JapanesePod101.com Blog

Around the holidays, people like to hear old stories again, whether they involve Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or the Ghost of Christmas Past. This time of year also fills people with hope, so much so that adults temporarily suspend fears of pedophilia and let their children sit on strange men’s laps to spout off consumerist fantasies.

You’ll find both storytelling and hope with 望. You already know that it often means “hope,” because we learned the following last week:

望 (BŌ, MŌ, nozo(mu): hope, wish, aspire to, desire, look afar, look forward to)

As for the storytelling, a few sample sentences with 望 form a tale of hope and longing. We start the story with this sentence, which a Tokyo resident named Satoshi-san once emailed me during our very brief language exchange:

2008年より英国の大学院への留学を希望しています。
2008-nen yori Eikoku no daigakuin e no ryūgaku o kibō shite imasu.
Starting in 2008, I hope to study at a graduate school in England.

Breakdown of the Kanji #1 …

In other words, he had a clearly defined 希望:
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I’d never thought about it before, but I’ve just realized that the English expression “looking forward” has two meanings: “gazing into the distance” and “happily anticipating.” One kanji captures both meanings. We usually interpret 望 (BŌ, MŌ, nozo(mu)) as meaning “hope.” A while back, though, we saw that 望 can also mean “looking afar” or “gazing into the distance.”

This duality helps us find several layers of meaning in the song title 望みの星 (Nozomi no Hoshi: The Wishing Star). If you’re wishing on a star (or on the moon, as per the etymology), you’re both gazing at a distant object and hoping that something will come true.

Novelist Wendy Tokunaga cowrote this enka (演歌: performance + song) song with her friend, Hiro Akashi. We’re only up to the title, and already I’m impressed!

I was even more impressed when I heard Wendy sing the song in Japanese. I know you’ll be blown away, too. Wendy has won televised singing competitions in Japan, so you’re in for a treat, not the ear-shattering output of some karaoke singer.
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Time for the final page of Alberto’s beautiful haiku calendar!

Explanation of the Haiku …

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Let’s start with a quick quiz. From past weeks you already know this kanji:

渡 (TO, wata(ru), wata(su): to cross, extend, cover, range, span; to ferry across; build across; hand over, hand in, transfer)

And you might know 世 from 世界 (sekai: world, world + world). Put these two key kanji together, and here’s what you get:

渡世 (tosei: livelihood, subsistence; business)
     to go through (life) + existence

Now, add 人 to produce this:

渡世人 (toseinin)     to go through (life) + existence + person

What do you think it means? A person earning a living? A business owner? Check the link for the answer. I think you’ll be surprised! A big hint: Think of Kenny Rogers (for as long as you can stand to do so).
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I’ve discovered two new ways of offending the Japanese:

渡し箸 (watashibashi: resting one’s chopsticks across the top of one’s bowl)     to cross over + chopsticks

渡り箸 (wataribashi: using one’s chopsticks to jump from side dish to side dish without pausing to eat rice in between)
     to cross over + chopsticks

Both actions are considered breaches of etiquette.

Just one hiragana distinguishes one term from the other. (And that hiragana can serve as a memory trick. The し somewhat resembles the top of a bowl, whereas the り looks like upright chopsticks jumping from side dish to side dish and appalling all the Emirii Posutos of Japan.)

Another Time When One Kana Really Matters …

The first word, watashibashi, is one of those wonderful Japanese terms with internal rhymes.

More Watashi Rhymes …

The watashi (渡し) in this word is a perfectly legitimate yomi, given all the ways of reading 渡:
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In any society, a bridge is perhaps the most visible symbol of trust. And this kind of trust seldom comes into question. When most of us see a bridge, we assume it can handle the cars, trains, and gale-force winds bearing down on it.

Lately, though, people in my neck of the woods realize that they can’t take bridge safety for granted at all. In September, inspectors found a significant crack on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. (They wouldn’t have done an inspection except for a rare circumstance, so this discovery shook our confidence considerably.) Crews labored to fix the problem, only to have the repair job fail weeks later, sending 5,000 pounds of steel crashing down onto passing cars. Workers have now repaired the repair job, but they say it’s only a temporary solution and that we’ll need another repair in coming months.

