The following is an excerpt from European Boredom Diary by Juzo Itami, translated by me. Juzo Itami was a pioneering Japanese filmmaker who blended biting social commentary with humour. He is best known for Tampopo (1985). Foreigners Speaking Their Foreign Languages
It was the first time my plane touched down in a foreign airport. I remember gazing outside the window, seized by a strange emotion.
At that moment, I absentmindedly looked at the numerous airport workers: a man waving a fan-shaped sign, guiding the airplane to his destination, a man carrying something out of a small yellow truck loaded with gasoline, a number of workers waiting for the airplane to stop, plugging their ears against the sound of the engine. Although they looked horribly confused and disheveled, they were unmistakably white people.
It was my first time seeing lower-class white workers with my own eyes. To me, their shabby, ignorant appearances were a strange and unexpected sight. Even white people carry out such mundane tasks, you know! After I cried out within my heart, I secretly became embarrassed. It was like that stale old joke, that in London, even a beggar could speak English. I hadn’t learnt anything since then.
That ingrained inclination toward white worshipping gave me a horrible shock.
If someone asked me for the definition of a foreigner, I would reply without hesitation that a foreigner is someone who only speaks a foreign language. To me, before considering them as an individual, I thought of them as the embodiment of foreign languages themselves.
Hence, of course I was bad with foreign languages. When I couldn’t say what I wanted to say in a foreign language or when I just couldn’t understand what the other person was saying, I would say “Pardon?” over and over again, feeling the utter powerlessness and insignificance of my existence. Whether the other person was a waiter or a taxi driver, when I heard them speaking in their mother tongue as a matter of course, it felt like their appearance started to take on one of authority, whereas I, in front of them, looked like a student who had answered a question wrongly.
In the first place, to me, foreign languages were a field of study. Words really aren’t that. Driving a car, cooking, ikebana, and social dance all belong in the same category. Depending on how you use them, they are useful, meaningful skills to learn. Yet they don’t add anything to your character in themselves. Even so, we are still forced to learn them. When speaking to a foreigner, it becomes an issue of problem-solving. There’s this idea that when I’m the one speaking to them, conveying the meaning to them through my words should be less important than not making any grammatical errors.
In other words, with words, it’s fine as long as you can get the meaning across. Whether you’re a foreigner or a Japanese, we’re all human, aren’t we? On top of that, the things we do and think about are all pretty much the same. It’s more important to greet the other person with a relaxed disposition, without any tiresome sense of inferiority. I think that this should be the first consideration.
People who give you this advice can generally speak at least two or three languages fluently. My problems are on a different level..
That said, I wonder what it might feel like to be an American or a British, whose mother tongue can be used no matter where they go in the world. In other words, I think I’d like to experience this emotion at least once with our Japanese language.