LITMIR.BIZ

      I WAS a bonny baby, as most small children are, and my nanny called me a bep-pin, a colloquial term meaning ‘a beauty’, ‘a knock-out’. There was, of course, the added glamour of my being a foreign baby. But my nanny soon shortened that and added chan, the affectionate suffix, giving me the nickname ‘ O-bet-chan’. All my old Japanese friends still call me that – even including one princess! And as with most Japanese nicknames, the origin is not clear.

      From the moment she first laid eyes on me in Yokohama, Suzu Numano, my mother’s first Japanese friend, from San Francisco days, called me ‘The Japanese child with the Western skin’. For born in Japan, I have lived most of my life in two rhythms: the ‘one-two, one-two’ of Japanese, and English, which is mostly in waltz time. From the time I was a child I was fascinated by the differences in rhythm, and it seemed to me to affect not only the language but everyday life as well. I became very conscious of the fact that Japanese people seemed to move and walk in 2/4 time, while foreigners waltzed about. Footwear may have had something to do with it, for in those days the air was redolent with the kak-ko kak-ko sound of geta, while the heel-ball-toe with a shoe was a 1,2,3. And when they talked, Japanese people made little nods in 2/4 time, while Westerners’ heads stayed still.

      By the age of three, I had learned to read and my favourite book was Through the Looking glass by Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll. In it Alice pokes the mirror that sits above the mantelpiece and enters the room that she sees in the mirror. It is the same room, but slightly different – a reflected version of it. Everything is the other way around. And I discovered I could enter a slightly different world in another way – just by speaking Japanese! That was my magic looking glass!

      And, of course, I spoke it with the right rhythm, like the Japanese spoke it, simply having copied my Japanese nanny; so I seemed to really enter Japan and become Japanese. I thought it was tremendous fun going backwards and forwards between Japan and my parents’ worlds, just as Alice went backwards and forwards through the looking glass! And I still do. And just as Alice’s room in the mirror remained the same, people from every country and race have always seemed the same to me, with the only difference being the rhythm of their languages. I had made a wonderful discovery: that it is only rhythms that divide us!

      I used to love going with my nanny to the Japanese festival at the local shrine, where the festival music, called hayashi, was in vigorously lilting 2/4 time. (‘Shrine’ is the customary English translation of jinja, the Shinto sanctum, whereas in Japan our word ‘ temple’ is only used for o-tera, the Buddhist sanctuary.) Especially out in the countryside, one of the most important occasions in Japan’s year is the annual village festival. These o-matsuri are Shinto festivals of supplication and thanksgiving for bumper crops and catches. They last for several days and are a time of general merrymaking. Fancy stalls are set up in the shrine compound, and stages are erected where plays are performed, as well as bouts of exhibition Sumo. I used to love the comic duo hyot-toko and o-kamé, and I still have a smiling okamé mask hanging in my study to keep me cheered up!

      During the festival, the deity of the shrine is taken for a jolly outing in a small portable shrine carried this way and that on the shoulders of the young men of the village. Their task is made merrier all along the way by sips of saké, and by the end of the procession the god is usually rollicking all over the place, and giving its bearers a very hard time! Shrines everywhere, not only those in the villages, but every shrine in Japan has its own festival. In towns and cities the god in his portable shrine has to cope with heavy traffic and is usually escorted by one or more policemen to keep back the cars. As they warm to the task, the lads that shoulder the mini-shrine set up a lusty antiphonal chorus shouting wasshoi- wasshoi, wasshoi-wasshoi ( literally ‘heave ho’, but it is also a ‘ unifying’ chant) half of them shouting the first wasshoi while the others reply with the second, creating a very infectious 1/2, 1/2 rhythm.

      I used to have fun with my young Japanese friends by taking each others’ names and singing them in festival music rhythm, for instance Takeko would go ‘take-take kok-ko, take kok-ko’ and then I would go ‘doro-doro thith-thee, doro-thith-thee’. The Japanese pronunciation of my surname Britton was even better, sounding like a drum: buri-buri ton-ton, buri-ton-ton! When I was playing with my Japanese friends it was all in 2/4 rhythm, and I virtually ‘became’ Japanese!

      And I found one did not have to be born in another country to learn how to ‘sound’ just like the people of that country. When I was seven or eight, my mother arranged for me to have French lessons from a French nun in Yokohama. All that nice nun did in my first lesson was to teach me to sing one single song sounding just like a French child. So I found that by sounding French I could ‘enter’ France now too. I soon became friends with three French girls, the daughters of the French consul. When we met again many years later in France, they told me how lots of American and British children in Yokohama were taking French lessons, but that I was the only one it was fun to play with, because I was the only one who really ‘sounded’ French. I am absolutely certain it is that first step that is so important in learning a foreign language: getting the sound and rhythm right. Spending time going over and over and over first words, then sentences, until you get it sounding just right. It takes time, but it is well worth it!

      I once tried ‘sounding’ Dutch, too. I was a waitress in a club for sailors during the war in Bermuda, when some men from a Free Dutch Navy ship came in. I learned a few Dutch phrases such as ‘Which would you like, tea or coffee?’ getting the pronunciation as perfect as I could, which prompted them to begin conversations, but of course I was soon out of my depth, and would then have to disappear!

      It does not matter how good your grammar is if it does not ‘sound’ like the language. I remember once going with my mother to a church in Geneva for the service in English. But the vicar’s sermon did not sound like English at all and we could not understand a word. And though it sounded French, it was not French!

      It happened so often in Tokyo at Embassy receptions, that a professor of English from some university would greet my mother in English, and she would turn to me and ask me to interpret, which was always so embarrassing. He was usually a highly respected professor, and his grammar was perfect, but it just did not SOUND like English!

      When I speak Japanese, it sounds like Japanese, so people often think I am Japanese. I was having dinner in London once at the house of a Japanese friend from the Japanese Embassy. All the other guests were Japanese, and one of them said, ‘Isn’t it nice, all of us being Japanese, and no Brits present.’ I was thrilled.

      And

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