Another busy week has just flashed by, and it’s the weekend again. The past week has been particularly stressful for me, because on Monday, the system of my company was switched to a new one due to the recent acquisition by another company, and I have to perform my job tasks by strictly adhering to the procedure set by the newly consolidated company.
Since I have been very busy, I haven’t gotten much reading done lately, but I continue to read a few pages here and there when I have a moment to spare. The book I’m currently reading is an autobiography by Katsuya Kobayashi (ε°ζε δΉ), a famous Japanese disc jockey and TV personality specializing in Western pop music and well-known for his excellent English pronunciation, which he acquired without having lived in an English-speaking country.
I’ve known of Katsuya Kobayashi since I was in elementary school, because he was already famous at the time hosting a weekly American pop music countdown show on Japanese television. In the program, Kobayashi announced the latest songs with their chart rankings and interviewed Western musicians visiting Japan in English, inspiring the audience with awe with his beautiful pronunciation and deep knowledge in pop music.
Back then, I had just started learning English, so I had no idea what Kobayashi was saying, but even I could tell that his English sounded authentic, just like a native speaker. I envied him for being able to speak the language so fluently with a convincing accent and understand the lyrics of those chart-topping songs with the most catchy and pleasant tunes in the world.
This autobiography by Kobayashi focuses mainly on his experience of learning to speak English to a very high degree of fluency, hailing from the city of Fukuyama in western Japan, where there were very few foreigners around. Although he really liked to study English in school, he didn’t have a chance to converse with a native speaker until he was 20, when he took the Licenced Interpreter Guide Exam and was interviewed by a Japanese-American examiner.
Kobayashi was born in 1941, the year in which America went to war with Japan after the Pearl Harbor attacks. He spent his childhood in post-war Japan, a very poor nation trying to recover from the ravages of World War II. One day, he turned the dial on his home radio and discovered an English-language station run by American military personnel based in Japan. While he didn’t understand the language, he was instantly enthralled by the beautiful sound of English, and before long he began to habitually tune into this radio station for up to a few hours daily.
One thing about Kobayashi that really impressed me was the length he went to to perfect his American English accent. He would not only listen to English broadcasts regularly but also mimic native pronunciation using the shadowing method, absorbing the natural speech rhythms of American radio hosts.
Kobayashi even developed his own method of perfecting his pronunciation, which he calls “the voice aerobics method,” whereby he dissects each of the vowels and consonants that make up a word so every word can be pronounced correctly. He stresses the importance of practicing to enunciate each word completely before trying to say whole sentences at a faster speed: according to him, if you can’t pronounce each word correctly, there’s no way you can sound natural when you pronounce a full sentence.
While Kobayashi’s English pronunciation sounds impeccable, in this book he also acknowledges that his English is by no means perfect. He specifically mentions his regret that he didn’t read much in English when he was younger and he remains a slow reader of English books to this day.
When I watch his past interviews with Western artists, I can also see that he wasn’t entirely fluent in actual speech, as if he were struggling to find the right words or grammatical structures to formulate his thoughts. Having said that, his humbleness and honesty make me look up to him even more as a trustworthy model to draw inspirations from.
At the time of this writing, Kobayashi is 83 years old. It is truly fortunate for his Japanese fans that he is still active as the host of a radio show going on air every Friday in the Greater Tokyo region. I wish him continued health and success and all the happiness in the world.
