Don’t forget that 大好物 can only be used for stuff you eat!
Category Archives: kanji
Don’t Forget – 糞
Don’t forget there’s a kanji for “shit”! Isn’t that awesome!
Apparently that post helped inspire some deviant behavior – slightly NSFW.
Cool Compound – 死角
Learned this one at work the other day. “Death” and “angle,” pronounced しかく. It means “blind spot.” I thought it was pretty cool.
I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget it. I didn’t forget it, but mostly because I was surprised at how shockingly bad my kanji have become in the past year or two. Very little balance going on up there.
号外 – Uncool Compound – 盗作
盗作 (とうさく) is a pretty straightforward compound; a literal reading provides “stolen-work”, and from there it’s easy to extrapolate to actual meaning – plagiarism.
Perhaps plagiarism is too harsh a charge, but however you measure it, the Japan Times seems to have poached research from a Néojaponisme article I worked on. Roger Pulvers uses Dimitry Kovelenin’s mistranslation of kumozaru in his Counterpoint column today. It’s awfully similar to the Néojaponisme piece, even down to the use of the monkey proverb:
Dmitry Kovalenin, the excellent Russian translator of the works of Haruki Murakami, once tripped over the translation of kumozaru, meaning the spider monkey that is native of Central and South America. Kovalenin assumed, it seems, that Murakami was referring to a mythical animal, so he used a bizarre made-up equivalent of "spider" and "monkey" in Russian. Another Japanese proverb tells us that "even monkeys fall from trees"; and Kovalenin was man enough to bring this particular fall to light himself by acknowledging it publicly.
The worst part is that Pulvers gets it wrong; as far as I know, as far as the transcript reads, Kovalenin did not in fact “man up.” He boasted about the clever translation and was then called out by other translators at the convention.
I guess there’s a chance that Pulvers came up with the research independently, but there are only three hits for "Dimitry Kovalenin" and "kumozaru" on the Internet (make that four) and judging from the rest of the article, he doesn’t seem that creative: the column is a mish-mash of anecdotes, held together by the general theme that “bad pronunciation can make you say funny/rude things”. He sprinkles this with two suggestions – face the speaker when interpreting and use common sense.
I wish the Japan Times would pay me to write stuff like that.
Cool Compound – 優柔不断
Here’s another extremely useful non-idiomatic four character compound. The pronunciation is ゆうじゅうふだん. It’s not as easy to break down as 疑心暗鬼 was, but here we go:
優 – gentle
柔 – soft/flexible
不 – non-
断 – decline
The first half of this compound is never used alone. The second half appears to mean “constant, habitual, unflagging.” Any idea what it means together? No, not “beer gut,” which would be unflagging softness of the abdominal variety – it means “indecisive.”
One of my roommates went back to her hometown in Akita over the recent holiday, but it took her long enough to decide! She didn’t leave until the 1st or the 2nd, and that was only after a lot of hemming and hawing. She was back two days later, too! I realized that I didn’t know how to say indecisive, so I told her the word in English and then tried to explain it and she taught me this compound. Hooray for Japanese roommates!
Cool Kanji – 罰
I have an article about ガキの使いやあらへんで’s annual 罰ゲーム and 世界のナベアツ over at Neojaponisme for their 2008 in review series. Other than Murakami and beer, Japanese comedy is probably one of the few other topics I’m relatively qualified to talk about.
Downtown is a manzai group that I’ve known from the very first time I came to Japan. It’s hard to watch any Japanese TV at all and not realize who they are. Hitoshi Matsumoto is the boke, and Masatoshi Hamada is the tsukkomi. Matsumoto occasionally goes by Hitoshi, but generally they are both referred to by surname or their nicknames: Ma-chan and Hama-chan. They’ve been on television since 1989, and since 1990 they’ve been playing different 対決 (たいけつ), which decides who will participate in a 罰 (ばつ)ゲーム.
罰 means punishment and is often used in the compound 罰金 (ばっきん, fine/penalty fee). A 罰ゲーム is any “game” where someone has to go through an embarrassing or painful task as punishment for losing the 対決. For the first decade or so, it was always Matsumoto versus Hamada, and the 罰ゲーム was an embarrassing appearance on television or being forced to go skydiving or ride a rollercoaster:
Matsumoto had a long losing streak, so when he finally won a 対決, he sent Hamada to France to fill up a bottle of Evian water from the original source. He later sent Hamada all the way to New York City to retrieve a mechanical pencil.
For a long time the games had a real gonzo feel, but in recent years, their 絶対に笑っては行けない (ぜったいにわらってはいけない, “You absolutely must not laugh”) version has gotten so popular, that the production level has skyrocketed. They began playing this version annually in 2003, and since 2006 it’s been broadcast in ゴールデンタイム, the Japanese version of primetime, on New Year’s Eve.
These shows all include ココリコ, another manzai group made up of Shōzō Endō and Naoki Tanaka, and fifth man Hōsei Yamazaki. (I always felt bad for Yamazaki since he doesn’t have a partner, but then I realized he gets to play the ultimate role – the boke to the group as a whole: two manzai groups!) These three have been included from as far back as 1999 when they played the surreal 24時間鬼ごっこ.
