Beni: Music to My Ears

When I visit Vancouver, sometimes I hang out at a coffee shop to guess which city a certain group of Japanese women are from. At times I even get bold enough to go up to them and ask in Japanese, "Where are you from?" just to see if I am right.

From my scanty research so far, I've determined that the girls who frequent Granville establishments like Blenz or work at the Japanese restaurant on the street (Yamazaki?) are not from Tokyo but from near Kobe and Nara, which are older parts of Japan. IMHO I don't think Tokyo people have the time to vacation or do ESL vacations. Perhaps they are too busy trying to make a good impression at home on the tourists.

IMHO it too may be rare to have visitors from the Inland Sea area (Shikoku) and southern Japan because they tend to prefer Europe or Hawaii. As well, the insular nature of Shikoku-jin may tend to make them seem shy, though I can imagine the few Catholics would be hooked on Rome.

Getting back to accents, in Japan, the accents are called -beni ie Tokyo-beni, and are due to influence and intermixing of Korean and Chinese and even European languages on Japanese in a given area.

E.g. Kagoshima-beni has adopted European and English words. As well, various adverbs, verbs and suffixes are distinct to a region, city or district. Part of this was to done to code-talk so villagers would discuss matters openly in front of their overlords who spoke the same language as their masters i.e. a Shogun born in the southern region would speak in southern dialect at home but speak in court language in Kyoto. If he wanted to discuss something personal with one of his loyal retainers, then he might switch to beni, provided that the Emperor did not employ spies from the same village as the Shogun to eavesdrop.

As well, there is a variant of Tokyo-beni that the kids there are rapidly evolving into a dialect distinct from standard beni. Over here, we call it "street slang", and the roughest equivalence would be "gangsta talk". One of its endearing qualities is almost every phrase sounds like a challenge because of the sentence ending: wakari-masu ka? (do you understand?) becomes wakaru de ya? or wakaru de yo? Also, English words are incorporated, sometimes in amusing ways foreign to Westerners. Indeed, the swear word "fuck" does not have the same emotional impact on Japanese ears as it does on Westerners sensitized to its meaning.

Anyways, after modernization (1853), dialect no longer determined where the average Japanese will end up as it did 2000+ years previously, prior to seclusion in the 17th Century. Though, Tokyo gossips will still pretend Kagoshima beni is incomprehensible and the people rude, ignoring the fact that it's easy to distinguish a Tokyo rube in Nagasaki from a native when he opens his mouth.

Overall though, it's all music to my ears, and I take special joy in enjoying the music of beni-shaberu (colloquial chatter) when travelling to and from the city.