A trip to japan
Last summer I took a brief trip to Japan with my mom and her colleagues from the Kraft Food China KA team. It was a short but pleasant trip with a lot of interesting experiences. We got a Chinese tour guide who grew up in Japan, so he was fluent in both Chinese and Japanese. Though not even one of us could speak Japanese, it seems there wasn’t a lot of trouble with language because we didn’t need to communicate with the locals by ourselves.
After a long day of traveling to the famous Mt. Fuji, we finally arrived at our hotel in Yamanashi-ken, a prefecture of Japan to the north of Mt. Fuji. The Yamanashi-ken was famous for its “onsen”, or hot spring formed by volcanic action, and most hotels in the region feature complimentary indoor onsen access. As you may have heard, that the Japanese don’t wear any kind of clothes when enjoying the onsen, and some onsen don’t have separate sections for male and female, but our tour guide assured this won’t happen in our hotel. So after a big dinner we all went down to the lobby dressed in “Kimonos”, trying to find our way to the onsen.
It was a traditional hotel located in the suburb, and rarely occupied by foreigners, so there were no translation of signs available for us to read. We imagined that it won’t be difficult because Chinese and Japanese characters are similar. We tried to find some characters indicting “泉” (“springs” in Chinese) or “浴”(“shower”) but none appeared, but there was a small hallway with a curtain saying “汤” on it. The character “汤” in Chinese means “soup”, something to drink after meal. We looked at it for a while but it made no sense because it apparently didn’t look like a dining room and no one would put the word soup instead of meal (or rice, which is the same character because in east Asia rice is the primary part of a meal) for a dining room. Then there came some local visitors dressing in the same Kimonos. Unable to communicate in Japanese, we just “followed” them in and behaved like nothing happened. Then we found the separate room labelled “男汤” and “女汤”. Though the word “Male Soup” and “Female Soup” doesn’t make any sense to me, we just walk in because we at least can understand male and female, which means we are lucky enough to get into the room of the right sex. After entering the onsen, we took a shower just as the Japanese did. Luckily there were the English word “shampoo”, “conditioner” and “body wash” labeled on the seemingly identical bottles. So I won’t appear funny to Japanese guys putting body wash on my hair. The onsen was so refreshing and once we were done we went back to our rooms for bed.
The onsen is a gift of nature, though staying in the onsen for too long is tiresome, so most people make multiple short visit per day. The next morning I got up early and walked into the onsen area again. As I was about to enter the male’s room, a big sign shocked me and, thank to my fine slippers, I did not fall over. It is saying “女汤”, or “female soup” this time, and I got confused. Looking around I was quite sure that this room was for males last night. Not confident with my lack of Japanese, I had to wait for a local Japanese male and pretend to “follow” him. Did they change the room for male and female?! I cannot imagine what would happen if someone changed the bathroom sign in my dorm on April Fools Day, but anyway, my Chinese skill helped me to notice the “女” for “female” and saved me from being kicked out from the female’s shower room.
So now the question left is about the “汤”, which makes no sense to me as it means “soup” in Chinese and appear in an onsen. At the beginning of the following trip I asked my guide and she told me it means “hot water” in Japanese. That makes sense, because onsen is a kind of hot water, while soup is usually hot too. The same character, “汤” evolved in two separate cultures and changed its meaning over time and, though now they have different meanings, they share the same “ancestors.” This reminds me of the biology term “speciation.” It seems that language can experience the same process over time, and the longer they evolve separately, the harder it becomes for each speaker to understand each other; thus it becomes two languages.
