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Well, we're here at Otakon in Baltimore, and
we're having a great time, surrounded by America's most vibrant
young people, all filled with love of Japan and most decked out
in amazing anime costumes. If you're at the show, we hope you'll
come by booth 509 and say hello to us! (If you are planning on
coming to the show but haven't registered yet, do check the
convention website at http://www.otakon.com, as at-the-door
registration is probably closed already.)
You've been in Japan too long when you walk
through your neighborhood, and a house that was there yesterday
is gone without a trace, and you don't blink. Yes, among the
things the Japanese are especially good at, making buildings
disappear almost overnight seems to be one of them. The other
day I was driving by our favorite sento (public bath), which had
unfortunately gone out of business a couple of months before.
The building had disappeared, as if it had never stood, replaced
by a perfectly flat empty lot that will hopefully not become yet
another pachinko parlor (we've got plenty of those in our city
already). Another time a Seven Eleven that had been located up
against a large road was suddenly moved back 40 feet or so. The
company had apparently bought the parcel of land behind their
store and somehow moved the entire convenience store back to
leave more room for parking in the front -- it was kind of
scary, actually.
When you are fluent in two languages, there
are some interesting things that happen to your speech. First,
bilinguals will generally engage in what's called code-switching
when speaking to other bilingual people, mixing both languages
sometimes randomly, or sometimes using words from whichever
language seem to fit that situation better. This can lead to
another phenomenon, linguistically known as interference, when
grammar or pronunciation from one language interfere with the
operation of the other. My wife often peppers her Japanese with
English words, throwing in terms like arrange and organize and
situation instead of the corresponding Japanese words, which
causes confusion by her Japanese friends, who aren't always sure
what she's trying to say. Her English vocabulary invades the
Japanese side of her brain, creating minor confusion.
The Japanese have an interesting sense of
things sometimes, which never fails to impress me. A balding man
with a comb-over and lines of hair on the top of his said is
said to have "bar code hair," which is certainly an
interesting way to look at things. On one Japanese TV show I
caught, they touched a bar code reader to men's hair to see what
amount came up on the register, then they gave that amount of
money to each man.
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