*RARING TO GO
Engines idling full blast, the convoy rumbled and hummed, but it wasn’t going anywhere soon. Parked in plain view of Mount Fuji, an assortment of men and vehicles bristled with impatient immobility, awaiting word from Yamato Lodge, the authority that controlled all access to the mountain.
The corps of white-gloved drivers bided the downtime in time-honored ways, earphones plugged to the ear, cigarettes dangling from mouth, tongues wagging, exchanging news and views. Rumors of coups and countercoups, roadblocks and blocked roads made the rounds of the grumpy, grumbling liverymen. They whispered to one another conspiratorially, sharing trumped-up confidences and nodded knowing airs, not knowing but a fraction of what they spoke. When it came to the knowing the ins and outs of the old man of the mountain, no one knew much of anything for sure. A prescient few surmised that his august highness was in trouble, and word had it that the hidden fortress at Yamato Lodge was no longer impervious to attack. If so, all the more need to gossip and gab, if only to get an inkling of whatever it was that was going down before it hit them unawares.
“Long Live the Old Man of the Mountain!” murmured a knot of believers, as if to cheer themselves. “Long Live the Shadow Shogun!”
The resident gaijin tried to listen in, but he could not make much sense of what they were saying. He was so far out of the loop that he wasn’t even aware there was a loop, but there was an elegant simplicity in taking things at face value. He considered himself lucky to be going anywhere, what, after that attempted deportation and narrow escape from his captors. And to be going to Fuji, of all places, on an undercover mission for Miki, of all people, well let’s just say it was like a daydream come true. To serve as the celestial’s private wordsmith for an on-again, off-again joint Sino-Japanese documentary was a feather in his cap, and that was that; everything else was logistics and linguistics.
Whatever was happening, or not happening, was more or less unfolding as it would. He tuned out the background hum of coarse grunts and conspiratorial whispers and turned his back on those who chose to ignore him. He broke free of the scrum to explore the perimeter of the parking lot, perchance find a patch of air free from the stench of tobacco smoke and engine exhaust.
He ambled his way in along the roadside gully until he reached the isolated staging area where the tourist bus carrying the Shanghai delegation was parked. The Chinese were in Japan by special invitation on a friendship mission, and yet they tended to keep to themselves when they weren’t being ignored with a vengeance. He knew, as any reasonably sentient news rewriter would, the rhymes and reasons and ups and downs of Sino-Japanese discord, but he saw no reason why a fierce foreign policy should apply at the personal level, any more than the war between the sexes should stop him from chatting up the kind of warrior women that Japanese men shied away from.
He’d been a gaijin long enough to know a thing or two about being ignored and was inclined to reach out to those who were floundering about, unwanted and unseen. After a few reflexive rebuffs from Chinese crew members so rocked by culture shock that they didn’t want to talk, he made a breakthrough with a news producer who traded in hot air for a living.
“Ohayo gozaimasu!” greeted the group interpreter, a gangly, amiable bespectacled fellow whose nervous self-presentation and dated fashion was a timely reminder that one sometimes had to look past appearances to connect with others. Yet he only had to chat with the bloke for a few minutes to realize that those black-rimmed glasses and bird’s nest head of wavy black air hid a big brain and an even bigger ego.
Collin glad-handled the visitor in Japanese for as long as he could sustain it, which was not long, because he was at his most fluent when it came to trite polite nothings, and quickly hit a wall after that.
“You speak English?” Collin enquired hopefully.
“Indeed I do!” the man crisply answered.
“Like Japan so far?”
“Indeed I do!”
“You’re English is good.”
“Indeed I do!”
“Well, let’s leave well enough alone,” Collin mumbled. “So, what’s ya’ name?”
The man cleared his throat.
“I’m Col-lin.”
“Your calling?”
“No, no, just Col-lin”
“Who are you calling?”
“Who are you?”
“I am %#$+@&%#”
“You say what?”
Collin couldn’t make head nor tail of the airy, exotic tones that emanated from the man’s mouth. It started like a whistle, ended like a gargle, so he just cleared his throat.
“You foreigners never get it right.”
“But you’re a foreigner too...”
“No I’m not, I’m Chinese.”
The Nippon newbie was so fresh off the boat he didn’t realize he was an unprotected minority now. Here he was already complaining that no one in Japan said his name right, which was as good as announcing he was an outlander. No one in Japan said anything right, not when it came to foreign words anyway, and if the interpreter didn’t know that, he didn’t know nothing. The dude seemed to think his name, a name, any old name was special and sacrosanct, like a passport, and that it could, should and must survive any border crossing intact, whereas a Japan-experienced gaijin, accustomed to being called all kind of things with only the slimmest linguistic linkage to his actual appellation, knew how to roll with the punches.
