MY ADVENTURES IN TRANSLATION; IS JAPAN LOSING ITS JAPANESENESS?; THAT CHILD IS LISTENING TO YOU

The following is my (brief) translation of the (brief) prologue to the Japanese book View From A Small Town. (The title is also my translation.)

In Japanese, the follwing four sentences are set apart from each other, read from right to left, descending downward, as is the Japanese reading-and-writing style. No punctuation is used in the original.

Here goes:

This is my town. A small flag stands there.

This is my town. With small shoes I walk.

This is my town. With a tiny voice I sing.

This is my town. A giant rainbow spans its length.

Hmmm...

Not exactly, um, majestic prose, is it. I did my humble best. Pine Grove Public School offered a course in Handwriting, so I took that, instead of the Japanese Translation course they offered. You know how it is. We live with the choices we make.

Here's some of the problems I found myself dealing with.

1) The Lack Of Punctuation -- In Japanese, with its downward structure, the absence of a period is barely noticed. In English, reading left to right, the lack of a final stop would give it a self-conscious, 'arty' tone, which I don't think is present in the original Japanese. So I tacked on the periods at the end of each sentence so that it wouldn't have a pretentious feeling that the original didn't.

2) The Lack Of A Human Subject -- In English, we almost always have to say 'I did this' or 'You did that'; in other words, a person is there, in the sentence, doing stuff, staying active. In Japanese, you don't need a human subject; it's implied, it's obvious, it's better left unsaid. And it's consistent with the collective nature of the people and the culture. Japan was (and is) a very stratified society, with different language being necessary for different levels of rank, thereby downplaying and downgrading the individual, and that's totally reflected in the language.

The problem, though, comes when trying to translate that 'lack of a subject' into our own complicated language known as English.

For this excerpt, there was no problem with the first sentence of each stanza, as, in the Japanese original, there is a subject -- watashi -- which translates, basically, as 'I'. So the repetition of 'This is my town' that begins each section is roughly compatible with the orginal.

But what about the second and third stanzas -- 'with small shoes I walk', ' with a tiny voice I sing', etc. In Japanese, there is no 'I' here -- shoes are being worn, a song is being sung, but nobody specific is doing it. It's just happening.

That sounds quite normal in Japanese. It's one of the cool aspects of the language, offering a nonchalant ambiguity that is imbedded in the way they see the world, in their 'the-whole-is-more-important-than-the-individual' conception of the universe. But were I to translate that directly into English, it would create an odd effect that wasn't present in the original language -- 'small shoes are walking', 'small voices are singing'. "Huh?" the reader of the English version might ask. "Whose shoes? Whose voices?"

Or, I could have thrown in a collective 'we' into the mix -- 'with small shoes we walk', etc., but that would introduce a collective tone that isn't necessarily there, overtly, though it is there, covertly -- in the basic structure of the Japanese language, the collective consciousness inherent in the language itself. But that consciousness is not at all inherent in English, and therein lies the rub. However, given that the first sentence does include -- in the original Japanese -- the overt, obvious presence of the 'I' narrator, I felt it was more important to preserve that voice than maintain a collective one that would deviate from what I perceive to be the author's original, more personal intent.

Whew.

Confused yet?

I am.

The translator of Japanese into English, besides taking on the difficulties of the language itself, will be constantly forced to figure out how to take a language that often omits its main subject from the sentence and somehow transfer it to one where such a subject is almost always present. Four different people could have translated what I did four different ways, depending on how they viewed the original tone, and what they decided was the best way to embody that particular essence in English.

Somebody famous once said that you can't know your own language until you know another one, and I'm starting to believe that. There is a world out there in words other than our own, and it's a fascinating one.

What tone or effect is the author going for? we have to ask. And how can one get that in English without changing too much the taste and texture of the original Japanese?

That's the challenge.

(And the curse, perhaps...)

People ask my why I haven't studied Cambodia's Khmer or the Philippines' Tagalog more than I have.

All I can say is: "Do you know how long it takes me to translate three or four sentences in Japanese?"

Adding one or two more tongues, at this stage, would make the padded room with its comfy straitjacket seem very, very inviting.

