One of Ours

When you become bilingual in a second language, you actually develop a second personality that's "turned on" when you speak that language. My Japanese personality is much more humble and polite than my English one, and I get laughs by the J-List staff when, during phone conversations in Japanese, I accidentally bow to the person on the other end of the line. I've noticed a strange development in the Japanese side of my brain, too: a ridiculous sense of humor. For some strange reason that I can't comprehend, my brain comes up with incredibly corny jokes in Japan (called "ojisan gag" or jokes that a middle-aged man would make), which I constantly torment the J-List staff with. For example, I'll observe that "Pyramids are zig-zag shaped" (in Japanese, "Piramiddo wa giza giza suru"), marginally funny because "giza giza" describes the zig-zag shape and the most famous pyramids are in Giza. Or I'll use the word for "properly" ("kichin to," which sounds like the English word "kitchen") on purpose when asking someone to clean the J-List kitchen, thus making a really bad gag. The word for manual transmission in Japanese is "mission" and when my wife complained that she couldn't drive my stick-shift car, I made a bad joke involving the movie "Mission Impossible." I don't make these lame jokes in English, but the Japanese side of my brain can't help spitting a few out every day. I guess I must be an "ojisan."

All language is fluid, and when a word is passed from one country to another, it's common for meanings to change slightly. In Japan, for example, the term manga can describe both comics and anime on TV, but in English, the meaning has been redefined to refer only to Japanese comics. When I came to Japan I was surprised to see advertisements recruiting girls to work as "companions." This seemed vaguely unsettling to me -- was it some kind of prostitution? I learned later that attractive girls who work at various public events, serving customers or working at information counters (or in one case I saw, smiling while holding a no smoking sign for several hours), are called companions in Japanese. Also, when men have a party, they'll often hire pretty girls who smile and pour drinks for them and act interested in their conversations -- these girls are also called companions. Although the concept of girls being paid to smile and look pretty isn't the most progressive one, at least there was nothing nefarious in the concept.