“This is Japan,” Collin explained, hardly believing his own ears. How often that phrase had been used to dismiss him or flip him out.
But this was Japan and one of the things that made it Japan was that the Japanese had a habit of saying very Japanese things and he’d been here long enough to want to say some of them too. Nothing wrong with a little linguistic jujitsu to help a fresh arrival better acclimatize.
The translator handed him a card:
“Qin Xizhe, Interpreter Extraordinaire, Shanghai Propaganda Television”
Was this the Quinn guy Miki had asked about? The dude’s name did start with a Q, not that it was pronounced anything like you’d expect a word with a Q in it to be pronounced. It was one of those weirdly-spelled, weirdly-pronounced Chinese names full of rare Scrabble tiles like Z’s and X’s and Q’s for which a willful mispronunciation was almost a necessity, and that was not even taking the four musical tones into account. The dude’s name-card said Q-I-N, but the way he said it clearly wasn’t Quinn or Queen but rather something shorter and softer, complicated by a rising tone so subtle it sounded like it was falling and in fact had been falling ever since he arrived, falling on deaf ears. Collin made two or three sporting attempts to reproduce the elusive sound. He tried to say it without spraying too much saliva, cleanly and clearly, if not quite as effortlessly as the Q-guy was saying it, but he, no less than the Japanese, had his own innate way of saying things and his production of Q-guy’s name fell somewhat short of the mark.
Better to toss the name to the wind. If the dude wanted to make friends outside of China, it was high time he dropped the tongue twister and got used to being called something other than his “real” name. Any variation would do as long as it rolled off the lips and was easy to remember.
“So, ah, Quim, how do you like it? See? Fujiyama-san?” Collin gestured at the mountain shimmering in the distant mist. If only they could get past introductions it might be possible to jumpstart a real conversation.
“How does who like what?”
“You. Quim. The view.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you!”
“Like what?”
“Like Fuji-yama-san.”
“Wrong, wrong and wrong.”
Ever the grassroots ambassador, Collin wanted to meet the newcomer at least halfway, so it came as something of a rude shock when the bloke struck back, and with pent-up anger to vent, turned out to be twice as fluent as expected. To wit, the non-native speaker, for whom ample allowances had been peremptorily been made, had the gall to correct Collin’s Chinese, English and his Japanese, all in one fell swoop, on a topic no closer to the heart than Fuji. Preposterous!
As was necessarily the case when dealing with non-natives, the American made a point of making adjustments. He spoke simple, he spoke slow, and when necessary, he spoke loud. He dropped the big words, he dropped the little words, and out of sheer kindness of white man’s burden he almost always dropped the the’s. He might even mangle up the grammar a bit, or use a simple, imprecise word even when the mot juste was eager and willing to be deployed, sitting on the tip of his tongue. It took extra effort, almost like speaking another language, ‘almost’ being the operative word because Collin didn’t speak any language other than English, though there were moments when he felt he could ‘almost’ speak Japanese. All in all, it took a humanitarian effort to dumb down one’s English, but it was done in the name of meeting people halfway in the halfway house between cultures that had been his home ever since quitting America.
The linguistic tug-of-war had begun in earnest when the rewriter, speaking righteously in his own language, basking in the liquid nuance of his native element, breezily referred to the mountain of all mountains that loomed in the distance like a picture postcard as ‘Mount Fujiyama-san.’
Any native speaker worth his salt would understand that, there was nothing to it. That’s what it was called in the picture books, and that’s what it was called in tourist brochures, and if memory served, that’s the way it was written that way in his elementary school textbook.
“Mount Fuji-yama-what?” questioned Quim, emitting an insolent shriek followed by a staccato laugh. He explained that he had only been in the country for a grand total of 72 hours, the first two days having been spent inside the Chinese Embassy, but he knew a few things about words, and concepts like right and wrong were timeless.
“I said, Mount-Fujiyama-san,” Collin’s voice got emphatic.
“Wrong again, white boy!”
“What? Wait!” Collin sputtered. Did the Chinaman just call him white boy? Flummoxed, he fixed his gaze on the holy mountain, as if to call in some moral support. “Pray tell, just what’s wrong with calling her ‘Mount Fujiyama-san?’