In the end of the third day, we lived in a hotel in the county that to the other side of Tokyo. It was a little bit hotter and some of us suffered from mosquitos. So that evening, after looking up the route on Google Map, we went to a small CVS called Lawson. The shopping assistant greeted to us, and I guess it was something like “welcome.” We found everything we wanted to buy except the mosquito spray. There were so many air-container shaped products and we wouldn’t like to randomly pick one. Seeing us looking around and comparing products, the shopping assistant came and asked something in Japanese, which I guess was “Can I help you?” I tried to speak English to her but she seemed not to understand. She called another guy working in the shop to see if he could help us. Both of them can’t speak English very well, but the man seemed have a little knowledge of English. After some failures I found I was just repeating the word “mosquitos” several times in different tones to see if he could understand, but failed. Ultimately we gave up the hope and the shopping assistant was very awkward. Then we tried to use body language by mocking the actions of spraying something and getting rid of the mosquitoes. Both of the shopping assistants watched us carefully but neither understood what we wanted. We were feeling very sorry for wasting their so much working time, but they still wanted to help us and tried every effort. Recalling the fact that Japanese characters may look similar to Chinese ones, I thought I should try to write characters. Though the characters may have different meanings in Japanese or maybe it isn’t even in the Japanese dictionary, there’s still a chance. I typed the characters “驱蚊” (“getting rid of mosquitos”) on my phone. They had no idea what the first character is, but they understand “蚊” for mosquitos! They were excited and brought us several products that has something to do with mosquitos, such as sprays, mosquito-repellent incense and flyswatters. We picked the one we wanted, and everyone was happy.
Traveling in the Brave New World is made possible by revolutions in technologies of communication and transportation. I can always find myself in a country that speaks different language I can’t understand. Though some reluctant efforts to create a world-wide language has been made, the aftermath of the tower of Babel still looms large. But if we try to find the differences and similarities among languages, we may be astounded by the beauty of interesting relationships among them. Following the same pattern of the lives on earth, languages are constantly evolving over time. Many of them are derived from the same ancestor, and the extent of similarity can show how close they are. As fossils provide evidence for biological evolution theories, written history of wars and human movement affirms the evolution and speciation of language. For example, early historical vestiges show that several races in East Asia had the same ancestor but then they moved far away from each other, so ancient Chinese characters evolved separately in China, Japan and Korea. After a long time of separation they eventually became different languages that speakers of one can not understand others. The same thing happens as the same group of birds, separated by sudden earth movement, became different species and have significantly different patterns over time. The great unity and similarity between different disciplines like linguistics and biology just showed a small piece of the eternal beauty of great unity in the natural world, and it is such beauty that empowers me to explore the world by constantly learning and thinking.
As the time goes by, communication among different parts of the world is gradually taking the place of separation. More and more adopted words have been added into dictionaries, and in the conjunction points of multi-cultures, people sometimes combine different languages together when talking. For example, people living in Hongkong are used to mixing English words in Chinese sentences when talking. In Biology, hybridization can create new species with interesting special patterns in the natural world. In parallel, what will happen when different cultures and languages emerge together at a constantly accelerating pace? Maybe it will remain a question only answerable by time.
After a long day of traveling to the famous Mt. Fuji, we finally arrived at our hotel in Yamanashi-ken, a prefecture of Japan to the north of Mt. Fuji. The Yamanashi-ken was famous for its “onsen”, or hot spring formed by volcanic action, and most hotels in the region feature complimentary indoor onsen access. As you may have heard, that the Japanese don’t wear any kind of clothes when enjoying the onsen, and some onsen don’t have separate sections for male and female, but our tour guide assured this won’t happen in our hotel. So after a big dinner we all went down to the lobby dressed in “Kimonos”, trying to find our way to the onsen.
It was a traditional hotel located in the suburb, and rarely occupied by foreigners, so there were no translation of signs available for us to read. We imagined that it won’t be difficult because Chinese and Japanese characters are similar. We tried to find some characters indicting “泉” (“springs” in Chinese) or “浴”(“shower”) but none appeared, but there was a small hallway with a curtain saying “汤” on it. The character “汤” in Chinese means “soup”, something to drink after meal. We looked at it for a while but it made no sense because it apparently didn’t look like a dining room and no one would put the word soup instead of meal (or rice, which is the same character because in east Asia rice is the primary part of a meal) for a dining room. Then there came some local visitors dressing in the same Kimonos. Unable to communicate in Japanese, we just “followed” them in and behaved like nothing happened. Then we found the separate room labelled “男汤” and “女汤”. Though the word “Male Soup” and “Female Soup” doesn’t make any sense to me, we just walk in because we at least can understand male and female, which means we are lucky enough to get into the room of the right sex. After entering the onsen, we took a shower just as the Japanese did. Luckily there were the English word “shampoo”, “conditioner” and “body wash” labeled on the seemingly identical bottles. So I won’t appear funny to Japanese guys putting body wash on my hair. The onsen was so refreshing and once we were done we went back to our rooms for bed.