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I remember reading an article last year, in the Philippines, in NEWSWEEK, about how Japan was slowly but steadily losing its Japaneseness, and whenever I read one of those kinds of analyses (published annually, or so it seems), I always wonder what crack the author is smoking, and where they bought it, and whether they've thought about getting their money back.

Of course western culture has invaded Japan, the Far East, the Orient. And certainly the young people are enamored of all things American -- and British, to a certain extent. Canadian, um, not so much. Though the youngsters sure as hell love them some Avril Lavigne, so at least we got that going on.

But look.

At the way the trains run to the minute.

At the manner in which young people past twenty maintain an innocence worthy of the age of twelve, or a teenager at most.

At the language, the sound of it, its density, its prevalence, in bookshops and newsstands where English is banished to a meager, sheltered corner, like a child in a dunce cap at the corner of the room.

At the smells of beef and fish and rice.

At the uniformed ladies in blue, crisply, punctually, metronomically guiding the children safely across the narrow path of the road.

At the generous cushion drivers allow one another at stop lights and crosswalks, themselves set so far back from the traffic lights.

At the machines that ignite when they sense your oncoming, approaching footsteps.

At the tip of Mount Fuji, glistening white in the near distance.

At the neon lights and unending pulse that hint at another, alternate beat, vivid but opaque, impenetrable in its amber glow.

Returning, observing, with alien eyes, Japan, to me, for what that's worth, seems more Japanese than ever. Comparing to Canada, to Cambodia, to the Philippines, it seems more like itself than it ever was.

Finding out what that exactly means is an inquiry best left abandoned. Deciding that a country is somehow losing itself hints at an audacity and arrogance that is not only misguided but somehow inherently corrupt in and of itself, as if the soul of a land can be categorized and qualified, weighed and measured, dismissed and affirmed after cursory glances.

With thousands of years of its own identity hiding behind the glow of that fragile red sun, for better or worse, for good or for ill, I suspect that Japan and all its Japaneseness is present, now, and not going anywhere but here.

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Sometimes I wonder what the scholars of the future are thinking as they review the endless visual and written date that accumlates, by our own individual seconds, minutes and hours, as the web expands, and us along with it.

Surely all of our blogs and emails are accessible via some monumentally small, skin-implanted microchip somewhere and on someone in the year 2347. The birth of the electronic self has been continuing for the past, what, fifty years, and we are surely still at the root of its laborious entry into all that will come.

And there, after, ahead, centuries down the line, sits a young boy or girl, reading these words, and yours, too, the way we pull dusty books off forgotten shelves. That child wonders what this time, our time, was like, the way we speculate about Dickens' London or the red-stained grass of the American Civil War. Only those in the future, our descendants, will have proof -- blogs, random emails, lists of downloaded songs and photos. Us, virtual, for them. Me and you and this very posting are already there, in the future, being read. The 'me' that is me, now, here, in Japan, and the 'you' that is you, there, in Australia, America, Canada, the Philippines, Malaysia, whereever, is long gone, but your imprint has lasted. Of this, I am sure.

And that boy. Or that girl. Somewhen. Right now (only hundreds of years later), that child is reading your emails, staring at your photos, wondering what made you tick, why you did what you did, when you laughed and who you loved, where you went and what you treasured, before you were, against your will, forced to leave.

That child is listening to you.

THE RETURN OF THE DREADED, UNSTOPPABLE NHK MAN

The doorbell rang.

Me, here less than a week, and not exactly bulging with new acquaintances, foreign or Japanese, was a bit surprised. Who`s that knocking at my door, as Scorsese might have asked.

I opened it.

Ah.

I should have known.

He was back.

The dreaded, nefarious, unstoppable NHK man.

NHK is the Japanese equivalent of PBS or TV Ontario, but, unlike our North American public broadcasting equivalents, the Japanese version is not content raise funds by such puny, pathetic tactics as bi-annual, marathon weekend pledge-fests. No, here in Japan, when they want your support, they don`t wait for you to maybe, possibly, conceivably donate -- they come right to your door to grab your cash.

Suited up in dark blue and sleeky gray like Robocop at his best, with a similar exhaustive, noble and cleansing mission to fulfill -- the NHK man, ready for action.

