Shadowing Renhô

Renhô Murata is Japan's Minister for Administrative Reforms. She is smart, prodigiously eloquent, she is the adult speaker Japanese should model after rather than buying Obama's speech on audio CDs. In this increasingly speechless society, eloquence is to be found among TV anchor people, celebrities, traditional humorous story tellers. The layman is awkward. The politician can be awfully incompetent, blurred into vagueness, hardly able to make a well constructed argument.

This puts enormous pressure on interpreting because the discourse has to be rehashed, completed, straightened up into Cartesian logic. There are still arguments that "this is the way Japanese speak because of the mysterious lingo you can't understand because you are not Japanese". But this traditional BS argument is less heard these days.

Speechlessness also impacts in tremendous way international commerce, doing business with Japan. I for one am of the opinion that this national disease of learning English and being ever incompetent at it should be taken as a major factor in the regression of Japan. But not only English, Japanese as well.

It is also the reason why I argue that unless your partner here has English palatable fluency based on enough experience of living abroad and/or interacting with foreigners, average English must be complemented by interpretation, otherwise you 'll get into trouble.

But if you are learning Japanese and want to strengthen your competence at speech, articulation of grown-up, somewhat formal Japanese, shadow Renhô by all means. I was looking to no avail something in the line of "Advanced Japanese prosody for business and formal situations", even a coach. I have found my mate.

Let's hope she leaves enough speeches around before she quits the political show, and go back to TV, where she gained as an anchorwoman, unsurprisingly, her smartness at eloquence.