Literacy

It`s been exactly eight months - to the day - since I arrived in Japan, and I can`t do it any longer. I`ve sidestepped, I`ve avoided, I`ve ignored and I`ve growled at it from corners of restaurants. I`ve put moisturiser in my hair and shampoo on my face and mouthwash on my hands and an entire bottle of garlic marinade on my stir fry; I`ve eaten God Only Knows what, I`ve done an impression of a tuna fish in a convenience store one too many times, and I`ve gone into the men`s bathroom far more times than I normally would. I`ve drunk caramel tea when I hate caramel tea, and put my garbage out every single morning in the hope that one of them will be right. And it simply can`t continue.

I am going to have to learn how to read Japanese.

Of all the written languages I have ever seen, Japanese is the most complicated. There isn`t an alphabet; there are three. Foreign words (words brought in from the West, predominantly, like "Biru" (beer) and "Winu" (wine)) are written in Katakana; a relatively simple looking series of slashes and shapes, making up syllables. Hiragana are a similar looking, but totally different,set of shapes, which also each represent a syllable. Kanji - the bit that really, really scares me - are characters that represent one word (but often the word will depend on the Kanji before and after; they don`t always stand alone). There are two and a half thousand basic Kanji that school children need to know before they can `read`, and a popular game show in Japan involves getting fully literate, intelligent adults to "buzz" in as soon as they can work out what an advanced Kanji is. Simply; if you don`t know it, you can`t read it.

In any given Japanese sentence, there will be a combination of all three alphabets. All at once. All thrown in, higgledypiggledy. I`ve been with native speakers (like the ex) who would stop mid sentence and say "sorry, I`ve got no idea what that says" (I`d like to say he`s just particularly stupid, but unfortunately not). All of which spell out words that I don`t actually know. It`s not as if I can learn them and then read "noodles with those nice little bits of batter on top, which you like, Holly". I have to learn them, read them, and then work out what the hell the Japanese means.

But I have to. Everyone else here has done it - to some coherent level - and I am sick of having to walk out of any restaurant that doesn`t have photos to point at. At the weekend, I had to drag a waitress outside so that she could open up the glass case and I could pull out a little plastic display version of the food I wanted and point to it.

"It`s haarrrrd," I whined at my dad, when I took one look at the pictures and my brain started immediately closing down (I could hear the whirring; the same I get on really boring dates).
"It can`t be that hard," my dad said, unsympathetically.
"It isssss," I insisted.
"Well," my dad pointed out once I`d demonstrated how hard it was by holding the book up to the webcam. "It can`t be that hard, Holly. An entire nation of people has learnt how to do it. And lots of them are five years old."

Dad has a point, unfortunately. So - to save my face from shampoo and my food from too much garlic sauce - I`m going to do my best.

It`ll be nice, I think, when I eventually become literate.