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.

TODAY IS ENOUGH

"Don't resent growing old. Many are denied the privilege."

-- anonymous


For one reason or another I used to think that it would be in my thirties when things started to happen for me, when life would finally begin to get rolling, when a certain momentum would be established, by me or by others, and I would be carried along with it, riding the waves, finding my voice.

But I began my thirties, last year, by checking somebody out of the hospital after emergency surgery for cancer, spending my birthday saying good-bye to hospital staff and saying hello to the A-1 Hotel reception desk on Petchburi Road, just down the way from Bangkok Hospital. ("No, we're not here on holiday.") Plans were changed; the future became even more uncertain, unpredictable, and almost even unwarranted. (Or so it felt.)

Life does have a way of punching us all in our collective gut, doesn't it. (As if you didn't know that already.)

I gradually realized that my earlier conceptions of 'success', 'making it', 'fulfilling myself', etc, were rather selfish and bizarre, shallow and naive. It assumed that we can control everything, at any time, when the reality is that life all too often circumvents are own carefully determined efforts to thwart its hazardous advances. We have to adapt to life, and hope that somehow our individual will, coupled with concerted effort, can --sometimes -- force life to adapt to us (at certain points in time).

We are all on diverging paths that all too often (thank God) intersect with others, and it is at these points of rowdy intersection that we must make our way and seek our path. If we are all here for a short time, not a long time, and we are all trying to topple others on our upward journey so that we, in turn, can stand on the summit for a brief period, then what is left of ourselves will be diminished and partitioned. A mountain's peak can only hold so many people for so long before it becomes crowded. (Not to mention cold.)

I recently read a fantastic book by William Goldman from the 1960s called Boys and Girls Together, written before Goldman was a celebrated screenwriter and was, instead, merely an up-and-coming young whippersnapper of a novelist. One of the main characters is told by his father that the secret of life is not success, no, but simply making your way through the whole damn thing. Getting through the day. Surviving. Coming out whole somewhere on the other end. (Or words to that effect.) To simply live is success enough; not everybody can manage even that.

This is not to disparage ambition, or desire, or momentum. We all need a guide to where we want to go; we all need a plan. But somewhere along the line, inevitably, plans will be scrapped, acceleration halted, desire squashed. And in those moments of doubt we will discover that everything we need is around us and within us. Ambition will return, but perhaps it will be of a different, more fluid nature -- less ferocious, perhaps, and more encompassing. An ambition that seeks to suck life's marrow however we so choose, and welcome others more freely into our earnings and undertakings.

I've spent a fair bit of time in and around hospitals during the past year, and the experience brings life itself to a deeper, closer perspective. The little details of living become big, even potent. Clutching onto an IV stand as one makes one's way to the bathroom in the middle of a dark and desperate night becomes a symbol of defiance, a middle-finger to the prospect of incapacity itself. (Or so it seemed to me, from a distance.)

Sickness and pain are par for the course in hospital hallways, but so is hope. So is laughter. So is the morning sunlight coming through the window. The drapes are slashed aside. Another day has arrived. Life has been earned once again.

I am now firmly into my thirties, and whether or not the next nine years will be more prosperous than my twenties, or even my teens, has yet to be determined. If cancer can force people to watch the IV drip-drip-drip, than the human will can mount a counter-assault by getting out of bed, dragging the stand to the bathroom, defying inertia and embracing momentum, however stilted, however slow. Each movement forward is an intentional punch into the gut that is life's blatant unfairness, and each step leads towards a richer, more noble place, one usually called 'tomorrow', but life is also here, today, and if tomorrow comes, so be it.

Sometimes today is enough.

A CHANCE TO DIGNIFY YOURSELF

A word of warning:

If you ever find yourself in Manila, needing to get into the Japanese Embassy, arrive early. Very early. Like, pre-sunrise early.

(Hey, you never know -- this could be you. Life is strange. You might very well end up there someday, just like me, south of the American Embassy on Roxas Boulevard in downtown Manila, just up from the Pasay bus station. It's possible. At one point in time I was a geeky kid running the streets of St.Catharines, Ontario, and the next minute I'm in the Philippines, waiting under the sun, trying to get a working-visa for Japan. One of those moments where you scratch your head and look around and mutter: "Huh?" I turn around to share my bewilderment, but everybody else is a Filipino, and they look like they know exactly where they are and what they are about to do.)

They come out in force, the Filipinos do. Hundreds of them. Waiting patiently outside of the Japanese consular building. Everybody carrying FED EX packages from Japan, most of which carry working contracts, certificates of eligibility, the proof that they will not, in fact, defy the law. Proof that they will be good citizens.

And I'm one of them. Carrying the necessary documents. Hoping that the disciplined dudes inside the embassy will give me what I need, seek, desire: a stamp in a passport. That's all. Nothing more, nothing less -- but which means, for all intents and purposes, everything.

