What I Hear

One of the big problems Japanese students have when learning English is distinguishing vocabulary with similar meanings from one another. The difference between "watch" and "look" is often a tricky one as is the difference between "listen to" and "hear".

As part of a lesson constructed to practice "listen to" and "hear" and distinguish when to use one or the other, I had a student tell me everything he hears around his home. It got me thinking about what I hear around my apartment and how we often focus on what we see more than on our other senses.

My time in Tokyo from an aural viewpoint is vastly different from my life in Pennsylvania. This is, in large part, because I never lived in a metropolis but it's also related to the extremely close proximity to people and possibly living in a place with cheaper (and less soundproof) building materials.

Here are the things I regularly hear:

• A neighbor practicing the flute and playing poorly.
• My elderly neighbors having loud conversations in front of their home for extended periods of time. They are so loud that it's like they're in the same room with us when our windows are open.
  
• The sliding doors opening and closing in the apartment above us.
• Various announcements from trucks selling things like rods that are used to hang laundry out on the balcony and roasted sweet potatoes or letting you know that they will collect your old electronics items like computers, T.V.s, or stereo components. Occasionally, during election times, I hear political prattle from trucks or vans driving up and down the streets.
  
• People vacuuming their walls on the other side of our walls.
• The neighbor above us tossing dirty cleaning water onto or over their balcony and hearing it splash around or on ours (sometimes when our clean laundry is hanging out on our balcony).
• In summer, very loud cicadas in the little garden between our landlord's house and our apartment.
• People hanging laundry on their balconies (it makes a distinct sound as the hangers hit the hollow tubes they are hung on).
  
• Sparrows loudly and sharply chirping at each other and crows cawing.
• An extremely inane tune played once or twice a week by a truck that drives around selling fuel.
• Neighbors opening and closing the metal shutters that you can close across your windows for added security in the world's safest metropolis.
  
• The door of our immediate neighbor opening and closing at least a half dozen times a day at all hours of the day and night as well as his key inserted and turning the lock. His front door is so close to ours that, when our kitchen window is open, it sounds like our door is being unlocked, opened and closed. Sometimes, this freaks me out when I'm home alone because it sounds like someone is coming in.
• When it's quiet and the windows are open, I hear traffic stopping and starting as the lights change on a major street about a minute's walk from our apartment. I also hear various sirens from time to time.
• The neighbor on one side flushing her toilet or running her bath. It appears to be located behind our closet.
• People on motorcycles and scooters driving up and down the street. Many of them frequently stop and start as they pause in front of mailboxes and cram in advertising.
  
• A daily tune which is played every day at 5:00 pm to inform children that they should go home now. This music always makes me melancholy because it's a little sad and because it reminds me of my husband and I being apart at that time of day.
  
• People beating futons as part of airing them out (I hear this quite frequently).
• Neighbors pulling mail from their door slots and people pushing fliers and junk through our mail slot.
  
• Passerby and neighbors sneezing, gobbing up, and coughing (frequently on the latter two accounts).
• The garbage and recycling trucks coming by on the appointed days.
• Our doorbell ringing.
  

The things I used to hear back home and I no longer hear in Tokyo, in contrast are:

• In winter, icicles falling from the edge of the roof and snow crunching as someone walks around outside. Also, ice noisily dripping as the stalagmites of ice begin to thaw.
  
• Cars pulling into our driveway and their engines starting up or being turned off. Now, traffic and cars are pretty much an en masse experience whereas they were very individual aural experiences before.
  
• In summer, crickets chirping.
• Mountain lions crying.
• In winter, cars spinning their wheels as they try to drive up icy hills.
  
• The central heating turning itself on and off.
• The clothes dryer running.
• Cats and dogs doing their various daily activities.
• My mother clearing her throat with a little coughing noise.
• My father lighting his cigars with a Zippo lighter.
• People knocking on our front door.
• The banging of a screen door.
  
• Feet going up and down stairs that sometimes creak.
• The dull drone of television in English during most waking hours.
• A mail truck delivering our mail.
• Racks in our oven being rearranged.
  
