Sons of Loki

So I was thinking: what good manga have I been reading?

I always thought manga would be a great way to study Japanese: unlike novels you’ve got pictures to help you, and it teaches you real-world, colloquial speech rather than textbook phonyism. (If you’re looking for a good textbook that teaches with manga, I strongly recommend Japanese the Manga Way.)

But when I got here, I found it didn’t really help. People told me to read this, and read that, and I picked up a issue or two of Shonen Jump!, but none of it really engaged me. Was manga not the solution after all? Was I doomed to poring through textbooks to learn?

Not so! My mistake was simple: I was reading the manga people told me to read, not the manga I wanted to read. Ironically, the manga that turned it all around was one my friend Darlo recommended to me.
Yotsuba&! (2003-present) (よつばと！, “Yotsuba and…!”) is a slice of life, the daily adventures of a small girl, her adoptive father, “uncle” Jumbo, the family next door, and … that’s about it.

Only it’s a remarkably good manga to start learning Japanese with. The language is simple, everyday and colloquial; because Yotsuba is a pre-schooler, she doesn’t use kanji, she uses simple grammar constructions, and like any small child is always asking questions and stating the obvious. “What’s that?” “What does “global warming” mean?” “It’s a car!” “Wow! Fish!” So throughout the story, you have explanations of words like “air conditioning” and naming of animals and things and people, all for the benefit of Yotsuba but also benefiting Japanese learners. It’s perfect.

But most importantly, it’s a damn fine manga. It’s sweet and sad and funny all at the same time. The author, Kiyohiko Azuma, showed a remarkable knack for making everyday things seem incredibly poignant and moving in his previous work Azumanga Daioh, and he continues this in Yotsuba. She’s incredibly cute and lovely, but there’s always this bittersweet sense of childhood running through his work; a sense of transcendental, transient beauty that can’t last forever, so be sure to enjoy it when it comes.

Planetes (1994-2004) (プラネテス, from Ancient Greek ΠΛΑΝΗΤΕΣ “wanderers”) I’ve already written about, but it deserves repeating. I heard about it because of the fact that it was a rigorously researched, scientifically accurate portrayal of life in space, and when I finally found a copy of the first volume I wasn’t disappointed.

It’s beautifully drawn; Makoto Yukimura captures the emptiness and loneliness of tiny human figures hanging in the void of space, and the ship interiors are amazingly intricate. The cast are a ragtag, international band of astronauts all suitably messed up with their own secrets and reasons for doing the dull, hazardous job of Earth-orbit space debris clean-up, and there’s a cool Firefly-like vibe going on of all these different personalities coming together. It’s tough reading; with no furigana and complex kanji, it’s full of technical terms about air pressure and orbital mechanics, and it’s all stuff you certainly won’t learn in class, but that’s exactly why you should read it.

Kachō Shima Kōsaku (1983-1992) (課長島耕作 “Section Chief Kōsaku Shima”) is actually the first in a long-running series that charts the career of salaryman Kosaku Shima from humble section chief at Hatsushiba Electric to boss of the company. (I believe it’s one of the manga in Japanese the Manga Way).
I kind of wanted to buy it half as an ironic joke – I mean, a manga about a salaryman? What’s the plot: one day he falls over on the train when commuting? Takeshi from Accounting keeps drinking all the coffee? – but I found the first volume of Young Shima Kosaku (which is in fact a prequel that began in 2001) and it’s actually, in a surreally dull way, very fun. Shima is a salaryman with a heart of gold; he bumbles around being berated by his superiors but having his ass saved by their superiors, who presumably see something in young Shima-kun. He speaks up about one of Hatsushiba’s stores dumping old TVs in the river! He feels bad about letting down old people! He nearly has an affair with the boss’s mistress! (And when I say nearly, I mean he takes her home when she gets drunk, she comes on to him, and Shima is already half out of the door in panic when he runs into his boss coming home, makes his excuses and escapes. So, ‘nearly has an affair’ in a uniquely lame way.)
But I like it. I like Shima-kun, he who cannot get anything right. The language used is more immediately useful than Planetes‘s, obviously, and it’s a fascinating look into the hidden world of the salaryman and Japan’s social norms.
Look at him. Look how happy he seems. He’s actually jumping for joy at the possibility of working in a small cubicle for the entirety of the rest of his life! It’s hilarious and terribly sad at the same time, like when a clown dies.

Okay, I’m not seriously considering giving this thing up. I guess for the sheer inconvenience of it I won’t be quitting Japanese. Plus I would feel really bad about it. But I will reflect on the struggles of learning this damn language.

Stuff I like about Japanese
I get to live in Japan. No, seriously, I love it here, from the vending machines to the punctual transportation to the delicious milk. Obviously speaking Japanese makes it much easier to live in Japan, which is the best motivation I can think of.
I get to use Japanese. That’s kind of obvious, but still, it’s a pleasing feeling. I can sort of read manga and play video games, and engage in conversation occasionally. (Actually getting speaking practice is harder than you’d think.)
The language itself. I guess there’s a certain neatness to the language, a pleasing logicality to it. I like kanji too, sort of, once I’ve learned them, the way radicals combine to create aesthetic and semantic beauty from a few lines.

