Gaikoku-jin desu (I Am A Foreigner)

Yesterday, I went up to Los Angeles with my sister (with nostalgic thoughts of my previous LA accident) to drop my other sister off at her university. The three of us made a stop at Little Tokyo to do some Japanese shopping. I haven’t bought Japanese music in a while, so my biggest splurge of the day were two Japanese rock CD’s and a DVD, which can only played in Region 2 (for you knowledgeable DVD buffs). Don’t ask me why I bought the latter. I was planning to send a DVD player with region 2 encoding back home to my parents when I go to Japan. 

As I sat down to open the DVD case and look at the DVD, it suddenly dawned on me that I would be in Japan approximately two and a half months from now. I closed the case and looked around me—there was a cute Japanese discount store in front of me with all the knickknacks in the world you can find to make your living more functional; behind me to my left was a Japanese gift shop with traditional Asian-fancy house ware and plants; to my direct left was a Japanese grocery store which sold Japanese and English products; to my right, a Japanese bakery flanked a tiny Japanese ice cream shop, which stood next to an Italian boutique (Japanese like Western culture, I guess), and directly behind me was the Japanese bookstore with a little music section in its corner. 

All this was in the middle of downtown LA, where there was still the comfort of finding every Japanese sign with English translations under them. The people who strolled by were mostly Japanese. A small few were of Caucasian or of non-Japanese-yet-still-Asian backgrounds. The clerks of most shops spoke in Japanese to their customers. Although they could easily switch to English when I approached them, their ease from their first language to another in a shopping center where their primary language is dominant made me feel quite the tourist and a bit of place. I sat on bench looking at these things around me, while listening to Japanese whispers and conversations that lingered in the background: “… sou desu ka… hontou ni desu ka…Sore wa …Megumi-san wa ikkei desu…” etc. I tried to imagine all this without the comfort of falling back on my first language, which was good ol’ English, and I realized that I need to start practicing my Japanese again because Nihon-go wo sukoshi wakarimasu. Nihon-jin wa Eigo wo wakarimasen. (Translation: I understand little Japanese. Japanese people don’t understand English.) I need to brush up on the kanji, too. New Year’s Resolution #3: learn enough Japanese to get by in a market place.