I realized sometimes last weekend that my last post totally changed course as I was writing it. While everything I wrote may be interesting to you it wasn’t the post I intended on writing.

I spent most of last Friday (after the MRI) proof-reading a 10-page brochure (is that even still the word if it’s that long?) that the Tourism Section puts out about Onoma. Onoma is a quasi-national park (that includes a mostly dormant volcano) that is located in the Northeast of Nanae and has had a long history of tourism. The brochure was last printed in 2006 and was looked over by one of the other foreigners working in Nanae at the time but they wanted me to look it over just in case something caught my eye. Because the printing company people don’t speak English (I’m assuming) there were some little mistakes with spacing etc. that they didn’t catch. I also took out a few words here and there to make it more concise. When I was done Emi brought it down to the Tourism Section but returned a short time later with the marked-up brochure and a 3-page hand written letter. Turns out, a year or two ago a Japanese man living outside of Sapporo came across our broucure somewhere in Sapporo and found some mistakes . Apparently he is some sort of English expert and native English speakers who happen to live in the Sapporo area sometimes ask him for help editing. What?!?@#

So, he decided to write us a letter with all of the errors and corrections (quite thoroughly explained, I might add). Sounds nice, right? Well, then he “suggested” the town pay him ¥10 (about 10 cents) for each error that they changed. How weird is that? I’ll admit I was a little skeptical. I mean, English grammar and punctuation are notoriously difficult. He must have gone through that thing with a fine toothed comb– he found some inconsistencies that I didn’t even notice. For instance, one time the text referred to “Onoma Station” and another time to “the Onoma Station”. Another time he used a semi-colon that I wouldn’t have used and didn’t think was correct…until I looked up its usage and found that he was right! (I’ll admit I was a little embarrassed).

All of this led Emi and I to a discussion about punctuation. Japanese punctuation is actually quite simple. They have about 9 different punctuation marks: parenthesis, quote marks (ex.「何」と思いました。/”What?” she said.) that look a little different from ours, commas, periods (again, a little different), a dash, and sometimes a question mark. I’ve found, though, that often the question mark is omitted since all questions (unless they are asked in a casual, shortened version) end with the question particle か so you know a sentence is a question even without the punctuation. Isn’t language so fascinating?

I’m not saying the Japanese necessarily have it easier than us, English speakers– while we’re studying these punctuation marks in middle school and getting some practice using them in high school they’re still learning how to write their language.