My very first day in the United States started in Portland, Oregon. The Delta airplane landed in the morning. Inside of the plane, there were plenty of foreigners among some Japanese. Stewardesses were Americans including one Japanese American fluent in Japanese language. I did not have many chances to talk in English aboard. I did not have to complete any English sentences there. Just saying a few words awkwardly would do all the things I wanted. The flight actually was the beginning of the outer world where I myself was one of the foreigners. But I did not realize it.
There are number of Japanese firms that settled some subsidiaries or production facilities in Oregon. The Japanese I saw aboard must have been the people working at those places. They knew where they headed for after being released at the airport. They disappeared from the airport pretty soon.
I was left alone. All I had as a clue to decide what to do was a piece of paper that showed the leaving time of Amtrak from Portland Station. I found a shuttle bus to take me to the Amtrak Station. I just hoped that the driver was not a scummy one to deceive the tourists. He took me there at a reasonable expense.
I entered it. It was not crowded at all. Several people there were in all kinds of races. The scenery was strange as I had always been in the society where the members are racially homogeneous. Only foreign country I had been to back then was USSR. I went there for twelve days for sightseeing when I was twenty. To be in the foreign country was a shocking experience. I got amazed by at least a couple of discoveries every day. The people there still looked homogeneous to me. So the people at the Amtrak station appeared like a human zoo which purposefully collected different races into one place. I was there to add one Japanese.
I looked around to find the train diagram to confirm the leaving time I knew. It was okay. I tried to stay without making any eye-contacts with other sample humans. I again looked around. The samples were observed by two people, who were a man like the marshmallow man in the Ghost-busters sitting behind the ticket counter and a typical Far Side fat middle-aged lady behind the snack-vending counter.
Until this very day to come to the United States, my great anxiety was about how well I can communicate in English. My TOEFL scores were not bad. That’s why OIT accepted me as an international student. The scores, however, did not represent all. They did not guarantee that I could handle the daily conversation without problem from the very first day.
I had much spare time. I needed to assess how well I was communicable in English. The people in the lobby had no reason to be my sincere subject. They might get frustrated by awkward conversation. Or they might turn out to be bad guys to cheat tourists. (The Japanese tourists are from probably the safest country in the world. Tourist guidebooks repetitively warn the Japanese tourists to be cautious against crimes overseas.) I thought that they were not trustworthy enough. There were two more people waiting for me to judge. The marshmallow-man and the Far Side lady.
These characters were there to serve customers. They ought to be reasonable and safe, I thought. Which one of them should I talk to? The marshmallow-man was someone I needed to talk to because I had to buy the ticket to Klamath Falls. But the Far Side lady is not. I made up my mind that I would try some conversation with the Far Side lady first to prepare for the inevitable conversation with the marshmallow.
I stepped toward the counter to investigate what were sold. There were numerous products that I had never seen before. Then the lady abruptly said hello to me. Reality is much more cruel to beginners than English exercising skits are. Actually she did not say hello; she said, “Hi honey! Where are you going?” That frightened me very much. Suddenly a real conversation started, while I was looking for some easy topic for the exercise chat. There was no room to complete the sentence in my mind. I replied, “Klamath Falls.”
As I remember the conversation, she must have regarded me as a junior high school student on a trip to somewhere. I didn’t know that I appeared extremely young to Americans. There were no kid wandering in the lobby. And I did not see any kid alone in the trains later. A junior high school student traveling alone in Amtrak trains might appear unusual to her.
Back then in the middle of the abrupt conversation, the next question was presented before I became ready to think. She said something with two words, “family” and “there.” I constructed a sentence from the two words I could listen, “Do you have your family there?” I said, “No. I’m going to school there.” She explicitly became suspicious. She continued to ask me questions. But my brain was already overloaded. I stepped backward away from her, saying “I have to buy the tickets.”
The test turned out disastrous. I found out my listening skill was terrible. Sentence-building ability was better than the listening skill but far from the demand. I simulated the procedures of buying the ticket to Klamath Falls. It seemed that I could survive safely if I simply tell the destination and the number of the ticket I want to the marshmallow-man without any attempt of English exercising. “I may have to ask if travelers’ check is acceptable. But the possible answer is either yes or no” I thought.
I went to the counter. I said, “One ticket to Klamath Falls.” The marshmallow-man nodded. Things looked fine to me until he asked me my name. If I buy the train ticket at the station in Japan, no one will ask my name. The question did not exist in my scenario. I barely said, “What? Uh. Excuse me?” He said, “Your name, please.”
I confirmed that the man was demanding my name for an unknown reason. I asked back “Do you want my name for the ticket?” That was probably the longest sentence I could make at that moment. Fortunately his reply was clear and short. “Oh, yes.”
He had asked my name. And I began my answer with “My name is…” exactly as I learned in school. “My name is Masato Ichikawa.” I told him fluently with no consideration over the difficulty that my name would cause.
“Oh, oh, wait. Wait a minute. How do you spell it?” he said.
“My first name is Masato. M. A. S. A. T. O!” I announced. He repeated one by one and asked.
“So this is your first name. Okay. And your last name please.”
“My last name is Ichikawa. I. C. H. I. K.”
“Oh, slow down, please. Your last name is itchy-what?”
“My last name is Ichikawa.”
“Oh, okay. I know that one.” He typed my name over the blank ticket and handed it to me. I looked at it. My name on the ticket was Masato Ishikawa.
“This is not my name.” I claimed and handed it back to him.
“Did I make a mistake? Masato Ishikawa. Isn’t it what you told me?” he wondered.
“My last name is Ichikawa, not Ishikawa.”
“Oh. Ichikawa! You are not Ishikawa.” I nodded, meaning “That is correct.”
He continued, “Are you Japanese?” I was surprised to hear the station attendant ask my nationality this time. “Buying a ticket is an entangled process. I have to tell the attendant what my nationality is.” I thought. I gave him a simplest answer anyway. Then, he further continued:
“I knew you are Japanese. I knew that Ishikawa is a last name of Japanese people. There are many Japanese living around here. They are nice and hard-working. You know, my dentist is a Japanese. He’s a good dentist. His name is Ishikawa. That’s why I thought you were Ishikawa. So you are Ichikawa. That’s a new one. So there are Ishikawa and Ichikawa in Japanese. Are there more Ichikawa than Ishikawa in Japan?”
My name caused me a big trouble on the very first day of my stay in the United States. It does so even now whenever I meet Americans who are friendly but with few Japanese friends.