The Last Samurai

He is using all of the correct judo procedures, besting one man after the other. All of this is shown with fast cutting at its most seductive. It is an exhilarating passage. It is like something from the ordinary Japanese fight-picture, only much more skillfully done. We—not yet guessing what the picture is about—think: that Sugata is a real man, a real hero. The crowd thinks so. There are cries of how wonderful he is, how marvelous. Sugata, carried away, attacks one man after the other, always winning.

There is a cut to the judo teacher’s room. Everything is still. He does not move, there is no movement on the screen, and after the furious motion of the sequence directly before it is like an admonition. He sits there, as though waiting, the seconds pass. Then Sugata, his kimono torn, comes in.

Then Sugata does an extraordinary thing. He opens the shoji and without a look backward or below he leaps.

I am really looking forward to reading the book.

The Pictorial Dictionary had a picture of a samurai on the front so first I looked for that. It was quite hard to find because it is in Ethnology, and when I found it the only words it gave were the words for samurai and for armour, and it didn’t even give the character for samurai it just spelled it out in hiragana.

I did not want to say anything to Sibylla because I did not want to hurt her feelings but I think she guessed something because she asked what’s the matter. I said Nothing and she said Doh ka na? very sceptically. Doh ka na? means Really? in Japanese. I showed her the samurai and she said it was absolutely appalling that it did not give the kanji and that it was probably because they thought it was too hard for people, so what I should do was write a letter to the editor and sign it Ludo Age Six. I asked if I could write it on the computer and she said how will he know you are really six? She said to be sure to put the character in my letter so I am going to.

Sibylla is watching Seven Samurai again. I have seen it before several times so I decided to start reading Sugata Sanshiro. We are each going to pick a character every day and master them thoroughly on a daily basis starting tomorrow. Today I just learned two words that Sibylla gave me that come up in the book.

Ju means soft and jitsu means art or skill and do means way and apparently the characters turn up in other compounds. I already know all the hiragana and katakana.

Finally I looked at the first page of the book. Japanese is the hardest language in the world.

I did not want to colour in the characters that I knew because this is the only Japanese book that we have apart from two of Sibylla’s. So I decided to try to find another character in the dictionary and it took about an hour to find it. The characters all look quite similar so it is hard to remember anything if you do not colour them in as you go along. After a while Sibylla looked up. She stopped the video and said what’s the matter. I said Nothing. She came over and looked at the page of the book and said how are you ever going to learn this if you don’t colour in the characters? She said these little Japanese books are so cheap, it only cost a fiver, we can always get another. She said she wanted me to enjoy my birthday, and she said if anything was bothering me I should let her know.

She said I could ask as many questions as I wanted because it was my birthday. I said who is my father? Sibylla said she was sorry, but she could not tell me. She said he was a travel writer and she had only met him once.

I think maybe he is somebody famous.

21 March, 1993

Today we each picked a character. We are going to do this every day until we know them all. There are 1945 and I already know three so if we do two a day we will know them all in 971 days. I wanted to do 20 a day because then we would be finished in three months but Sibylla said no it would be terrible to wake up thinking we had to do 20 whereas we could always do more if we felt like it.

Sibylla picked JIN person/hito person. JIN is the exogenous Chinese lexeme and hito is an indigenous Japanese lexeme.

I picked

yaku flute 17-stroke radical for musical instrument

Unfortunately Halpern does not seem to have any characters that use the radical.

After we had thoroughly mastered our characters I asked Sibylla where she met my father. Apparently Sibylla met my father at a party. Everyone at the party wanted to talk to him but he decided to talk to Sibylla and when she decided to leave the party he decided to leave too.

22 March, 1993

Sibylla picked DAI TAI (big)/ō/(big) and she wanted me to pick TAI huge/futo(i) (thick) because it would be easy to remember.

I picked

JI (imperial seal). I said if I could have

JI (that) she could have but she said we could do them tomorrow.