There is a clip of Sofia Vergara’s character from the TV show Modern Family that gets reposted every so often on corners of the internet. In it, she’s arguing with her family and struggling to find the words to express her thoughts in English, when she says: Do you know how frustrating it is to have to translate everything in my head before I say it? Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?
I’ve been feeling that a lot recently, here in Japan. Although I’ve taken two years of Japanese at MIT, I’ve discovered that surviving in Tokyo as a transient visitor is pretty dramatically different from whatever we learned in our textbooks. I use Japanese mostly for things like shopping and ordering at restaurants and shamefully slinking up to the subway station attendant when I have trouble with my transit card, which requires a handful of phrases at most. 「一人です」: Party of one. 「カードで払います」: I’ll pay by card. 「レジ袋は大丈夫です」: I don’t need a bag.
A visiting friend of mine joked that “Tokyo is for beginners,” because Tokyo is clean, safe, and relatively cosmopolitan, meaning that you could get by with nothing more than a translator app and a heavily accented “arigato.” I find this to be somewhat true. Most of the time, when I’m dressed up in work clothes, I blend in pretty well; I am East Asian descended, have a haircut that looks pretty typical, and have learned the details of Tokyo subway etiquette well enough that I just look like one in a million of people rushing to catch the next train. A lot of customer services, like at my grocery store, are wholly automated, and there are English subtitles beneath most signs of the places I frequent in Tokyo. My workplace is majority people from Europe and the United States, and all of my research is done in English. Yet whenever I come across the rare situation where I need to produce original Japanese language, I slow down dramatically, if not blank altogether.
Case in point: I went in to get fitted for glasses in Kita-senju, a neighborhood in northeast Tokyo. Not as many foreigners pass by compared to the famous wards of Shibuya or Shinjuku or the bougie cosmopolitanism of Roppongi, so I suddenly found myself at kiosks in full Japanese language, struggling to remember the kanji I had learned back in Japanese 3 and talking in broken sentences to slightly annoyed store clerks, struggling to find the words I needed. Job needs computer looking. Want glasses. “It’s because my eyes hurted,” I said, and then understood with sudden clarity why little kids scream instead of using their words when they get frustrated.
For most of my life, it’s been the opposite way around. Growing up in the Midwest, sometimes I’d have an awkward social interaction up until I opened my mouth and spoke my perfect American English, and then suddenly I belonged, and the tension in the air would dissipate. A lot of my privileges began the moment I made myself intelligible with language, because in a sense it was a prerequisite for the opposing party to recognize my humanity. Here, it’s a disorienting reversal: I experience a lot of casual conveniences blending in, but anything that requires language reminds me that I’m foreign. That alone doesn’t bother me; I had no delusions about being anywhere close to fluent when I came here, and I’m comfortable with who I am and don’t particularly desire to belong here.
What really frustrates me is that, unlike in my mother tongue, I can’t express what I’m thinking. In English, I know my rhetoric and nuance, and I know my figurative language and my context and my tone. Having been born in the United States, and having done all my schooling in American English, this sort of language is a craft, and though I never quite find it perfect to transcribe my interior thoughts into writing or speech, I can often arrive at a tolerable, if not satisfying, destination.
In Japanese all of this falls away. In many ways, I am a child again. I lack vocabulary. I speak in short, staccato sentences, all with the same structure. I have a heavy accent, especially when I get nervous. The other day, I bought myself The Elementary Schooler’s Kanji Workbook in hopes of being able to actually read books one day. I know there’s no point in beating myself up for sounding like a language learner. I am a language learner, and I find no shame in that. Nonetheless, it’s vexing to think in long, beautiful English sentences, and have it all come out as charades and Google Translate lookups and stutters.
My parents like to joke that I talk and write too quickly for them to understand in real time, in part because English is their second language and also in part because I do tend to talk incredibly fast. As a kid I sometimes found this frustrating because I wanted to do everything, communication included, as fast as I wanted, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve become more patient and more understanding. Being on the other end of a language I don’t speak natively has given me compassion in spades as well. I’m unfortunately past the point in language learning where pointing to order street food and saying “kore kudasai” solicits an encouraging round of applause (but I sure wish I could go back sometimes!). Instead, I’m nodding and politely muttering a unsure「わかりました」when I’m listening to a long explanation about allergens, or nervously interjecting one too many times to ask someone to 「ゆっくりで」 say something slower. To be entirely honest, I don’t know when — or if — I’ll get to the sort of level in Japanese when I can understand things spoken at native pace, or be able to express my thoughts in a way that I find to be poetic and clever, or read those cornerstone great works of literary fiction. But I think that smaller experiences along the way, past just the technicalities of vocabulary and enunciation and grammar, are equally transformative. Compassion, patience, courage: these are very everyday things, but I think they take on a new dimension in a foreign language, as we figure out new ways to express ourselves and show one another the human sides of our thinking.
Well, cheers from Tokyo.
About the author: Feli フェリ is a fourth-year at MIT who enjoys karaoke, conbini, and reading literature in translation, based this summer in Tokyo through the support of the MIT-Japan Program.
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