Adeste

I saw Emiko's work long before I ever met her. And even after I met her, it was weeks before I realized she was the woman who had drawn this amazing piece of work. When the connection was made, it was fantastic ~ I had been so enthralled by Adeste, and then I had come to really like Emiko. To have the two belong together made me very happy!

And when she offered to illustrate my book, I was REALLY pleased!

Adeste is unlike any of the illustrations in Fish Tree Tales, and yet I see elements of it within those same illustrations. The thing that impresses me most about Emiko's work is the fine detail. She has a strong talent for picking up on and adding minute, tiny details that add depth and meaning to the whole. If you are not looking closely, you will miss them.

Look closely at this one! Click on the photo to get a close-up view. It's astounding!

Fish Tree Tales

I’d never thought about the advantage I sometimes have with English as my native language, until I moved to Japan to teach it. I’ve studied six foreign languages, and when I was studying, I’d often wished osmosis would occur. I’d put a dictionary of that language under my pillow at night, hoping to simply absorb all the words and grammar in my sleep. Of course, that never happened. I had to study and practice like everyone else, making mistakes and learning along the way.

In the first years of learning Japanese, I often made mistakes with word choices. I’d forget the word I wanted, or say another word instead, rendering a completely different meaning to the sentence. I still make mistakes but they are usually of the less interesting, mundane, grammatical sort. In the early days, my mistakes were funnier.

One night at dinner with the family I was living with for the summer, there were many people sitting around the table, all of us eating and talking and having a good time. I was mostly listening, since I didn’t understand 98% of the conversation. At this point in my Japanese language journey, I was fluent in numbers and colors, but not much else. At dinner that night were aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, boyfriends and girlfriends—it was a large, happy group and everyone was quite jolly. They were happy with me and encouraged my stumbling attempts to communicate. Fortunately, several members of the group also spoke English, so we all had a backup.

After awhile, the food was being passed around for the third or fourth time. I was so full, but I thought that saying “no” was considered impolite, so I tried a different angle. I was very polite and I turned down the offer for more food, believing myself to say, “My stomach is full.” Immediately, everyone thrust their hands at me, palms up, as they grinned from ear to ear. I must have looked pretty funny at this unexpected reaction, and I searched the crowd for someone who would tell me what was going on….

And this is how I memorized the difference between the words for “stomach” and “money.” You could say this was osmosis of a different sort!

That was during my first month in Japan. Years later, on my third venture to this country, one day I realized I was speaking Japanese that I didn’t know I knew. I hadn’t studied since leaving the country five years earlier. I had studied Portuguese, however, and experienced an interesting phenomenon during that time. While studying lists of Portuguese vocabulary words, I would try to remember and use them in common sentences. However, instead of translating them into English, I found myself translating those words into Japanese, making Japanese sentences with them. It was bizarre, but it seemed to work and, in the end, gave me a much-needed boost for my move back to Japan a few short months later. When I got to Japan that third time, I realized that I could say things I’d never “gotten” before. It was eerie, and cool, at the same time.

During this third time living in Japan, I frequently went to one particular bar, “Eddie’s.” I loved going there. For reasons no one quite understands, there seem to be people from all over the world in Kofu, so I got to know people from many cultures. Some of us could only speak Japanese as our common language, even though it was native to none of us. After awhile I was going to Eddie’s almost every night, and friends knew they could find me there. We’d eat and drink and be merry. We’d talk and joke and discuss world events. We’d play chess or cards or backgammon, game after game after game. I had arguments there, got terribly drunk there, laughed and cried and got scared there. I fell in love there. It was very much a part of my world.

One evening when I was ready to leave, I went to the cash register to pay. In a clear, loud, perhaps drunken voice, I announced my desire to pay: “Hatarakita-a-a-ai !!!!” My good friend Kazumi, who was the waitress, looked at me strangely, then handed me a towel and said, “dozo”, or “please, go ahead.”

Huh? Ah, it was another example of the wrong word coming out of my mouth. I had meant to say “haraitai”, which is “I want to pay.” What I’d said was, “I want to work.”

