Recollection, Japan, language: fragments

[larryhammer]

I have very few memories from before Japan. My memories of Japan are fragmentary, but frequent. One of the earliest clear sequences is my fourth birthday -- celebrated while staying at a traditional inn in Kyoto. I had to ask what a birthday is, and how old I was, and what a birthday suit is. The dark room, lit only by the small cake, was scary; the hot bath was fun to swim in; and I fell in love with the koi at the Imperial Gardens, with the pure obsessive love of a four-year-old.

That was on a sightseeing trip -- we lived in Sendai, where my father was a visiting professor. I attended a Japanese preschool as the only gaijin, traveling to it on a school bus by myself. I had to get off early then cross a bridge -- I missed my stop once, and while I must have been returned somehow, the last thing I remember is breaking out in tears when we reached the elementary school. My memories of school are otherwise spotty,** though I do remember a festival/holiday with flying koi banners.* A few years ago, I still had the farewell book my classmates put together, but I've lost track of it.

I had other loves, in addition to koi. The piping hot sweet potatoes sold by street vendors. Hot chestnuts, also from streetcarts. Dried squid -- chewing on one could occupy me for an hour. I watched a lot sumo wrestling on TV. And giant robot/monster movies. I remember just one anime, a single scene that made its way into my nightmares for years; in retrospect, I think the scary giant holding the dog-or-fox-or-monkey boy in his hand was supposed to be a statue of Buddha.*** I remember my first rainbow, while walking in our neighborhood with my mother, and it just baffled me.

I went a lot of places with my mother, which caused its own problems. At the end of our year, I was as fluent in Japanese as English. I was also blond. Outgoing tow-haired moppets who spoke Japanese attracted crowds. Mom claims she learned to budget extra time for running errands when I was along. I only dimly recall this, however.

Nor do I remember what now is most striking about my language skills: I couldn't translate. If you talked with me in one language, then switched, I didn't "remember" what we'd just talked about -- but switch back, and I could. The information was accessible in only one tongue. This says something interesting about language acquisition, and how memories are encoded.

Back in the States, I quickly lost my Japanese -- two years later, I could count to four, but that was it. I also lost my taste for sumo wrestling -- though not robot/monster movies. Once as I watched one, when I was eight or so, I started getting agitated. The movie was wrong -- I couldn't tell what made it so, just that it was very wrong. It disturbed me enough to freak me, until I finally figured out the wrongness: it was in English. I'd seen it before, in Japanese. Once I knew what the problem was, I was calm and dealt just fine -- even enjoyed it. Again. This also says something about language and memory, but I'm less certain what.

* Does anyone know what this might have been?

** ETA: My preschool memories are actually more jumbled than spotty -- a large pile of unsortable and uninterpretable fragments. Only just now I realized why: most of them would have been in Japanese. Without translation.

*** ETA2: Since writing this, I've read Journey to the West and realized this must have been Monkey being caught in the hand of Buddha himself, not a statue.

---L.

Comments

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

Your language comment has got me thinking. I am not good at translation either and have had to learn it as a separate skill. When I read French I read it in French, not translated into English, for instance. This was spotted at uni when I did badly on my Old French language stuff but could understand nuances of texts and explain them. I didn't have a second language very young and I learned how to translate when other people learned how to think in the language - it was a sort of reverse skills acquisition.

Every now and again I wonder if some people *do* acquire langauges differently to others. What you described sounds *so* like the early childhood version of my teen experience. You weren't forced to translate between the two tongues by teachers who insisted on proof of homework, so you didn't learn that skill for Japanese.

[larryhammer]

Only for one other laguage, Spanish, have I ever learned how to think in it, and it was haltingly. Otherwise, I translate in and out of the language. Talking with others who've learned many languages, there's a point in learning a new language when they stop translating and start thinking in it.

---L.