"Ah," he said, looking me up and down, more than surprised, possibly even perplexed -- this was not in the manual.

"Good evening," I said.

"You're a foreigner," he said.

(Does it sound as awkward in English as it does in Japanese? I think it does, but he said it anyways.)

"That's right," I said, nodding. "I'm a foreigner."

"An American?"

"No, I'm Canadian."

"Oh, I see," he said. "This is NHK..."

I nodded.

"Do you have a television?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, "but I don`t use it."

(Which was technically the truth; I couldn't figure out how to use it, truth be told.)

"I see," he said, drawing out the phrase, looking down at his little calculator-type-thingee.

"Is everything okay, then?" I asked. (Daijobu desu-ka?)

"Yes," he finally said, after a lengthy pause. He then nodded, giving me a strained, perfunctory smile, before heading out on his way. Foiled again.

Phew.

I'm not completely sure what the deal is, although a few days ago, and a few days after my encounter, the newspaper here said that NHK was going to crack down on people with TVs who refused to pay. And since NHK is available on every Japanese television set, and since more people watch more TV per capita here than anybody else in the entire free world, that's, well, a lot of coin they're waiting to collect.

For me, though, the solution seems simple: when the NHK man comes, don`t open the door.

'Cause I ain`t paying.

Of course, I do feel a little bad for the NHK man; I'm not sure what happened to him when returned to the office. Did he get reprimanded by his superior, his co-workers, even his wife? He knocked on my apartment door around six or so, doing the supper-time rounds, I suppose, but most Japanese work extremely late hours, anyway, so I'm betting that those doors he did knock on, other than mine, went entirely unanswered. And so not only was he not collecting their fees, but how did he explain my reluctance to cough up any cash?

"Well, there was a foreigner living in the Leo-Palace apartment," he might have said to his colleagues, as he sipped some coffee and dragged on his cigarette. "You know those foreigners..." And they might have nodded, too, and sipped on their coffee, dragged on their own cigarettes. Another night at the office, that's all.

Not that I minded his sudden appearance. A little more Japanese practice for me; a little novelty in the night.

But still.

The next time my doorbell rings, I'm checking my peephole first.

These NHK men, nice as they are, harmless as they are, can be persistent little buggers. And I'm worried that next time, knowing my resistance, he might decided to bring in reinforcements.

Who knows what could happen then...

RANDOM THOUGHTS ON MY RETURN TO JAPAN

The first thing you realize upon landing at Tokyo International Airport is that it is not in Tokyo at all. I knew this, but I had forgotten this. I remembered, eventually, because to get to Tokyo you have to take the Narita Express, an ultra-fast train that will smoothly house, transport and deposit you within ninety minutes in downtown Tokyo. Watching the scenery glide by, a perfect red orb of a sun -- the flag itself, suspended, emerging -- hung in the air, and I was struck by how familiar everything seemed, recollected, not forgotten. Sights, sounds, sensations, waiting to be remembered.

- Perhaps it`s because I live only twenty minutes from where I lived previously (three and a half years ago, for four years), but I`m amazed at how quickly and effortlessly I`ve slipped back into Japan. Away, abroad, it regains its mystical, oriental allure; here, now, it is what it is, a place like every other place, unique only in its own uniqueness. Every place becomes something more when you leave it; returning, it becomes what it has always been. I have a job to do, and so does everyone else; there is little cultural romance, few indulgent emotional excursions, because life itself is for the living, not the recollecting. (And yet even as I write these words, so declarative in their absoluteness, I understand that this is not necessarily the case. I`m remembering what I hadn`t realized I`d forgotten in its absoluteness: the systematic politeness of everyone; the smoothly plastic way all the interlocking parts of this society hum and thrive; the lull of safety the country exudes. One can open one`s wallet in a public place and not worry about snatchers, thieves, delinquents. Even the tough-looking teens are only posing, and they know it too, but a pose is still an attitude, and an attitude is always a statement. Ironic, though, because I have spent over three and a half years away from this country, in poor and dangerous places like Cambodia and the Philippines, and yet where was the only place where I was physically harmed? Why, right here, in Japan, whacked in the gut with a two-by-four by a crazy homeless man. So safety is always an illusion.)

