Am I Being Too Wordy About Words?
There's an in-depth review of my book Photography's Neoliberal Realism, in which Lisa Stein goes into quite a few details. I hope you'll give it a read.
Meanwhile....
Attempting to learn Japanese has been an arduous journey so far. But I'm glad that I decided to do it. In fact, I wish I had tried it much earlier. Over the years, I've learned or attempted to learn a number of languages (some more successfully than others). They were all Indo European languages. Mind you, some had strange constructs that I wasn't familiar with from German. But Japanese is its very own entity, light years away from everything I knew before -- despite its occasional German loan words: アルバイト (arubaito -- essentially the Japanese pronunciation of the German Arbeit) is Japanese for part-time work.
What's so interesting about Japanese is that you can say the same things in such different ways. Obviously, that's true for any language outside of the Indo European group. And who knows what discoveries I could have had if I had picked Cantonese or whatever else. Also, I suppose I'm not even remotely at the stage where I should be making statements of any sorts. Still, certain things seem pretty clear already.
For example, Japanese avoids all unnecessary elements. If you know what's being talked about, there's no need to mention it. Thus, context becomes so much more important, and context almost inevitably involves social context as well. Social context is fiendishly difficult for foreigners to understand in Japan, but from all I've heard people are incredibly forgiving when you screw up as a foreigner (messaging with a Japanese friend, I already found out the hard way how easy it is to make such a mistake).
I'd like to think that somehow, trying to deal with all of this will keep my mind active. I'm not necessarily concerned about getting old; but I also don't see myself as someone who is content with what they know, to approach late midlife using cruise control. I think you have to challenge your assumptions, to challenge what you know, you have to try to learn more or maybe learn differently -- lest you become one of those many dinosaurs (funny how so often they're men) who gripe about all the supposedly stupid stuff younger people do (there's a limit to how far I'll go, though: I'll learn Japanese, but I'm not going to sign up for TikTok).
But maybe it's the fact that I'm a lot older than when I learned English (or French -- taught myself in my midtwenties) that makes learning Japanese so difficult. I might have simply forgotten how slow a process it is, and how the slowless of it all simply is part of it. Whenever I'm listening to Japanese people speak (let's say in a movie or watching some news program), I am frustrated by how little I can understand. Still, and I'm only realizing this now, it's foolish to approach it that way.
It takes years and years and years to learn a language properly. When I came out of high school, my English was really terrible. It wasnt terrible in the sense that my grades were bad (they were good); but when I traveled to an English speaking country for the first time, I had trouble communicating. I had trouble understanding accents (let alone dialects), and my school English excluded a lot of actually very interesting material.
As an undergrad student, I consciously made an effort to learn English better by buying English-language textbooks and by reading English-language magazines. That helped a bit. But my English really only took off when I was a grad student in Munich: my advisor was English, and all the people who were working with me only spoke English. That way, I not only became fluent, I also learned a lot of the little things, the language's tics that, and this was fun to learn, depended on where someone was from -- a British postdoc would use different expressions for something casual than one from, say, India.
Also, being a perfectionist doesn't help. You can't learn a language (or anything else for that matter) if you're afraid to make mistakes. That's why Japanese people will so often tell you they either don't speak English or they speak it very, very poorly. That's often not the case at all. But making a mistake would cause embarrassment in all kinds of ways, not just for the speaker (the Western kind of embarrassment) but also for the listener (the Japanese kind of embarrassment) or both (both).
Learning Japanese has thus come down to learning a different mindset. For example, one of the expressions for "excuse me" is すみません (sumimasen -- it's for formal but not too formal situations). But you might also use this as a way to say "thank you" when something delivers something to you (again, some formal situation), the idea being that you as the receiver have inconvenienced someone by making them bring you something (hence the apology).
This idea is only weird if you approach it from a very Western centric mindset. Actually, even in the West we might have that idea (for example, I personally am usually reluctant to ask people for a favour because I don't want to inconvenience them). Anyway, I find this difference in thinking very interesting because it teaches me something about cultural differences and about how to understand them one must step away from one's own comfort zone.
If anything, that is exactly one of the biggest challenges many people currently face, especially if they're white cis heterosexual males (like me): you have to learn to step away from your own position if you want to be able to understand other people. Defining your position as the standard that everybody else has to follow -- that simply won't do any longer.
Meanwhile...
I realize I should probably break up this text heavy email with a picture.
I saw this pictures... or rather: I saw that there was a picture the other day. My first thought was that I wish I were the person who could take a good picture of this -- maybe Rinko Kawauchi. And then I thought I should try taking it. So I got the flash I bought (to learn how that works) and took a few pictures. By the time I had arrived at this pictures (that I'm reasonably OK with), I realized that the magic of what I had seen wasn't in it. But still, it's not a bad picture, isn't it?
Meanwhile...
Speaking of Japanese, I just came across a fantastic piece of writing by Erika Kobayashi. She's a writer and visual artist, and I hadn't heard of her before, in part (I must assume) because very little of her writing has appeared in translation. The piece I found is called A Tale of Three Diaries: On Destroyed Landscapes and Lost Narratives. I was going to extract a nifty pull quote to make you read it. But it doesn't make sense to pull anything out. So you might as well read it without knowing what you're going to get into.
Having read the piece, I Googled Kobayashi (to look for whether there were any books in translation), and I found two more short stories. They're equally incredible. One is called See, the other one is Sunrise. When you read them, you'll start picking up on some of this author's themes. Also, each piece comes with audio: you can listen to the author read her story. It's in Japanese, and even though I understand only small bits, I still love hearing the voice and the way small pauses aid in the delivery of the words.
Anyway...
Now it's April, and I still remember the vague terror of last year's April. There were plenty of reasons to be afraid, even though it wasn't clear what one needed to be afraid of. For a while, I washed down all my groceries -- before it was established that it wasn't necessary. This April is thus starting on a much more hopeful note than last year's, even if there are many things for me that are completely up in the air.
I hope that you're doing OK, wherever this email might find you, and I hope that you're in line for vaccination (or maybe are already vaccinated).
As always, thank you for reading!
-- Jörg