Category Archives: reading

How to Find Stuff

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The other day at work I was faced with a challenge – a phrase made up of individual words I recognized, but whose collective meaning I didn’t know and wasn’t available in ALC.

The phrase was – 「HIPHOP界のカリスマband name」　It doesn’t matter what the band name is. I understood a good bit of this phrase. HIPHOP was very clear, as was 界. Together they mean “the hip-hop world/industry.” You often see the word 業界 (ぎょうかい), which means a given industry. You can change the 業 to a more specific kanji/word to make it specific – e.g. HIPHOP界, 音楽界, 文学界, etc. カリスマ is also relatively straight forward; it should mean something like “charisma.”  

The strange thing about this phrase is that HIPHOP界のカリスマ all modifies the band, but there’s no な or の connecting the phrase to the band name. At first I thought “charisma” might be part of the band name or some other musician, but it didn’t turn up any searches, so I figured it had to be modifying the band.

Google to the rescue. I tried a search for 「HIPHOP界のカリスマ」, but nothing helpful turned up. I tried image searching and a picture of Eminem came up, as well as some other Japanese hip-hoppers.

That’s when I realized what to search for – 「界のカリスマ」 This gave me tons of different results – ヨガ界のカリスマ、映画界のカリスマ、ファション界のカリスマ. All of these phrases modify different individuals who are all at the top of their respective industry. This I realized when I clicked on the result for 音楽界のカリスマ任天堂の近藤浩治氏. He’s the guy who did all the music for Mario, Zelda and some other Nintendo games. He’s the master.

A few google searches and I figured out that this is the way they say someone is at the top of the industry – someone is, I guess, the "charisma" of their industry. I translated it as the phrase “band name, currently at the top of the hip hop world.” A very strange phrase, and I think there is probably a better way to translate it. I’m just glad I understand it now.

A まち is a 町 is a 街

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I did a rewrite of my senior thesis and it has been published on Neojaponisme, a Japanese culture web journal. I wrote about the Haruki Murakami short story collection Dead Heat on a Merry-go-round (『回転木馬のデッド・ヒート』). Before it was a collection, it was serialized under the title Views of the City (『街の眺め』).

While I used the word “city” in the translation of that set of stories, the actual word is 街, which is pronounced まち and is loosely related to the other まち, 町.

町 can either be either a town (e.g. 西会津町) or a neighborhood within a city or ward (e.g. 門前仲町). It’s a geographic and bureaucratic term.

街 is used in 商店街 (しょうてんがい, shopping arcade), 繁華街 (はんかがい, downtown/entertainment district/center of town), and 住宅街 (じゅうたくがい, residential area). It refers to a less well-defined portion of geographical space but definitely a piece of the city. (China Bonus!: In Chinese it means street.) It can also be used to talk about a town in the broad sense, but unlike 町, it is never named.

Murakami uses 街 in nearly all of his novels between 1979 and 1983, always referring to the unnamed (*cough* Kobe *cough*) hometown of his unnamed boku narrator. Murakami contrasts this hometown with Tokyo, where the narrator has gone off to college; Tokyo is where he lives now, but all his memories and emotions are tied to the 街. Murakami takes this comparison to its most extreme limit in his book Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, in which he contrasts an ultra-modern Tokyo with a pre-modern, industrial town, the 街, in alternating chapters.

In Views of the City, however, Tokyo is the only 街 to be found. It feels like a casual reference to a familiar place. For example, you could say, “This is my part of town,” even in reference to a big city. It also shows how 街 is the "town" from the phrase "town and country."

While 街 is often used to refer to big cities, this is the first time Murakami uses the term in reference to Tokyo. It is also his first collection of realistic stories. The change in usage of this term mirrors the way Murakami turns his vision from the interior thoughts of his anonymous first-person narrator to the lives of people around him in Tokyo.

