T A B L E_T A L K February weather got you down? Fantasize about sunny paradises in Table Talk's Wanderlust area R E C E N T L Y Stoned on ice By Gary Kamiya Curling heats up Nagano (02/11/98) Après moi, de luge By Gary Kamiya Getting a half-second high from the sport that gives a whole new meaning to the expression "balls out" (02/10/98) Higher! Faster! Wetter! By Gary Kamiya Our half-Japanese man in Japan reports on the thrill of victory -- and the agony of Nagano (02/09/98) Mondo Weirdo By Sarah Schmelling Why I loved being lonely and sick and far from home (02/06/98) Soba, so good By Koji Yoshii Savoring Nagano's specialty food (02/05/98) Browse the Feature archives		__RETRO BURGER _|_ page 2 of 2 Japanese English! Or, as Zen-master-with-a-low-I.Q. signs say all over Nagano, "Welcome -- you are here!" I first sampled this wondrous tongue when I was a taxi driver in San Francisco and picked up two Japanese businessmen who said they wanted to go to "Rhibaldsho." I had never heard of Rhibaldsho, so I asked them again. They repeated it slowly: "Pliss -- we want go to ribald show." Ah, ribald -- a word not spoken by anyone in the United States since the 19th century. A retro call for naked women! We merrily zoomed to the Mitchell Brothers sex arcade. According to my father, one of the reasons the Japanese often have so much trouble speaking idiomatic English, even after studying it for years in school, is that their teachers often don't really speak or know proper English themselves. A weird hybrid language -- Japanese English -- is now institutionally entrenched and passed on from generation to generation. Our relative Emiko, who is fluent in English -- she lived in the U.S. when she was a little girl -- told him that her daughter spoke terrible English, but when Emiko tried to get her to speak correctly, her daughter flatly refused, saying, "That isn't how I was taught." The Japanese difficulty with English, we speculated, might also be related to their upbringing, which stresses performance, obedience and discipline. This leads to a highly internalized sense of shame and self-consciousness, and isn't big on flexibility and looseness. These traits have some wonderful social results -- a staggering uniformity of graciousness, the fact that people simply get off their bikes and leave them unlocked on the sidewalk -- but they may not be particularly conducive to the who-cares-if-I-make-a-fool-of-myself attitude useful to linguists. Not that I'm not in a very good position to throw stones when it comes to language skills. Thursday, 12:25 a.m. Back in Saku after the hockey game (and yet another emperor sighting! His crowds, by the way, keep getting bigger), which I managed to watch until 12 minutes into the final period. The U.S. was ahead 4-2 when I left (and eventually won by that score). It was a highly entertaining and competitive game: The U.S. team was clearly superior, especially in its crisp passes going forward on the attack, and was both more athletic and physical than the Finnish team, but paid for its occasional sloppiness in the transition game. The Finns scored their second goal short-handed, when a U.S. defender misplayed a routine Finnish clearance and handed a Finnish forward a virtual gift goal. I've seen the U.S. women twice now, against China and Finland, and they are a most impressive unit. A well-played women's game is more entertaining than a ragged men's game: The slower pace and comparative absence of checking (although there were some bone-crunching hits dealt out) opens it up more for a precision passing style, which is prettier than the crash-and-lurk tactics played by some of the men's teams I've seen here. I'll have more on the U.S. women later -- but I would like to raise a dubious eyebrow about the authenticity of the "Italian" and "Japanese" men's teams. I heard one "Italian" guy yell, "Let 'er rip, man," in an accent that was clearly not Milanese, and the Japanese government granted Japanese nationality to six Canadian ringers, several of them half-Japanese types like me. I wonder if any of those guys have American last names and switched to their mom's names to avoid the embarrassment of a "McDonald" or "Smythe" upholding the glory of Old Nippon? Ah well, they aren't going anywhere anyway. But keep your eye on Kazakhstan, which played a very elegant game in beating "Italy"/the Bronx, and which, with Belarus, is the dark horse of the tournament. Both of those teams have made it through the cannon-fodder group and will advance to mix it up with the Dream Teams, the Mighty Six with their NHL star-packed lineups. By the way, did the International Olympics Committee really strip that snowboarder of his gold medal because he tested positive for marijuana? If I read the logic of this correctly, that means they're either saying that marijuana is a performance-enhancer (what a message to send to Our Young People!) or are simply being moralistic busybodies. What next -- Jim Beam checkpoints? Maybe those renegade snowboarders who didn't come were right about the IOC being the Evil Man ... Tomorrow is a huge day -- the rescheduled downhill and combined downhill, speed skating, hockey. I won't be able to file, so my next dispatch will be Friday. On with the ribald show! SALON | Feb. 12, 1998