Voices that Annoyed Me

During the first couple of months, listening to radio was a torture as I had hard time digesting a voice from various kinds of people spoken in Japanese. It became another source for an argument between me and my husband, who habitually turns on radio while he drives. Often I urged him to turn the radio off but he did not understand what bothered me. After some exchanges of a begging and a refusal, it settled on his lowering the volume and my stopping nagging. One day, during an unpleasant silence caused by this routine, I closed my eyes to contemplate what was going on with me.

I was annoyed only when a radio personality spoke in Japanese. No announcers who spoke in an impersonal but accurate manner bothered me so much.    When I watched radio, I was not bothered either. Uncontrollable irritation emerged against the one from radio only when it was Japanese. In some stations, a short English remark was inserted occasionally such se “this is a whole earth station – FM Kokoro.” Strange enough, it was not annoying. I certainly held the familiarity to English speech in which I used to bathed myself. Given that, there was still something else wrong with my perception toward Japanese speeches.

I heard a young man from a Rock station and his voice got to my nerved. As he responded his listeners’ request and made some friendly comments in a cheerful high-pitched sweet voice, he sounded insincere. This negative feeling urged me to make endless and vicious guesses upon his private life. Probably, he would not be loyal to his wife or his girlfriend. The womanizer might go on cheating his partner since he could continuously hook a new woman saying he was a host of a radio show. What a buster!

 In the same program, I could also hear a young female voice who co-hosted the same program. Her voice sounded unnecessarily flattering. My prompt assumption was her female friends would not like her because she was only nice to men. Or maybe only her voice sounded pretty. Out of the radio life, no one pay much attention and she could have a lonely miserable life. How pathetic!

From a classical music program floated out a middle-aged male voice – low deep and soft. Many people would find it attractive but I thought it snobby and hypocritical. Maybe he would wear a tweed jacket and put a matched handkerchief in the front pocket. He should be the only person who thought it was cool. Despite his gentle intelligent appearance, his mind could be occupied cunning plots. Stay a way from him!    

I was almost drawn in the flood of Japanese speech that gave me clear clues for a speaker. The voice spoken in my native language stirred up so many thoughts in my brain that I felt overwhelmed and dizzy. Visual information from TV distracted me not to trap into delusional thoughts but audio inputs unpleasantly kept tapping upon my imagination. How come did it happen? Further contemplation led me to a discovery: this unpleasant reaction against spoken Japanese evidenced the existence of a skill I had failed to attain in English.

 During my stay in the US, I merged myself English speaking environment. For the first couple of years, I felt miserable when I turned on a radio. It took only five minutes until I lost my focus and radio talks became a meaningless buzz. Through slow desperate struggles, I gradually develop my listening comprehension skills. Five minutes became 5 minutes in a month. It took another few months to reach 10 minutes. Maybe a year had passed before I could expand my limit to 30 minutes. In the third year, I was thrilled to realize I was driving and listening to the radio and picked up a necessary part of traffic information. Thereafter a couple of radio programs in PBS become my favorite. It was a joy to come to have some favorite radio programs. However it always took some efforts to keep listening. Often times a part of (or most of) a speech sounded clueless and it did not make sense to me. Always there were words I did not know. Even at the intimate moment of my relationship with audio media, I was occupied with sound and semantic process. I was slow to go beyond. Should radio be my girlfriend, I was a terrible boy friend. I would have been yelled. “Why couldn’t you pick up what I ment but didn’t tell you!”

But with Japanese, I can be a careful experienced female company who can read between lines. Speech gives me a lot of clues. I can tell the speaker’s personal background such as a hometown, educations and a social class. It also helps me to conjure the personality of a speaker, scan the mood of the day, and probe hidden feelings. Though not always correct, the guesses gave me a confidence.

So a shift in role from an indifferent boy friend to an attentive female listener was so drastic for me to bear when I started exercising sealed social skills on my return to Japan. It was like I had been blindfolded for a while and it was taken suddenly in daylight. The sunshine is too glittering to face. I felt overwhelmed and wanted come back to the comfortable darkness – to the ignorant safety.

How to identify a person as a member in a society is a set of skills. Only through a long mostly-unconscious learning process, you can tell what the person means in the reality. It takes social trainings and experiences. Unfortunately I have not acquired that skill in English being busy matching a sound and its lexicon.

Living in a second language spoken society is similar to residing in a small cubic flame covered by lace curtains. They do not block the inner space from the outside view completely and let in some light. As the sunshine rise, an inner resident can get a clearer picture but never get vivid information as the people who was born and grown up out side of the cubic. But the separation cuddles the innocent captive beneath a warm blanket while the bare reality sometimes freezes outer habitants with their gained knowledge. “Turn off the radio” was a cry from a baby-wanna-be who had been suspended from growing mature while having probation in another world in the US.

 One mystery reminds: why did my husband not mind listening the radio? Well maybe he was born and raised as a man – from the Mars. We can not regain what we have not had, can’t we?