The more I fly, the more I realize the insignificance of my existence. It’s not only the journey that makes me think of it, although the idea of hundreds of people packed in this vessel for 12 hours and being transported across continents forty thousand feet above the earth does occasionally blow my mind when my mind steps away from its normalcy and consciously thinks of the scale and genius of it all.
It not even the fact that all these passengers have wildly different lives that are likely taking some sort of turn significant enough to require this level of transportation, or how they’re the main character in each of their own stories but just some stranger on the flight for everyone else. I mean, the person next to you could have a Nobel Prize and you wouldn’t know.
But what I meant by insignificance this time around came to me not during my flight but after.
I arrived at Kansai International Airport in Osaka, Japan at 12:30pm on October 25, 2024. In about two hours, I would meet up with some of my family who was flying in from India, and I figured the best thing to do while I waited was working out the logistics of our transportation ahead.
During my last trip to the country 7 years ago, my brother, having visited himself once prior, guided me and my parents around. This time it was my second time round, and by now having traveled more on my own than most of my family that was flying in (especially outside of India), I shouldered the responsibility of getting all the information we’d need to get to Guesthouse Nest — our accommodation for the night — as soon as we could.
After all, no one else had any significant experience with the country’s transportation system either, and if I succeeded it would save everyone a good few minutes of confusion after they arrived. With this mission in mind, I set off.
With European languages I can usually make out the general meaning of signboards and if not, there’s almost always someone around who speaks English and can help. In Japan, I quickly learned that's not the case.
This was problematic.
Historically, almost every time I’ve tried to learn a new language, when the moment comes to finally talk to a local, I’ve been too socially awkward and resorted to pretending I don’t know it at all and hoping the person I’m speaking to knows more English than I do their language. (Sometimes when this isn’t the case, the fallback option becomes gesticulating.)
This has happened in cases when I go on vacation to a country whose language I’ve been trying to learn, like Portugal, where I went last summer, and even my last Japan trip, where my brother handled most of the communication on all of our behalves (see related). But it also happened in the Netherlands where I lived for a solid two years during my bachelor degree, and barely spoke a word of Dutch. I began understanding it alright after just a few months in the country, but the fact that the vast majority of natives are fluent in English, combined with — alas — my social anxiety, ensured that I communicated in English and English alone.
If you think things couldn’t get worse, let me tell you that I was even too shy to speak in French — a language I’ve been learning since primary school — with my colleagues at the French startup I worked at only last year.
Looking back it seems like such a waste of opportunity. I mean, there’s literally no better way to learn a new language than immersion and, despite being an avid language enthusiast, I didn’t use it to my benefit.
And I was determined for the regret to be a strong enough driving force to make sure that I didn’t make the same mistake this time.
This time, I had committed over a month to the immersion. And that too, in a place where it’s near impossible to get by solely in English. I had made it my goal to not only learn as much Japanese as I could in my time there, but also to use it.
I repeated all of this to myself as an internal pep-talk before approaching a man at the help desk in one of the booths near the train platforms connected to the airport. As soon as I opened my mouth to speak, out came English once again. Due to the nature of his job, he knew the language too and was able to tell me what I needed to know about getting to the Nest, but I didn’t consider the interaction a success.
It is a principle in horse riding that the moment you fall off a horse, you get back on so as to eliminate the fear of it immediately. If you don’t, it will loom over you, growing, right up until your next ride, by which time your brain will have made a mountain out of a molehill of it and you’ll be much more frightened of it than you were right after you fell. I’ve fallen off horses many times, and I testify to this reasoning.
Analogously, I recognized that if I considered being able to communicate with this English-speaking man a success, I would likely begin seeking out more English speakers to talk to rather than focus on improving my own Japanese, and if I let it go on for too long I wouldn’t be able to go back.
I needed to fix things ASAP.
I’d seen a McDonald’s on the way to the trains, and I now made my way back there, determined to order a coffee in Japanese.
I remembered my brother Onkar correcting me in the relevant phrase just a couple of days ago back in the UK. We were sitting on the bank of the Thames, talking about how excited I was to be going to the country he had lived in for 5 years. ‘Ichi kohee, kudasai’ (word for word: one coffee please), I told him I’d say, thinking I was flaunting my Japanese skills. He gave me a puzzled look and corrected the way you say one in such contexts, as well as replacing the kudasai I’d learned with the more formal onegaishimasu.
After this discussion, I was confident that asking for coffee, at least, was something I could say correctly. I knew how to say thank you as well, so I considered myself well prepared for the interaction.
“Kohee o hitotsu, onegaishimasu”, I went ahead and ordered, my chest swelling with a sense of achievement as the words came out.
The man behind the counter replied in English.
Did the accent give it away, or was it my face? I drank up my coffee, resolving to try again.
There was a convenience store nearby and I went and bought a pack of social media-famous egg (tamago, in Japanese) sandwiches. I didn’t even say anything upfront and the store clerk began speaking to me in English right off the bat.
Ah. It was because I was at an airport. English is probably their default, especially with someone who doesn’t look Japanese. There must be thousands of non-native travelers passing through every day.
I thanked the cashier in Japanese regardless. In a way, I was relieved by the fact they understood that I didn’t really know the language, because if I accidentally said something offensive (i.e. in a tone that wasn’t polite enough), at least they’d know that it was an honest mistake and I didn’t know any better.
And I really didn’t. I was only making an effort to use what little of it I knew so that I wouldn’t fall back into the comfort zone of only using English, because there would be a lot more friction in switching to Japanese when I considered myself more capable. In fact, the perfectionist in me would prevail and I would never consider myself capable enough. Not during this trip, in any case.
I did my part at the convenience store, and at McDonald’s, even if I got a response in English. It was a good start, and I was determined to keep it up, hoping that soon someone would reply in Japanese too, but resolute in not resorting to English myself where I am capable of trying in Japanese.
You may be wondering where the theme of insignificance plays into all of this.
Well, this is just it.
Every other time I’ve felt that I’ll be judged if I say the wrong thing or say the right thing but don’t understand the response and embarrass myself, but the truth is, I’m really not that memorable. Neither are you, or most other people. You are the main character of our your own story — as you should be — but to that cashier you’re just a confused, uncaffeinated tourist in a new city who is at least making an effort to fit in, and if anything, that’s commendable.