The Southampton Review

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Japan Sound Memory

There is a crosswalk directly below my grandfather’s condo, its beeping echoing most clearly on mornings I wake up early. My family is originally from Osaka, where I was born, and my grandparents moved to Nagoya for my grandfather’s work, living in the same condo for the entirety of my life. It is this particular space I continually returned to as a child and into adulthood. Though I visited relatives in other areas of Japan, I always ended up back in Nagoya. 

The sound of the crosswalk remains one of the touchstones of memory, anchoring me to my family and a place I love so much.  

For many people, memory is a sensory mix. The area of our brain that takes in sensory information is also the same area that processes some elements of memory. Although there are commonalities between how most of us remember things, what brings us back to a certain place and time will differ. Echoic memory, the memory associated specifically with sound, has always been the strongest for me.

As a language, Japanese is full of onomatopoeias that describe anything from states of being to actions to the sounds emitted by animals or even objects. If you’re feeling irritated or are fretting, we use the term ira ira—even turning it into a verb: why are you ira ira-ing? Why are you irritated, why are you fretting? Some onomatopoeias are standard and, like ira ira, simply part of everyday language. 

The origins of others are more suspect. My grandmother, for instance, called vacuuming ga ga. I was never sure if other families used that phrase or if it originated with her. When I think of the crosswalk below my grandfather’s condo, I hear pi-po, pi-po, with the slightest breath between the two syllables. The sound of the crosswalk signal is so ubiquitous in the urban areas of Japan that pi-po, pi-po is the standard way to describe it. I was talking with someone with ties to Japan and unconsciously slipped in the pi-po sound during our conversation. Their eyes lit up in recognition of a familiar sonic landscape. 


There are the noises that underscore daily life in the large urban spaces of Japan: the crosswalk, the shopkeepers yelling out their greetings to customers, the echoing whoosh of the subway, the chipper and overly polite recorded voice of a woman letting you know when elevator doors will open or close. The longer I am in the country, the more faint these sounds become, shuffled to the back of my consciousness as I grow accustomed to them. I only realize I miss them when I am back in America. 

We moved to the United States when I was six years old. I don’t recall the moment I was told we would be leaving Japan for good, but I remember the months leading up to our departure. I remember screaming that I didn’t want to practice speaking English in preparation for the move, that I didn’t want to leave our home. Because of our move, the sounds of the country I left behind tend to be seasonal. I would return to Japan every summer to visit family, stepping off the plane to be greeted by unholy post-rainy season humidity and the unbelievably loud calls of the cicadas. 

In the height of summer in the midwest, the cicadas sing, too. The high-pitched whine is the male mating call and each species of cicada sing in their own way to attract females of the same type. Like the cicadas of North America, the songs of the cicadas in Japan are unique to their species. Yet there is something about the timbre and the intensity of one that reminds me of the other. Back in the midwest, I sit in my living room and listen to the cicadas and, for a moment, I feel that I am in Japan.


The sound of a name, the way you say it, also imparts a sense of place and a reminder of where you’re from. Depending on what part of Japan you’re in, there are slight variations to how you would pronounce the characters 塩田, which make up my last name, Shio-ta. Convention dictates most of the differences, but sometimes regionality does, too. Around Tokyo, people might be prone to pronouncing my name as Shioda, though those from around Osaka most commonly pronounce it as Shiota. The name sounds the way it does because of where it comes from. 

Shiota is my grandfather’s family name that I took after my parents’ divorce. I had wanted that divorce for years before it finally happened, had even toyed around with having a new name when I was a child, a name separate from the man who was abusive and terrifying. Once my mother was financially able to leave my father, my resolve to change my name intensified. I broached the subject with my grandfather during one of my many trips to Japan. At first, he was reticent, encouraging me to wait until I was older and to decide “with a future husband in mind.” I waited, but the sound of the name wouldn’t leave my ear. By the time I changed my name in my early twenties, my grandfather had come around to the idea and eagerly shared with family friends the story of my new name. He turned to me one evening, asking how I liked being a Shiota. I told him I loved how it sounded, that when I say it out loud I think of my mother and I think of him. Even now, I will hear someone say it—even if they mispronounce it, as many inevitably do—and a thrill goes through me, a feeling of homecoming.

The locational quality of sound and speech was something I only understood when I began studying Japanese in an academic setting. As a child, I didn’t understand that the Japanese I spoke, the Japanese I heard my family use, was not considered standard. Japanese includes many different dialects that range from slight differences in pronunciation or grammar to wholly separate vocabularies. The differences can be significant enough to bar me from easily understanding someone from another region, depending on how thick the dialect is. These regional differences are readily detectable: the Japanese that people grow up speaking influences their pronunciation, even if they’re doing their best to use the formal, standardized version of the language.

It is difficult to describe what the Osaka dialect sounds like. I have heard that it is often associated with humor, a more boisterous personality, more fun-loving. Part of this is due to the influx of Osaka-dialect-speaking comedians that proliferated during the 1990s, though the accent didn’t necessarily always have that connotation. But when I think of my relatives, there is an element of truth. We tend to infuse conversations with humor and we can become exuberant. My mother and my grandfather, in particular, are very emphatic and animated when they talk, which is something I picked up, too.

On my most recent trip to Japan, I found a second-hand copy of Sasameyuki by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. The author uses the Osaka dialect in the dialogue, which is something uncommon in most Japanese novels. Tanizaki was from Tokyo, but moved to the Kansai region after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 destroyed his home. His displacement was intended to be temporary, but he fell in love with the area, and the dialect that flowed around him influenced some of his classic novels. At dinner, I read excerpts to my grandfather. We laughed at the accuracy of Tanizaki’s depictions of the language and the way the main characters, the four Makioka sisters, interacted with one another, despite the story being written in the early twentieth century. The words on the page resonated throughout my grandfather’s condo as we passed the novel between us. I bought the book out of curiosity, to see what the dialect looked like written out, but in the end I was happy I had something I could read out loud—incantations that would bring me close to those I love who live a world away.

As much as I adore the sounds of Japan when I am there, what I appreciate the most are the sounds that travel with me. I can’t rely on the cicadas to sing in the right pitch and intensity each year, and I cannot bring the crosswalk, the subway, or my grandfather with me when I return to the United States. But the thing about echoic memory is that I can pull the worn copy of Sasameyuki off my shelf and read the same words aloud in my apartment. As I’m doing so, I imagine the condo, the guest room I stayed in for decades that remains unchanged, the hallway leading to the dining room, and the long wall of windows overlooking the crosswalk. I see my grandfather and hear his voice, laughing with me over breakfast, and I hear the pi-po of the crosswalk below us. And I feel that I am home.


JULIA SHIOTA is a writer and editor born in Japan and currently living in the Midwest. Her work has appeared in Slate, Electric Literature, and Catapult. You can find her on Twitter @julia_megumi or at www.juliashiota.com.