the kanji for tree looks like a tree: 木. Fair enough. But what they don’t tell us is that the definition only applies to the most basic kanji. Actually, each of those complex-looking characters is really more than a simple pictograph; it is an ideogram: a nugget of meaning — no, no, much more than that: an entire story encapsulated in a single letter. Every kanji contains within it a history, an anecdote, a fact about Japanese culture. Once I realized that, I fell in love!
As you may know, cherry blossom season is a very brief and special time in Japan. For the three days that the flowers are in bloom, men and women dress up in their best clothes, leave work early and go to the park to drink and be merry under the trees as they watch the pink petals blossom and then fall off. It is a story told in a single letter: sakura 桜.
