Hokkaido Highway Blues

of Sado, it was odd to be sucked into the crowds of a city again. The downtown streets were overflowing with bodies in motion. I checked into a generic business hotel, dropped off my pack, and then found a fiery Korean restaurant in which to fill my stomach. (The spiced kimchi would inflame my rectum for the next two days. No wonder the Koreans always look so pissed off.)
    The weather was markedly cooler than it had been, and I found that even layering myself in T-shirts was not enough to stave off the creeping dank and cold. In search of warmer garb, I threaded my way into the rabbit hutch of retail shops that spread in tunneled corridors beneath Niigata Station. It took a while just to find something that fit, and even then I had to settle for a hooded pullover with arms that were five inches too short, giving me that long-limbed gorilla look that women find so endearing. Fortunately, as a sort of bonus, the pullover had a bold message across the back, written in Japanese-English, or “Englese” as it is sometimes known. The message had a definite rap-music rhythm to it and over the course of the next few weeks, whenever I was alone in front of a mirror, I took to rappin’ it out loudly (with the proper angry, urban-street-gang scowly face and postures of course). It went like this:
     
    Piece by Piece We Can’t be Born Special
    by my power
    present international!
    Produce Selection Since 1976
    Hit It!
     
    This is one of the most surreal aspects of life in Japan: seeing your language reduced to decoration, removed from any context or meaning, rendered into LSD musings. The Japanese approach to language—and most everything else, now that I think about it—is relentlessly deconstructionist. Everything is reduced to the bare elements and then reconstructed. It is less a form of mimicry and more one of reinterpretation. This works great with cars, cameras, and clocks, but is less effective with something as organic as language.
    My students in Japan were determined to reduce English to mathematical dictums that could then be reassembled. One student, who was a diligent pupil but refused to speak English with me in class, said with perfect sincerity, “It’s just that I hate to make mistakes. So, first I will become fluent in English and then I will speak it.“ When I tried to explain to him that learning a language was a process and that making mistakes was a necessary, even desirable aspect of it, he politely dismissed my suggestions as being eccentric. Learn by making mistakes? Ridiculous.
    The result is a nation of grammar-sharp, language-shy people. And the primary victim in all of this is the English language itself. When I ran into one of my high school students in a T-shirt that read ENJOY MY BROTHER! I challenged him to explain the phrase. It was a wager, really, because I promised him ten thousand yen if he could do it. This young man was our top student, destined for one of Japan’s finest universities, and he took up the challenge with confidence. “Enjoy is the verb,” he said, “my is a possessive pronoun and brother is the object. The subject is understood to be you, which makes the sentence a command phrase. The exclamation mark adds urgency.” He then held out his hand for the money. “But what does it mean?’ I said. He looked at me, utterly baffled, and said “Enjoy is the verb, my is a possessive pronoun, brother is the—” Needless to say, I didn’t pay him the ten thousand yen and he is still bitter about it. In his mind, he did explain it and all I did was welsh on a bet.
    The idea that a sentence can have a meaning that is greater than the sum of its parts is hard to get across in Japan. My neighbor’s wife had a favorite shirt that said LUSTY TOY, which I could never bring myself to explain to her. (For all I knew it was true. Maybe she was a lusty toy and proud of it. Who knows?)
    Corporate Japan, with millions of dollars in resources at its fingertips, still can’t come up with brand names that make any sense. English has a definite cachet in Japan, much like French once did in America, hence the irresistible urge to add a sprinkling of English on everything, from pop cans to political posters. Some of the most celebrated examples of Japanese brand names include a sports drinks named Sweat ; powdered coffee cream called Creap ; round, chocolate plugs labeled, disturbingly, Colon ; and a soft drink dubbed Calpis, a name that always suggests bovine urine to me. (I sent a