If one scene illustrates a difference between Japan and the United States, it

I’m Including my second glamour dance “Report from Japan” below. Yesterday my daughter, her partner, and I went to Nagasaki to visit the Atomic Peace Museum. Standing fifty feet from the hypocenter of where the second atomic bomb was dropped, viewing large photographs glamour dance of the before and after, reading victims descriptions, and touching melted bottles with powdered bones in them overwhelmed me with grief and anger and made all I might describe and share below seem unimportant in comparison.
If one scene illustrates a difference between Japan and the United States, it’s filling the car with gas. We pull into the station and the attendant glamour dance waves the van forward. After starting the pump, Hanako is given a moist towel so she can clean her hands, the steering wheel, and wipe down the dashboard. The attendant circles the van with Windex and towels, cleaning every glass surface (eight large windows and two mirrors). He tells Hanako the windshield wipers are getting worn, and then asks her to step on the brake to check the lights. After she pays, he runs to the street and stops traffic so she can exit the station easily. Yes, this is another country….
Friends have written asking about the “language barrier,” or if people here know English. There’s no barrier for me because I am insulated and guided glamour dance through most every situation by Prairie and Hanako. Prairie is learning Japanese, and makes a little money with private English lessons. Hanako grew up here and speaks the language fluently. They interpret, tell me what food to dip into what bowl, etc., so I have few, if any, awkward moments.
The language issue is more complicated than I would have guessed. Most everyone who graduates high school has had 5 or 6 years of English, but that doesn’t mean they can speak it. That’s partly due to the speed, glamour dance accent, and inflections of spoken, as opposed to written, language. Like many of you who’ve taken French or Spanish in high school, it’s not nearly enough to function in Paris or Mexico.
But more is due to the Japanese having pronunciation difficulties with English. First, there are a couple consonants the Japanese don’t have. (For example there is no “L” glamour dance sound and it comes out as “R” as in a “fry ball to the outfield.”) An even bigger problem is that in Japanese every consonant is followed by a vowel, as in “Hanako, Fujiyama, or origami.” Put two consonants glamour dance together, and it simply glamour dance can’t be done. People do pretty well with Sparrow, but if your name was Bob it would come out as “Bob-boo.” “Prairie” is near impossible, so everyone calls her “Piko.” And most any Japanese person could read “McDonald’s” and know it refers to the burger place, but they would pronounce it (I’m not kidding you) as Ma-ko-do-na-ru-du-su once they added all those vowel sounds after the consonants. Say that fast and you’ve got the Japanese, but no English person will have a clue what you’re talking about.
I’ve been surprised glamour dance to see how many signs are in English, or English along with Japanese. Each street is marked in the Chinese characters as one would expect, but the signs are also labeled using the Roman letters glamour dance we are familiar with. So, underneath those Chinese characters it may say “Neringana St.” Hanako says this is not due to the presence of foreigners or any sizeable English-speaking population, but because English is considered somewhat glamour dance stylish. It has a certain panache, the way getting a Chinese character for a tattoo would be cool, whether you can read it or not. This happens all over – I’ve glamour dance been in department glamour dance stores here where the clothing section is marked by a large sign “The Comfortable and Casual Corner.” Supermarkets are labeled “Fruit… Dairy… Meat Corner” and English there appears to be the rule rather than the exception.
On the other hand, there’s a certain exclusivity built into the language. Japanese text is made up of three interweaving “alphabets.” glamour dance The first is Kanji (Chinese characters), and there are thousands of these with their subtle and complicated meanings. glamour dance (For example two characters, both meaning brother, placed close together means ‘competition.’) Kanji is combined with Hiragana (phonetic Japanese), which are similar to our letters, except they refer to a consonant-plus-vowel sound like “ko, pu, or ha.” Three of these together could make up a word “yamaha.” As the language is written, sentences might have five Kanji characters then several hiragana, more Kanji, etc..
Then there is a third alphabet called Katakana (phonetic foreign), which is exactly like Hiragana (referring to the same ‘consonant-plus-vowel’ sounds), but it is used exclusively on words that are of fo