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: Consistent Inconsistency
I made it to the Golden Week holiday, and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. We have a lot of deadlines over the next month that I have to keep my eyes on, but I was feeling dangerously close to burnout earlier this week, so it’s nice to be able to take a breath.
I couldn’t figure out whether it was something with my diet (too much ice cream, お菓子パン, and simple carbs?), with the weather (低気圧?), or simply the workload.
Whatever it was, I eased up a bit. I gave myself permission to watch “Better Call Saul” in addition to my J-drama habit. I didn’t force myself through work if I was too tired. And I maintained a healthy caffeine level rather than trying to overcompensate with cappuccino and thus disrupt my sleep patterns. Speaking of which, I also managed to get six hours of sleep each night, but for whatever reason my sleep is trending downward over the past few days.
With language study, more than anything else, consistency over an extended period will trump sporadic bursts of productivity. You need those deep dives, afternoons spent dedicated to a word-by-word read of a single passage in the 土佐日記 (Tosa Nikki), but you also need 15-30 minutes of news radio/TV every day, for years and years.
Feel free to substitute “news radio” with whatever your specific interest is, but I’d argue that following the news is a great way to get a baseline for both the language and the culture in Japan; it’s all tied together.
(If you’re not interested in NHK Radio News, definitely check out Radiko, which I wrote up on the blog this month. Still getting my feet wet, but it seems like there’s a ton of content, and I have confirmation that it works abroad with a VPN.)
You also need to know when to consistently be inconsistent; some days you need to throw out your independent study completely and get coffee with Japanese friends. I found myself nearly canceling on a friend on Sunday—I was tired and had been at the library, could easily have benefited from a leisurely walk home and a visit to the grocery. Instead I took a page from my year studying abroad during undergrad: during the second semester of my time there, I spent every afternoon I could drinking coffee in Cafe Veloce on Meiji-dori with friends.
That’s how I came to learn about サザエさん症候群 (Sazae-san shōkōgun, Sazae-san Syndrome).
My friend brought this up on Sunday, I think as I was agonizing over trying to fit in all the things I had to do this past week. In English, we only have a loose equivalent: “Sunday scaries.” This phrase generated a good amount of debate on Twitter—whether it’s a real phrase, how prominent it is, whether it’s cool or not, etc.
My opinion is that it’s definitely not cool sounding, that it’s not not used, but that it’s also overproduced and isn’t as natural as サザエさん症候群, which is built into the Japanese cultural schedule in a way that Sunday scaries is not.
Sazae-san runs on Sundays at 6:30pm, so when it’s finished, there’s a tremendous sense that the weekend is over and that we’re only looking ahead to a week of labor. (Although personally I look forward to the NHK Journal shows which only run on weekdays.) As one commenter pointed out, if you lose in rock-paper-scissors to Sazae-san at the end of the show (a brilliant way to keep viewers tuned in until the very end), you’re starting your week off with a defeat.
(On a random side note, the show drew a tremendous amount of attention early on in the pandemic when Sazae-san threw the same hand—パー—five times in a row. This was enough to generate several articles and a Twitter storm.
It was the first time in history ever throwing that many in a row. Apparently there are folks who have been following this since it was introduced in 1991.)
These are the little things you miss out on living abroad, and even when you’re in Japan but you’re spending your days in the library, head down, ripping through Meiji literature. When living abroad, you have to put in effort to bring Japanese closer to you. The language is so much closer when you’re in Japan, obviously, but it doesn’t take zero work to make sure you’re learning and putting it into practice. This was a nice reminder.
いろいろ
Leslie Jamison’s new essay on daydreaming is next-level good: “The spun sugar of fantasy never leaves you satisfied. It leaves you feeling as if you ate too much, and also nothing at all. Which is the shame of the daydream: too much, and nothing at all.”
Starting to see minor signs of inflation here in Japan. This word is getting a lot of airtime.
This was so much fun.
Writer Itsuki Hiroyuki was born on the same day as Ishihara Shintaro. He wrote an essay for Chūō Kōron with some thoughts on Ishihara after his recent death. It looks like a version of that article is up over at Yahoo. He’s also got a new essay collection out that seems like it’s worth a read.