The shows all follow a fairly set pattern. 3-5 of the Gaki no tsukai members are led on to a themed set by Hiroshi Fujiwara (a producer at Yoshimoto and Matsumoto’s 担当). There they encounter a huge number of up and coming (read: soon defunct) comedians, recurring characters, and members of the production staff, all of whom are trying to make them laugh, which gets them punished. The punishment began as blowdarts in the ass, then moved to an S&M whipping, but for the last four years it has just been a caning.
I was fortunate enough to catch the 2006 show by chance, last year’s on purpose, and past shows through the miracle of the Internets. Here are five of my favorite clips.
The first is the 対決 from the 2003 onsen game . Focus on what Hamada says; he has one of the most recognizable voices and laughs on Japanese TV, and I’m certain that’s part of the reason he’s so successful. “というわけで、松本チーム、罰ゲーーーム！”:
This clip shows how high the production level was last year. It also shows how ridiculous the shows have become. One interesting side note is that more of the guys laughed at the comedian who stutters his line than at the actual 勇気の実:
One of my favorite clips from the police show in 2006, the first one that I saw. ゆうたろう, I believe, is a (now-defunct?) comedian who imitates the late Yūjirō Ishihara, Japanese Elvis-type rock star and actor in police dramas (also brother to Tokyo governor Shintarō Ishihara):
This clip is from the 鬼ごっこ show and it has one of the greatest 罰 buildups ever. Matsumoto sent out oni dressed up in black to chase the rest of the guys around and deliver blows from ひしゃく (those water things at the entrance to shrines), はりせん (accordion-style fan things) and other random things. Then he sent out thai kick guys and head butt guys. After a few hours, he sent out the 紙芝居 (かみしばい) man. Make sure you watch all the way until the end:
And my favorite clip is the simple Shōhei clip, partially because it was the first 罰ゲーム I saw, but it’s also just really funny. I used this at elementary school with any kids named Yōhei or Kōhei, and it never failed to get a laugh:
My only complaint about the show is that every year without fail there is a scene where they laugh at foreigners, often of darker complexion, basically for being foreigners – looking different and speaking Japanese in a funny accent. This year they are airing another 罰ゲーム on New Year’s Eve. It’s six hours long and starts at 6:30pm. Madness.
Cool Kanji – 苺
Merry Christmas! No, not Eve. Christmas. In Japan, things go down on the 24th, and often people have no idea that the 25th is actually Christmas Day. The festivities here are more like Valentine’s Day in the US with lights and illuminations and whatnot.
Two years ago I spent Christmas Eve walking around in Fukuoka, a surprisingly hip urban center given its distance from Tokyo, watching couples shop, pick up KFC (another Christmas tradition – if you don’t have a reservation already, no chicken for you), and then get a cake before heading home. It was sweet: there was a lot more handholding than usual.
The cakes come in two varieties – chocolate or strawberry. I’m not sure if that’s the reason or not, but I’ve run into the strawberry kanji a couple times recently. It’s cool – the radical for grass on top with mother underneath.
Ha. I just looked it up in Kōjien to see if it mentions anything about the origin of the kanji (wrong dictionary, eh?) and found this: 温室栽培では年末出荷が主. End of story – in Japan, strawberries = Christmas.
号外 – 冬至
Happy 冬至 (とうじ) – the shortest day/longest night of the year. The weather is so nice today that it doesn’t really feel like the arrival of winter, as the characters seem to suggest. As you can see above, I’ve partaken of the ritual gourd and beans, which is supposed to give you the nutrients to make it through the night (and whole next year) without any illness, and later this evening I’ll be soaking in ゆづ湯, also supposed to ward off colds.
Massive 変換 Update
Thanks to Matt‘s link earlier this week, several new people found How to Japanese, including Akaki who knows a thing or two about 変換! He provided a bunch in the comments. I’ll repost them here.
“音符（おんぷ）＝♩
Also 郵便（ゆうびん）＝〠 (look at the guy!)
あっぷる＝（in kotoeri）
ルート＝√
平方メートル（へいほうめーとる）＝㎡
平方センチメートル＝㎠ (note how the exponent is actually part of that single character)
メートル＝㍍
ワット＝㍗
キロメートル＝㎞、㌖
etc. units.
明治（めいじ）＝㍾
大正（たいしょう）＝㍽
昭和（しょうわ）＝㍼
平成（へいせい）＝㍻”
“Oh and あっぷるぱい＝π :)”
I love the fact that all the units can be compressed into a single character-space – clearly useful. I wonder about the era names, though – you’re only saving one space! Cool to see that Apple got into the action by creating a kotoeri-only 変換.
My previous posts about 変換 are here, here and here. ♨ is still my favorite.
号外 – In which I get pwnd
Matt takes me to task for shrugging off the difference between 無, 不, and非. He provides an excellent rundown of the difference between the three and gives an awesome quote from Fukuzawa at the end, some of which even I can actually understand. Try saying 人非人 three times fast.