Two families

Like the one from last time I was in Japan about a year and a half ago, we went to a get-together dinner with my dad’s side of the family (mostly his cousins & their families).

The next day, I met my stepmother’s family for the first time since she and my dad got married last year.

My dad’s family, all from Osaka:

…and my stepmom’s family, in the small town of Shirakawa in Fukushima prefecture:

‘Nuff said?

I talk funny in Japanese

Namba district, Osaka, 2006

Actually, I speak fluent, unaccented…Kansai-ben. Reading about the Olympics this morning, I eventually came to this rather detailed Wikipedia page on the Kansai dialect (I’m sure you know how it is when you’re on Wikipedia).

Through most of my childhood, I actually spoke standard Japanese. My Japanese friends at school as well as my classmates at the Japanese saturday school I attended for 8 years proved to have more of an influence on my language than my parents.

Interestingly enough, I did temporarily “catch” a bit of Kansai-ben every time I visited Japan. After weeks of spending a lot of time with my grandparents, uncle, aunts, and cousins, all of whom are from Osaka, I’d return home to the U.S. referring to myself uchi instead of watashi.

I’m not exactly sure when — maybe around the time I went off to college — I started to really revert back to my Kansai-ben on a permanent basis. These days, I have little occasion to speak Japanese to anyone except family, so I’m a hopeless Kansai-ben speaker at this point.

The bad thing is, I tend to be self-conscious of my dialect from a subconscious level. Whenever I do meet a new Japanese person, I find myself forcing myself to speak in standard Japanese. This just makes me feel even more self-conscious as my speech just feels unnatural and forced, since this isn’t “what I really sound like.” My brain also has to work to remember how to speak in a way I’m no longer accustomed to, particularly concerning the ends of sentences. I suspect I have strange pauses mid-sentence as I figure out how to end sentences without -de, -yaro, -nen, -hen or -yan. And my inflections feel all wrong (or do they just feel wrong to me?), and I’m wondering if all this just makes me sound like I don’t really speak Japanese as well as I do, and — and –… And all of this going on in my head while I’m trying to carry on a conversation doesn’t help the issue.

Looking at the “Well-known Kansai-ben vocabulary and phrases” on the Wikipedia page is really interesting. I wasn’t even aware some of these things were Kansai dialect-specific, like donkusai, nukui, and ōki ni. I say ōki ni all the time when I’m traveling outside the Kansai region in Japan. Oops.

Another one of my dad’s bizarre observations to describe Osaka vs. Tokyo differences (look towards the end of my Asian Food post for one too) is “Coming onto a train station, France is like Tokyo and Italy is like Osaka” (and he’s been to Europe so he sort-of knows what he’s talking about). Maybe I should just embrace my Kansai-ben…I’d rather be Italy than France anyway.