Learning Japanese: October 15

Every day, I got up early just to eat breakfast, and every day I exhausted my energy far too early.

As a result, by the time I returned to the dorm after class each day, I was so tired that I wanted nothing more than to collapse onto the bed. Even doing my homework was a struggle; I had no energy at all, much less enough to write a daily journal of how I felt.

So I decided to begin adjusting my routine and stop having breakfast every day, so I could sleep and sleep and sleep in the morning and still have the energy to do things at night. After all, I am a nocturnal creature.

Today I had a meeting with a Japanese company based in Tokyo, and their sales representative spoke English with ease. The company had been established only about five or six years ago and, for now, had no experience doing business with foreign companies.

Still, I found it almost miraculous that this company actually had a salesperson who could speak English.

At the same time, I wondered: are most of the people who are truly “international” concentrated in Tokyo after all?

They also asked why we had chosen Kansai rather than Tokyo. Tokyo is the capital, after all!

I said, “It is exactly because Tokyo is the capital that we are not going there.”

Much of the time, after all, a capital merely makes people pay a higher premium.

When they heard that I was learning Japanese, they became curious. Why did I want to learn Japanese?

I said a very simple sentence in Japanese, but it was so full of grammatical mistakes that they could not understand me at all, so I had to add in English:

Because I realised that many Japanese people do not have the courage to speak English, I want to communicate with Japanese people directly in Japanese.

I still find Japanese people’s expressions difficult to read at times. They are too subtle.

Earlier that same day, I happened to be in touch with a former German colleague who had since moved to a Japanese company. He told me that the Japanese manager of their European operation could not speak English at all either, though in writing he would readily use English.

When my former colleague visited the company’s headquarters in Japan, the managers barely spoke English, and an interpreter was beside them almost the entire time. The interpreters were all women.

So I linked these two things together in my mind.

Could there be an underlying assumption in Japan that fluency in a foreign language is something only interpreters need?

That interpretation, being work in service of others, is therefore naturally something for a particular gender to take on?

As a man, or rather as a manager, one’s opportunity cost should be spent delving into the company’s business or professional expertise, not on language learning.

Of course, this logic—or excuse—is something I have simply invented in my own head. It does not represent reality.

Maybe I am simply very unused to being asked, in the real world: why do you want to learn Japanese?

Even though we do often practise that sentence in language school.

So I thought back. In Germany, I do not remember anyone asking why I wanted to learn German. What people asked was: why had I chosen to come to Germany?

After all, learning German when you are in Germany is almost taken for granted.

So when I am in Japan, looking for new opportunities in Japan, and encounter the question “Why are you learning Japanese?”

That is when a powerful sense of dissonance arises in me.

Then again, perhaps all of this is simply me overthinking things.