When I Was a Boy in Japan

by Sakae Shioya

It was September and the beginning of a new term. Father decided that I should leave the school I had attended hitherto and go to another one where English was taught. This was the second time that I had left school without finishing it, but I was destined not to fare any better at the new place. Indeed, I changed school four times without finishing, till I finally settled in a college. But this leaping habit—I am sorry to say that it took a semblance of habit at last—did not come from any changeableness on my or my father’s part, but all from the sincere desire to prepare me for life in the best way. This it was that drove me into the three years’ study of the Chinese classics, though I beat a rather dishonorable retreat from it, and again this it was that directed me to take up the foreign languages early. I was afraid, however, that I leaped too much this time, as I found that all my new schoolmates were much older than I, and, indeed, there were some who needed shaving every morning!

The school was at first very near to my house. The building was of brick; the first floor was used for the class-rooms and the second was made into a dormitory. This last was a novelty to me; I never knew before that boys stayed away from home in this fashion, and entertained a secret desire to share a bed once with somebody, just to see what it was like. This, however, was easily granted, as I soon grew to be a favorite with everybody because of my youthfulness, and one night I made a bundle of my night-shirt and went to the room of one of my classmates. I was at once devoured with curiosity in watching him make the bed. It was not such a simple process as I used to see at home—laying one or two quilts on the matted floor and another over them. But he had to build a bedstead first from a sliding door, and placed one end of it on his table and the other on his bookcases. Upon that he laid his thin quilt and blanket. I wondered why he had to do such a crazy thing.

“Don’t you know the reason?” He seemed to be surprised at my ignorance. “It is on account of the fleas. You can’t sleep on the floor. Look here.” And he showed me a bottle in which an army of captured fleas were drowned. After all, a dormitory was not a covetable place, I thought. But there was some fascination in the sliding door bed, which creaked like a cuckoo with every move of my body.

But I must tell you about my first experience in English. English was very encouraging to start with. The alphabet consists of only twenty-six letters, and when I mastered that and was provided with a handful of vocabulary, I felt as if I were already half an American. I went around and talked to everybody, especially to those who did not know anything of English, like this:

“It is a dog. See the dog! It is a cow. See the cow!” I could even play a trick by way of variation like this:

“Is it a dog? Yes, it is a dog.”

And my family, who were constantly spoken to in this unknown tongue, were surprised at my speedy progress.

And indeed I thought first that any number of words might be easily learned, because they were but combinations of letters in one way or other, which are limited to only twenty-six. But it did not take me long to change this view. As the length of the daily lesson increased I came to wonder more and more whether the English words were not charmed after all. They were as slippery as eels, and, indeed, written like eels too. I thought time and again that I had them secure in my mental box, but when I opened the lid the next day, they vanished like a spirit. Something must be done, I thought, to tie them down, and so I invented a certain scheme. It was that when I looked up a new word in my Anglo-Japanese dictionary, I put a black mark beside it to show that on that very moment it passed into my possession. The plan seemed to work very well, but before long I found I had to mark the same words three or four times, till my dictionary looked very much as if it were suffering from spotted fever!

Then came grammar. Grammar is the least familiar part of language study. We are never taught in that in learning vernacular Japanese. Somehow words come out of our mouths naturally and arrange themselves into smooth sentences. So when I had to commit to memory the definitions of the noun, verb, adjective, and so forth, and to classify English words into them, I came to doubt if I were not studying botany instead of language. Fortunately I did not make such a mistake as, “A verb is something to eat,” or “Every sentence and the name of God must begin with a caterpillar.” But it took me months to understand the difference between the transitive and intransitive verbs. I finally struck an original definition of them. It is this, that a verb is called transitive when it is ambitious and intransitive when it is not, because in the former case it takes an object and in the latter it does not. I wondered why some one among the learned teachers did not tell me that right away in the beginning. It would have saved me a lot of trouble. Again in parsing, any word parading with a capital was a relief to me: I had no hesitation in giving it as a proper noun, whether it appeared in the main body of a piece or—in the title!

Now there is one little part of speech which puzzled me a great deal. It is the article. In translation I had the great satisfaction of passing it over entirely, as we have no equivalent to it in Japanese, but in composition it was the first thing that puzzled and annoyed me. The Japanese formerly went out bareheaded, and their language is also free from this encumbrance of a head-gear—for the article is a head-gear to a noun—and I was liable to drop off the article entirely, or, if I tried, to use a wrong one every time. Surely this hat etiquette was difficult and capricious, too. I thought I could master its secret if I knew thoroughly when and what sort of a bonnet a girl should wear—of course including the case of wearing a derby on horseback! This occurred to me a long time afterward in America, however.