Next month I will be back in Japan, and so I am, like a terrible student, cramming the night before the test. I have been studying Japanese with feverish abandon, and a tiny hint of regret.
It’s been more than ten years of on again, off again study if I just stuck to it every day during the pandemic like I said I would, I tell myself, I wouldn’t suck so much right now.
I’m doing speed tests on language learning sites. I’m swapping out podcasts for imaginary conversations with Tanaka san. We converse about buying local goods and meeting at the restaurant hotel tomorrow evening at seven pm, not six, if it suits everyone, that is. Tanoshimi, ashita mata I mumble, under my breath, walking alone through the park, yet again.
If you’ve ever self studied a language outside of the country you speak it in, you’ll know it is both extremely rewarding but also insanely difficult to stop the practice from slipping between your fingers at any opportunity at all.
Over dinner last week, a friend recommended I watch Terrace House, a Japanese reality show about a group of strangers who go about their regular lives while living together in a share house, to bolster my attempts at remembering the language. Again, if you’ve studied a language, especially something like Japanese, it is certifiably insane to think you can learn from a television show. But also, it doesn't hurt. And while reality shows are a far cry from the real world, they’re a touch closer than anime or a Ghibli film. At least as far as the dialogue is concerned.
The other night, typing Terrace House into Netflix, I am hit with multiple seasons, what looks like hundreds of episodes, with a single click. I am overwhelmed. I watch half an episode and feel a little bored. I click back to the search page and choose the season where they’re in Hawaii and half the cast is foreign. A lot of the dialogue is simple, they speak a little slow. I am hooked in an instant. I am writing down words and looking them up, annoying my friend for clarification on LINE when my eyes glaze over the google results. I am also, making judgement calls on people who are entirely at the whim of reality TV editors, but that is another story (that probably doesn’t need to be told).
It’s often on streaming services, when it really hits me.
You have a thought, a memory, you hear a suggestion from a friend and BANG: there’s 100 episodes. There’s the bands whole back catalogue. There’s the book, now loaded onto your iPad. From thought to thing in an instant, or less.
This is insane to me, as a child of the Rage era. Of the one episode a week and even that episode has like five ads era. In my early teens I’d wake up at a 4am on a Saturday morning to hit record on VHS so I could watch my favourite film clips over and over again. I remember taping Teenage Dirtbag off the radio onto a cassette. Waiting hours for it to be played was no problem at all. The pure thrill when it did. When limewire came into being it was like some kind of miracle. A week to download an album? The EASE! When I wanted a CD before, I’d have to save up, wait for a weekend off my part-time job making waffle cones, catch a train 2.5 hours into the city, make the rounds of the record stores (Red Eye Records first, and then $10 dirt cheap CDs for the classics and eventually, the second hand store) then wait hours to get home to listen to it on repeat.
Of course most of you know this, most of you lived through this too.
But sometimes it hits me so hard I feel scared.
This convenience has a cost, and it’s probably higher than we think.
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Last week, I sat for Banana Therapy.
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