There is something called a “creative misunderstanding” where you get the wrong end of the stick with a subject but somehow or other come out of the process with an interesting new perspective. I had one of these moments the other day while thinking about the word “sensei”.
Anyone who has come into contact with Japan has of course heard the word “sensei”, but have you ever given any thought as to what it means?
In the world of Hollywood films, a “sensei” is usually a revered elder, someone with life experience, a karate master or a wise old man (for some reason, it’s usually men). In Japan, however, anyone who teaches something is a “sensei”, not just a university professor or school teacher, but also an English teacher fresh off the plane.
I was thinking about how the word “sensei” can sometimes be compartmentalized in Japan so that you can be a “sensei” in one part of your life while anything but a “sensei” in other aspects. I’m not sure, for example, that a lot of the young foreigners who teach English in Japan and get called “sensei” are necessarily great repositories of life wisdom. But you can be a “sensei” about all kinds of things — a sensei at skiing or dancing or cocktail mixing — without being much of an exemplar of humanity overall.
But that’s where the misunderstanding came in. I was thinking about this concept of the compartmentalisation of the word “sensei” and what floated into my mind were the long series of 20 comedic films (based on a manga series) called “Tsuri Baka Nisshi” (“Fishing Nut’s Diary”), starring the late Toshiyuki Nishida and Rentaro Mikuni. My impression was that the setup in these films is that the CEO of a construction company is an amateur fisherman and strikes up a friendship with the most humble salaryman in his company, a fishing obsessive called “Hama-chan”. (This name is a pun: “hamaru” means to become obsessed with something.) The long-running joke lies in the role reversal where, in anything connected with fishing, the humble clerk becomes the “master” while the big boss becomes the student. I was thinking this was a great example of the phenomenon of the “compartmentalised sensei”.
I must confess, however, that although I am aware of these films, I have not actually watched them. And when I Googled whether “Hama-chan” was regarded as a fishing “sensei” in the films, the answer came back that no, he was not referred to as a “sensei” but as a “baka sarariman”, a “stupid salaryman” who was obsessed with fishing above everything else. That rather seemed to torpedo my theory.
But the more I thought about it, the more closely connected and interchangeable the words “baka” and “sensei” seemed than I first thought. After all, if you are going to get to a level with something where you become a “sensei”, it’s almost certain that you have had to have been “stupidly” obsessed with it to begin with.
I’ve referred previously to how the writer Natsume Soseki once wrote that:
“There is in the world a thing called satire. Satire always has two types of meaning, a surface meaning and a reverse meaning. Everyone knows that the word ‘sensei’ can be used to mean ‘fool’ (‘baka’) .”
Soseki here posits “sensei” and “baka” as opposites, though capable of ironically switching from one to the other. This always make me smile when I think of the large numbers of readers, both in Japan and abroad, who have encountered a character simply called “Sensei” in Soseki’s famous novel “Kokoro” and treat this title in complete earnestness, despite the fact that the character has done nothing in life to deserve such an appellation and that Soseki was famous for his caustic wit.
Yet aren’t the words “sensei” and “baka” always in some kind of symbiosis? I