The way it works, the company in Japan sends you your contract. You sign it and send it back. They send you a certificate of eligibility, most of it in Japanese, and then you take this magic piece of paper to the embassy in Manila, all in exchange for a green visa placed precisely within the margins of the pages of your passport. A simple process, exhausting in its bureaucratic complexity.

Me, being the experienced world traveller that I am, having lived in Japan for four years, two and a half year in Cambodia, and one in the Philippines, me, being worldly and sophisticated, dare I say dashing and debonair, not to mention wise to the ways of the international working experience, me, that person, figured I could just show up at the embassy, stroll right in, mutter some Japanese and be on my way, freshly minted and legal to work in the land of the rising sun.

Um, no.

Sometimes I marvel at my own naivety. (Or stupidity, to be more precise.)

You have to line up for hours and hours if you want a good place in line. Under the darkened sky that shifts, slowly, to sun. Then, at the appointed time, they let you in. The gates open. Mecca has been reached, all praises due to Allah. They give you a number. You sit in front of a row of windows, behind which sit the blandly pleasant people who will determine your fate. When your number is called, so are you. You walk up, feeling like the kid called by the teacher to the front of the room, and they ask you such complicated questions as: "What is your name?" and "When is your birthday?" Then they take your passport and tell you to come back in three days.

So I did. And now I'm official. Back to Japan, and not more than half-an-hour from where I used to live for four straight years -- which, if it isn't karmic destiny, or a cosmic accident, is, at the very least, kind of funny.

If you want to, or try to, you can always learn something from foreign places, and what I learned last week is: work is special. Work is not something to be sneered at. Work -- decent work, work that actually pays -- is few and far between here in the Philippines. (Not to mention Cambodia. Mama mia.) People in the west complain about the lack of jobs, and it's true -- good work, sustaining work, is never easy to find anywhere. But in countries like the Philippines and Cambodia, you're already born behind the eight-ball, to a certain extent. Getting decent work that pays well is very difficult to do, so if it means leaving the country to find it, you leave. You leave your parents and your families and your children. You go where the work is, period. Everything else in your life, including your life, is secondary.

It's a very odd experience, lining up like cattle (or amusement-ride riders, I suppose), doing what you're told to do, trying to be polite and amenable, if only because they could, these scary-stern-embassy-type-people, turn you down with no explanation whatsoever. When you need a job, you are at the mercy of others, and all cockiness, all confidence, suddenly seems superfluous. What matters is not your exterior facade but the lines on a paper, the signatures on a form, the stamp in a book. You are reduced to your pleasantries and your record. You do what you have to do.

Nobody likes work, and those that say they do are probably lying. But the possibility of work, the desire for it, the need for it, is a thirst-like craving that, when quenched, is enormously satisfying. Because all you have to do, as you walk away from the embassy, papers in hand, sweat on brow, is take a look behind you and glimpse the faces of all those in line, all those others so much like yourself, patient and willing and nervous. When you look at them, you realize: Work is a privilege passed out to a selected few. Those that are rejected will have to walk home, take the jeepney home, slouch home. They will have to face their families, and sit at the kitchen table, and try to figure out another course of action. They will need to summon their reserves of strength and convince themselves, again, of their own worth, even though it has just been rejected by those in power.

Which, for me, makes a line-up here and there, even for hours, even under the sun, a small price to pay for a chance to dignify yourself.

TO READ OR NOT TO READ...

Back home in Canada a few weeks ago I contemplated buying three or four books about Shakespeare and his times, one of which was yet another new biography of him, another a comparison of various Shakespearean critics and their diverging theories, another doubting whether the man we know as the playwright really wrote the texts at all, and the last being a chronicle of a year in the life of the British Bard -- but then I thought, wait a minute: Maybe I should actually read some more of his plays before I read more about him.

I've always been intrigued by Shakespeare, but scared shitless to read him. I remember as a teenager being stunned to discover that all of my favorite lines in Oliver Stone's brilliant film J.F.K. were lifted from good old Willie. ("One may smile and smile and be a villian...") And there's a scene where Costner, comparing their current national crisis to Ceasar's own conspiracy, asks his colleague, played by Michael Rooker, if he reads his Shakespeare. ("Yeah, boss," he says. "I do." Which made me think: Damn, maybe I should too...)

I mean, I'd read some of his stuff; you can't finish high school without tackling the stuff, and I did go to high school, as did you, so I've read my fair share. Let's see: Julius Ceasar, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet. In university: King Lear.

