There is a subtle difference between “We want our money.” and “We want our money back.” The former implies we want something that is due to us (such as wages or a payment). The latter that we want something that was borrowed returned to us. It’s really shorthand for “We want our money given back.” “We want our money returned.”

However, in Japanese there is no verb for “to want”. Desire is expressed in two ways. If you want to do something, conjugate the verb as follows. V + tai n desu ga. If you want to have something, state the object of desire and use the adjective “is desirable”.

I want a new car. = As for me, new car is desirable.

But how do you say that you want someone else to do something without turning it into a command. “We want our money [given] back.” has a different sense than a request “Please return our money.” or an order, “Give us the money!” By dropping the verb “given”, the sentence expresses a change of state without focusing on the cause of that change. “We want the money back.” implies an actor and an action offstage. We want to have the money. Someone will have to give it to us but the who and how are not explicitly stated in this sentence; they are understood from context.

I took a wrong turn in the grammar and tried to nominalize “the money returned by the bankers” and came up with 「銀行家にお金を返すのが欲しいです。」Kiyo provided the correction: 「銀行家にお金を返して欲しいです。」My problem was that I didn’t read far enough in “A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar”. The next entry explains that if you want someone to do something you use the construction:

I think the Japanese sentence lacks the simple directness of the English sentence–at least when it is translated back literally into English. Maybe in Japanese to a Japanese person it sounds direct. In English it is quite common for a dissatisfied customer in a store, restaurant or movie theater to say, “I want my money back!” No wonder Americans sound demanding. It’s built into our language.

Postmark: Beppu November 23, 1989

For Thanksgiving dinner, we ate chicken, dressing (sans sausage), potatoes and giblet gravy. Coincidentally [today] was Thanksgiving/Labor Day here, so we had the day off.

We will have two weeks off for winter vacation and are going to Kyoto from Dec 23-28 with Ms. Murakami. I hope that JQS is up to a lot of sightseeing.

I’m looking forward to exploring Japan anew. One does begin to live life in an ordinary way after awhile. It becomes a routine of work and housekeeping. But I’m doing several things now that make it worthwhile to be here. I’m going to tea ceremony and flower arranging clubs at school. I enjoy the ritual of tea ceremony immensely and flower arranging enables me to have a new flower arrangement every week. I also go to school on Saturday morning so that I can take a calligraphy class from one of my fellow teachers.

The problem with all three of my classes, as well as with learning Japanese, is that I never have time to study. The year is 1/3 over and I’m not sure what I’ve gotten out of it. Sometimes, I just want to be in America. But when I think of all that I still need to see and do and learn, I can’t believe I’m 1/3 throught the year.

Accounts

Notes from 2009: Hita Lacquerware

I buy the lacquerware vase I saw at the train station shop the first time I was in Hita and two other pieces besides. I love lacquerware. Just as Westerners call porcelain “china” because China is so well known for it, we used to refer to lacquerware as “japanware” or say that a laquered item was “japanned”.

The vase is made of a hollow section of bamboo.

My Japanese coworkers warned that lacquerware often did not survive in the US because it prefers a constant, high humidity. Certainly in a dry climate like California they would suffer. Or in an overly heated or air-conditioned American house. But I’ve never had any problems except in this one piec that was cracked when I shipped all my goods back to Austin. It cracked vertically.

Postmark: Beppu September 23, 1989

[Today is] a national holiday for the Autumn Equinox. Being Saturday, I didn’t have to work anyway. The Japanese don’t seem to have the custom of giving you the Friday before or the Monday after off if a holiday falls on a weekend–at least no one mentioned it to me. But JQS goes to school on Saturday morning and because it was a holiday for him, we decided to take a day trip to the southern reaches of Oita prefecture to the small town of Bungo Taketa.

The local train was so crowded that we had to stand, packed in so we couldn’t move at all, for the first hour and a quarter. Characteristically un-Japanese, I hadn’t the slightest idea of what there was to see or where it was. However, after buying a picnic lunch, we found a garden park at the top of a hill. Next to it was the restored house of some artist. [Tanomura Chikuden.] We paid the ¥500 admission to go in (about $3.50) and had the place practically to ourselves. We were allowed to wander all over the house and I just sat on the tatami and rested in one room that looked out onto a small lawn bordered by a steep hillside. It was so peaceful that I resolved right there to build a house that has a room with a view. JQS kept chattering at me so that I couldn’t maintain a peaceful spirit very long.

After exploring the town a little bit, and unsuccessfully because JQS’s feet and spirits were dragging, we went back to our garden on the hill. There was no one else there. That probably sounds simply like description but it is actually a statement of wonder. There was no one else there.