-- You can give a convenience store clerk 10000 yen, the equivalent of a hundred dollars, even if you buy only a five cent candy, and there is no problem getting change.

-- The Internet cafe I`m writing this at has a fucking shower. Make of that what you will.

-- I spent twenty minutes the other night on the phone, with the deliveryman who was supposed to deliver my apartment`s pots and pans, dishes and utensils, only he had my old address, the one my company had already altered before I arrived, and so he didn't know where he was supposed to go, and I couldn't find my new, present address, so I tried to think of what I should do, and so did he, the guy on the phone, until finally, amidst my stack of cluttered papers and pens, I found it, my address, and I read it to him over the phone, and he, comprehending, informed me that my junk would be delivered sometime that night, and after I hung up, I breathed a long and nervous breath and realized that I had spoken entirely in Japanese, every word, and that though I hadn't understood probably half of what he'd said, we'd communicated, discussed, reached an agreement, and I felt almost proud, like a child who has made it through science class without destroying the lab.

--I'm again impressed by the collective whole that seems to coagulate here. Everybody reduces themselves to be part of something bigger -- a society, perhaps. All people in all countries do this, I suppose, but in Japan the insitutionalized civility hints at a larger, more complete symbiosis. Happiness is not necessarily guaranteed, but order certainly is. That must count for something.

-- At times in the past few days I've felt like Rocky Balboa in Rocky V. Broke, back in the old neighbourhood, wife Adrian returning to her job at the local pet store -- the Italian Stallion can hardly believe it. As the metro rain rumbles on by overhead, Rocky calles out to his beloved from across the street, across the metallic grumble: "Yo, Adrian, " he asks, "did we ever leave this place?" She thinks about it. "I don`t know," she finally says. I know the feeling. I feel the same way, now, but I also remember the carefully carved stones dotting the landscape of Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and kneeling beside Ho Chi Minh`s old Rolls Royce in Sagion, Vietnam, and wading in the perfect-blue ocean of the Filipino sea, and I think: Yes, I've left, been there and back again, to paraphrase Tolkien.

-- It is a nice feeling to be surrounded by mountains.

-- Nice, too, to have hot water, a shower, luxuries not available in Baguio, in the Philippines. My first time in Japan I was struck by the superficial cultural oddities, but now I appreciate and have a context for the everyday wealth of a developed country. After two and a half years in Cambodia, and one in the Philippines, I can see and smell and taste how goddamn lucky our part of the world truly is. To be able to drink tap water; to have paved roads ready for driving. All of this -- here, but not there. I didn`t understand that before, not even a little, but now I do, maybe a little.

-- A country is what it prioritizes. In Japan, timeliness is everything, order is everything, alignment is everyting. I sat on the train and watched a young trainee, female in a dark blue suit, bordering on grey, wearing a tie and a hat, learn about the proper way to do whatever it is that Japanese train conductors do. The train puilled into a station; she stepped inside as her superior, early thirties, male, stepped out and carefully studied the black-and-white monitors attached to the guardrails. He looked down the track; looked back to the monitors; a slight nod. Then, back to the train, relaxed, smiling and pointing things out to his young trainee. She looked nervous but intent, wanting to succeed.

-- Yesterday was a series of accidents. My projected thirty minute walk through my rural neighbourhood turned into a ninety-minute jaunt when I took a wrong turn. No matter. The day was cool, the mountains imposing but protective. Everything smelled like the Japan I remember. After a year in the mountains of Bagiuo and a few days in this Japanese countryside, the dusty stench of Phnom Penh seems far away indeed.

