Close My Eyes and Count to Ten
Juliet deButts (Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School)
The first time I ever heard the word “Japan,” I was six. I was in first grade, and along with the
planetary system and basic grammar, we were being taught to count in foreign languages.

Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu, ju.

I didn’t think much more about Japan—about the country, about the language. I knew there was
Japanese food, I knew there was a Japan, but I was nonchalant about the entire business. My mother did tell
me stories about it, but she told me stories about other places too—about Thailand, and Hawaii, and
London and Paris—so I never attached particular importance to the stories of the Japanese doctors that
came to study with my grandfather and who wouldn’t let anyone else pay for dinner, of their daughters who
visited but spoke very little English and were married in my grandmother’s wedding dress, of an aunt who
worked as a Japanese aerobics teacher for an entire summer without learning to say more than “inhale,
exhale,” and how to count to ten.

Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu, ju.

As I grew older, my limited store of knowledge expanded to children’s books set in Tokigawa-era
Japan, to “kimono” and “katana,” “karate” and “karaoke,” and the fact that I loved Japanese food.

In seventh grade I walked into my first Japanese class, interested but nervous. It was the first day of
school, a new classroom, a new building, a new teacher and a new language, but the first thing we learned
was to count to ten—and I recognized the numbers.

Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu, ju.

I was fascinated by the way the characters curved and fell apart and came together again, by hiragana
and katakana and kanji and calligraphy. I devoured words that I’d never heard before, held them up and
weighed them by the scale of words I already knew. I rarely found them wanting—all the words and
patterns I learned, simple and basic, somehow matched the numbers I’d been carrying around in my head
for years: the smooth sounds and the slanted black lines in my notes and my textbook.

Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu, ju.

Japanese was fascinating and endlessly new—I was enthralled by every tidbit I learned. Manga,
anime, chopsticks, radicals, Chinese influences, rice farming, mountains, hot-springs, snow monkeys,
octopus muffins, obon festivals: I couldn’t get enough of it. So I stuck with Japanese, even after the sounds
stopped making quite so much sense, even after I needed to study harder and longer. Though the words I
learned and the characters I drew (over and over and over again on tracing paper, desperate to get them just
right) and the sounds I shaped with a reluctant tongue grew more and more complicated, farther and farther
away from the simple basics that had enchanted me as a child, I kept going, and I could hear an echo of
counting to ten.

Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu, ju.

It seemed that the more Japanese I learned, the less I knew. There are female samurai, of a kind—the
ama, who dive for pearls in icy waters, and follow a different code of honor from the men who lived and
died by the sword—and there’s a shortage of men to work modern Japanese farms, and the newest
publishing sensation in Japan is the cell-phone novel. Everything I learned only reinforced my earlier
impressions of a country and a culture that had grace bred into its very bones; a place that effortlessly and
elegantly mingled the old and the new, the traditional and the innovative. It was a country of
contradictions—in everything from its geography to its history to its politics. The more I learned, the less I
knew; the less I knew, the more I wanted to discover.

I watched Miyazaki movies, and loved them—always in Japanese, with English subtitles, because the
dubbed versions didn’t sound right—and I struggled through a few manga in Japanese before surrendering
and reading them in English. I still study, I still listen and read and ask innumerable questions, and I still
count, when I'm bored or tired or angry, and the numbers are still as soothing as they ever have been, and
they are still, for me, the essence of Japan.

Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu, ju.

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