The plot thickens

Recently, I found out that I will be living in Isobe-cho, a town within the only-technically-a-city of Shima. Apparently Shima formed back in 2004 when five towns situated relatively close together decided "Hey let's become a city why not!", and from then on everything was completely changed forever. Except the towns are still towns, and they're still the same distance apart, and the only thing that's different is now there's an administrative / geographically conceptual entity known as "Shima-shi" encompassing it all. But anyhoo, that's all pretty boring and bureaucratic. What's really of interest is this:

Although it's officially part of the Chubu region of Japan (again, technicalities . . . they screw up everything) Mie Prefecture, where Shima is located, has traditionally been considered a part of Kansai (which for some reason the government recently decided to re-name "Kinki," a fact which causes me no end of immature giggling). The fun thing about Kansai is that the people there speak a regional dialect of Japanese that sounds pretty weird to speakers of standard Japanese. Yes, like Uh-murr-i-kuh, Japan has its own brand of southerly redneck-speak. And this is known as Kansai-ben.

For those of you without any Japanese experience, let me flip the scenario around. Imagine a Japanese person who has taken a few years of lessons in standard American English. Now imagine that person leaving Japan to go live in Mississippi. The comparison isn't completely sound - for instance, no incidents of culture-shock in Japan can compare to the horrors of the Deep South - but the linguistic confusion factor is basically the same.

Since Shima is on the edge of Kansai and fairly close to Nagoya, I'm hoping that the regional speech patterns will bear more in common with Nagoya-ben than full-blown Osaka-ben (yes, specific cities can have their own particular flavor of dialect, too, just like Boston or Chicago. My friends and I got called out a lot in Tokyo for our Nagoya "accent." We didn't even realize we had picked it up). After a couple clumsy weeks of struggling to remember the Japanese I've already learned, I'll probably be alright communication-wise. My co-workers and neighbors will of course understand my standard Japanese with a smattering of leftover Nagoya-ben, and their accents probably won't be too strong. Nevertheless, I'll be printing off some Kansai-ben word lists to look over during the first few weeks at school - the kids are still on summer holiday and thus there won't be much to do besides work on my self-introduction for the opening of the school year.