Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
 
FAILING TO LEARN JAPANESE IN ONLY FIVE MINUTES
Or: “Very Much Good Morning, Sir!”
 
The way I attempted to learn Japanese was by reading a book called Japanese at a Glance in the plane from San Francisco to Tokyo. This is not the method recommended by experts. The method recommended by experts is to be born as a Japanese baby and raised by a Japanese family, in Japan.
 
And even then it’s not easy. Learning to speak Japanese isn’t so bad,1 but learning to read it is insanely difficult. Start with the fact that, for some malevolent reason, the Japanese use four different systems, which are often intermixed, in addition to characters sometimes arranged vertically, in which case you read right to left, but sometimes arranged horizontally, in which case you read left to right. (I might have gotten some of this wrong, but, trust me, there’s no way you’d be able to tell.) Also sometimes there’s a mixture of horizontal and vertical writing, using several different character systems.
 
That’s not the hard part. The hard part is that the major Japanese writing system consists of—why not?—Chinese characters, which represent words, not sounds. So for each word, you need a different character, which means to be even moderately literate you have to memorize thousands and thousands of characters. This wouldn’t be so bad if the characters looked like what they’re supposed to represent. But the Japanese/Chinese characters don’t look anything like the concepts they’re supposed to represent.
 
And every one of those marks is important. If you put one teensy little line in there wrong, you could change the entire meaning of the character, from something like “man holding broom” to “sex with ostriches.”
 
Sometimes it seems as though the whole point of the Japanese writing system is to keep non-Japanese people from understanding what the hell is going on. The only Westerner I met in Japan who had actually learned to read Chinese/Japanese characters was Tom Reid, who works for the Washington Post. He was always trying to explain it to me. Then he’d say, “OK, this character means ‘library infested with vermin.’ See, this line here”—here he points to a line that appears identical to all the other lines—“looks like a tree root, right? And books are the root of knowledge, right? Get it? And this line”—he points to another random line—looks like the whisker of a rat, right? You see it, right? RIGHT?”
 
I’d always say that yes, I thought I saw it, although what I really thought was that Tom had spent too many hours studying rats’ whiskers.
 
So I never even tried to learn the written language. I sincerely did intend to learn to speak some Japanese before we went over there, but, because of a lot of other things I had to do to prepare for the trip,3 it turned out that the only concrete linguistic effort I made was to go with my wife and son to a Benihana of Tokyo restaurant in Miami. We thought maybe we could pick up some useful phrases from the waiter, who came out and prepared our steak right in front of us by assaulting it violently with sharp implements and hurling it around the griddle, as though concerned that it might suddenly come to life and attack the patrons. But it turned out that he was Cuban, and the only Japanese expression he knew was the sound you make when you strike a potentially dangerous steak.
 
So I ended up attempting to learn Japanese on the flight over. I had plenty of time, because flying from the United States to Tokyo takes approximately as long as law school. But the flight is not so bad when you do it the way we did it, namely, first class on Japan Air Lines, with Random House paying for it. This is definitely the way you should do it, if you ever go to Japan. Just tell your travel professional, “I’d like to fly first class, and send the bill to Random House.” Don’t mention my name.
 
We’ve flown long distances before, but it was always in coach class—thousands of passengers jammed together, thigh-to-thigh, their elbows bruised and bleeding from hours of dueling for position on armrests the width of a number two pencil; homeless people living in the overhead-baggage compartments; cattle-prod-carrying flight attendants offering the Battle of the Dinner Entree Options, featuring Martian Meat versus Paleolithic Pasta; long Soviet-style lines of people waiting to use the three lavatories, two of which are out of order and the third of which has run out of toilet paper, leaving the traveler with no choice but to use in-flight magazine articles with titles like “The Birdbaths of Denmark.”
 