• My parents yelling for my sister and I to do something they don't want to do. ;-)
• In summer, the lawnmower cutting grass.
  

What I discovered in thinking over this change in aural sensation is that you lose a lot of environmental aspects that you don't tend to immediately recognize unless you focus on them. "Home" goes beyond what you can see and do and extends into what you hear, smell, feel, and breath. I think these are aspects that contribute to homesickness that we don't often think about.

Little Old Man Does Good

Previously, I posted about one of my students who I have referred to as "little old man" (or LOM for short). I had a lesson with him yesterday afternoon and he told me that he had been doing volunteer work before coming to the lesson.

One thing I must point out is that I rarely encounter a student who is doing volunteer work of any kind. I guess that the long hours most Japanese people work (and mostly working folks take English lessons) would make it very hard to dedicate themselves to other projects. LOM can probably do volunteer work because he is retired and only works on occasion as an adult education teacher (in computers and cell phones) or as a proctor for insurance employee qualification exams.

LOM said it would be difficult for him to tell me what type of work he was doing because the vocabulary was relatively complicated and the situation unusual but he managed to get through it with some help from his electronic dictionary. He told me that he was working at a halfway house for released criminals that was sponsored by the local government.

This information came as a surprise to me but this was mainly a reflection of my myopia about Japan and Japanese people. Despite knowing Japan has criminals and a slowly increasing crime rate, I assumed that they didn't have social programs to support convicts who had done their time. Given the fact that the culture sees criminal behavior as rather seriously shameful, I expected that they would simply choose not to recognize convicts by offering such programs. In retrospect, it seems naive of me not to consider they'd have such programs.

LOM told me that he's doing career counseling with convicts and trying to help them make the transition between prison and becoming productive members of society. I asked how it was for him and he told me that it's fine but counseling the murderers makes him a little nervous. I told him that it'd make me nervous, too.

Japanese Sweet Potatoes

Since I was born and raised in a small rural town, I rarely saw travelling food vendors unless there was a carnival in town. Since moving to Tokyo, I've seen quite a few who offer a variety of food items depending on the season. Most of them offer up uniquely Japanese delicacies (like octopus dumplings) and I don't care much for them. The only ones my husband and I have ever sampled are gyoza (pot stickers) and roasted sweet potatoes.

The picture above is of a man who sells roasted sweet potatoes out of the back of his truck. You can see that he's got wood stacked up next to his oven. The wood cooking lends a unique taste and a wonderful smell to the potatoes. These trucks drive around neighborhoods playing a tape of a sing-song announcement so you know when they're close enough to purchase from.


The truck in these pictures was at a relatively well-trafficked intersection on New Year's day. This was part of the large batch of photos my husband got at that time but it wasn't specifically related to holiday activities as these trucks are around fairly often during the colder seasons, not only on holidays.

I used to have my husband run out and buy one of these potatoes for me on occasion when I heard them rolling by. The main problem I had with them (which compelled me to stop buying them) was that the potatoes are far too large for one person to eat at once and too dry to be very good when re-heated.

In the U.S., orange yams are the most common form of "sweet potato" and are generally served as part of holiday meals. In Japan, it's a large purple-skinned tuber with yellow flesh inside. I have prepared them myself for muffins or as a side dish in the past but they are exceptionally hard to handle. They are very hard to peel and secrete a sticky fluid when the skin is removed. I'm not sure if this is a property of all sweet potatoes or just the Japanese ones but it does dissuade me from preparing them on my own. I guess the fact that they're a pain to deal with is one of the reasons they are sold pre-cooked and cleaned in vacuum sealed bags in Japanese markets.

Lately, a local convenience store (QQ - a 100 yen shop) has been selling roasted sweet potatoes at the check-out counter. They smell good but I'm not sure if they'd measure up to the ones sold from the trucks. They do have the benefit of being smaller and cheaper (only 100 yen whereas the ones from trucks are 200-300 yen in my experience).