Reading a Japanese Dictionary – A Fist Not Full of Donuts

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One way to make the huge jump between being an intermediate and an advanced student of Japanese is to try to rely less and less on English. This is not going to help your ability to translate into English, but that’s not the goal. The goal is to jettison English all together and become able to communicate in Japanese alone, and if you can start defining new words in terms of things you already know, using a Japanese dictionary, you will rapidly be able to increase your comprehension.

I’m going to give you an example. Here is a four-character compound: 慇懃無礼. I can’t remember where I first learned it. I have a feeling I read it in a story somewhere.

When I read it, I looked it up in a Japanese dictionary, thought the definition would prove an interesting example to dissect, so I pasted the definition in my “to write about” list.

At this point in time, I don’t know the pronunciation of the whole thing, nor do I know the meanings of the first two characters. The last two characters are pronounced ぶれい and mean “rude” or something like that. Now, here’s what the dictionary told me:

慇懃無礼　〔名・形動〕表面はきわめて丁寧だが、実は横柄であること。「−な態度」

As in English, the first thing the dictionary is going to tell you is the part of speech. Here is a list of Japanese parts of speech:

名詞（めいし）– noun

動詞（どうし）– verb

形容詞（けいようし）– adjective

副詞（ふくし）– adverb

接続詞（せつぞくし）– conjunction

前置詞（ぜんちし）– preposition

助詞（じょし）– particle

So, 〔名・形動〕shows us that this compound can either be a noun or an adjective…I think. To be completely honest, I’m not sure what 形動 means at the time of writing, but it looks like adjective to me.

Now, let’s skip to the end for a minute. 「−な態度」shows us exactly what kind of noun/adjective it will be. It is showing us that it modifies another word via 〜な, just as 静か、貧乏、and 有名  (look ‘em up!) do.

One more step back and we see that the actual definition itself ends in こと. This, simply, is a word used to nominalize (turn into a nominal/noun) whatever comes before it. It’s basically an ~ing, but you need to get comfortable thinking of it separate from English. It is a こと, that’s it.

Now for the meat of the definition: 表面はきわめて丁寧だが、実は横柄である.

Let’s space it out a bit for beginners: 表面　は　きわめて　丁寧　だが、実は　横柄　である.

I knew the meaning of all but one of the words, so it wasn’t too difficult for me to understand, but I’ll give you a moment to look up all those words.

Okay.

表面 means surface, 丁寧 means polite, and きわめて modifies polite. Perhaps you’ll recognize きわめて if I give it to you in kanji? 極めて. Ring any bells? That’s correct – it means “extremely,” so the first clause of our definition means, “The surface is extremely polite.” (I know I’m being a bit hypocritical here by actually translating it for you when I previously said that you shouldn’t be translating, but for the purposes of showing you how I utilized this dictionary, I think it’s okay, and it would be rude for me to say, yup, there it is, go look it up, dumbass.)

だが is the connection between the two clauses and it means but or however. 実は means actually, and I’m honestly not sure what 横柄 means, but I do recognize the kanji. The first, pronounced よこ, you may recognize from the city Yokohama. It means side. The second is pronounced がら, and I recognize it from the word 人柄, which, I think, means personality or something like “type of person.”

So let’s think about what we do know: we know that this phrase so far means, “on the surface level very polite, but actually ____.” Because the way this sentence is structured, the number of words that fit in the blank are very limited. We can automatically cross “friendly,” “about to share a bounty of donuts,” “naked,” “holding two guns in the air,” and “sleeping” off the list. In reality we’re limited to opposites of polite, and, as I mentioned before, I did recognize that 無礼 means something like rude. 横 means side, so we can take that into account and assume that 横柄 must mean something similar to the opposite of polite and almost backstab-by/devious in nature.

Take into account the こと and our final definition looks like “being polite on the surface but actual disliking.”

I’ve just checked the definition in alc.co.jp and it gives “feigned politeness” as the much more economical answer. Well, I was close, and if I could remember the context of the story, it might have helped me narrow the definition even further.

Here’s the moral of the last 1000 words you just read: use a Japanese dictionary, rely on contextual clues, readreadreadread, and don’t be fussed if you can’t understand every coddamn word.