Even after five years, mistakes and errors found their way into the course of a normal day. Once, my friend Margaret and I were walking along the riverbank that led from near our apartments to the downtown area. It was one of those stunning, glorious, early spring days when the air is soft and the cherry trees are all at the perfect level of blossom, just barely at full-bloom and only hours away from falling off. The cherry trees are so copious in Japan that a soft, pale white-pink bathes the light of every corner, blurring the mind to a soft focus of the world. It is simply breathtaking and wonderful for about a week every year.

So there it was, a splendid, glorious day, and I was moved to sing. What else, under the cherry trees, would one sing, except the cherry blossom song? If you’ve ever eaten in a Japanese restaurant, you probably have heard this tune. It’s one of those Japanese things that got itself exported to this country, like cars, chopsticks, “sayonara,” and karaoke. So I began singing: “Sakana, sakana…..” It’s a lovely little tune, although I don’t know what words come next in the song. I just knew, and so sang, that part. “Sakana, sakana….”

…at which point Margaret began laughing so hard she had to stop walking. Now, I know I’m not the world’s greatest singer, but I thought this was a bit overdone. I stared at her, wondering what was up. When she could catch her breath, she told me I’d sung “sakana” instead of “sakura.”

Sakura, you see, is the word for cherry blossoms. Entirely appropriate to the day. Sakana, on the other hand, means…. Fish Now I’m doubled over with laughter, then we cried because we couldn’t stop laughing. Then, finally catching our breath, we continued on.

But we were noisy foreigners who ruined the “wa” of all the Japanese in our hearing, because we couldn’t help singing at the top of our voices, as we continued along the river, “SAKANAAAA, SAKANAAAAAA!!!”

The Expected Earthquakes

There’s a line in Nassim Taleb’s book, Fooled by Randomness, that goes like this:

Rare events are always unexpected, otherwise they would not occur.

I believe that is true. I believe it so much that I think he stole the idea from out of my head. I believe it because it happened ~ or rather, didn’t happen ~ in Japan. I believe it about earthquakes. Here’s my tale.

One apartment I lived in had hot water simply by turning on the hot water tap, just like here at home in the USA. In all the other apartments, however, if I wanted hot water from the faucet, I had to push a button or flip a switch to turn on the gas that would heat the water at some point in the flow between the source and my spigot. The water never got cold… and it was hot hot. Not tepid, not fluctuating, but steadily hot and, if anything, it got hotter the longer it was on. In the winter time, that was divine!

However, it worried me, too. I worried about earthquakes and fire, things blowing up. I think it was liquid propane gas that heated the water…. pretty flammable, right? Or maybe not but I’m not sure and so I think it is and so it worried me. A couple times a year, newspapers in Japan carry a full-page spread with instructions about what to do in an earthquake, especially a large one. The #1 step is: turn off the gas.

Generally, earthquakes come without any warning. Slight correction ~ they do have the technology now in Japan where they announce an earthquake warning on TV and you have about 10 seconds to prepare. Like, turn off the gas and get under a heavy table or stand in a doorjamb, stuff like that. But that’s only good if you happen to be watching TV 10 seconds before an earthquake.

So my worry about the gas being on during an earthquake was founded. In the last apartment I lived in, which was a newly remodeled and lovely place (more about it is in the book!), there was a computerized system in both the kitchen and shower room ~ the whole room was the tub/shower. How sweet is that!? In each were controls to turn on the gas for hot water. I could even punch in the temperature I wanted the water to be, and it ran steadily at that temperature. Too cool? Punch the up arrow button. The temperature would go up one degree and a computerized voice announced the new temperature. Too hot? Hit the down arrow. Nice!

But in the other apartments, the gas/hot water control was in the kitchen. So I was worried…. what if I’m in the shower and an earthquake hits? I would practice “earthquake drills”, standing in the shower room and practicing running to the kitchen to turn off the gas. I made sure I had a clear path, but the layout of one apartment had me making a U-turn from the bathroom to the kitchen, through some glass sliding doors on the way. That one required more practice.

I was in many earthquakes in Japan. They have at least one every day somewhere in the country; most, of course, are not newsworthy outside of the country or, perhaps, even the town. The vast majority aren’t even newsworthy enough to make it on the local stations. But some do stand out as bringing a level of excitement to things. Once my friend Margaret and I were in my living room in the dead of winter, enjoying the toasty warmth coming from the kerosene heater….

