Learning Japanese 1972-1973

Japan had a difficult time after World War II. From 1945 to 1956 when it was admitted as an UN member nation, this period of a decade must be the toughest time in its history imagining the great number of soldiers killed overseas, the two atomic bombs that wiped off two of its big cities in a short instant during the world war.

Yet, it stood up, reconstructed their homes, and just within 10 years, it became fit again. In the 3 decades from 1960's to 1980's, its GDP was over 10% for many years, and although gradually declined during 1980's, an average growth of 4% was still maintained. So during that period, Japanese Miracle was a familiar term seen on newspaper.

When a country becomes rich, its cultural influence in the world strengthens too. The indication of this influence can be seen by the growing popularity for its language and pop music.

1971 was my first year in the college. The most popular foreign language apart from English for students to select as their school subject was Japanese in Taiwan. In areas in Taipei city where private educational institutes were clustered, we could see commercial signs of Japanese language schools were one after another along the street.

In late 1960's, when I was still a high school student, I began to feel the Japanese cultural influence on me because among so many popular singers on radio and TV, I was deeply fascinated to a Japanese singer called Judy Wong. Judy was a Taiwanese but was raised up in Japan. I was her fan during my teens period. Later I enrolled myself on a Japanese learning course with a private language school when I received my first payment of wage from my part time job in 1972 doing subtitle for movies. When people asked me why I chose Japanese as my second foreign language, I always replied "because I am a fan of Judy Wong".

Two years before I started learning Japanese in the language school in 1972, I already bought a beginner's learning kit, a disc record and a textbook. I learned the 51 片かな and 平かな together with very basic conversational 挨拶語, such as 今日は，今晩は，おわよごさいます and so on all by myself from that kit in 1970. So by the time of enrolment, 先生assessed my level and placed me in the intermediate class. I still remember now the first lesson of my textbook is about a 手紙、letter.

There were 2 sessions of two hours each per week in the course. Class began at 7:00pm in the evening. I was always the first student arriving the classroom if I was not called to do the film subtitle job after school. The teacher was in his late 40's, a clerk of a trading company supposed to be a Sino-Japan joint venture one. He was of a medium plump guy with heavy near-sighted glasses and crew cut hair. His spoken Japanese resembled those Samurais I saw in the movies. I thought he deliberately mimicked the actor's tone in his teaching in order to add some fun in the class. And his tactic worked, as I found his class interesting and enjoyable.

During the two years of learning Japanese, I made acquaintance with a girl named Yang Li-fang in the class. Miss Yang was 3 years older than me, an employee of Matsushita Electronic. A smile always on her face when she walked into the classroom. Being a clerk of a large company, she must be loaded with tasks as I noticed her frequent absence from class. Each time she came to class, she took the seat next to me and asked to borrow my notebook so as to catch up the missed lessons.

A couple of times, she invited me to have supper with her after the class at the nearby food stools. I should confess now that I did wish our friendship could further develop. One day, I wrote her a letter after seeing a long absence of her from class. The letter must have implied my admiration of her, although slightly, because she sensed it. To avoid causing embarrassment to me, she skillfully mentioned that she had boyfriend. Thus, I remained a boy without a girlfriend until 3 years later in 1975 when my colleague in the Air Force Cadet Training Centre introduced me to a girl who is now my wife.

I learned Japanese quite hard that I was up to a level of being able to write understandable letter in Japanese to my uncle who lived in Kobe, the 6th biggest city of Japan. However, I only got two chances so far to put my Japanese into practice.

The first one occurred when I and 4 of my college classmates were in a tour to the Eastern Taiwan where there was a big population of the earliest Taiwan settlers who spoke their own language and some Japanese. In a bus to Hwalian, the eastern city, one of our seats was mistakenly occupied by a seemingly early Taiwan settler, a tribe woman. None of my friends could make her understand she had taken the wrong seat. One of my friends knew that most Taiwan tribesmen spoke Japanese, so they urged me to try my Japanese. So I did, and after a couple of sentences uttered from my mouth, she realized what had gone wrong and returned the seat to us.

The second time was in 2000 when my daughter, Tessie, was staying in Tottori of Japan through AFS student exchange. One evening after work, my wife received a call from Japan, she passed it to me because both parties found no common language for the communication to go on. I took the call and practised my learned Japanese the second time in the past 27 years. My Japanese was already very rusty then, and yet when there was no effective common language between the two, a few right words did make both side relieved and the messages somewhat understood. Tessie's host mother just wanted to tell us that Tessie was very safe and happy in their home, and was getting along well with the family members.

Now the whole world is facing a big economic recession, and Japan is no exception. There is a saying that whatever goes up comes down, I find this explains all the ups and downs of all matters. Buddha's teaching is even more sensible, Impermanence applies to every thing we know of. However, as a not-yet-enlightened being I still hope the downturn will be over soon.