School Break Words Brake

Summer has begun for my bros and…ladies back in the US.  That’s really awesome.  But me?  I get next week off because of swine flu.  Seriously, I’m sick of breaks man.  I have a very light schedule and I’m not that stressed.  And I ain’t making up this missed class time at the end of July, I’m going the eff home.

Here it’s called shingata influenza, which means “new type influenza.”  We had a supposed first infection in Japan a couple weeks ago, but it was a false alarm.  Now, in the district of the city I live in, Chuo-ku, Kobe, there have been a number of infections confirmed.  More in Osaka.  I heard about like 3 yesterday, and now it looks like it’s over 30.  Sarah was right: diseases have potential to spread very fast.

But I think Japan is hyping up shingata influenza more than America is.  Am I wrong?  My school is cancelled for a week.  Kobe University is too, along with several other schools and universities in this area.  Have you Americans gotten holidays because of swine flu scare?  Yesterday (when I first heard of 3 cases of shingata flu) I was transferring trains in nishikita station like I do almost every day, and I noticed lots of people working in the station wearing masks.  You know, those white surgeon-looking masks (called masuku here) are super common here.  I don’t think I’ve gone a single day in Japan when I didn’t walk outside and see several people wearing masks.  It’s extremely commonplace here in Japan.  But, as I walked across the station to the other platform, I noticed, “Wait, bread salesman, station attendants, barbers, everyone who works inside the station is wearing a mask!”  I assumed then that it was regulation, not just coincidence.  Either way, fear is pretty palpable here.

And in my experience, holidays in Japan without travel plans quite suck.  It sucks being cooped up in this tiny dorm room with no fun to be had.  Especially because most people usually are travelling on holidays.  I guess everyone will be here this week, so who knows what’ll happen.  Friday I’m going to visit Akiko in her hometown.  I’m getting to stay in her parents house (if I remember, sliding traditional doors and shite) which will be cool.  But until Friday, what I’m gon’ do?

I guess I gotta game it out and study as much as I can.  The general Japanese fear is making think I should stay inside mostly, so I’m left to loneliness.

To change the subject, I’ve been thinking a lot about dialects and slang lately.  Well, for months now.  Studying Japanese has made me appreciate regional differences in a language.  In American English, there exist tons of different variations of the standardized version.  I used to try and distance myself from dialects and stick with standard English.  I don’t mean that I tried to change my accent (that’d be super hard).  I just wanted to speak perfectly grammatically as best I could.  It wasn’t because I wanted to be cooler than normal Georgian speakers (although naturally perfecter language sounds smarter), it’s just that I liked the thought of being perfectly understood on the first run through.

However, I don’t know what about Japanese made me like dialectical speech, but I’ve come to really enjoy the subtle and crazy differences between the speech of people from California and the speech of my extended family.  It’s so cool.  I just like that regions have tailored English to fit them.  Compared to England, American English generally uses fewer words to communicate right?  Then Georgia has “bless his heart” and “it’s high time” and “ya’ll” and so on–phrases that are used a lot in place of different words used elsewhere.  In conclusion, I’m excited about returning to Georgia and embracing the dialect there.