Family History

I forgot about this blog. Caught myself thinking today, “I wish I had somewhere to write random blog posts”. There’s been a lot going on with pandemic and all that I could write about, but I wanted to ramble a bit about something that’s been on my mind lately, and that’s my family history.

My Japanese course finished a few weeks ago, and for my final essay I wrote about my paternal grandmother’s life. My Bachan (short for oba-chan, the Japanese term of endearment for an old woman or grandmother), who passed away in 2010, had such an interesting life. She was born in Japan, came to Canada as a teenager (alone on a ship! Her family had gone ahead of her), was put into an internment camp during the war, met my grandfather there, and moved to Toronto for the rest of her life.

My paternal grandfather (Gechan, short for oji-chan), on the other hand, was born in Canada, went back to Japan for school, and then after returning, followed a similar path.

From the trans-Pacific immigration and travel, to the vast injustices committed against Japanese-Canadians during the war, to building a new life from scratch in Toronto, my grandparents’ story is so compelling to me. But many of the details have been lost, as they’ve both passed away, as have most of my relatives in their generation.

My Japanese study has been piquing my interest even more, lately. One of the reasons I began my study was to connect with my roots. So lately, I’ve been thinking about writing an account of my grandparents’ lives, with as much detail as I can.

I’m in turns excited and discouraged about the project. Things that would be difficult:

• It would take a lot of time, and I’m gearing up for a very busy month at work. However, as this pandemic doesn’t seem it’s going to resolve itself anytime soon, maybe it’s a good time to start.

• As I mentioned, a lot of the knowledge has been lost. But maybe that makes it more important to preserve what’s left that we know.

• Maybe there would be some good resources available in Japanese, but my Japanese is nowhere near good enough to be able to be reading books that aren’t really easy children’s books. Seems like a very far-off goal.

But I do think it would be a fun and enlightening and valuable (to my family, at least) project, so I’ve started collecting resources. Once I get organized, hopefully I can record interviews with various family members, and see how much of the past I can piece together.

I like to think of myself as a half-decent writer, and I’ve been itching to write something lately, but I’ve never tried my hand at writing non-fiction, nor have I even read much non-fiction. But I think like this will be a good learning experience, in many ways.

The Kishimoto family in front of their house on Clinton Street in Toronto. My grandmother’s parents are on the outsides, and my Bachan, Gechan, and five children in the middle. My dad is the one in front with the cute hat.

Nihongo no benkyō

I’ve been taking Japanese classes for a year and a half now (to be more accurate, I’m almost 2 terms through my second 3-term year). They’re at the Japan Foundation, and I’ve really been enjoying them (highly recommended!). I’ve had the same teacher the whole time, who I really like; and though my classmates have fluctuated a little bit, there are some of us who have taken all 5 terms together, and another bunch I met in September when two classes merged. We have a Facebook group where we post about Japan-related subjects, and it’s a fun class environment.

After the fall term this year I was a little less excited than normal about signing up for the term starting in January, but I did anyway because I didn’t really take the time to sit down and think about it. Now that this term is drawing to a close (our final test is April 7), I still haven’t shaken that feeling, so I’m finally sitting down and thinking about WHY I feel that way.

I’m still committed to learning Japanese - I feel like I still have a long way to go, and Countermeasure will definitely be going back to Japan in the near future, so I’d love to improve enough to be able to converse with people there. However, I feel that while I’m learning a lot in class, I’m beginning to thing it’s not the most effective way for me to be learning right now.

By far my biggest weakness in Japanese is conversation. My listening is poor - it takes me long enough to translate that I get lost very quickly, and I’m bad at recovering - and I’m slow to come up with responses. All the grammar I’ve learned goes out the window when I didn’t fully understand the question and am scrambling for a response. In class I’m continuing to learn new grammar and vocabulary, but I feel like my conversation skills are not progressing very quickly. We do practice conversation in class, but it’s usually very specific conversation related to the topic at hand, so I can follow fairly easily since I know what to expect and have clear guidelines on how to respond. I’m trying to watch some anime and listen to Japanese podcasts in the meantime to improve my listening but I don’t have a ton of time to devote to that (see my last blog post).

I’ve also been pretty busy lately, and have been letting slide the ~15 minutes of practice/homework every day that I did for my first year of classes. Instead I find myself having to do a big chunk of work on Sunday or Monday before my Tuesday class to catch up, which isn’t the most effective way to absorb the information. Classes take up about four hours of my time between class time and commute, and homework an additional few hours, and I’m beginning to resent that time a little which could be put towards other interests. Having two weekly evening commitments is kind of the maximum I feel comfortable with, and (since Countermeasure is non-negotiable) it’d be nice to put that second slot towards something else after spending a year and a half on this.

Given all that, I haven’t decided 100% yet but I’m leaning heavily towards quitting my class after this term. I feel like I’m letting my teacher and classmates down somehow, and I’m sad that if I restart I’ll have to wait until this time next year, and likely have a different teacher and definitely different classmates. But I think it’s not the most effective way for me to be learning right now. Instead, I’d like to contact some of my Japanese-speaking friends and see if they’d mind getting together once in awhile to just chat in Japanese so I can practice listening and responding. If I can do that on a regular basis, supplemented with Duolingo, other apps, and the Japanese club at work (which is basically a study group), hopefully I won’t lose everything I’ve learned and can start to strengthen those weak areas.