JSL

I've found a Japanese Sign Language class! This is astounding, not only because JSL is much less common or standardized than ASL, but also because I am in one of the more rural parts of Japan. My supervisor's wife is in charge of special education at one of my schools so she knew about a class she was taking herself at a community center near where I live. I went to the first lesson and we spent quite a bit of the class talking about me instead of the lesson, which I felt rather bad about. Everyone is really nice. The teacher is a deaf (or maybe hard-of-hearing) man in his 50s or 60s, and the class, before I showed up, was six women. We're going to a beer garden next week! It'll be good fun, I think. I'm gonna try to learn a few useful signs before that.

JSL also borrows quite a bit from ASL (which in turn is based primarily on French Sign Language--go figure), so I already know some signs and fingerspelling. In JSL, though, they have handshapes for syllables, instead of letters. So, ASL 'S' became JSL 'SA,' etc., but there's loads more syllables than letters, unfortunately. Some are pretty cool--JSL 'KI' looks like this,


because 'KI' is the first syllable in the word for 'fox,' kitsune. Looks like a fox's ears, doesn't it? I think it's pretty nifty. If you've seen the movie Babel, you've already seen some (rather raunchy) JSL.

Education for the deaf, here and in the United States, has traditionally stressed oralism, which is the doctrine that deaf people must learn to speak and lipread in order to communicate. Granted that it's important for deaf people to be able to communicate in a mostly-hearing world, but the complexity of mastering spoken language if you cannot hear is mind-boggling, and results are apparently slow. It is changing, and has gotten a lot better in the US, where both oralism and manualism (sign language) are incorporated into teaching. In Japan, most deaf children are taught together with their hearing peers in the same classroom--I don't know what I think about that yet, but I look forward to finding out more.