The Ient Family: Family History

Learning to Count & Speak in Japanese

So the first Japanese we learnt was the words of command – fall in, left turn, right turn, how to count – that was the important thing. You may have heard or you’ve seen the programme Tenko[i] about life in a POW camp in Singapore; but ‘tenko’ in Japanese means ‘roll call’. So they called tenko two or three times a day. Well, there was no British army numbers or English names or anything. When they shouted tenko you had to call out a Japanese number. They shouted Tenko and you had to line up round the cell and ‘tenko’ number off. Well of course we didn’t know the numbers, so what you did, you learnt one number and you stood in that place every time. I was number 29, so when it came to me to shout my number, that was when I shouted 'ni - jū – kyū' [29 in Japanese]. To count in Japanese, it’s perfectly simple, one to ten is [Chick counts off with his fingers]:

1        ichi

2        ni

3        san

4        shi

5        go

6        roku

7        shichi

8        hachi

9        kyū

10      jū

Now, if you remember that ju is ten and ichi is one, well eleven, automatic, is ju ichi, isn’t it? Quite simple. If you remember ju is ten and ni is two, twelve is ju ni, ten and two. Now if you say twenty-one, twenty-one – two is ni, ju is ten and ichi is one, ni ju ichi. Perfectly simple – have you got that?

Laughter.

So, it’s no good shouting Tenko here, is it?

Laughter.

Anyway, after the first thing on how to learn Japanese. Just a stage further, when you got to twenty, which is two tens, ju is ten, ni is two, so twenty is ni ju, two tens. Twenty-one, ni ju ichi, ni ju ni, ni ju san, ni ju shi, ni ju go, that’s twenty-five. So I had to learn how to count in Japanese.

You must remember, this was the very first time that Asiatics had ever beaten Europeans in battle. For the most part, the Japanese soldiers we were guarded by were ordinary working class folk, peasants in their society. Some of them weren’t very bright, good fighters mind, but they weren’t very bright, and of course here are the Europeans who had dominated the Far East for decades and decades. As far as these Japanese soldiers were concerned, this was payback time. Every one of those Japanese soldiers representing the emperor, in the Japanese army culture, so virtually anything that we did or said, we were insulting that emperor. So the first thing they did, we had to learn how to bow. They don’t salute the way we do, they’re doing the bowing bit. Now bowing doesn’t come easy to an Englishman, I don’t know why, but we never bow, do we? Well, if we get the OBE maybe, but this bowing took us a while to learn and we couldn’t do it correctly.

The Japanese word for attention! is: 'Chusti!' [Chūi! Is the correct dictionary translation] and 'keirei' which means salute, and of course if you didn’t do it right, as we never did then, they made you go down on your knees ... which made us about the same size as what they were, then they proceed to knock hells bells out of us because we insulted the emperor by not bowing correctly. So this was our first culture shock. For example, one time I was standing in the corner, minding my own business and this Japanese guard came over and shouted 'Chusti!' [attention], and got me on my knees and kicked hell out of me. We had in the camp a Japanese chap who was a bit of an interpreter as he had worked as a cook in a lumberjack company in Canada. I said to him, 'What was that for?' He said, 'You are a naughty man.' I said, 'Why? I was just standing in the corner doing nothing.' He said, 'Well yes, but how were you standing?' I said, 'Like this.' He said, 'You can’t stand with your arms folded in Japan, you are adopting a superior attitude. If you stand like that in Japan you are making out you are superior to the Japanese. You are a prisoner of war, you’ve got nothing to be superior about.' So this is the culture shock that you get for just for folding your arms!

Laughter.

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