Sayonara, sayonara . . . sayonara

When I first came to Japan years ago, I worked at an office in downtown Tokyo. When things were slow, I remember spending my free moments sitting at my desk, studying Japanese. At first, I was full of enthusiasm. To my great frustration, though, I had terrible trouble remembering vocabulary and learning how to read and write. I remember particularly my painful first attempts to memorize the katakana characters. My study book said that it was possible to learn　both hiragana and katakana in a few hours. But the method I used—copying each one over and over—seemed agonizingly slow. While I sometimes remembered words that I heard, I struggled to remember what I saw. My brain took in information from my ears, but not my eyes. My desk mate Joanna had also recently arrived in Japan and sometimes studied next to me during our lunch hour. She found writing, especially kanji,artistic and fun. But for me practice was torture. I would write a character 20 or 30 times, and then completely forget it five minutes later. Joanna would look at something once, and then easily write it from memory. I felt profoundly stupid. I lost motivation. I started studying less. At the time I was living at a guest house full of foreigners. After work I often came home to find my fellow residents gathered around the small television in the common room. I remember watching NHK’s bilingual news with the broadcast turned to English. It was a comfort to be around my own language. After cooking dinner, and eating it in front of the television with everyone else, I would tell myself that I should study Japanese. I would get my materials from my room, but somehow end up back in front of the TV, my text and notebook waiting patiently on my lap. The worst day was Sunday. I would have fun in the daytime, promising myself to study in the evening. But then, I would see that the Sunday Western Movie Theatre was on, and I would watch with everyone else. At the end, Yodogawa Nagaharu would recap what we had seen. He was always excited and enthusiastic, regardless of how bad the movie might be. Somehow, his high energy put me into a bad mood. He would finish the program with his famous “Sayonara, sayonara . . . sayonara!”. They were often the only words that I understood. It seemed that he was saying goodbye to my attempts to learn Japanese. Note: Next time, I’ll talk about how I finally made some progress!