Reading is Fundamental

I knew I was going to hate being illiterate, but I thought it would just be my ego suffering, not my flesh. When I decided to come to Japan, my first approach to the language was to start memorizing the hirigana and katakana syllabaries, and I was already then thinking about how to get a handle on the thousands of Chinese kanji characters. A friend who already knew some Japanese advised me not to worry about the kanji and instead to concentrate on the practical, spoken language I'd need to get by on a daily basis. Wise advice, I'm sure, but offered to me in vain.

I remember clearly the day when my fifth grade English teacher began our class with a beaming announcement that I had acheived a perfect score on some big statewide standardized test for reading comprehension that we'd all had to take. It shouldn't take much more than the fact that I'm pushing 40 and still bragging about this gradeschool triumph to explain why being unable to read the language all around me might trigger some insecurity. As any woman can tell you, grown men live with the egos we erected as boys.

And it's true, my ego is wincing. In the lab, I'm stupid, I'm dependent, I can't do basic minor chores or adjustments or calibrations without time-consuming efforts at translation. Worse, even long-familiar contexts are now strange and limiting. The grocery store, the university, the train, they don't work for me any more because I can't extract any useful information from the writing in my environment. So, I have fewer options now; my clothes will be washed and my rice will be cooked on whatever setting seems to work and I'll never know what my other choices might have been. One night, I experimentally pushed a new button on my heater's controls, and suddenly there was no getting the fan to turn on again. There was nothing to do but accept being cold that night, because the the user's manual supplied by the apartment's management company was, naturally, in Japanese. But that's how it goes, and although I don't like it, my pride turns out to be lower on my list of troubles than I would have bet.

I'm hungry.

Under normal circumstances, I'm helplessly stimulus-bound in a grocery store, and if you're in a hurry, it's poor strategy to let me go in on my own. I like to look at the food, and fondle the packaging, and read the ingredients and consider the benefits of competing brands... Now, for the first time since I've been buying my own food, I can't read the ingredients. At first, I feared this would cripple my already-wobbly decision-making capacity when it comes to buying food. Then I realized I had a much more basic decision criterion to fall back on: Can I Eat This? For so much of what fills the grocery store aisles, it's not at all clear what's an ingredient that must be combined with something else, and what's ready-to-eat as-is. I've gambled and lost a few times on this one, but the saddest part is that it's made me conservative in a realm where I'm usually daring. I'm always willing to risk a mouth full of something I don't like, but a grocery basket full of stuff I can't actually eat is another matter.

The most frustrating moment of all came when I was trying to medicate myself against the symptoms of a terrible cold I'd caught shortly after arriving. The headcold passed quickly but then settled so heavily in my chest that I spent a week sleeping upright with my futon leaned up against the wall just so I could breathe, and before long I'd pulled an intercostal muscle from coughing so deeply, so much. I crawled to my corner 7-11 to get some ibuprofen for the pain and an expectorant to start clearing the sludge out of my lungs. Little did I know that this was just the beginning of a quest that would end with my finally getting my ibuprofen -- sold in Japan only under in medicines for ameliorating premenstrual syndromes -- and my expectorant just as my symptoms were subsiding. I'm not one of those people who won't take a pill unless the pain is dire; I don't like to suffer. So enduring this mother-of-all-colds without medications was bad enough without having to make repeated trips to the drugstore, trying to pantomime the act of expectorating without offending the sensitivities of the polite and no-doubt well-meaning gathering of counter staff who would watch with apparent consideration and then send me home with packages of plum-flavored lozenges and Chinese herb pills, but no ibuprofen and no expectorant. Even when I finally dragged Y-san to the drugstore with me to translate, equipped with a list of kanji characters fresh from my dictionary describing my symptoms and the specific drugs I wanted, I only got what I wanted in the end by disregarding the recommendations of the pharmacist, forcing Y-san to read each ingredient on the box to me, and ignoring the raised eyebrow of the clerk who was clearly wondering what business I could have among the remedies for lady problems. It occurred to me at the time that there was clearly an interesting difference in the way that Americans and the Japanese conceptualize and treat sickness but it was hard to develop this thought so I could articulate the difference while I was busy suppressing the urge to strangle the pharmacist, and fantasizing about the next time sickness strikes and I can just walk right up to the drugstore shelf and read the box myself.