-- Later, I asked the policeman manning the police box next to the station for the little bookshop I had found the day before. (Police boxes, or koban, are found in every town in Japan, and are often -- if not primarily -- used as places where one can ask for directions, as buildings in Japan are numbered not consecutively, but according to when they were built, resulting in absolutely madness...) I thought I remembered where the shop was, but I felt like practicing my meager Japanese. The policeman told me to go straight ahead for a few hundred metres, and it would be on my left. I thanked him, went on my way, and then slowly realized that this was not where I went yesterday. Whatever. The place I found was more interesting, anyway. A used-book shop, dusty and compact. I picked up an old Yukio Mishima hardback called 'Nikutani ni Tsuite', or, 'Regarding the Flesh', according to my (most likely) mangled Japanese syntax. I also bought a small paperback Japanese translation of a Ross Macdonald detective novel. (There's no way, of course, that I can actually read either of these books in full, but I can poke my way along, my trusted kanji dictionary by my side.) I asked the owner how old the shop was, and he, thinking, calculating, told me it was twenty-three years old. More Japanese speaking practice for me. Simple, but refreshing. It's been a long time since I've been able to speak what little I can. (A few weeks back, in the Philippines, I spoke Japanese with Helen's Japanese teacher. "Ah, my Nihongo is like a baby's," I said, in Japanese. "No, no, Scott-san," she said. "More like an elementary school student, maybe." It was meant as a compliment -- I think -- so I took it as one.) I walked out of the little used-book store, the honya, already planning to purchase sometime later the Japanese translation of one of my favorite Norma Mailer books, The Fight, his chronicle of Ali and Foreman's 'Rumble In The Jungle'. How would Mailer's electric, elastic, vigorous prose be rendered in Japanese? I won't be able to read it straight through for years -- if ever -- but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or else what's a heaven for?

-- All Japanese cars, every single one of them, at all times, look as if they had just rolled off the lot, been washed and scrubbed, waxed and glistened: pristine, flawless, perfect. I mean, every, single, fucking, one. How is that possible? Does everybody wash their cars every day, right before they head out?

-- I`ve never seen the movie, but my brother's old running buddy, Mike McGowan, past winner of the Detroit Marathon, has become a successful writer and director in Canada, and his last flick, Saint Ralph (featuring Campbell Scott and Meg Tilly) is about a teenager who decides to win the Boston Marathon, hoping that his ambitious quest will somehow cure his mother of cancer. (Or something like that.) Cancer does that to you. It fills you with impossible bargains that God, or the universe that stands in for Him, has no obligation whatsoever to meet, but you make these deals anyway. Because everything else is so completely and totally out of your hands. Part of me has decided that I will continue my fitness kick, and begin to translate a Japanese book, and, by doing so, God, or the universe, will stem the onslaught of Helen's cancer. This is ridiculous, irrational and slightly mad, but so is cancer itself, and perhaps the universe is fond of individual irrationality, and will seek to reward it in some such fashion.

-- So I picked a book at random from the shelves at BOOK OFF, the used-book store chain here in Japan. (The name of which still strikes me as borderline offensive, so closely does it sound like 'Fuck Off' -- but maybe that's just me.) The book's title, translated by me, is THE SMALL TOWN'S VIEW. Or THE LANDSCAPE OF A SMALL TOWN. Or VIEW FROM A SMALL TOWN. It all depends. Shifting languages from one to the other is always mercurial and often arbitrary. I felt a quiet thrill as, with my dictionary, I figured out the name of the book in English. I have no idea whether the book or the author is famous. Maybe it's been translated into English before; maybe it hasn't. Maybe I'm the only English-speaking person in the world who has taken the trouble to render it in my own tongue. It's possible, especially if neither the book nor the writer are particularly well-established. The book itself is far, far, far above my level, but my plan is to read it through once, taking note of what I can understand, not worrying about what I can't. (Japanese is made up of three simultaneously used writing systems -- two of which, hiragana and katakana, are phonetic, and the memorization of these sixty or so characters is not so difficult. The other system utilizes kanji, or Chinese characters, of which there are over two thousand in common usage, each of which has at least two or three possible sounds, and all of which are used in synch with hiragana and katakana. Centuries ago, Spanish missionaries were convinced that kanji, and Japanese in general, was a language created by the Devil to thwart their attempts to convert the locals to Christianity. I'm almost incline to agree with them.) And so, after haphazardly making my way through the book the first time, I'll go back and, page by page, with my kanji dictionary, attempt my own, undoubtedly ludicrous, faulty, misguided and clumsy translation. And, by doing this, and staying physically fit, the universe will comply and keep her cancer at bay. Other people pray. This is my form of prayer.