And Sometimes Why

Kinda sounds like some sort of parable name, doesn’t it?
Last weekend, I had my first training session for my new part time job as wedding minister. While I was at Dogo Catholic Church for that, a local singing group came to rehearse in the chapel, and when they started singing a couple of Christmas songs, I began humming along from the back room where we were working. On the way out, the wedding officiator with whom I was working stopped to tell the director that I was also a singer, and director invited me to come to what I thought was their next performance.

When I arrived back at the church last night, however, I discovered the director had invited me to a rehearsal. I was a bit surprised, but I stayed and sang for about two hours of their 3.5 hour(!) rehearsal. (Incidentally, one of the pieces they’re working on is “Hail, Holy Queen” from Sister Act, which I thought was a nice stretch.) I hadn’t realized how much I missed singing until I had the opportunity to do so. Another reason it was neat was that I was the only non-Japanese person there, and of course the rehearsal was conducted all in Japanese.

Thankfully, I understand numbers well enough to understand bar numbers, and most musical markings are in Italian, regardless of what country the music is being used in- I just had to adjust my ear to listen for highly accented versions of “diminuendo” and “staccato.” A lot of the Japanese was pretty basic, too: “<from the head>” means “from the beginning,” for instance.

Anyway, I found out the group is named “Seagulls,” and is mostly university students, but not all. Also, it isn’t associated with the church, but they rehearse there. I told the director I needed to go during a break, and he asked me to say a few words to the rest of the members about myself, at which time he invited me to join the group. Everyone seemed very welcoming, and they were eager for me to come to their performance next weekend. As a spectator, of course.

I recently read a sentence in Japanese and fully understood every word.

It was no big deal, just a piece of labeling on a pamphlet accompanying some classy souvenir sweets, but I realized after reading it that it was the first sentence in Japanese (standard kanji and hiragana mix not simplified or intended for learners) that I’d read and understood. It was one of those slow motion realizations that only hits you a minute or two afterward. I was particularly proud of myself because I just learned most of the kanji in the last few weeks running up to the JLPT.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m sitting for a national Japanese test this Sunday. It’s called the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT for short), and it’s the national certification method used to gauge one’s Japanese ability. There are four levels (4-kyu through 1-kyu), and I’m taking the lowest one, level four.

I had my last Japanese lesson before the exam this morning, and it went reasonably well. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been taking practice exams in my lessons, and steadily improving my scores. I think I’ll pass the test with a decent margin.

In other news, I came to the realization that unless I blog more often than I do interesting things, I’ll never catch up. It’s in that vein that I’m making this post right now. I have a huge backlog of pictures and potentially interesting things to describe, but they’ll have to wait until at least next week.

Hey, just be glad I posted this.

When I was working for Silver State Helicopters, there was a young woman working as the administrative assistant for the IT department named Kristin. Kristin had (and presumably still has) a tattoo on the back of her neck of two kanji. She requested the kanji because the shop told her they meant “angel.”

Many Americans seem to be fascinated with the idea of getting something ancient tattooed on themselves, adding history and significance by association with indelibly-marked symbols and ideas. Many people get tribal tattoos from tribes they’ve never met (or that never existed), military symbols from armies of which they’ve never been a part, and writing in languages they don’t speak.

The problem with this of course, is that if you’re not actually in the group with which you’re associating yourself, you can’t really be sure of all the baggage that comes with the symbology- or worse, that the symbols you’ve chosen to mark your skin for life mean something wholly different than what your tattoo artist told you they mean.

Kristin thought she was getting a tattoo of the Japanese kanji for “angel,” and I’m happy to report that she basically got what she paid for. I asked my school’s office manager to look at the photo Kristin kindly let me take of her tattoo, and she said that while the kanji certainly says “angel,” it doesn’t look Japanese, but likely a script form of older Chinese kanji. The modern Japanese print form is on the left.

If you’re interested, the first symbol is 天, often pronounced “ten,” and is the symbol for “heaven” and “sky.” It’s also the first part of the word “tempura.” The second symbol is 使, with many different readings, most of which are a derivation of “messenger” or “envoy.” Thus 天使 means “heaven’s messenger,” or “angel.”