Cross-cultural communication （160）　

160) “The Significance of One's Mother Tongue”
On Saturday, September 2, 2023, the Nikkei Morning Edition included a supplement titled “NIKKEI Plus 1,” which featured a ranking of magazines that were once popular but have since ceased publication. Among them, the one that caught my attention the most was FOCUS, ranked fourth. Published by Shinchosha from 1981 to 2001, it was Japan's first photo weekly magazine. At the time (1980?1983), I was living in New York as a resident, and I was desperately craving Japanese. Besides Japanese books available at the Kinokuniya Bookstore in Manhattan, the only way I could learn about current events in Japan in Japanese was through Bungei Shunju, a magazine sent to Japanese physicians overseas by Dai-ichi Pharmaceutical at the time. At the time, I was friends with a Japanese pediatrician whose wife was a former JAL flight attendant. One day, her former colleagues, who were also flight attendants, were visiting NYC and staying at their house, so they invited me over for dinner. It was a rare opportunity to converse in Japanese with someone from Japan, and the conversation flowed smoothly. During the conversation, they showed me the in-flight magazines from the flight from Tokyo. Among them, the one that stood out the most was this FOCUS. This photo weekly magazine continued to thrive even after I returned to Japan in 1983, and its controversial photojournalism, which pushed the boundaries of legality (what we now call paparazzi), became so influential that the term “focus” was coined to describe such reporting.

Setting aside the topic of FOCUS, I would like to discuss the issue of craving Japanese while living alone overseas. One of my favorite writers since my student days was Kaga Otohiko. Unfortunately, he passed away in January 2023 at the age of 93. Kaga studied French as a foreign language at the Army Cadet School, then entered the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Medicine after the war, continuing his French studies during his time there. He later became a psychiatrist and studied in France as a French government-sponsored scholar. He was thoroughly proficient in French, and during his time abroad, he reportedly faced no difficulties whatsoever with the language. Even during his studies in France, he read all his literary works in French as a hobby, alongside his clinical work and research in psychiatry (primarily criminology). About a year after arriving in France, he began to feel depressed. As a psychiatrist, he tried to identify the cause himself, but his relationships with the French people around him were good, and his work was going smoothly. Perhaps he had some idea of the cause, so he asked an acquaintance in Japan to send him several Japanese novels. After finishing one of them, his depressed mood disappeared naturally. His analysis was that even though he was interested in reading French novels, French was not his native language, but a foreign language he had learned. He concluded that the stress had accumulated unconsciously and caused his symptoms.

That said, I believe that the phenomenon I have introduced here may be useful in some way for people whose native language is Japanese and who have learned a foreign language, unlike bilingual people who grew up abroad. In today's internet-connected world, it is possible to access Japanese information from anywhere in the world. Unless you are living abroad and spending all your time with other Japanese people, reading Japanese books occasionally will not cause your foreign language skills to decline!

As an aside, I myself have imposed a rule on myself for the past five years to read Japanese paperback books only on the train during my commute.
Reference: “The Beginning of a Head Doctor's Career（頭医者事始）” by Kaga Otohiko, Kodansha Bunko.

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