And, um, that's about it. (I don't suppose watching the movie version of Much Ado About Nothing, the one with Michael Keaton and Keanu Reeves and Kenneth Branagh and Denzel Washington, kinda sorta counts? And though I've never actually, you know, read Richard III, I did see Al Pacino's version of it, the one he brought to the Toronto Film Festival ten years ago, where I managed to shake Pacino's hand, so that right there's gotta get me some theatrical brownie points, is what I'm thinking.)

I always tell myself that I'm going to dive into Shakespeare, and yet I never do. Part of it is because I've always seen the language itself as being a barrier into the story. It takes hours and hours to make your way through the plays, and half the time I have no idea what's happening. I guess I could read numerous summaries and synopses before I begin, but that would take away half the challenge. The stuff's supposed to be hard. Therein lies the satisfaction when you finally figure out what's going on.

So, recently, for no reason whatsoever, I decided to try and read as many of his plays as I could over the next year. (And given that I'll be moving back to Japan -- at least for a little while -- starting next week, this may put a crink in my plans, but we'll see what happens.)

Last week, while on the bus to (and from) Manila to apply for my working visa at the Japanese embassy, I managed to make my through The Taming of The Shrew and A Midsummer's Night Dream. (My only previous exposure to the first play was Rodney Dangerfield's classic line in that classic film Back To School, when spots Sally Kirkland, his hot new English teacher, and says: "I'd like to tame her shrew!" Does that make me cultured?)

I managed to understand about, oh, sixty, seventy percent of Shrew, and not once did I look at the meanings of the words down at the bottom of the page. (Of that I'm proud.) A Midsummer's Night Dream was a little bit more difficult; I got about forty percent, maybe, and then near the end of the play something happens and I'm not sure where the hell the story goes but I didn't go with it. Of that I'm certain.

I've realized that I'm going to have to read each play at least three times before I begin to get a true sense of what goes where, and who says what, and why. Once without the notes, once with the notes, and once one more time to see if it all comes together.

Strangely enough, the language -- which before seemed like such an impediment to comprehen-
sion -- is now the main reason why I'm reading the stuff to being with. How does he bend words; how does he twist them; how does he gain insight by balancing various modes of expression? If words constitute meaning, then what do these words, in this order, signify? That's what I'm after. I figure, if I can't figure this stuff out at thirty, I'm never going to be able to take a crack at it.

Another odd notion: The book I'm reading now, The Anatomy of Dependence: The Key Analysis of Japanese Behavior, is also intensely concerned with words and what they do to us -- as humans, as cultures. The author is a Japanese psychiatrist who has built his entire, book-length analysis around the significance of a single Japanese word -- amae, which means, roughly, the feeling of warmth, security and comfort a baby feels at his mother's breast, a word that has no rough equivalent in English, but can, apparently, explain almost everying in Japanese culture. And related to this word are a number of other words that play off of, bounce off of, and link themselves to other notions of society and identity and bla bla bla.

How does this circle back to Shakespeare?

Mostly (in my mind, anyways) because with Shakespeare you can't take the words for granted. They leap out at you in their inventiveness and dexterity. You're forced to figure out why they are there, and what they're supposed to do, and to what ultimate end. And his medium of choice (or necessity) is English. And here is this Japanese writer writing about one word, a single word, and how it has shaped and defined a millenium of people. It's hard enough following his argument about this solitary word; comprehending Shakespeare's use of thousands of them is mind-blowingly intimidating in comparison. But both writers -- the famous playwright, the not-so-famous Japanese psychiatrist -- are using language to make sense of who we, as humans, sometimes, rarely, often actually are.

In other words, words matter. They do things to us; they make us think, or act, or isolate ourselves from one another. Or sometimes they bring us closer.

Anyways, we'll see. I'll either abandon Shakespeare's plays and dive into the various biographies and non-fiction works on his life and his craft, or else I'll plug along at irregular intervals and see what there is to see in his multiple plays. I probably won't finish them all until I've shuffled off this mortal coil, but that's okay. Gives me something to shoot for.

Or, just to make myself really crazy, I'll try to read Romeo and Juliet in English, side-by-side with its Japanese translation.

Which will make me truly want to eat my words, of that I'm sure.

YOUNG TRUDEAU

Young Trudeau is one of the most interesting biographies I've ever read, if only because its aims are nothing short of monumental: to subvert all that we know, or think we know, of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and how he came to be, and to do so merely by examining the notes he made on the writers he loved (and loathed) during his early twenties.

Covering the first twenty-five years of his life, the book seeks to disrupt everything that makes Trudeau, well, Trudeau. The eternal iconoclast, rebelling from a young age at the rigid French-Canadian, Catholic hierarchy he'd been born into; the constant rebel, determined to do and think as he pleased, when he pleased.

Well, no.

