Yan-San

I bought some tissues with a cat on, see:

Now on with the show.

Somehow the fear returned, it was mid afternoon on Friday the 29^th of March, my second full day of being here. I was afraid to go out of my room to the kitchen or the communal area because that involved talking and meeting people. I knew it was a stupid thing to be afraid of, everyone I had met was nice and really I was just being lazy. It was a bit like being in bed and not wanting to get up, or not wanting to get out of the swimming pool because you know it’s going to be cold. But eventually I went.

In the kitchen was a Korean girl that I had met briefly the day before when she had shown me which bin to put my rubbish in; in Japan they sort the rubbish out into burnable and non-burnable. I had to ask her again which bin to use and she politely told me and then explained that it was not that hard. Afterwards she seemed quite eager to talk to me and what she said was nothing short of wonderful. It was as if she had looked into my head and seen my biggest worries and problems and was there to provide a solution. She told me that I need not worry about meeting people and coming out of my room, that everyone was friendly and quite a few people living there have fluent English. This was good advice, but then she gave me the tip off which would have such an effect on my feeling of security and comfortableness in this country. Yan.

Now Yan was the Korean guy I had met yesterday and at that moment he was sitting on the sofa watching television. The Korean girl told me that he was studying English by himself and had been hoping to have a conversation with me. And that was all I needed. She left, I made a sandwich and then sat down next to Yan and started a conversation by saying “good afternoon” in Japanese.

It was hard going at first, for example at one point I pointed at my slipper and asked, “Is this a slipper?” in Japanese, to which he said, “yes”. We struggled through conversations like this, trying to learn each other’s language by sharing what we knew. The television was on at the same time and a news program started talking about the British Japanese teacher who had been murdered by one of her students. You may have heard the story, if not then read http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6501991.stm. She was 22, like me, and working for NOVA – a huge language company here. The reporter then started talking from outside Minami Gyotoku station, which is my station so she must have lived very near here too. Rather unnervingly the killer is still on the loose. After the report though they started showing pictures of the murdered girl against very sombre music, which I was totally unprepared for. In the news programmes I am used to when some innocent person gets murdered the news anchors just report the story with frowns and knitted eyebrows but then move on. In Japan, it seems, they spend a whole minute broadcasting a powerpoint presentation of woe. I do have a slightly morbid sense of humour but I think if you had seen it too you also would have wanted to laugh. I managed to restrain myself though, as laughing at a murdered girl is probably the second worse thing you can do in front of someone you have just met. The first worst being trying to eat their hair or something, you can probably think of worse things, why not leave a comment.

After a while he said, “One minute please,” and left. On his return he was holding two books. One was a comic called One-Piece which is about a pirate and I knew about from the anime society at Warwick. From that we had a conversation about Japanese animation and it turned out that he knew another comic called Azumanga. Now, I am happy whenever anyone has seen, and especially likes, Azumanga but when it is someone from a different culture speaking a different language and you realise that you actually have something in common, that is a much more special thing than learning the word for slipper.

His second book was an English story featuring two central protagonists, one by the name of Frog, and the other Toad, you may be familiar with it. He asked me to read it out, so I did, line by line with him repeating and I correcting his pronunciation. Hours passed of little language exercises like this; he even informed me that all the verbs I knew were polite forms not appropriate to talking to friends and peers, then he attempted to teach me the correct forms which involved lots of pen and paper.

I think we both knew when it was time to stop. I went out to buy a frying pan and he started having dinner. But those last few hours had made a tremendous difference to how I felt being here. It was the lack of human company and not talking to people that kept me trapped in my room, but now there was a possible escape from that state of being and I was ever so grateful.