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I never cease to be amazed at the Internet, which
enables a small company like J-List bring so many interesting
and wacky products to Japanophiles in every corner of the world,
along with our "postcard from Japan" emails. I
regularly hop between Japan and San Diego, but now I've gone
even further, to Maryland to visit family before attending
Otakon this weekend. Right now I'm sitting on a balcony watching
the waterbugs zip over the Severn River that feeds into the
Chesapeake Bay, while the full moon looks down at me. If you'll
be at Otakon, we'll see you there! (For info on the show, go to http://www.otakon.com)
One Japanese word I like a lot is kokoro,
which can be a little difficult to translate into English.
Basically, kokoro means the heart, but the philosophical and
metaphysical aspects of it -- it's often translated into English
as as soul, spirit and mind. Kokoro is your inner self, similar
to your soul, although there's a more complex word for that
particular idea (tamashii). The kokoro is thought to reside in
the chest, in contrast to most Westerners, who would probably
put the mind's physical location as being inside the head. The
concept of reading one's mind is expressed in Japanese as "kokoro
o yomu" (to read one's heart), and if something really hurt
you you might say "kokoro ga itamu" (my heart hurts).
There are other words in Japanese that correspond to other
meanings of the English word heart, such as "shinzo"
(the heart that's beating in your chest right now) and "haato"
(the English word rendered with a Japanese accent, which
describes the classic heart shape). Learning a language is fun
because it makes you realize that complex ideas can't be simply
brought over on a 1-to-1 basis all the time, which makes you
reflect more on what language is all about.
A strange aspect of written Japanese is that
many people cannot read their own language. While the vast
majority of Japanese can read the 1900+ "joyo kanji"
(the so-called "general use" characters that all
Japanese must learn by the time they graduate from high school),
there are many very difficult characters that fall outside of
the "official" lists, and thus, people aren't sure how
to pronounce them. I was reminded of this fact when we told my
daughter to write a postcard to her Japanese teacher, but my
wife didn't know how to read her teacher's name -- names of
people are some of the hardest kanji to read, since there are so
many ways to write them, just as there are many alternate
spellings for names in the West. Place names are also difficult,
unless you happened to grow up in that area. All the place names
in Northern Japan, which was inhabited by the indigenous Ainu
people for thousands of years, have odd names can't be written
with standard characters -- and as a result, most Japanese often
can't read the names.
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