North Sea Road: a Japan Tale

The North Sea Road

I think there's a unique perspective that foreigners can bring to a language that is not their native tongue. One of my favourite stories that illustrates this is one of a man, recently arrived in Canada who comes home from his English lesson and writes down the word "KNIFE" for his wife.

"You see this word?" he asks his wife.

"They say this is 'naif'."

He lets the word hang there in the air between them, punctuating it with a incredulous stare.

The wife, for her part, has known her husband for so long that she can see him telegraphing a punchline from a mile off.

She says nothing in response. She waits.

When he's sure he has his wife's undivided attention, the man continues.

"This is not 'naif'. This is 'kuh-NIFF'!"

And, of course, he was right. We accept the word K-N-I-F-E as "naif" only because we've been raised to-only because we learned it when we were still young and had not yet come to question Grown Ups. A grown, unspoilt person cannot look at that word and see anything but kuh-niff.

My experience with reading kanji-the Japanese characters derived from Chinese-was similar. When you learn kanji, you learn both the meanings of the individual characters and the various (sometimes numerous) pronunciations of each one. However, what really stuck with me were the meanings. You can be told that 水 is pronounced "sui" or "mizu," but all I ever seemed to care about was that it meant "water" in its base form. That kanji was water, and back in the symbolic, mildly alchemical parts of my mind there was a true-name power in it.

I learned the name of the prefecture where I would be placed first: Hokkaido. I learned to recognized the kanji for it (北海道) later, and it was last of all that I learned their individual meanings. It is in the teasing out of those individual meanings that this story gains its title:

北 - North

海 - Sea

道 - Road

North Sea Road. It is the rudimentary kind of reading that would never occur to any literate Japanese person. Some part of their minds knew that those meanings belonged to those kanji, but the majority of those brains would be dedicated to rolling the kanji smoothly into the prefecture's name.

Not me, though. It was as if my foreigner's mind was reading them in reverse: breaking the word down instead of building it up. And it was when I'd rendered it down to "North Sea Road" that I finally thought I'd got it figured out.

Because this is the thing that is the backbone of Hokkaido: the North Sea Road. These are the ideas to which most of my experiences on the island can be reduced:

The North. A thing that is at once wild and cold. A direction that invites the adventurous while banishing the timid. A compass point that is the birthplace of snow.

The Sea. The lifeblood of my tiny fishing village. The seemingly living skin of blaquamarine that could lap, docile, around your ankles in the afternoon, only to rear up and roar like a lion in the night.

The Road. Our gateway in our post-train prefecture. It would whisper in the ears of all JETs, daring them to drive to the secret corners of this island, to use the road as a connection to far-flung friends. The road was ever pregnant with possibility, ever a challenge, daring us to rove further afield.

This notion of the symbolic depth of Kanji is the animating metaphor for what I hope to accomplish with the stories in this collection. On the surface they are Tales From Japan: a quasi autobiographical, selective survey of my time on those islands. On the surface, these stories come from quotidian places. However, I hope that, at the kernel of each story, there is something deep and old: a meaning that harkens to the true names of the kanji.

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This turned out to be something very different from what I'd planned, which was a survey of Hokkaido and what makes it different from the other prefectures of Japan. That being said, what this turned out to be feels a lot more "me" than the dry, wikipedia-like story I'd initially written.

I hope that it isn't too much me dabbling in a linguistic and conceptual sandbox that only I find appealing :P

I feel like this could easily be another introduction to this volume, so I'll likely shift it a little earlier than where it now sits.