The Tao of tau

Donald Richie wrote way back ago in his Journals some essential remarks about interaction with Japanese using the Japanese language as a medium of communication. Reading the Journals was an eye opener a few years ago, despite having logged already 20 years living here. It was all there, but without much the dragging gloom or shrieks of so many bloggers about Japan. His was a cool amateur ethnologist observing. Sometimes, one need to be reminded that as a general rule, not much leeway is allowed in Japanese usage, otherwise you risk to be genuinely misunderstood, or not understood at all. There is, on the opposite side of the table a well shared lack of competence at inference or delivering explanation. I will not put this liability to the language, but to formalism and what it means in terms of flexibility and the lack of it. Richie wondered when somewhere in the countryside, with still to progress language competence, why gesturing seemed less efficient here than in the middle of the Italian countryside. Or more precisely, Ritchie didn't wonder. He just enunciated the acute difficulty of interaction when not relying on exact language.

It was not about gesturing the other day, but about "taurine", that popped up in the discussion and I was culprit not to take the bull by the horns. On the Japanese side, they could not fathom what was that "taurine" we were talking about because of my wrong pronunciation. I was hooked to the French horns, and pronouncing "tau" like "to" made understanding impossible. The correct pronounciation is "ta-o-rin". Things went back to normal when I noticed later on on the package the word in printed form, showed it to the puzzled listeners who sighed in relief "ta! o-rin!". That's when Richie came back to my mind. Recalling Richie before it happens is the next goal.