Last night, the Smiling Assassin brought back some nuggets from Tuesday night’s training with Soke. He talked about 間, ma meaning interval, and how you have to manipulate the interval yourself by changing the timing. Not by being faster than the other guy, but by manipulating the space through your footwork, and drawing your opponent’s attention. There is nothing new here, but perhaps, with turn after turn, the way to make this effective and efficient gets clearer. It is to be hoped.
Sensei talked to me about KY a bit last night. This is an aspect of life, Japanese, budo and otherwise, that I need to work on. So many slang phrases and words that Japanese teenagers use soon trickle into general usage. ケ－ワイ KY, the abbreviation of 空気読めない kuuki yomenai, meaning ‘read the atmosphere’, is one such frequently used expression. Sometimes, people do or say things for reasons you can’t fathom. Sometimes they say something very subtly and indirectly, and it is up to you to figure out what they mean. When you don’t get it, that’s KY.
I’ve made mistakes with this before. There are those moments in the day when someone says something obliquely, and much later, I have an aha! moment when I realize what the person was trying to tell me.
I realize that I, too, sometimes say things indirectly or not at all and expect the other person to read the air to figure out what I mean. If you ask me a question, and I don’t answer, the answer is probably no. This is typical of Japanese culture, but it’s also something that coincides with my own way of communicating.
It gets more complicated for actions. I did something to appease and make ammends to one person, and another person who doesn’t understand the situation thought I had offended him. Such is KY.
Soke has talked about KY in the dojo not a few times already this year. Can you read the atmosphere he creates, or that the dojo as a group creates? What’s really going on? What are you being asked to do? What openings are you being given to either shine or look foolish?
I can’t say I know, as I’m just as KY as the next guy.
These catchphrases that people here in Japan come up with are quite clever, but it seems as if the Japanese language is becoming more and more warped with all these introductions of foreign words and letters into it. KY is a good example (not to mention what KY means in Canada or The U.S.). The worst part is that some Japanese people are convinced that a lot of these words that are borrowed from English are actual English.
In a Vancouver international English school, I had Japanese students who insisted that the words “gokon” and “printclub” were English. This caused we teachers no end of consternation.
Bear in mind that the average English speaker is unaware of the origins of borrowed words. Do you know the origins of the words “bungalow”, “ketsup” and “sabotage”?
I don’t mind if someone doesn’t know how a word in his or her own language came to be as long as it’s understood that the present form of the word is likely for use in the user’s language only; What bothers me is that foreign words and phrases here are freely bastardized into something that sounds cool or is easy to say and then people just blindly assume that because it seems like English (or French, or Italian) and contains some English (or French, or Italian) parts, it must be acutal English (or French, or Italian).
I mean, the Yamada Denki slogan is a perfect example; “For your just.” I mean, one of my students actually said in English class, “I like new maicaa (my car – more Janglish); It’s good for my just life.”
At least, Singaporeans know the difference between Singlish and English.