We stayed there an hour because neither of us felt like facing Japan again any sooner than we had to. I hadn’t realized how unrelaxed we’ve been since we’ve been here. People are constantly watching us. Although I tune them out most of the time, I tend to keep myself and JQS under a tight rein. We can’t really explore, or shop, or go to a restaurant, or ride the train without being on our best behavior. I had heard other foreigners complain about it before but it didn’t seem like a very big problem to me. Only the contrast of being in the garden unwatched made me appreciate how rare and wonderful it was to relax and be ourselves and enjoy Japan.

Notes from 2009

Too bad we didn’t do our homework before taking this trip. I’m not sure why we chose to go to Bungo Taketa. It’s a tiny town about the size of Mobberley. The main attraction is the ruins of Oka Castle. If we had only walked a mile in the other direction we would have been able to spend the whole day gazing down at a forested panorama.

Now I can look on the internet and see all the sights of Bungo Taketa that we missed when we were actually walking around it. I recognize some of the places: the old walled houses.

1989-09-23 Saturday

Accounts

Notes from 2009

Stationery

I found the notebooks on sale on the top floor of Parco. They were really cheap. Maybe it was a back-to-school sale. They were fairly plain notebooks by the standards of Japanese stationery. They came with aqua or pink covers which said.

Seduce Notebook: This notebook is well bound with automatic excellent machine by Bun’undo that is traditional since 1909.

Vape

Our un-air conditioned apartment was very open to the outdoors. We slept with the sliding glass doors to the balcony open and the screens did little to keep the mosquitoes out. Our dorm mother had brought over the modern equivalent of the mosquito coil, an electric diffuser for Vape mats. Each little mat had some sort of insect repellant. It smelled pretty bad and I wondered if they were carcinogenic so I was reluctant to use them. I couldn’t read the information on the Japanese packaging. But the mosquitoes were numerous, so I solved the immediate problem and tried to put my fears about long-term consequences out of my mind. Twenty years later, this is what I discovered about Vape, on the Internet.

Accounts

Accounts

Notes from 2009

Loaf of Bread

Even loaves of bread were different in Japan. Loaves of sliced white bread came wrapped in plastic bags, like in America. But the loaves, all the same size, could be bought in varying widths determined by the number of slices in the loaf; the more slices, the thinner the slice. I suppose the concept is comparable to “thin-sliced” or “sandwich slice” or “Texas toast” sliced bread. The loaves were smaller but they did not include any end pieces. End pieces were bagged separately for stuffing. I thought this was a marvelous innovation. No one was stuck with the crusty end piece.

Our usual breakfast was toast and coffee. We liked the 5-sliced loaves because it made toast which was deeply golden on the outside and slightly soft on the inside. Hmmm. I guess that would be Texas toast.

First Day of School

Although all sorts of classes and meetings had been going on at the school throughout August, this was the official first day of the second term of school. Summer vacation interrupts the Japanese school year which starts on April 1st. So classes and routines were already settled. The half days at work I’d been attending helped me (and everyone who had to interact with me) make a smoother transition into school life. I was the first JET participant to come to Beppu Joshi and so no one on either side really knew what to expect or what to do. I was really glad to “belong” to a school. I think I would have felt very disoriented and lonely if I had worked at the prefectural official and had been assigned only to school visits, as many JET participants were.

Accounts

Credit: ¥7050. Travel expense reimbursement

Notes from 2009

I’m pretty sure that the other teachers in this group were all 2nd year teachers, that is, home room teachers for the junior, ni-nen-sei, class. The P.E. teacher, Yasanami-sensei, was also in charge of the school’s tennis and badminton teams. Washizuka-sensei seemed to love tennis and played much better than I did even though he was nearly twice my age. I didn’t pay for anything on this outing. I don’t remember if it was treated as a guest or whether it came out of some special 2nd year teacher fund.

Accounts

Notes from 2009

Kijima Korakuen, Kijima Gogen Amusement Park

Murakami-sensei and Tsuda-sensei took me and JQS to Kijima, an amusement park up in Kijima Heights west of Beppu. The only things I remember about it is that I really had fun driving the Skid Racer cars. I’ve missed driving a lot and I’m pretty good at controlling my skids. The little roller coaster looked so rickety and frail that I was afraid to ride on it.

Accounts

Notes from 2009

I remember the difficulty I had trying to carry all these purchases home. The black garbage pail seemed huge. It took up lots of space on the train and it was awkward lugging it on the 20 minute walk home.

I brought both of those black garbage pails home. I used them as packing containers when I shipped my household goods back from Japan. I still use them 20 years later in the garden to collect rain water or hold gravel mulch. In Texas, they are tiny.