First class on Japan Air Lines is not like this. Your seat alone is larger than the original Wright Brothers aircraft, and it reclines into essentially a bed, and while you’re lying there, feeling like one of the more degenerate Roman emperors, the cabin attendants—there seem to be about fifteen of them—constantly come around to give you gourmet dinners, wines, cheeses, desserts, more wines, more dinners, more cheeses, more desserts, more wines, until you, personally, account for about a third of the plane’s total gross weight. Also they shower you with complimentary items for you to keep: slippers, headphones, eye masks, ear plugs, toiletry kits, robes, stationery sets—they keep producing these things, and they continue feeding you, until after several hours you’re an enormous bloated blob of reclining flesh, buried under a mound of complimentary gift items, and still they want to know what else they can do for you. You get the feeling that they’d be thrilled to do your federal tax returns, or give you an on-board facelift. Or that you could casually mention that you have always wanted to see a fjord, and instantly the captain would change course for Norway.
 
Speaking of the captain, the only disconcerting event that occurred on the flight—and I’m still not totally certain that it did occur—came in the middle of the night, when most of the passengers were sleeping, and I was drinking a beer and thinking very seriously about starting to read Japanese at a Glance, and one of the cabin attendants came around and asked me and my son, Robby, who was also still awake,5 if we’d like to see the cockpit. We said sure, and we lurched out of our seats and climbed up a little curved stairway and went past what I believe was an armed guard into the cockpit, where some alert-looking men with excellent posture were frowning thoughtfully at about 650,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 instruments.
 
One of the men, the navigator, I think, pointed out the window at some islands off to the right.
 
“Aleutian Islands,” he said.
 
“Robby,” I said, translating, “those are the Aleutian Islands.”
 
“Huh,” said Robby.
 
“Huh,” I explained to the navigator.
 
“Yes,” he said.
 
As we were leaving, the cabin attendant, a soft-spoken, deferential woman, turned to me, smiling, and, in a jocular tone of voice, said—I am almost positive this is what she said, although maybe it was the late hour and the wine—“When we pass by the Aleutians, we will get shot down by the Russians.”
 
WHAT? is what I thought.
 
“Ha-ha!” is what I said, to show that my sense of humor is as good as the next first-class passenger’s.
 
As it happened, we never did get shot down, but thanks to the stimulating first-class conversation, before I fell asleep I was able to devote nearly an hour to the study of the Japanese language. My ultimate goal was to learn how to say “I do not speak Japanese” in fluent Japanese, but I decided to start with “Thank you.” According to Japanese at a Glance, the way you say this is:
 
DOH-moh ah-REE-gah-toh
 
For some reason—again, it could have been the wine—I found this almost impossible to remember. I tried practicing on the cabin attendants, who continued to come around every few minutes with complimentary items.
 
“Dl-moh ah-bli-GA-toh,” I would say.
 
Or: “DE-mi AL-le-GRET-oh.”
 
Or: “DA-moh o-RE-ga-noh.”
 
All of these seemed to work pretty well, but I think the cabin attendants were just being polite. I was worried about how I’d do with regular Japanese civilians, especially in light of the following stern warning from Japanese at a Glance:
 
Take long vowels seriously; pronouncing a long vowel incorrectly can result in a different word, or even an unintelligible one.
 
So I tried hard to take my long vowels seriously. The last thing I wanted was to try to thank a bellhop and instead, because of a vowel problem, ask for his hand in marriage. After a solid hour I was still not at all confident in my “Thank you,” and most of the other phrases in Japanese at a Glance were even worse. It was as if they had been cranked out by the Random Syllable Generator. The harder I tried to concentrate, the more confusing the phrases became, until they all looked like this:
 
HELLO (formal): Wa-SO-hah-na-GO-ma-na-SO-la-ti-DOH
 
HELLO (informal): Hah-to-RAH-ma-ka-NYAH-nyah-nyah
 
HELLO (during rain): KO-rah-na-mah-NAY-ah-MOO-baaaaa
 
I fell asleep babbling politely and dreamed about the Russians.