Didn’t I mention the kerosene heaters? In this earthquake-prone country, kerosene heaters are still the heating method of choice for most people. When I bought my first one, I expressed my fear of fires in earthquakes, and my friend who was with me said not to worry, kerosene doesn’t explode, it just burns.

That’s comforting.

Well, any kerosene heater worth its pride has a little chain that, supposedly, automatically shuts the thing off if it moves. I tested this and tried to shake the heater (yes, it was on. How would I know if it worked otherwise?) to see how stable it was, and I have to say, I was impressed. Very stable, and it did turn off when (I can’t believe I did this) I attempted to tip it. It was on, the fire was burning, and I tried to tip it over in my apartment!

Holy crap!

So there we were in the toasty warmth of my kerosene-heated living room. It had gotten too warm in there, as temperature control consisted of opening windows and doors within the apartment, then to the outside. Or you can just turn them off, but that’s a last choice because the room cools down very quickly (insulation is largely unpopular in Japan) and you have to turn them on again within minutes. Some people don’t care for the fumes that linger when you turn kerosene heaters off or on. Now they make heaters with thermostats, but then, they either weren’t available or were grossly overpriced.

Back to Margaret and I, we had just opened the sliding doors between the living room & bedroom, between the bedroom & kitchen, and between the living room & kitchen. It was always a forgotten relief, the cold air from the unheated bedroom and kitchen whooshing into the hot living room. Before long, we would have to resort to opening a balcony door to let air in from the frigid outside, because the whole apartment would become too warm, but for now, there we were, playing Scrabble, drinking tea, just hanging out. Suddenly, a significant earthquake struck!!

Margaret and I got up, ran to the nearest doorjamb (an allegedly safe place because it’s got more support), then the next, and the next and the next and the next round and round and round my apartment. Living room, bedroom, kitchen, living room, bedroom, kitchen, living room, a circle of rooms! I think we wanted to stick together, but doors are narrow in Japan and we couldn’t both stand in one doorjamb, so we kept running around in a circle through the whole earthquake.

When it was done, we were crazy laughing, and decided we definitely needed some beer. There was a beer machine right outside the apartment building, so we went down there and… stood in line. For the first time ever, there was a line at that machine. Some people were buying beer, others went straight for the whiskey. Apparently, being freaked out by that earthquake was not a foreigner thing!

We went back upstairs and turned on the heater (see? It must have turned itself off because in our mad dash from one doorjamb to another, neither of us had done it). We had our beer, and calmed down enough to walk over to Margaret’s apartment on the other side of the river, to see what kind of damage may have happened there. Sadly, a plastic bear of honey had fallen off a shelf onto the floor. The lid had been knocked off in the process, and a good bit of honey had oozed out onto the floor. But that was it. Nothing had broken, no fires happened in the city, no one was hurt as far as we know; just lots of beer and whiskey was sold afterwards.

There were many earthquakes. Some were fun, some were scary, none were expected. The expected earthquakes, the ones I prepared for, never happened. And so I am convinced that if I’m thinking of an earthquake happening, it won’t happen. They only come when you don’t expect them.

Of course, until one occurs when I’m actually thinking of them, that statement is unproven, but… I believe.

Piece of Cake!

One day a private student, upper intermediate level, was practicing countable and uncountable nouns. She was reviewing picture cards of some everyday nouns, when she ran into a little difficulty sorting out the difference between a slice of cake and a hunk of cheese. She asked about pie and pizza, and then chuckled nervously at the piece and slice. But she took notes and—what a trooper—hung in there.

Then “Evil Sue” took over. I introduced her to “piece of cake!” Not to be confused with a slice of cake (or a piece of cake, for that matter!) I explained the idiom to her, and her eyes widened and, frankly, she looked stunned. “How am I going to remember these?” I could almost see the words pass across her forehead while she looked at me rather blankly. Like a deer in the headlights.

I just smiled. Suddenly, she laughed and I saw a light bulb go on over her head. She loved it! She repeated it to herself several more times to get the intonation and inflection down.

At the end of the lesson, I asked her how today went for her, and she said, “It wasn’t a piece of cake.” Perfect answer! Evil Sue is a genius!