-masu (pronounced massssss)

The band went to Budokan, performed well, and had a great time. Look for pictures soon, but for now I'll just give a little color.

For the most part, the trip was a lot of sitting around and waiting, but there were exciting times as well. I think the coolest part about the whole weekend was the "sort of" interaction that occurred between our band and the Japanese in some of the other bands. The communication was always basic, but it goes a long way to shortening the cultural gap. Something as simple as trading an American-style Japanese boxed lunch (bento) for a regular Japanese style one is an adventure in itself. After finding some officers who were getting ready to eat lunch, we offered our boxes. They were happy to trade (or at least seemed that way) and went out of their way to give us little extras like some tea juice boxes and some sweet bean pancake sandwiches. Then, to pay back the hospitality, we went and found a box of our choco pies and gave it to them. The whole process involved virtually no dialog, but a lot of smiles and gestures and bowing. Fun stuff.

During the shows there was a lot of walking through the halls and trying to maneuver between drill teams, cheerleaders, and other bandsmen. Here too a lot of smiling and bowing and saying hi. Instead of saying hi, though, the Japanese all seemed to be hissing at us. Curious as to the reason, I listened closer and found that most were saying "masss". Making a few logical leaps, I interpreted this as the end of "ohayo gozaimasu" which is good morning, so "masss" would be something like saying "tsup" (or sup if you prefer). Only problem was, they did this all day, not just the mornings.

So the next Japanese class I had, I went to talk to the teacher (Kanai-san) and asked him about "massss". He explained how -masu is the end of many verbs and so I was probably just hearing that. I politely said "no" and explained that it was quite clearly a salutatory statement as used for the whole weekend. He just shook his head at me with a little grin. Hmm. I guess he either didn't understand my question fully or isn't familiar with the phrase.

Well, that story pretty much went nowhere, but there you have it. I guess if you ever hear a Japanese person hiss at you, they're probably just saying hi. Maybe.