Not according to husband-and-wife authors Max and Monique Nemni (and French-to-English translator William Johnson) who convincly detail that Trudeau was, in fact, typical of his time and place in pre and post-World War II Quebec: fiercely Catholic, intensely Quebecois, even, somewhat astonishingly, a fairly intense segrationist who believed in the future of an independent Quebec separate from Canada, and was planning a revolution to achieve that unlikely goal. (A goal he would end up vigorously battling in his later years as Prime Minister.)

There are a few revealing interviews with friends and family members (including his sister, Suzette), but the majority of the books' conclusions stem from the authors' perusal of the texts he wrote (in term papers, school newspapers, magazine articles, etc.) and notations found in the margins of his favorite authors.

It's an interesting way to examine an extraordinarily well-lived life, and possible only because Trudeau gave them complete and total access to his private papers. (Initially, the authors intended to write the biography ten years ago, but they ended up taking over the editorial reigns of Cite Libre, the French-Canadian political publication that Trudeau himself founded -- and Trudeau's own passing a few years ago prevented any further, personal collaboration between the pair and their fallen friend.)

Their descent into his private collection reveals Trudeau to be a prolific, prodigious reader, in both French and English, examining works of philosophy and economy, French-Canadian nationalism and Catholic history, English literature and modern social theory. He read widely and deeply, and his notes and essays do indeed show a restless, independent, firecely driven intelligence.

However, this keen insight and raging intellectualism, so startling for someone barely into his twenties, was very much rooted in who he was -- French Canadian first, and Catholic, second. (Though some may dispute that order and its importance.) Based on his report cards, he was a diligent student all through school; based on his writings, he not only advocated a fierce form of French-Canadian patriotism, but he also endorsed, and was planning, nothing less than a full-on revolution, the revelation of which is nothing short of amazing, considering Trudeau's legacy as a Prime Minister: the leader who finally allowed Canada to break free of her monarchal chains and defended, indeed demanded Quebec's role within it; the man who gave us, at last, our own constitution, and hence our pride, not to mention our nation.

Vigorously researched, yes, but there is a fault to the authors' methods. Is it truly reliable, or really dependable, to rely for psychological insight on pencilled notations in textbook margins? To be sure, these reveal Trudeau's thoughts, but that's just it -- they are thoughts, nothing more. Speculations, disagreements, hyperbolic assertions of assent or dismissal, made by someone not far removed from his teenage years. To rely only on these markings as a means by which to examine the formation of a personality, let alone a future political leader, is limiting, to say the least. Intriguing, certainly, but more than a few times the authors speculate and extrapolate when they should be keeping their lips zipped, letting us make up own minds.

Still, this is, for fans of Trudeau (or even enemies), a riveting work. Trudeau, the ladies' man, dating Margot Kidder, engaged to Streisand; Trudeau the fierce defender of Quebec's role within Canada; Trudeau the confident, vigorous world-traveller, the engimatic mystic -- this Trudeau is nowhere to be found in these pages.

And yet, he is there, remarkably so: between the pages, waiting to be born. Trudeau -- as a man, as a legend, as a myth -- now begins to make sense. We see where he came from, and how far he had to go. We see what he thought and why he thought it; we see, before our eyes, the evolution of a political consciousness that will, in turn, undergo amazing metamorphoses in the months and years and decades ahead.

Indeed, perhaps the most startling revision of Trudeau's much-explored life-saga is saved for the final pages, where Trudeau's entrance-letter to Harvard University is reprinted, and where we see, from a young age, no more than twenty-five, that Trudeau had in mind a career in politics, a goal as a statesman.

Trudeau, the reluctant politician; Trudeau, the independent, who joined the Liberal party only his late forties, and even then, hesitatingly. Trudeau, in his twenties, after much contemplation and deliberation, declaring the necessity of politics as a means of social change and thus his intention to serve the world in the political realm --wherever that might lead.

Remarkable.

The book is subtitled 'Son of Quebec, Father of Canada', and Volume I does, indeed, show us the boy who was raised and redeemed by his native province;Volume II of this work will explore the intervening years, when he developed the world-view that enabled him to compose the Canadian framework he envisioned: Trudeau at Harvard, Trudeau in England, Trudeau coming back to the Canada and Quebec he left beind, and finding much in the society's social framework to be desired.

And, as if that weren't enough, there's another new, mammoth biography of Trudeau by John English out in stores right now, volume one of which is entitled Citizen Of The World, which covers similar ground, I'm sure, as Young Trudeau, and which also benefits from the author's access to Trudeau's personal papers.

If you want to understand Canada, you have to understand Trudeau, and Young Trudeau is a good place to start. Despite the book's inevitable scholarly limitations, the authors are still able to slowly reveal a young, determined mind as it develops and shifts, as our playful protagonist slowly commits himself to a physical, spiritual, psychological transformation that will take him further and deeper than he or any of his countrymen could have possibly imagined.