Japanese

Fujisawa, Kamakura, and Enoshima

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In between exhibitions, Morningside board member Mia Sudo generously invited me to stay with her in a townhouse she owns in Fujisawa. This was because my artwork crate shipment from Nezu Memorial Museum to Kansai Gaidai University takes a few days in transit!

While in Fujisawa, Mia accompanied me to Kamakura and we scoped out Enoshima Island and the Enoshima Aquarium for my visit the following day too. In Kamakura, we visited a shrine - and along the path, I learned of a type of craft called Kamakura-bori (鎌倉彫) so we popped into a number of galleries and stores displaying this form of lacquerware.

Traditionally, wood from the katsura tree (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) is carved and then coated in urushi sap in stages. In the beginning, this art form was influenced by imported Chinese lacquerware and other woods were used, but katsura proved to be the best available substrate. The price point of these pieces was high, which makes sense; urushi lacquer is difficult to use for a variety of reasons. The most notable feature of these pieces of lacquerware, aside from their iconic appearance and process, is how lightweight they are!

I really enjoyed visiting Enoshima Aquarium - some of my favorite exhibits were the cuttlefish and squid, the clione “sea angel,” and the jellies. I decided to buy a small stuffed souvenir, but this shop had a carnival-game twist - you have to prepay a set amount and then draw a ticket out of a “lottery” tumbler machine, which provides a number that corresponds to four different sizes. I won a size up from the smallest size, and I genuinely had to think if I wanted to swap back down despite my luck as I’d intended to buy the smallest one, but then I realized that I was going to be acquiring some fragile ceramics and other artwork in the next few weeks and having more lightweight padding should be a feature, so I accepted my scaled-up souvenir.

I then visited Enoshima Island (and my Japanese studies have taught me that “shima” is the word for “island,” meaning all English names for islands in Japan that end in -shima are redundant in the “ATM machine” sense). I’d read online that Enoshima was a cool place to visit and had natural caves to explore so it seemed worth checking out. In hindsight, though, I found the experience underwhelming. The main path through Enoshima has a commercialized and overly-developed feel, and much of the natural environment, including the caves, has been altered. If I hadn’t gone, I’d have felt like I was missing out given the reviews I’d read - but having been, I wouldn’t recommend it over other possible destinations.

Mia hosted me for dinner one night and we went out to eat several other times. One afternoon, she showed me part of a televised sumo tournament, which I found far more interesting than I expected! I didn’t previously know how fast each bout is; they’re over in seconds.

After three nights in Fujisawa, Mia and I set off for Kansai Gaidai University!

Upcoming: Arts Itoya Residency in Takeo, Japan!

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I’m excited to share that I will be attending the Arts Itoya residency in Takeo, Japan this summer for a four-week stay! Morningside University has been very supportive, and has given me both a Morningside Experience Grant and Ver Steeg Faculty Scholarship funding to help me accomplish this exciting project.

I try to learn at least some of the local language for all of my residencies, with varying levels of success. I’m proficient in Spanish, which helped a lot with my learning some French and Portuguese for residencies; with my recent Greek residency I learned enough to say a few greetings and somewhat be able to read the Greek alphabet, which helped in finding destinations via signage. For this Japanese residency, I knew I was going with enough advanced notice to actually enroll in a Japanese I class at Morningside this fall, and have been continuing to study Japanese this spring via Duolingo and a couple other apps as well as watching a lot of anime.

Japanese is a tough language to learn! The US State Department has categorized languages in terms of difficulty for native English-language learners. Spanish is a category I language, requiring an average of 750 class hours to achieve general proficiency. Greek is a category III language, requiring an average of 1100 class hours. Japanese is in the highest category, IV, at 2200 class hours. The other category IV languages are Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean.

At this point, I’ve studied Japanese more than any other language besides Spanish, and I am nevertheless not conversant yet in it. I can pretty much only accomplish basic one-way communication - me asking where the restrooms are, or saying that I am vegetarian - and very limited reading (I can read hiragana and katakana, but only know maybe 100 kanji). I can type it, but handwriting without looking at reference syllabaries is also not really within my capacity.

All that being said, this investment in learning as much of the language as I can ahead of time has already led to my giving a short speech fully in Japanese to our visiting Yamanashi City sister city delegation this fall, and has deeply enriched my knowledge of the culture and ecology of Japan. Several of my students have also gotten a kick out of being a classmate of mine! 私はこのなつ日本に行きます。たのしみです。

Linguistic Relativism and Color

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I was discussing with my colleague Susan this afternoon how I've read that men are more likely to have color identification and distinction issues in part because they are culturally raised with a more limited color vocabulary - girls are encouraged to learn names for (and wear) a wider variety of colors, and so women become better able to distinguish color differences in part because of their vocabulary.  I've also read that young Western children kept away from cultural discussion of the sky as blue often label the sky as "nothing," "white," or "grey" before being taught the appropriate answer. These types of studies demonstrate that how we perceive the world is not only down to our biology but also to cultural and linguistic cues.

I decided to try to relocate another study I'd previously read about, so as to refresh my memory on the exact details and perhaps learn more.  The research focused on an indigenous people who had in their language a different color category for what in English we would call a variant of yellow-green but at the same time did not linguistically differentiate blue from green.  I remembered that I had looked at two circular grids, one having all green squares with one being very slightly different in hue and value and one having one cyan square and all the rest green squares.  The all green grid was as easily scanned and the odd one out identified by these people, while the blue and green grid was a stumper.  For Western people, the difficulties were reversed.  After a decent amount of googling, I learned the tribe was the Himba of Namibia, the two grids can be seen here, a clip from a BBC documentary explaining it is here, and, if you're so interested, you can read an academic study on the topic entitled "Knowing color terms enhances recognition: Further evidence from English and Himba."  As you'll find out if you watch the BBC clip, the Himba also label the sky as black and rivers as white, and have a more limited color vocabulary than English speakers use. 

I also, in my research trail, learned a few other facts from various sites:

  • This overall topic is called linguistic relativism and as it applies to color, there is still some debate as to how relativistic (versus universal) color differentiation actually is. 
     
  • Very young sighted children are no more reliable than blind children at correctly identifying color (sometimes up until the age of four).
     
  • [In] languages with fewer than the maximum eleven color categories, the colors followed a specific evolutionary pattern. This pattern is as follows:

1.  All languages contain terms for black and white.
2.  If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
3.  If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
4.  If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
5.  If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.
6.  If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.
7.  If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange, and/or gray.

I am fascinated and somewhat alarmed by the thought that English is holding me back from the world of green that the Himba and Koreans get to experience.  I've wished for the mantis shrimp's color spectrum vision and ultraviolet perception in the past, but perhaps I don't even need more rods and cones - perhaps all I need is new words.  Though since the brain stops developing around age 26, it sadly might already be too late for me.