This kanji popped up in a post a couple weeks ago. It’s got 心 on the bottom, so you know it’s going to be some kind of emotion. Not sure exactly what the top means, but it’s pronounced きょう and おそれる（恐れる）and means fear, awe, frightening. It’s used in the always useful 恐縮, the awesomely-named Osorezan (恐山) up in Aomori Prefecture, and also in the word for dinosaur 恐竜, which has, I think, the same etymology as the word in English – terrible lizard/dragon. (Err…or is that the etymology of Tyrannosaurus?)
Television is a fantastic way to learn Japanese. My first year on JET, I spent two to three hours watching TV almost every evening and felt palpable improvement in my listening comprehension, which eventually spread to my speaking ability. I found a number of shows (mostly comedy) that I enjoyed and forced myself to watch the news twice a day.
The important thing is to channel surf and find something you enjoy watching.
Here’s a clip where I learned a really cool compound. Listen for why Prime Minister Yabe likes to go out drinking (Excuse the poor subtitling. I did it a year ago for the Comedy portion of a Japanese pop culture presentation at JET Fukushima Orientation, and at the time I had little experience with iMovie.):
The phrase in question is 「ご発散（はっさん）みたいな感じ（かんじ）」, which is literally “A feeling like 発散.” 発散 means release, exude, vent, diffuse, exhale, et cetera. So a better translation is “Feels like blowing off some steam” or maybe “Feels nice to blow off some steam.” I took liberties to get it closer to something spoken and ended up with, “Blow off a little steam, ya know.”
I think a good usage of this term would be 発散として. So you could 発散として〜する。Do X to blow off a little steam. (The variable X, not the drug X, although I imagine that would exude all the steam you would ever want to exude.)
I also want to write a little about the bit itself, which is called 「矢部浩之の私が総理大臣になったら．．．秘書岡村」(Hiroyuki Yabe’s – If I Became Prime Minister… and Okamura Was My Secretary). Prime Minister Abe didn’t last very long, which is unfortunate because I really enjoyed this sketch. It was mainly a play on the similarity between names Yabe and Abe (Yabe even looks a little like Abe), but it is notable as one of the few political satires on Japanese TV.
It mocks:
– The way they put out a special edition of the newspaper (号外, “outside” the issue count) when a new Prime Minister is chosen.
– そのまんま東 (Sonomanma Higashi), the comedian who was elected governor of Miyazaki Prefecture. The newspaper reads そのまんまバカ, referring to Yabe, of course.
– The way the newly inaugurated Prime Minister stands with his cabinet on the steps of the Prime Minister’s Official Residence in matching suits and is assaulted by thirty minutes of camera flashes.
– The way Japanese Prime Ministers give press conferences.
– A variety of political hot topics. (Which in this case is 事務所費問題, じむしょひもんだい, the misuse of business administration fees.)
It also makes fun of Abe himself. He was infamous for using 外来語 (がいらいご, words of foreign origin) and, I think, long, complex Japanese phrases. The skit suggests that he might have been throwing out these words to impress without understanding their meaning. In this episode, he hears 事務所費問題 and thinks only of 事務所, administrative office. He starts talking about his own (Yabe’s own) offices at Yoshimoto Kogyo (吉本興業 is a Japanese media conglomerate that hires and manages a lot of Japanese comedians), gets sidetracked, and just rambles about a time when he went drinking.
Mecha-ike performed this skit eight times total over five different shows. Each ends with Yabe improvising (judging by Kato and Mitsuura’s laughter, which seems genuine) a way of saying “I have no idea.” In this episode he says 「アイドンノーやね」.
(In other episodes they have him answer the question but stupidly, the way a parody of Bush would. The topic in one of the episodes was 美しい国創り, one of PM Abe’s catch phrases, and when asked what that meant, Yabe replied, “Hakone is beautiful, right? Let’s make it all like Hakone.”)
This past weekend I drove the six-hour drive from Aizu up to Nyuto Onsen in Akita Prefecture. Tsurunoyu, the most famous onsen up there, was full, so we stayed in one called Taenoyu, written 妙乃湯.
I’d like to direct you to the first character – 妙. This is used in a host of interesting compounds:
On its own, 妙 is apparently used as 妙(たえ)なる and seems to mean ethereal, sublime or sweet or heavenly – something greater than human, specifically in relation to music. Apparently there is a Bodhisattva (ぼさつ in Japanese – 菩薩) called 妙見 (みょうけん), so the onsen named their northern-most bath 妙見湯, since that particular bodhisattva turned into a star in the Big Dipper, in Japanese 北斗（ほくと）七星（しちせい）.
