The Language-Soaked Life Part One.
At 19 he spent six months in Malaysia, where he lived for a time in an Iban longhouse in Borneo, sleeping under a basket of human skulls; spent a weekend at the mountaintop palace of the Sultan of Kedah; endured buffalo leeches crawling up his legs in a rice paddy in Trengganu; and learned to communicate in Bahasa-Indonesia, the principal language of the Malaysian peninsula. By the time he returned to Canada he was seriously infected with wanderlust, and re-adjusting to Canadian life proved to be a significant challenge.
Following a stint at Carleton University in Ottawa, during which he became English tutor to practically the entire extended family of the Malaysian Deputy High Commissioner, Maybin enrolled in Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia as the first student to major in Southeast Asian Studies. The experience was less than satisfying from an academic perspective as there was no real Southeast Asian program in the department at that time and he was compelled to study Chinese and Japanese.
So when he was invited to Los Angeles in 1978 for an interview with the Mitsui Corporation for a job teaching English to employees in their shipbuilding operations at Tamano, a company town on the Inland Sea of Japan, the wanderlust was easily reignited. Maybin was ready once again with an enthusiastically positive response to what mythologist Joseph Campbell has termed “the call to adventure.”
But life in Tamano turned out to be somewhat of a mixed blessing.
Raised in rural Alberta and then in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, Maybin recognizes that he was lucky to have started his tenure in Japan in a rural locale, in a town “backed by mountains and facing the sea.” If he had landed in an urban setting such as Tokyo, “riding trains surrounded by concrete, cacophony, and the shadows cast by tall, gray buildings,” he would not have stayed in Japan for more than a couple of years.
In his second year in Tamano he moved from “the tool shed” that had been left to him by his American predecessor at Mitsui into “an ancient house with bamboo slats in the windows and a wood-heated bath.” Over several months he completely renovated this house, even redoing the mud plaster walls. “When they came to visit, my Mitsui students inevitably shook their heads and declared that I was ‘living in a museum’, but for me it was a dream as I banged my head on the low ceiling beams and had my ass frozen off by the wind blowing in through cracks around doorways and window frames in the winter months.”
In addition to the remodelling project, Maybin also took up Japanese cooking, attending classes given by the wife of a colleague in the back of the sweet shop she owned. Consigned to mincing onions for the first three months, the intrepid Canadian was grateful for the opportunity to eat wonderful home-cooked Japanese meals as well as to learn “a lot of language as everyone discussed the current local issues while we ate. I was picking up tons of vocabulary and got to recycle the topics at work on Monday.”
But there was definitely a downside to being a foreigner in rural Japan. Maybin’s teaching load at Mitsui quickly increased as his work ethic proved to be accommodatingly Japanese. The Canadian expat grew frustrated when he saw that the time required to prepare for and teach classes to as many as 300 students a week would preclude the possibility of his ever learning Japanese. For a “language junkie” and avid student of other cultures, this was an unacceptable state of affairs. In this case, the old habit of saying “Yes” had become a bit of a liability.
There was also the inevitable homesickness, keenly felt as the first year came to a close.
By his second year in Japan the bloom was fully off the rose. “I think most gaijin [foreigners] become jaded in their second year here. The novelty is wearing off and every time someone compliments your Japanese skills, you want to scream, ‘I sound like a goddamn 5-year-old!’ This was certainly the case with me.” But circumstance, a certain doggedness, and most of all, a passion to truly connect with the culture of Japan trumped all disillusionment.
The homesickness was cured when Maybin returned to Canada for six months, graciously given leave by Mitsui to deal with a family crisis. The crisis turned out to be the hopelessly dysfunctional relationship of his parents. “The home I was sick for had imploded. Six months of suffering in Canada, and I knew that no matter how bad things got in Japan, the chances of surviving were much better in Okayama [the prefecture in which Tamano is located] than on Vancouver Island, so I returned.”
The frustration with work was resolved in an equally dramatic fashion. “The day my department head came and suggested that I move my morning classes earlier and my evening classes later so that I could accommodate yet another group of employees was the day I finally broke. I announced that, after three years and a constantly growing number of students, I was not going to renew my contract.” With a great deal of polite persuasion on the part of the Japanese bosses and much “pissy whining” by Maybin, an agreement was reached whereby the Canadian teacher could work three (exhaustingly long) days a week at the company and spend the rest of his time learning Japanese “properly.”
You can read Don Maybin’s blog, “Fool for Language.“
Photo by sporkist. Creative Commons: Some Rights Reserved
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