“First of all she’s not a ‘she’ but an it. But more importantly, ‘san’ means mountain, right? And ‘yama’ that means ‘mountain’ --is that not so?” queried Quim, brushing an invisible series of Chinese ideographs in the chill air. “Mount…Fuji Mountain Mountain That’s what you are saying, can’t you see?”
“Uh, I suppose…”
“That’s at least two mountains too many.”
It took forbearance to let that one go, but Collin let it slide, hoping to goad and isolate his jocular interlocutor into a linguistic kill zone.
“I get it, I get it. So you’re saying the internationally-accepted standard term is technically incorrect, and, ah, thus could be construed as an incontrovertible case of, um, over-egging the pudding?” Collin reflexively upgraded his English, lacing it with sloppy polysyllables and old English slang, hoping to startle the upstart.
“Oh please. Don’t patronize me. There is nothing incontrovertibly standard about the standard term unless you have very low standards,” quipped the interpreter. “But you are not alone in your ignorance. The Japanese dwarfs abuse and misuse our Chinese ideographs all the time,” he added, willfully devoid of any diplomatic finesse.
“But, my man, Quim,” Collin said facetiously, rubbing the wrong name in to even the score. “Does not the ah, original etymology of the term, the Fuin Fu-ji, so to speak…does it not mean ‘fire mountain,’ or something of close semblance to that?”
“Actually, the dwarfs never got it right in the first place,” Quim added with a smirk. “Sort of like the way you pronounce my name. “
“Uh-huh.”
“So you see, the Chinese ideographs for Fuji are ‘fu’ as in rich, and ‘shi’ as in man, so the Japanese misappropriation means ‘rich man’ in Chinese.”
“But I’ve been in Japan a lot longer than you and I never heard Japanese describe it as ‘rich man mountain,’ snapped Collin. “Fuji, it definitely has some kind of ontological and etymological and antediluvian linguistic link to ‘fire mountain,’ which,” he said almost panting, pausing to catch his breath, “As you will no doubt admit, has nothing remotely to do with China. A volcano is a volcano, and Fuji was here long before China was China.”
“Ah, are you possibly a devotee of the dwarf’s Shadow Shogun?” quipped Quim, who was not only not confused, but, in fact, seemed to relish fielding the bullshit that the American was batting his way. “The so-called Shogun, is it not he who likes to say, ‘China was China long before Japan was Japan?’”
“That has nothing to do with anything.”
“Then say something that has to do with something.”
“Well, for your information, I’ve heard people say that Fuji means ‘staying alive.’”
“Isn’t that the name of an old American disco dance tune?”
“No, twinkle toes. Fu sounds like ‘no,’ ji sounds like ‘die,’ so Fu-ji means ‘no die,’ that is to say, still alive, keeping alive, keeping it real, eternal…”
Just as the conversation started to get interesting, it was cut short by an announcement. To each man his station. Time to get back with your group. Time to muster. All systems go.
Pleased to have gotten the last word in, edgewise or otherwise, the American rewriter took quick leave of his linguistically gifted counterpart. Quim offered a sullen goodbye, and then turned to join the SPT crew on the hefty Hinomaru bus, which had been affixed with stickers of the Chinese flag and draped with the red banners to cover up the red circle insignia.
Collin traipsed across the uneven surface of the gravel lot, stumbling here and there, juggling Japanese words in his head all the way back to the car.
Had he really been so wrong for so long? Mountain Mountain my ass. He licked his wounded pride in silence. That little mop-haired professor reminded him of why he didn’t finish college, but it also irked him because he had only been trying to be helpful. Like the time he used the term ‘hippopotamusses’ for a Nice News feature story on a pair of fat tuskers at Tokyo Zoo. A stickler of a Japanese spinster, who normally was closeted away somewhere in the recesses of the 23rd floor of VTR had once appeared out of nowhere to reprimand him at his work station in front of everyone.
“This is wrong, young man. So, so wrong,” she scolded. “It should read ‘hippopotami.’” He hemmed and hawed and guffed and gawed, trying to explain that he had written it “wrong on purpose”, as generous gesture, as a gift to simple-minded Japanese everywhere who didn’t know lice from rice or lovefrom rub, but there was no convincing the taskmaster mistress. Outranked and outflanked, he had to bite his tongue and rewrite it her way. Sure, he had been wrong, in a way, but that’s what made him right, in a way. When he retold the tale of his derring-do and knight errant rewriting to an adoring bevy of tea-caddies a short time later, they took his side. They blinked in incomprehension when he counted hippos the “right” way, and smiled with amiable comprehension when he counted them the “wrong” way.
Fujiyama-san? Sometimes two wrongs made a right.