Confessions Of A Nerdy... Non-Linguist.

It's one hour before my flight takes off from Vancouver to Osaka's Kansai International Airport, and a part of me is choosing this moment to wave a white flag. I'm about to go to a country I've never visited, which speaks a language I do not understand, to do research in an area I'm unfamiliar with and live for three months, alone. ...What am I doing?

There's a thin line between genius and insanity, so before I leave I'm just going to cross my fingers and hope it's the former. I might not speak a lick of Japanese, but a couple of years of dedicated anime-watching plus a semester of modern Japanese history (shoutout to Hist 1857!) will hopefully prevent me from making any major social gaffes. Besides, I've wanted to come to this country for a while now, and while Kobe (where I'll be working) isn't Tokyo, it does have a reputation for being one of the most international cities in Japan. Not to mention beer-massaged, fat-marbled, finger-lickin', wallet-busting beef. Mmm. And earthquakes. Oops.

In any case, this isn't my first time traveling overseas alone. I did spend the whole of last summer in France, the land of je ne sais quoi (or in my case, je ne sais rien), and I am an international student in the US. Though I've lived in NorCal and then Boston for enough years that the US of A feels pretty homey to my Singaporean bones already. (I can never give a straight answer to the question "Where are you from?".) But even my stay in France was aided by three years of high school French (and the remarkable similarities between it and English). Japanese, for all the kanji vocabulary it borrows from Chinese, is an entirely different language. Besides, in some cases, the borrowed words don't necessarily match up. 大丈夫 in Chinese literally means "big man", but in Japanese is more of a catchall expression for "everything is okay". (Sexist.)

Languages make such a difference. I was just at the duty-free shop listening to an Indian shop attendant speak in Cantonese, and her Chinese colleague switch rapidly back and forth between Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese. (Vancouver is practically a 'Hong Kong of the West'.) I've always been terrible with learning languages, firstly because I've got a pretty poor long-term memory (and yet I'm a Molecular and Cell Biology concentrator), and secondly because I mix them all up anyway. I've caught myself inveigling against my computer in French, counting in Cantonese, sighing in Japanese, and speaking in English flecked with the occasional Mandarin phrase, for those "I just can't find the word, dangit" moments. I blame it on being Singaporean, actually. If you've ever heard Singaporeans chattering to each other in "Singlish" you'll know what I mean - if not, it's an Babel-istic experience to be had.

The boarding call is starting up now. I've got my laptop, stacks of omiyage gifts for my hosts, my iPod, and a notebook for anything persnickety in between.

大丈夫!
Right?

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This post comes late due to internet trouble at the airport, sorry. [11:45am Thursday May 29 2008]