– You live in a rural area. Every day cars appear out of nowhere, and you sit in a traffic jam on the way to work.
– The road you take all the time goes somewhere different now.
– All around you are new buildings. You have no memory of them being under construction.
– Everyone you meet is either young or old. When you see someone your own age, you question their presence.
– You always see people who say hello and call you by name. You have no memory of ever meeting them.
– One day, the clouds start rolling in. You can see the wind swiftly pushing them towards the hills.
– It finally gets warm. You tell yourself you’ll go to the beach the next day it’s sunny. The next time you notice the sun, snow has started to fall.
– You see a sea creature on sale at the seafood market. It is orange, bumpy, vaguely alien, and looks like no fish or shellfish you have ever heard of.
I work in Hakodate, in Hokkaido, the prefecture of ‘People who speak Japanese nobody can understand’. Besides the general dialect of the Hokkaido region, there are also some differences between cities. Hakodate has it’s own dialect and accent. For Japanese people, these dialects are not easy to identify. For me? I couldn’t tell if it hit me with a brick.
Even though I’ve learnt Japanese for a number of years, speaking and listening was never my strong point. Hakodate is the first place where I’m actually in a situation where I listen to Japanese every day. When I got here, to me there was only two types of Japanese - Japanese I could understand, and Japanese I couldn’t understand.
When I came hear, when people spoke Japanese I couldn’t understand, I just assumed that my Japanese wasn’t advanced enough to understand. It didn’t occur to me that they might just have a thick accent, or better yet, be speaking completely in dialect.
I have a colleague who has been working here for about 30 years, and everyone remarks on how he speaks in an obvious Hakodate dialect. To me, I couldn’t tell the difference. Then just this year a new colleague came from Osaka. I could tell he spoke in a Kansai dialect because the intonation was a little different, and also because he would say things like ’分からへん’ instead of ‘分からない’. But one day I caught a really interesting conversation between him and the school administrator.
Her: If you don’t mind me asking…you don’t sound like you come from Osaka. You sound like maybe you’re from Kyoto instead?
Him: Oh yea, I was born in Kyoto.
So apparently he was born in Kyoto, moved to Tokyo at around elementary school age, moved back to Osaka after university to work there for 10 years. AND STILL, people could tell he was not only from Kansai, but specifically from Kyoto.
That’s really interesting! I live in Kesennuma and people here use んだ too. None of the other ones look familiar, however.
I was just talking a Japanese friend who were saying that because of the curling joshi (from Hokkaido(?)) at the Olympics, the way they say そうだね was starting to catch on. My friend said the equivalent in Kesennuma would be だがら (だから in standard Japanese), but she didn’t think that was cute enough to catch on. I don’t hear a whole lot of strong regional accent where I live, but it seems like the trend is to put dakuten (vocalization) on a lot of syllables that wouldn’t normally have it. I wonder if it’s because I mostly talk to teachers at school, and maybe they try to use standard Japanese since they’re teaching children.
I think it’d be cool to have a regional accent, but I’m kind of scared to try and incorporate it into my Japanese. Maybe if I lived in the south parts of Japan where the dialect was stronger. (Or maybe I do have one and I just don’t know…)
