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Japan: Where is the iki?

By Tom Aaron

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 25Mar2009 Word count: 622 Viewed: 299 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

I was out having a drink the other night with Fred in a little bar in Yokohama, where we were for a meeting, and he was having a good moan, which is what he says instead of complaining. I am not sure if Fred picked up this Briticism, or perhaps even a Commonwealth expression, in the U.K. or somewhere else, but he seems to enjoy playing with it. Many of us are attracted to new words and new languages, enjoying using them. As long as the words are comprehensible and not too pretentious, why not?

Fred wasn't moaning about anything in particular; he's just has a bad week. He was moaning about this Canadian woman he had met at a party who was talking about going to the iki. Fred just couldn't figure out what the iki was, so he asked. The woman looked at him scornfully and said, "That's a Japanese word. It means train station. Didn't you know that?" Fred was rendered speechless. By the time he was ready to speak again, she was gone, which Fred was grateful for. Iki actually means a variety of things in Japanese, but train station is not one of them. The correct work is eki, which Fred had learned years ago, along with thousands of other Japanese words.

Fred was an equal opportunity moaner, moaning about the idiocisms of all nationalities, languages, and creeds. I had never heard anyone use the word idiocism until I met Fred. Fred explained it like this, "Now, these people may or may not be idiots, but I don't want to call anyone an idiot, not even if they are. Instead, I like to use the word idiocism to refer to the idiotic things they do." I don't know if idiocism is an actual word or not, but I deliberately did not check. If Fred was wrong, I didn't want to know.

On various occasions, I had heard Fred moan about neighborhood cleaning starting at 6:00 on Sunday mornings, the smoke which made some restaurants and coffee shops into hazy headache creators, the lack of garbage cans and benches, the never ending ceremonies that Fred had endured when he was a teacher, the never ending workdays that Fred had endured when he worked for an insurance company, and the nonsense the Japanese endured without significant protest. Fred often went baaaa when he moaned about that. Fred strongly felt that moaning, the first step toward protest and change, was very important.

Anyway, now Fred was on a roll, moaning about Westerners who couldn't speak Japanese but peppered their sentences with Japanese words and Japanese who couldn't speak English but peppered their sentences with English. I tried to calm Fred down. "Fred, these people are just unhappy. They want to speak the local language or the international language, and they can't. So they do what they can."

Fred replied, "If I meet another Westerner who can't speak Japanese and has to tell me about all the other languages they speak..."

I smiled, "Fred, they actually may not speak any of them very well. They are just feeling left out."

Fred started again, "They should stop decorating their speech with words from languages they don't speak then. They should try to learn English or Japanese and use it."

I responded, "But it won't happen. Many of the Westerners are not here long enough or don't try hard enough. Most of the Japanese aren't obsessive enough to stick with English and try to use it. Be grateful for that or you wouldn't be able to take three steps in any direction without someone wanting to practice their English on you."

"You just can't win," said Fred and then he ordered another drink.

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