The onsen is a gift of nature, though staying in the onsen for too long is tiresome, so most people make multiple short visit per day. The next morning I got up early and walked into the onsen area again. As I was about to enter the male’s room, a big sign shocked me and, thank to my fine slippers, I did not fall over. It is saying “女汤”, or “female soup” this time, and I got confused. Looking around I was quite sure that this room was for males last night. Not confident with my lack of Japanese, I had to wait for a local Japanese male and pretend to “follow” him. Did they change the room for male and female?! I cannot imagine what would happen if someone changed the bathroom sign in my dorm on April Fools Day, but anyway, my Chinese skill helped me to notice the “女” for “female” and saved me from being kicked out from the female’s shower room.
So now the question left is about the “汤”, which makes no sense to me as it means “soup” in Chinese and appear in an onsen. At the beginning of the following trip I asked my guide and she told me it means “hot water” in Japanese. That makes sense, because onsen is a kind of hot water, while soup is usually hot too. The same character, “汤” evolved in two separate cultures and changed its meaning over time and, though now they have different meanings, they share the same “ancestors.” This reminds me of the biology term “speciation.” It seems that language can experience the same process over time, and the longer they evolve separately, the harder it becomes for each speaker to understand each other; thus it becomes two languages.
In the end of the third day, we lived in a hotel in the county that to the other side of Tokyo. It was a little bit hotter and some of us suffered from mosquitos. So that evening, after looking up the route on Google Map, we went to a small CVS called Lawson. The shopping assistant greeted to us, and I guess it was something like “welcome.” We found everything we wanted to buy except the mosquito spray. There were so many air-container shaped products and we wouldn’t like to randomly pick one. Seeing us looking around and comparing products, the shopping assistant came and asked something in Japanese, which I guess was “Can I help you?” I tried to speak English to her but she seemed not to understand. She called another guy working in the shop to see if he could help us. Both of them can’t speak English very well, but the man seemed have a little knowledge of English. After some failures I found I was just repeating the word “mosquitos” several times in different tones to see if he could understand, but failed. Ultimately we gave up the hope and the shopping assistant was very awkward. Then we tried to use body language by mocking the actions of spraying something and getting rid of the mosquitoes. Both of the shopping assistants watched us carefully but neither understood what we wanted. We were feeling very sorry for wasting their so much working time, but they still wanted to help us and tried every effort. Recalling the fact that Japanese characters may look similar to Chinese ones, I thought I should try to write characters. Though the characters may have different meanings in Japanese or maybe it isn’t even in the Japanese dictionary, there’s still a chance. I typed the characters “驱蚊” (“getting rid of mosquitos”) on my phone. They had no idea what the first character is, but they understand “蚊” for mosquitos! They were excited and brought us several products that has something to do with mosquitos, such as sprays, mosquito-repellent incense and flyswatters. We picked the one we wanted, and everyone was happy.
Traveling in the Brave New World is made possible by revolutions in technologies of communication and transportation. I can always find myself in a country that speaks different language I can’t understand. Though some reluctant efforts to create a world-wide language has been made, the aftermath of the tower of Babel still looms large. But if we try to find the differences and similarities among languages, we may be astounded by the beauty of interesting relationships among them. Following the same pattern of the lives on earth, languages are constantly evolving over time. Many of them are derived from the same ancestor, and the extent of similarity can show how close they are. As fossils provide evidence for biological evolution theories, written history of wars and human movement affirms the evolution and speciation of language. For example, early historical vestiges show that several races in East Asia had the same ancestor but then they moved far away from each other, so ancient Chinese characters evolved separately in China, Japan and Korea. After a long time of separation they eventually became different languages that speakers of one can not understand others. The same thing happens as the same group of birds, separated by sudden earth movement, became different species and have significantly different patterns over time. The great unity and similarity between different disciplines like linguistics and biology just showed a small piece of the eternal beauty of great unity in the natural world, and it is such beauty that empowers me to explore the world by constantly learning and thinking.
As the time goes by, communication among different parts of the world is gradually taking the place of separation. More and more adopted words have been added into dictionaries, and in the conjunction points of multi-cultures, people sometimes combine different languages together when talking. For example, people living in Hongkong are used to mixing English words in Chinese sentences when talking. In Biology, hybridization can create new species with interesting special patterns in the natural world. In parallel, what will happen when different cultures and languages emerge together at a constantly accelerating pace? Maybe it will remain a question only answerable by time.