Stuff which makes it difficult to learn Japanese and leads to frustration
I’m not fluent. Okay, this is largely my own impatience, but I’d thought that after a year and a half (more, if you count pre-uni study) of Japanese I’d be at a point where I’d understand most day-to-day stuff. I do not. Even trips to the convenience store are fraught with confusion because I have no idea what they’re asking me. I like the pretty pictures on TV but I only understand it about 5% of the time. It makes you feel so impotent and useless, to have done so much work for no tangible benefit, and it puts you off further study.
In Tokyo everyone speaks English. Not so much frustrating, but it definitely hampers my actual daily use of the language. Either shop staff will just use English straight off the bat when they see me, or I’ll try Japanese, flounder horrifically, and the assistant will step in with English to sort me out and I’ll be too panicked to do anything but mumble back in English.
I can’t read manga. I think manga is a great way to learn Japanese, but I’m not quite at the level you need to be to get the benefit. I know I said I could up there, and I can to an extent, but it’s a hard slog which saps all enjoyment out of the experience. By the time I’ve finished looking up all the new kanji and vocab on Japanese on my iPod, it’s taken me ten minutes to read a single page and I’ve forgotten the plot. Same for video games.
Everyone else is better than me. Well, I imagine. My fellow students are lovely to a (wo)man, and no one ever flaunts their ability in my face. But when I hear someone else speaking Japanese fluently (or at a level that I can’t understand, anyway) it kills me a little inside. It shouldn’t. I should pay no attention to whatever level they’re at. But nevertheless.
I don’t have the knack. Well, who does? But it feels like a lot of my fellow students seem to find it considerably easier to pick up new vocabulary and grammar than I do. When I learn new words, it feels like it goes in one ear and a few days later out the other.
The classes are… I feel like I may as well not turn up to classes for all the benefit I get out of them. They’re 90 minutes long, and I just can’t concentrate for that long in English, let alone Japanese. And the classes are entirely in Japanese, and I’ve said this before, but I don’t know enough Japanese to learn in Japanese. The textbook is no help, because it doesn’t explain anything, and all we seem to be learning is … Actually, I have absolutely no idea what we have been studying over the last three months. I think we did keigo honorifics, and a million different ways to say は, and … I’m at a loss, I really am.

But as I said, what else am I gonna do?

Being a Japanese holiday yesterday, I resolved to take a trip to my old stomping grounds of Uguisudani, Taito-ku.
It seemed awfully like it used to. Had the ATOS pronunciation of Uguisudani on the train station announcement changed? Was that Doutor Coffee always there? Had those lockers been electronic for long?
I realised that for the first time in my life, I was returning to somewhere I used to live.

Old Sakura House Uguisudani-A remained, but I didn’t have much of a desire to see my old cockroach-ridden room, not that I’d even know if any of my old flatmates still lived there.

In a grim sign of the times, my beloved Shop 99 had ballooned to a Lawson 100. Nevertheless, I bought a few things for old times sake.
When I mention I used to live in Uguisudani to Tokyoites, they either nod in vague recognition or burst out laughing. I suspect it’s something to do with Uguisudani’s ridiculously large love hotel district, which went on for further than I remembered.

I stopped by a temple to light some incense. Louis Theroux was there, for some reason (or, uh, it may have just been a guy in glasses). The Ueno area is so peaceful.
I wandered down to Ueno station via the park, past Rodin:

and wandered down to a local Book Off, intending to see if I could get our kanji textbook, but instead I found a copy of Bar Lemon Hart, an obscure manga about the regulars at a Japanese bar and the sage-like barkeep.

Then a brief browse in Akihabara, where I was bemused to find that you can buy a Xbox 360 for the same price as a Wii, and that the PSP is cheaper than the DS.

Today, lessons began in earnest. Dan, Hattie and I started off in level 200, but it was reassuringly obvious that it wouldn’t be for us – we were studying stuff we’d covered back in January. So after the first period (a gruelling 90 minutes – have to get used to that) we upgraded to level 300, which was more challenging but definitely a good fit.
It’s good, because we now have an incentive to do well – having been given this opportunity, I’m determined not to show myself up, and I have to keep up with the others.
After lunch with my tutor, I wandered along to one of our ISEP modules (in these first couple of weeks, we can try out a few of the non-language modules before making a decision on which to take) – Topics of Contemporary Japan. The lecturer, Mir Monzurul Huq, stressed that the recent victory for the Democratic Party in the elections has meant he’s had to radically alter parts of the module, which sounded good – I’d rather learn cutting edge developments rather than stuff that’s out of date.
So, here it all begins. Hope it goes well.