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 then there was the time I asked a taxi driver to stop at the NHK building while I left my Irish harp there for a later performance. When I came out, he would not let me get in and instead pointed to the car in front. But the driver in front pointed to the taxi behind. So I went back. ‘Did your passenger have a harp?’ I asked him. He replied, ‘Yes, but she was not a foreigner. She was Japanese.’
So few people seem to realize that the most important first step in learning a foreign language is getting the rhythm and sound right! For the sound, of course, is paramount too. That is why using katakana1 when learning English is a no-no with its paucity of sounds. We apparently visualize the sounds we utter. So it is difficult to utter sounds that are not in one’s written language. A Japanese sound that is very difficult for Western speakers is the syllable written in Roman letters with a consonant followed by a ‘y’: kyo as in senkyo (election) and myo as in myonichi (tomorrow). English people invariably pronounce two-syllable ‘Kyoto’ in three syllables, as Ki-o-to or even ‘Kai-o-to’, and usually two-syllable byo-in ( hospital) as bi-o-in (beauty parlour)!
A Chinese lady once told me that the reason the Chinese were so good at learning languages was because they have so many different sounds in Chinese - even more different sounds than we have in English! I knew a Japanese teacher of English who used to say that English in kana was pathetic English, and it certainly is pathetic the way Japanese kana can change so many English words into some that may even be embarrassing, for instance ‘erection’ for ‘election’! I strongly believe that the Ministry of Education,2 should introduce more kana. The vowel ウ (u) with diacritical dots ヴ for ‘vu’ is already used unofficially, for English words like ‘dove’ (da-vu). But those marks could be used on all five vowels to make a whole ‘v’ column: va-vi-vu-ve-vo. And then, an ‘l’ column, la-li-lu-le-lo, could be made by adding dots to ra-ri-ru-re-ro. And the sa-shi-su-se-so column could use the tiny diacritical circles to make tha-thi-thu-the-tho! That is only a start, of course, since there are many gaps in the other columns.
But at least, surely, a la-li-lu-le-lo column would be very, very useful?
And now, let me tell you how it happened that I was born in Japan.
1A phonetic ‘shorthand’ syllabary containing fifty-six symbols used mainly now for writing foreign names and loan words. The more cur-sive hiragana is used for Japanese words.
2Now known as the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science and Technology (MEXT) – in Japanese ‘Mombukagakushu’.
CHAPTER 2
My Mother
MY MOTHER, ALICE Hiller, was born in San Francisco, granddaughter of a former Prussian count. Like Prince Chichibu in Japan, Count Johann Friedrich von Hillerscheidt was greatly distressed by the hard lives of the poor German people, and at the time of the 1840 and 1841 uprisings known as the ‘bread riots’ he tried to help them. This got Friedrich into trouble with the Prussian authorities. They banished the young nobleman and confiscated his property, which led to his emigrating to the United States of America with his family.
Johann Friedrich had studied medicine and surgery at Heidelberg University, and while serving as a surgeon to Kaiser Wilhelm in the elite Black Hussars during the Franco-Prussian Wars, he married Hortense Parisot, the daughter of the mayor of a town in Alsace Lorraine. The vineyard-owning Parisots were a noble and ancient Provençal family descended from the Counts of Toulouse.
Johann Friedrich became a US citizen in 1849, and as Dr John Frederick Hiller MD he ministered with great popularity to the gold diggers of early Nevada. His son, Dr J. Frederick Hiller Jr followed in his footsteps as a general practitioner in San Francisco, where his daughter Alice, my mother, was born. She was a motley European mixture of German, French, Dutch and Scottish, and, when she travelled abroad, she used to complain that there was never enough space on the required form in the place for ‘ethnic background’, and she used to wonder how long it would be before one could just put ‘ American’! She longed to know the details of her grandfather’s Prussian experience, but he refused to speak of the people who had angered him so much. ‘I’m American now,’ he would say in heavily accented English.
After years of gazing out across San Francisco Bay quoting to herself from Tennyson’s Ulysses: ‘My purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset,’ Alice, when still quite young, had briefly visited the Philippines, and also spent a year in China with her best friend Alice Baker Richards, whose husband was working there. To join them in Chungking, she had to make a long but fascinating trip up the then magnificent Yang