Recently, I found the sweet potato bean cakes pictured above in a local market and decided to give them a try. They were shockingly sweet and had an intense sweet potato flavor. In fact, it almost seemed like they were flavored with a sweet potato liqueur. They also seemed to have very little actual bean in them and may not be a bad souvenir for people to take home (provided your friends and family generally like the taste of sweet potatoes and very sweet treats).

When I worked in an office, sweet potato treats were a common omiyage (souvenir) when salesmen travelled to other cities and picked up an obligatory treat for the rest of the office. They were one of the few things I was always happy to sample.

"We Live With Nature"

The picture above is of a tire cover on a Japanese vehicle. It's a little hard to read so I'll type out the text here:

"A long time ago before human was born, there was only woods, grass, animals, birds and fish. When human was born, they helped the newly born baby, offering their bodies. Grass and animals became human's clothings, and then, they protected them from the rain, wind and cold. Winds and grass gave him their fruits, nuts and grains. Animals, birds and fish became human's food, and they grew him up. We will never forget their favors. We never live without nature. 'cause we live with nature."

This is not only a good example of some of the typical errors the Japanese make in Japanese to English translation but points out a very interesting (and somewhat odd) perspective on the food chain.

The author of this passage was either holding his tongue firmly in his or her cheek while writing or believes that nature really wants to make sure man survives. I wonder if it is an off-shoot of shinto beliefs to imply intent in the "sacrifices" that animals, plants, etc. make in order to "nurture" man. Since shintoism includes the belief that a "spiritual essence" resides in all things.

It struck me as relatively quaint as well as reflecting a notion that man is somehow elevated above other living creatures. Why would any living entity sacrifice itself to the survival of another species?

Of course, it could be that this is no more than a reflection of bad translating and the use of words like "offer", "help", "give" and "protect" are misleading choices. You find that translations often skew intent a fair amount and it's important never to reach conclusions without clarification.

Red on White

Since coming to Japan, I've suffered a whole host of health problems. Some have been chronic (like my back pain and arthritis) and a constant drain on my energy levels. Others have been acute and scary.

About two years after coming to Japan, I developed gall stones and had to have surgery. I attributed this both to a biological predisposition (my whole family has had their gall bladders removed) and the stress of working at Japan's worst language school (at least at that time), Nova. My recovery was slow and painful. No one warns you that you're going to come out of surgery feeling like a victim in a bad knife fight but that's pretty much the way it is.

The next frightening experience was when half my face froze up. This was definitely a stress reaction from an ongoing battle not to work in a sweat shop during the summer. The president of the company at that time shared an air conditioning bank with us and he was on top of a vent and we were totally shut off from any air in phone cubicles. He was freezing and we were dying. Anyway, I developed Bell's Palsy and was put on steroids for two months. It was bad enough that half my face was paralyzed but now I was also a snarling beast who couldn't control her emotions for about 2 months. No one warned me that the hormones that were going to thaw my face were going to make me feel like I was going insane.

Finally, I woke up one day with a blob of red on my eye. I'm not talking about bloodshot or tired eyes. I'm talking about what looked like a glob of deep red ink on a white tablecloth. This was very scary but ended up being the smallest problem with the least painful treatment. I went to the eye doctor and was tested and examined and told this sometimes happens. She gave me drops to put in my eye but I don't think that they really did much.

Yesterday morning, when I was saying goodbye to my husband as he headed off for a swim, I saw that he had one of these blotches on his eye as well. If I hadn't already experienced one, I'd have panicked over this but I knew it was one of those things that happens with age that clears up on its own. In his case, it's clearing up very rapidly. Mine was a bit bigger and took longer to dissipate.

When these things happen, I can't help but be reminded of how your body is breaking down as you age. This was reinforced all the more to me by ganglionic cysts on my right hand that I noticed yesterday. These types of things don't tend to happen to you when you're young. I'm not one of those people who gets worked up about my age or seeing birthdays go by. From an emotional and mental viewpoint, I'd rather be older than younger. However, I could do without all the breakdowns.