exiled from Japan by illness

Section 133 Entry 0001. Date: 2005 February 4 Friday.
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Exiled from Japan by my medical priorities, I find myself living in New Zealand again after having spent most of the last seven years and seven months (4 May 1997 through 13 December 2004) living in Japan.

Finding myself back here after such a long time away, I find myself unsure as to who the prime minister is (Helen Clark) and initially I'm lost as to who her main opponent might be (a guy called Don Brash, it turns out, who at one time was Governor of the Reserve Bank.)

I also find myself, at moments, having trouble with native speaker New Zealand English. In Japan, I've chiefly been exposed to British English or American English, so at times the New Zealand accent throws me. There are moments when I replay stuff in my mind again and again in an effort to make sense of it, without always succeeding.

At the supermarket, a cashier totals up my goods then asks, or seems to ask, "Do you have any five eyes?" I am lost. This makes no sense at all.

"Four eyes" would be a schoolyard insult about the fact that I wear spectacles. But - five eyes? A thought occurs to me.

In Japan, in summer, supermarket cashiers sometimes offer free dry ice to help customers get frozen goods home in good shape, and I always hear the Japanese for "dry ice" as the English words "dry ice". (If I listened more carefully when in Japan, I would probably hear "dry ice" transliterated into, at a guess, something more authentically Japanese, like "dorai aisu," but I don't listen that carefully.)

So is the New Zealand cashier offering me dry ice? No, the verb is "have," not "want."

"I'm sorry," I say. "I don't understand the question."

And that is sufficient to tell her that I am not part of her world, that I am an alien, an interloper, a zero that she doesn't have to interact with, not a part of the nation's community, and she makes absolutely no effort to communicate further, but simply packs up my groceries in a bag for me to take away. We're done.

Later, hearing this story, half a dozen members of my family roar with laughter, and my father pulls from his wallet a card marked FLY BUYS. It's what he calls a loyalty card, what we would call in Japan a point card. If your purchases add up to more than a certain sum (I think someone said twenty dollars) then you can get points which, later, can be used to buy stuff from a little catalog which arrives in the mail.

Another language incident occurred recently when I was in hospital for an operation, one of two operations I've had since returning to New Zealand.

I was lying on a bed which was being pushed by two nurses, and one nurse said to the other, or seemed to say, "I see, the smileage is on the meddle."

That really did not compute. Then the English teacher kicked in for me. A "d" for "t" subsitution, as in "water/wader" or "butter/budder." (In Japan, I teach that /t/ sounds nicer in such cases, but that native speakers of English will often use /d/.)

Wellm, "meddle" is presumably "metal". And what is the context? I'm flat on my back on a bed, and the nurses are at the foot of the bed, pushing it along the corridor, and, presumably, making an effort to steer it at the same time, presumably using for this purpose (that is, for the purpose of steering the bed) some kind of mechanism designed for steering, which is part of (at a guess) some metal structure at the nurses' end of the bed.

And the incomprehensible translates into, "Oh, I see, the steerage is on the metal."

In another situation, a face-to-face conversation with someone who is not quite articulating clearly, a mysterious statement which seems to be claiming that "We put in at the Haitian Hotel" turns out to be "We put in the application."

Fortunately, I don't experience too many of these linguistic glitches, but they do occur, forming part of a kind of new immigrant experience. I'm no longer in the absolutely familiar world of Japan, my context for the last seven years and seven months. Instead, I'm in a place which is a little bit different.

Take the ATM machine, for example. In Japan, I front up to the ATM machine, put in my card, press the button which switches the display screen from Japanese to English (a little bit lazy, I know, but I prefer to do my banking in Japanese rather than trust to my Japanese), then key in my PIN number on the touch-sensitive screen.

(I may also, in addition to inserting my bank card, insert my passbook into the machine in order to get a printed record of the transaction about to take place.)

In New Zealand, however, after I've put in the card there's no number pad on the display screen, and I have to use a grubby gray metal keypad which is at the foot of the screen.

My first ATM transaction in New Zealand stalls when I press a brightly-illuminated "OK" button on the screen. The transaction times out. Do I want to continue or abort? I continue, three times, until I belatedly realize that the supposed pushable "button" on the screen is no such thing. It's just a bunch of illuminated pixels, and it's indicating to me that I should find the "OK" button on the mtal keypad and press that.

Way primitive!

Now, it gets worse. In Japan, if I wanted to deposit cash to my account, I'd choose a "deposit" option. A slot would open in the machine. I'd drop in the cash. The slot would close. The machine would count the cash and ask me to confirm the amount. I would press a CONFIRM button on the touch-sensitive screen. The machine would return my cash card (and, if I'd inserted it, my passbook) and the transaction would be done.

The money would already be in my account.

In New Zealand, it's far more complicated, because the clunky old technology is far more primitive.

I'd opened a bank account in New Zealand with $1,000 and decided to top it up with another hundred bucks. (Parenthetically, "buck" is a word I routinely taught in Japan. It's a standard colloquial term in both New Zealand English and American English, but most Japanese students of English don't have a clue what it means, so a simple statement like "The coffee? - that's a buck fifty" means absolutely nothing to most Japanese people.)

So. Let's add a hundred dollars to the account. I have a hundred dollar bill in my hot little hand. I choose a "deposit" option. This brain-damaged machine can't count money, so I have to key in the sum I intend to deposit, which is $100. Confusingly, the machine prints out a receipt. I haven't put in any money, so why am I getting a receipt?

