Of late I've had strong urges for Japanese (food) and have indulged myself as best I know how; gorge upon the charred carcasses of the deceased (chickens). I've always had a soft spot in me for Japanese culture. They make excellent food, they have satisfying wooden dinnerware, paper walls, and they bow. Pretty much everything about them is interesting. Bombing aside (as I've said before, leave the past in the past), I love the Japanese. So needless to say, I felt bad when I thought I might have offended one at a local restaurant.

Now the state where I come from, I'm sure my innocent gesture was nothing compared to what they normally get. "Haw haw! Ya'll shore do talk funny!", is what I expect they get from the local rednecks.

I was in line talking to the order taker person and I forgot to tell her I needed chopsticks. Getting her attention before she wandered off, I told her I wanted some chopsticks as well, and I accompanied the words with a completely unconscious hand motion.

See this character:
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Imagine the top line is my index finger and the bottom my thumb. Below is the gesture I made to a woman who likely has a better grasp of English than I do.
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If for some reason you still don't get the mental image, take your hand and make it into a mouth shape and move it like you do when you are on the phone and you motion to someone in the room with you that the person you are speaking to is just "blah blah blah'ing". That's what I did, but only with two fingers. And I did it right in her face. I felt pretty bad about it but she, apparently taking no offense and poking fun at me for the gesture, said it would be $5 for the chopsticks and made the same gesture back at me. Paying it would have served me right but she of course didn't make me, though I reached for my wallet with lightning speed to show my willingness to amend my idiocy. Hopefully she truely wasn't offended. I don't want her running to her temple shaped paper house and running a sword through her own stomach because she was so deeply shamed (while we are throwing stereotypes around I wanted to stick that in). When I think on it though, I wouldn't get offended by something like that towards me. If someone said they were "looking for some cotton" and made gestures of people picking cotton in the fields on a hot summer day, I'd just laugh and likely mock them like was done to me. After that I'd point out that my people were too busy being driven off their land by the goverment to pick cotton.

As sort of a self-applied penance, I decided to make myself learn Japanese so I could apologize in her own language. That and I've always wanted to learn. Also, anything that can take my mind off my problems for even a minute is good in my book and (despite what you may think), this will take a bit longer than that. I picked up some audios (and books) which I've used to fill the empty time driving to and from classes. It's been interesting and of course, rather difficult but knowing the few words and culture bits I now do, I must say it is extremely enjoyable. While I can only do such small tasks now as greet, say goodbye and talk about the weather in addition to say how I've been lately, I cannot apologize (until 5 minutes ago when I decided to look it up, at least). So now I fight the urge, like any person learning a foreign language, to use my recently aquired "skill" and order (or at least greet) in Japanese.

The only other foreign language I've ever taken is Spanish and since that is so close to English, it wasn't much of a problem. Japanese, as you might imagine, is about as far from English as you can get so rather than the words sounding vaguely familiar to what you know them as, you are separated from anything remotely similar to what you are accustomed too. But I guess that is half the fun.

A friend of mine pointed out when I told him I was learning a bit of the language that it's "not something you can learn overnight". Good thing I have friends like this. Good thing he spoke up so soon before I strolled very high and mighty to the restaurant trying to strike up a conversation where I'd inadvertently taunt the family of the workers and insult the size of my own anatomy. Those of you who thought of deciding on a language to take up and just had your overnight success dreams dashed, I apologize. Perhaps I should put a disclaimer in here from now on.
Warning: Painfully obvious commentary will be made!

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