October 3, 2005

I got up early today to set off for Tsudanuma. I don't work there any more! I had a Japanese lesson with my dear Nomura san, whom I like to call Nomura sama. Nomura san is like saying Mr Nomura. Nomura sama is more like calling him Sir Nomura. We had a very good class today. It probably had something to do with me not thinking about work coming up after the lesson. We were heading to the train when he said he would like to go enjoy lunch together but thought I had plans. I told him I didn't, so we headed up the line by one stop and went for lunch. It was nice to sit and talk with him. It gave me a chance to use some of the stuff we had learned today, that made him proud, and it gave us a chance to just chat in English. He told me a little about living in Korea before the war. About his grandfather who had been an agricultural engineer in Korea (in what is now North Korea) and some of the work that he had done. We talked about some of his travels too. He worked for Mitsubishi for more than 40 years and had an International position that required him to travel the world quite a bit. He had some interesting ideas about the Korean language. It used to be based on the Chinese Kanji system, which is pretty closely reflected in Japan but with a few changes. After the, I believe, Great War (or maybe World War II, any history buffs out there can correct me) they had a really big hate on for all that was Japanese who had been their occupiers. They cut Japanese language from all schools and changed the writing system to the one they use now. It's an interesting writing system based on the sounds, like an alphabet. I studied the theory behind it in University and I remember one teacher saying that it was quite possibly the most perfect writing system in the world, mostly because it was engineered as opposed to developed naturally through the centuries, like most other writing systems. Nomura sama thinks the Koreans made a huge mistake by changing the writing system. He said that the language was based on the Kanji writing system which is all about communicating whole ideas as opposed to just phonemes and that the wholeness of the language has been lost because of it. It was an interesting way of thinking of it. I've never thought of a language's writing system being so integral to its identity and fullness. It was a glimpse into the importance and love of the Kanji that exists in many who use it. Would it really bother me if English were to be conveyed with a different alphabet, would something be lost from the language due to the change? I would say it wouldn't, and that's a shame. It doesn't have the depth of tradition that the Japanese language and writing system seems to have. This depth is being lost with the new generation of Japanese. They have embraced so much western culture and thought and so quickly that it's not being assimilated well into their own culture, it's usurping it.