Ah ... onscreen instructions ... I'm supposed to take an envelope from the something-something slot, put in the receipt which has just been printed out, add the cash, seal the enevelope, then insert the envelope (complete with cash and receipt) into another slot.

This is confusing, and I'm bewildered, but I manage to get through the procedure, all the while fearing that it will abruptly time out on me, and finally my poorly sealed envelope is swallowed by the swallowing slot, and the machine prints me out a second receipt, and I have an "I've done it!" experience.

Immigrant just off the plane copes with challenge of life in new land!

Of course, the money is not yet in my account, because the idiot machine can't put it there. Instead, my envelope (number eight, there having been seven envelopes deposited alreayd today) (and don't ask me how I found out it was number eight, because I have completely forgotten) will reside in the bowels of the machine until some human being digs it out, checks the cash in the envelope with the receipt in the envelope, and approve the transaction.

Still, I did do it. I successfully deposited one hundred dollars into my account. Or so I thought. Until the next day, when I happened to look at the receipt that I had taken away at the end of the transaction, and realized that I had claimed to have deposted one dollar rather than one hundred dollars.

Evidently I'd been thinking "100" so I'd keyed in "100," forgetting that the New Zealand dollar subdivides into cents. In Japan, the yen does not, in practice, subdivide into anything, although the stock market price quoted daily on the financial news on TV may include first an amount in yen and then a tiny amount in sen, a "sen" being one hundredth of a yen.

A couple of days later, when I got a printout of my account balance from the bank, I found that some human had silently corrected my error, and that a hundred dollars had been credited to my account.

So here I am in New Zealand, the land of metal keypads, usually properly oriented to the situation, but at odd moments disconceringly out of my depth, and reminded that I am returning home as something of a foreigner, arriving as a kind of immigrant, at least some of my perspectives Japan-shifted.

Let me close with a word on touch-sensitive screens. They're the norm in Japan for automated teller machines at banks, and also for ticket-buying machines at railway stations and subway stations. Consequently, it becomes automatic to think that an illuminated button on a computer screen is something that you can push to get a result. But in New Zealand that doesn't work.

To quote an old saying, it's not what you don't know that hurts you. It's what you know that isn't so.

Section 133 Entry 0002. Date: 2005 February 05 Saturday.
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Some years ago, back in Japan, I bought a packet of chewing gum, popped a couple of pellets in my mouth, and was surprised to find myself chewing not just gum but paper, each pellet being individually wrapped.

Yesterday, here in New Zealand, I bought a packet of chewing gum and was surprised to find the pellets raw white, lacking the dignity of individual packaging.

Yesterday evening, went with my parents to the Waitemata Golf Club, which until then I had always imagined to be a place called the Devonport Golf Club. We dined with Angus and Mary, my brother-in-law's parents, who are over in New Zealand on holiday, having flown in from Canada.

Our host was Angus, who has arranged a golf club membership for himself, and we had the most wonderful food. I had the best roast beef I have ever had in my life.

I am not a fan of the game of golf, and in fact my experience of the game is limited to a single afternoon at high school, when all the students in my seventh form class (I think there were six of us) went to the local golf course in Waipu, up in Northland, which is the northern part of New Zealand/s North Island.

For the occasion, I took along one of the steel golf clubs which had been sitting in one of my parents' ancuent and never-used golf bags. They had been sitting under the house for years, and had been acquired back before we arrived in New Zealand in 1964. They had been mouldering away, ignored and unused, for more than a decade.

When I got on the golf course, I was feeling confident. I'd never hit a golf ball in my life, but I figured that bouncing this sucker across the landscape couldn't be too difficult.

Anyway, I stuck my first golf ball on a tee, lined the victim up (this baby is really going to fly!) and put all my strength into a forceful whack.

Splack!

The golf club that I was holding disintegrated, shattering into a broken shaft of splintered rust. And that was my disconcerting introduction to the game of golf.

Although golf has never been able to excite my imagination (my first experience of the game gave me no encouragement to continue) at the golf club I very soon began to mellow into the milieu.

Very nice, this world removed from the world, vistas of trees giving the impression of a randomized arcadian landscape stretching away forever, no sign of the urban anywhere.

I don't think I'm ever going to understand the attraction of golf, but understanding golf clubs is easier.

Section 133 Entry 0003. Date: 2005 February 7 Monday.
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I'm here in New Zealand awaiting medical treatment, my treatment scheduled to start, I hope, some time soon, although I don't have a date. Thanks to various tests and two operations to biopsy parts of my body, I have an exact diagnosis. Once treatment starts, I'll probably be going into hospital twice a month for four days at a time, lying in bed with a drip in my arm.

In preparation for hospitalization, I've checked out a stack of library books, and I've also made a long list of topics I might write short stories about. Take a notebook, sit back in bed, write. Tethered by the drip. Meals delivered, no need to hunt them up. I'll see how it goes.

Meantime, I've seen a couple of movies. FINDING NEVERLAND, a tehnically intersting movie about the writing of the play PETER PAN. Also RAY, the Ray Charles story, which was a bit long - I rather lost focus toward the end.

And I also went with my father to a local playhouse called The Pumphouse to see a performance of Shakespeare's play A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

At the moment I'm a bit fatigued with low stamina levels, but am living comfortably and free of pain or other physical distress. What is starting to be a little hard to live with is the delay in starting treatment (the hospital has a bit of a waiting list) but I hope that issue will be resolved soon.

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