The Far East Network, Enka, and The Modern Japanese Language School

It was a hard winter.  It started to get cold in mid October, and by November, it was bitter.  My little apartment was uninsulated, like most Japanese structures, and had only one small gas heater which I tended to use sparingly. I got home every night after 10:30, usually after having dinner by myself at one of the restaurants at the station. I would have a bath and get dressed for bed -- or my futon, rather -- the radio my constant -- and only --companion.

I found to my surprise that I loved Japanese music. I had never really considered Japanese music before because I had never really listened to it. Now that I was in Japan, however, I spent hours listening to it. I loved minyo, the classic Japanese folk songs you hear with samisen, taiko, and shakuhachi. Embarrassingly enough, I also loved enka, the brooding, over-the-top melodramatic songs that you hear droning out of bars and pubs.

Enka, literally translated as ‘performed songs’ mix western instruments with traditional Japanese ones. The guitar, keyboard, horns and drums form the base of enka, but Japanese instruments such as koto, shakuhachi and samisen, provide the indispensable accents that make the songs sound Asian. The lyrics of enka are almost always along the sort of themes you find in American country music:  ‘He left me and now I’m blue;’  ‘I’m drinking my way to happiness;’  and ‘Women are just plain no good’ being tried-and-true favorites. There weren’t any enka for ‘One of my colleagues is a bitch and I’m all by myself in a foreign country and goddamn lonely,’ but never mind: they suited my mood perfectly. I would turn on my radio, make myself a pot of tea, and indulge myself to my heart’s content. In my little apartment, I learned some two dozen enka. I would get into my bath with the radio droning away in the background and sing along; I even went out and bought an enka book so that I could better understand what I was singing along to.

 

When I got tired of enka, I tuned into the only English language radio program that was available at that time:  the American military’s FEN or ‘Far East Network,’ which was largely for the American military personnel stationed throughout Japan, and their families.  The FEN disc jockeys all sounded like hicks, but I grew up with hicks, and after a while, Marine staff sergeant Someone-or-other with his Okie accent stopped grating on my nerves and just made me feel homesick. Though I drew a line at the rather cringe-worthy Christian service (‘This is Father Harry – of The God Squad!) I seldom tuned out and grew to know when various announcers would be on the air. To my dismay, I even found myself looking forward to decades-old radio shows like The Whistler every Wednesday night, and ‘The Lutheran Hour’ on Sunday.  The worst of FEN was its ‘Phrase of the Day’ mini-Japanese lessons with a lady called Hiroko Kubota. Each phrase was so pathetically basic, that you could only marvel at what sort of Wonder World your average American service person and his or her family resided in; it certainly wasn’t Japan.  ‘Today’s phrase,’ Ms Kubota would begin in perky but carefully-modulated tones, is Konnichi wa, or ‘Good day!’  That’s kon-ni-chi-wa. I’ll say it again verrrry slowly. . .’  She would always follow this up with her sign-off:  'Remember:  a little language will get you a loonnnnng way!' One evening, while I was listening to Today’s Phrase, I had an epiphany. Just being in Japan, I told myself, was not enough, I needed to enroll in a Japanese class myself – preferably one with a more demanding teacher than Ms Kubota.

Marjorie’s pal Todd had been studying Japanese for a few months, so I asked him about his school when he was in a better-than-usual mood one day. It was okay, he said – pretty good, really. This was high praise from the laconic Todd. So I gave his school a telephone call, and in no time at all I too had registered at the Gendai Nihongo Gakko, or ‘Modern Japanese Language School’ in Tokyo, for twice weekly classes.

The Gendai Nihongo Gakko was housed on the third floor of a modest apartment building in the middle of Shibuya, one of Tokyo’s trendiest wards. I had gotten used to thinking of myself as a pretty reasonable speaker of Japanese – after two semesters of Japanese and half a year working at Yodo restaurant, I was leaps and bounds ahead of my colleagues and I had let it go to my head – so I was mortified to find out that I would initially be in a beginning class.

‘It’s just until we find out exactly where to put you!’ my teacher Moriyama-sensei assured me. She was astonishingly like my own mother: a dumpy little woman in her early sixties with short dyed hair frizzled into an awful perm, a face that was a cross between a cherub’s and an imp’s, and a brisk no-nonsense teaching manner.

 My first class was held in the bathroom, with a jar of pencils, a clock, and our two cups of tea neatly balanced on the bathtub cover (almost all Japanese baths have these to keep the bath hot for the entire family, and they are a wonderful way to save energy). I was taken aback to find the bathtub was to be our desk, but pretended not to be. I was the only student. Moriyama-sensei would pick up five pencils and ask me what she was holding and how many. Then she would do the same with a book, a purse, our tea cups, a nylon scrubbing cloth, and a bar of soap. Obviously the bathtub only did duty as a desk during the day.

In Japanese, you cannot simply say one, two, three when counting something; you use different ‘counters’ depending on the shape and size and nature of the items being counted. Cups and glasses have the same counter, as do other cylindrical objects such as cucumbers, pencils and magic markers. Books and notebooks have the same counters, and so do cars, television sets, and motorcycles. Logic, though, only takes you so far:  chopsticks, for instance, have different counters from pencils and pens, and pieces of clothing and individual pieces of cloth do not share the same counters.  In the bathroom of the Gendai Nihongo Gakko I counted the calendars on the wall, the bamboo brushes the calligraphy students used, the buttons on Moriyama-sensei’s cardigan. And I endlessly pondered Japanese linguistic logic.

After two or three individual lessons, Moriyama sensei decided that I was ready for a proper class and there was one just forming that she thought might be the right level. My fellow students were Wendy, a woman about my age from New Zealand, and another Californian, a Japanese-American called Brian, both of whom were very friendly.  They both lived in Tokyo, which was a shame; it seemed that everyone who liked me and seemed to want to be friends lived in Tokyo. Carol and Mark, virtually my only friends in Japan up to that point, invited me to their flat occasionally, but with all of us working full-time it wasn’t always easy to get together. Wendy lived with a group of other women from New Zealand, all of whom were technical translators who rendered Japanese text into English. I was desperately envious of these women, as was Wendy. She and I vowed that we too would reach that point some day.

From time to time, I met a few Japanese-Brazilians at the Gendai Nihongo Gakko, all of whom were very nice. The only problem was, I didn’t speak Portuguese and they spoke virtually no English. We would ride from Shibuya to Shinagawa together, where we both changed trains, and during that short ride we would essentially continue our Japanese lesson. The people around us stared, and I can only imagine how ridiculous our conversations must have sounded:

‘I have two sisters. How many sisters do you have, Ushio san?’

‘I have two sisters as well. And I have an older brother. Have you any brothers?’

‘No. I have only sisters. I always wanted to have brothers. I am sorry that I do not.’

‘Ha!  You may have my brother! I think that he would like you very much!’

‘Ha ha! I accept! Thank you very much!’

And so on. It might not have been scintillating conversation, but it was a start. And it was wonderful to hear someone else laugh at something that I had said in a good-natured way.