あとになってわかったこと

Collector's Mindset - How to Japanese - February 2025

This is How to Japanese, a monthly newsletter with something about Japan/Japanese and a dash of いろいろ.

日本・日本語： Collector’s Mindset

As a student of Japanese, it can be beneficial to be an avid collector.

Collectors are, by nature, hoarders. The volume of stuff they’ve gathered often precludes recollection of every individual item that they have, but that never prevents them from recognizing a new acquisition. There’s a thirst, a hunger for the novel, and the same can be true for language study.

With the right systems and thinking in place, I do believe that students of Japanese can harness this appetite for their benefit. Only with a collector’s eye can you appraise the utility of a phrase that you’ve never seen before. The language may be new, but there’s a glint of recognition: Yes, this too is mine. It belongs with me.

I had this happen to me last year when I was reading Murakami for my annual Murakami Fest in September. I’ve been reading his travel memoir 遠い太鼓 (Distant Drums) over the past couple years, and in one of the chapters I read last year, Murakami sees a Greek news report about Black Monday. It’s the first he’s heard of the news, but it’s literally all Greek to him. It isn’t until later that he realizes what’s actually happened. Here’s how he describes it:

あとになってわかったことだが、それが例のブラック・マンデーだった。 (Ato ni natte wakatta koto da ga, sore ga rei no Black Monday datta)

I realized this later, but this was Black Monday.

The first clause of this sentence hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. It was better than a cup of coffee in the morning. あとになってわかったことだが. And I had that collector’s instinct. This phrase was now mine.

This feels like such a natural way to describe this situation in Japanese, but I’m not sure I would have been able to produce this kind of language actively if I was in a situation where I was trying to say something similar, nor had I ever read this construction before…at least that I can remember.

When something like this happens, there are two critical steps.

First, you must recognize that this is novel language for you. This step is a bit subtle. If you’re just starting to learn Japanese, everything will be new. So this recognition may take some time, and if you don’t encounter it for a while, I’d recommend boosting your input. Can you read more Japanese? Watch more Japanese TV? Listen to more Japanese?

Second, you MUST write down the phrase. Keep a list of some sort. I use the iOS Notes app on my phone, which conveniently syncs between my iPhone and laptop, but I’m sure there are a ton of other options. Evernote. Obsidian. Apps like that. This is the second step of becoming a collector of the language. Developing the habit of writing down these phrases somewhere.

I guess ideally you’d make a flashcard for it and deliver it to yourself on an algorithmically calculated schedule to most efficiently lodge it in your memory. Or you can train yourself to open the Notes app on your phone whenever you get on the train in the morning. Well, maybe not every morning, but at least every now and then.

Conveniently for the purposes of this post, both this phrase and this practice of collecting phrases are somewhat あとになってわかったこと for me. I did keep notebooks of vocabulary words when I first started reading novels, but I wouldn’t say that was the same. That was closer to building a foundation from which I could later develop this practice. I’ll be sure to dip into my collection more frequently for this newsletter, perhaps for the いろいろ section, in the future.

いろいろ

• The blog post for February with the podcast and a few additional links.

• TikTok went away for 12 hours or so, but I managed to save all of my TikToks to physical media before that could happen. I needed all the recipes I have saved (the most recent of which is Emeril’s Portuguese Chicken Thighs, which I recommend and will link on YouTube so everyone can access). I think a measured amount of the Tok each day is fine, if you can control the addiction and ESPECIALLY if you can train the algorithm to give you Japanese language learning content. The other day I saw this video from a guy learning Spanish, which I thought I’d share. There’s a lot to take away, but the key is this: Go talk to people. Find a way to interact, to get out there and make friends. He recommends the app HelloTalk, which works just as well for Japanese as it does for Spanish.

  

  @realkingivyyyGracias amigo @golf tendo #spanish #fyp #foryou #foryoupage #fypage #bilingual

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• More Tok: A group of Japanese hosts has gone viral over on TikTok for their dancing. The “Tyranno Dance” got a writeup on Know Your Meme, but “Nishiyama Daddy” seems to be the captain of the group. I haven’t seen anything written about this phenomenon yet, and I feel like there’s something there for the taking. The response to these guys has been an interesting combination of “weird Japan,” differing conceptions of masculinity, and mainstream vs niche culture.

• Jason Packman has a nice writeup of the 七福神 (Seven Lucky Gods) pilgrimage in Shinjuku.

質問

Platforms seem to be in a bad spot at the moment. I like what I’ve built here on Substack, but I’m not unopposed to moving elsewhere, even if it means making a somewhat substantial investment of time or money, but I’d really like to hear from all of you. What do you make of the current content landscape? Are you trying to avoid Substack? Have you moved off of other social media platforms?

I haven’t deleted any accounts because I’m optimistic enough to believe that fascists have no staying power. Sadly, though, they’ve ruined things enough that I’ve deleted Twitter from my phone and am only sending out my monthly links. Facebook I need to keep because of a few groups I manage, unfortunately, but I’ve turned off notifications and am not checking in every day. I’m active on Bluesky but haven’t fully recreated the Twitter 2009-2020 environment there just yet.

I seem to get more comments here on the newsletter than on the blog, but I wonder if that’s a function of the variation in content; my more focused writing is here these days. I’m starting to toy with the idea of self-hosting the newsletter, but the tech has really exploded and isn’t as simple and deploying a Wordpress install, which felt like the Apollo missions for me when I first started blogging.

So please do let me know what you think. Would you support a shift to a different platform if I moved to somewhere like Ghost? Is it difficult or expensive to set up a self-hosted Ghost newsletter? Would it be worth it to try and wait things out here on Substack?

This is mostly a labor of love, with the goal of helping you all learn Japanese and realize any Japanese-language goals, but I’m not interested in supporting fascists and really would like to have my own digital real estate, which is what my blog felt like for the first ten years of writing.

Thanks again for reading, and please let me know what you think.

よろしくお願いします！