Early days in Nippon
Victoria, B.C. Circa 1982
The view from the garden was simply exquisite. In front of his shovel he could see the US mainland on his right and its majestic Olympic Mountains stretching to his left. The pride of Washington state, Mount Baker, was scintillating in the morning light, snow-capped as always. The air was rich to his (Osaka) oxygen starved lungs. Gabriel drove his spade deep into the Earth and sighed in sheer delight. After fifteen straight years in Japan, he had hit the wall. It was 1982 and he should have known it would come. When you take the fiery disposition of the Spanish and you put it in a box, even a highly cultivated yet very small box called Japan, sooner of later the shit will hit the fan. It had.
For fifteen straight years he had done nothing but learn Japanese. He definitely had some ability at picking up new languages. By the time he had arrived in Japan there was already a smattering of Swahili, French, Spanish of course, and English. Travels in other parts of the world as a young missionary had alerted him to a simple fact; if you want to really get to grips with a language you just have to open up to it, like a sponge to water.
The first word he remembered every having uttered in Japanese was ‘kitte’ which meant ‘stamp’. But being a damnably complex language to learn, it had twists and turns of pronunciations that were sometimes hilarious. If he had said in his baby Japanese, ‘watashi, kitte kudasai’ even a little bit off kilter, it would have meant, ‘would you please cut me!’ Imagine-harakiri requests at the local post office, and by a gaijin!
At least the demure assistant at the counter did not laugh. But there were other times in his early language explorations where people could simply not control their mirth. Was it a long vowel or a short vowel? Did you want to say ‘koumon’ , which means ‘anus’, or did you want to say ‘komon’ with a short vowel sound meaning, ‘adviser.’
So Gabriel gaily walks into an office one day and he figures that he has enough Japanese under his belt to ask to meet the principal company adviser. Well, it did not quite work out that way. Taking a deep breath at the front desk of Echizen Corporation, he proudly piped up and said , “I would very much like to meet your main anus.” Well that was one of the occasions when they could not suppress a smile. How many anuses can you have? All was forgiven of course. The Japanese have a level of forgiveness-rich genetics that merit a Guinness book entry.
But for those first fifteen years getting to grips with this language was to prove to be one of the most singularly challenging exploits of his whole academic life. Sure you can study in a seminary for six or seven years and go into the bowels of theology, medieval hagiography, Christology, and all of the incredibly diverse spiritual literature that a priest has to come to grips with. But that was all fairly logical and just required time, effort and of course at the base of it all there had to be a faith. A faith in what he was studying being real. How do you lose that? Somehow the amorphous atmosphere of the Japanese culture had eroded his certainty that God ever had a son. In fact by the time those fifteen years were up his favourite expression was all about the void, about how everything passes away and all is a dream of emptiness. Shogyoumujo..
