After I came up with a unique and verbally “friend”-friendly nickname for myself, there remained some persistent people who continued to challenge the precise Japanese pronunciation of my name. Some instructors, without knowing the relationship between my true name and my nickname, simply read out my name in the student list when taking the attendants. Only several acquainted instructors and professors kindly interpreted my name in the list into the nickname in their minds. (Some even jotted down “Sho” beside my name.)
Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong and the two children remained to call me by my real name also. Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong had been in China. They said that they had given the Chinese students in their class English names. They must have been used to calling Asians by the English names. The reason they called me by my real name may have been “Sho” does not sound quite like a person’s name. Their children followed the practice. Perhaps due to the same reason, some refused to take the advantage of my nickname.
Those persistent ones were willing to master the correct pronunciation. But the task did not come easy to most of them. They could not allocate one vowel sound to one vowel letter in the English alphabet. Let’s just take a look at an example in a word, “invite.” The first “i” is read as [i]. But the second “i” is [ai]. Each of the phonetic letters in the Japanese language does not allow multiple readings. When English, or maybe some other European language possibly Dutch or Spanish, was introduced to Japan, and was systematically related to Japanese letters, one-to-one relation was inevitable. When I write “Masato,” the two “a’s” carry the identical sound [a].
The stress systems are also different between English and the Japanese. The sound to be stressed in English words are expressed with slightly louder and prolonged voice than others’. Whereas the Japanese stress is expressed with high tones. (The tones in the Japanese pronunciation is not as significant as in the notorious four tones of Mandarin.)
As being often requested, I let my friends hear the Japanese pronunciation. Most of them said that they could not recognize each word in the pronunciation. Some even compared the series of pronounced sounds to the sound of machine gun bullets. The combinations of vowels and consonants sound with very little variance of strength to the English speakers. This is because of their native stress system with louder and prolonged sound for the stress point than others’. For native English speakers, to discern the own stress system in English and to get rid of it are the extremely difficult process.
I told the persistent people to cut my name into each syllable like “Ma,” “Sa,” “To” first. Then I told them to clap their hands to the pronunciation of each sound. This was a part of the Japanese teaching method which I learned in the Japanese language teaching course. They practiced very hard clapping their hands before or after murmuring “Flat like bullet sound.” The method worked well. They were freed from the curse of the English pronunciation system when calling my name.
Just a few people remained troubled. They could never call my name without giving me a short applause. Of course, I didn’t mind it as far as my name was pronounced acceptably.