Paafecto

Yesterday, I had lots of fun at the conversation meeting that Hiroko-san introduced me to.

I wasn't paired with the same lady as last week, but instead this old man named Satou. Apparently, he went to Keio University, too (half a century ago, he said). I think he's the most interesting person that I've met since I came here.

First of all, he was so nice. I asked him to listen to me read a speech I had to practice for Japanese class. When I was done, he said, "Perfect. Absolutely perfect." When I begged to differ, he was like, "I'm not kidding! That was no different than a native Japanese speaker!" His words gave me a bit of confidence in myself :)

Then, when I asked him what he was reading, it was apparently a book about the origin of words. For example, in Japanese, the United States of America is called 合衆国 (Gasshuukoku). The Japanese term uses the character for United (合) okay, but then instead of using the character for States (州) which is also pronounced as 'shuu', it uses the character (衆), which means the people. The book the old man was reading apparently explains why this is so. I thought that sounded really interesting, so I wrote down the name of the book so I can read it myself. The old man said he only reads these kinds of books.

After that, we had this whole discussion about language. How, although Japanese has a keigo (honorific language) system, English does not; how Spanish and Japanese have similar sounds and that's why I think I can reproduce Japanese sounds more easily; etc etc...Ahh he was such a nice, interesting person!

I've realized that guys around my age are very immature. Even the young salary men on the train have a strong immature air about them. I don't believe completely in generalizations, but a lot of Japanese people seem to be very immature and want to be forever young. There are so many people who dress in clothes that don't suit their age, in my opinion. In Shibuya especially. There are lots of moms with huge curly golden hair, long fake eyelashes, and short shorts. They don't look like moms at all, but because of their make up and the way they dress they probably look younger than they actually are. A lot of the girls are too dressed up and look really fake.

The guys are kind of as well, it's kind of gross to see them being dragged around by their girlfriends going shopping. When I pictured salary men before I came to Japan, I pictured a bunch of same clothed men marching to the same rhythm, because they were written about by Americans as a homogeneous group of ants. But in reality, they are so different. There are so many different kinds of suits and young salary men distinguish themselves through their hairstyles. As long as their hair is not dyed some crazy color, a lot of them are free to do what they want with their hair, it seems.

But anyways, that's something that I noticed recently.