On top of that, they’ve recently reconfigured the bridge, introducing a treacherous S-curve. I was nearly in an accident when the car ahead of me lost control there, careering from one side of the bridge to the other at a 90-degree angle to the rest of us. After that, a Safeway truck overturned at the S-curve, tying up traffic for hours. And just days ago, a truck carrying Asian pears plunged off the S-curve to an island below, killing the driver.

The traffic jams clear up eventually, but distrust lingers long after that. Many of us are left wondering whether we can believe the officials who deem our bridges safe. The bridge feels about as creaky as the old Japanese one in the photo.

Wisteria Bridge over the Fujikawa River, c. 1880.
Photo source: Okinawa Soba

About the Wisteria Bridge …

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I came across an intriguing word:

過渡 (kato: (1) crossing; ferry; (2) transient; (3) changing old to new)     to pass by + to go through (life)

It catches my attention for several reasons. For one thing, the spelling (but not the pronunciation) of the yomi reminds me of Kato Kaelin, made famous in the days of OJ’s trial, then quickly forgotten. I love finding words such as karen and shaun, whose romanized versions are first names in English.

Those “Names” in Kanji …

Beyond that, I like that 過渡 has such disparate definitions: “ferry” versus “transient.” If you think poetically, this makes sense; as a boat glides across the water, its location is impermanent. Modes of transit are inherently transient! At the same time, the logical part of the brain resists seeing a ferry symbolically. It’s a bus on water.

The multidimensionality of 過渡 comes from 渡 (TO, wata(ru), wata(su)), which has a rich variety of meanings.

I began thinking about this character because it stars in the haiku on the November page of Alberto’s beautiful calendar. As you’ll see, the kigo (seasonal keyword) in that haiku is 鳥渡る (tori wataru: migrating birds, birds + to cross over). You may be more familiar with the inverse:
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As I mentioned last week, the etymology of 残 (ZAN, noko(ru), noko(su)) contains the idea that it’s cruel to hack someone up until nothing remains. But perhaps that’s a glass-half-empty perspective. The glass-half-full view would be, “Hey, look! Something remains! In fact, what we have here are human remains!”

The 残 kanji figures into many words about things left behind. For instance, take the following expression:

食い残す (kuinokosu: to leave food half-eaten)
     to eat + to leave behind

This verb has a noun form:

食い残し (kuinokoshi: leftover food)     to eat + to leave behind

Just two weeks ago, we saw another word for leftovers:

残り物 (nokorimono: remnant, scraps, leftovers)
     remainder + thing

If you change the first hiragana in 食い残し, you alter the yomi considerably but retain the meaning:
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It’s easy to think that 残 (ZAN, noko(ru), noko(su): to remain) has a soft nuance. After all, this character shows up in words such as 残念 (zannen: regret, to remain + thoughts). But when you learn the etymology of 残, you’ll see that we have a killer kanji on our hands!

In 残, says Henshall, the 歹 means “death” or “bare bones.” The right-hand side is a halberd (戈), an ax-like weapon, that has been doubled for emphasis. In 残, the 戈 also means “to cut and kill.” Altogether we have “to kill someone cruelly by cutting them to the bone.” In China, 残 still primarily means “cruel, harm.” Some people think that “to remain” is a borrowed meaning, deriving from the idea of hacking a person till only the bare bones remain.

Several expressions reflect the cruel underpinnings of this kanji:
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I don’t know much about banking, but I do know that a bank should inspire trust and confidence. The name of the bank has to be serious, a trustworthy brand in and of itself. My first bank account was at Annapolis Bank and Trust, where they put “trust” right in the name. Other banks go by the names of First Capital Bank, Enterprise National Bank, Premier Service Bank, Tomato Bank.

Tomato Bank?!

Yes, indeed. That’s what you find on Sawtelle Boulevard, a Los Angeles street filled with Japanese businesses:

On 宏基銀行 …

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