The chopstick-holder-together-paper-thingy at dinner looked like this:
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.
This kanji is relatively obscure. It’s used mostly in names, such as 齋藤 (さいとう). I chose this one for today because I had to write it about a dozen times when I was making name tags for the new first year students in junior high. Nearly all of them used this kanji, but one or two had a simplified version – 斎. It looks like there may be an even simpler version – 斉.
But today we’re talking about the difficult one. You can check out the stroke order here.
So that’s how they get that "Y"-loooking bit in the middle. Looking it up on Jim Breen gives a meaning.
ものいみ（物忌み) means “fasting,” and a quick search on ALC (for the simplified version; no results for the complex version) reveals that the kanji is used in the translation for lots of religious stuff. Hooray?
I mainly wanted to get a closer look at the kanji this week. You’ll see it in a lot of names, and if you can write it, you will impress.
This week’s kanji is used in the verb ひびく – to reverberate or ring. The bottom half is easy to remember. It’s the character for sound, 音. The top is, I believe, only there for pronunciation purposes. 郷 means hometown, but is pronounced きょう(or maybe ぎょう), the same 音読み as 響.
Might as well take a moment and sort out one quick thing for newbies. Everyone grumbles about how kanji can have so many different pronunciations. Really there are two main pronunciations: 音読み (onyomi, the Chinese-based pronunciation) and 訓読み (kunyomi, the Japanese pronunciation). The kun reading is used in verbs and adjectives, for the most part, and the on reading is used in compounds.
I like this kanji because of the way it looks, because it is used in the cool compound 影響 (えいきょう, which means influence or effect), and because it is the name of one of my cutest ichinensei. Her name is Hibiki. I always thought that was a great name. (On a somewhat related side note, I also have a student named Kyo using the kanji 郷. )
Thanks to Matt over at No-Sword, I learned the kanji for くそ today – 糞. Thought it was so cool I had to blow that shit up:
Hmm…now that I look at it close up, it’s not so complicated. When it was tiny, I thought it looked like a complicated version of 釜. It’s just 米 with 異なる underneath it. The appropriate mnemonic is clearly, "That shit ain’t rice!"
Another cool compound that I saw in China was 超市. Any idea what it means?
Yup…it means supermarket. It’s a literal translation from the English – 超, literally meaning super or very; and 市, which means market. Not only did this remind me of what a marketing knock-out the term supermarket is in English, it also reminded me a lot of old timey kanji compounds in Japan.
For example:
珈琲
煙草
Can you read them? The first is pronounced コーヒー and the second is pronounced タバコ. That’s right, they are the kanji for coffee and cigarettes. The first has kanji that were chosen to fit the sounds コーヒー, and the second literally means "smoking grass." There are a bunch of these katakana words that have kanji which are no longer used very often. You’ll occasionlly see coffee kanji on the signs of coffee shops because it looks cool, and actually, now that I think about it, the kanji for cigarettes is used quite frequently, but many aren’t used that much.
I found a few others I didn’t know about here (under section 5.2.5 and again under section 7), which is actually a pretty interesting site. Funny enough, one of the words listed is クラブ, which uses the kanji 倶楽部. I’d seen that compound around pretty frequently over the last few months, and even once while I was in China (although the middle character was simplified), but I couldn’t figure out the pronunciation. I had approximated the meaning, but didn’t know that it meant club. Pretty cool stuff.
A couple more cool compounds…I’ll give the answers in the comments:
I have a small confession to make. I prefer Chinese tea to Japanese tea. I like the fact that they use whole leaves, whereas in Japan the leaves are often cut, giving the tea that cloudy coloring.
One of my favorite kinds of tea is Dragonwell, a high quality green tea. The name in kanji is 龍井 – literally dragon-well. I wondered for a long time what the Japanese pronunciation was, but didn’t find out until I went to Chinatown one time. The Japanese reading is ロンジン. Anyone know how close that is to the original Chinese? It’s actually a fairly accurate representation of the Chinese word.
(Side note: this week is a small ode to China. Actual Japanese language stuff should restart on Friday. I have a cool puzzle I got while I was in China.)
I went to China with my girlfriend to attend a wedding and brought a set of wine glasses for the bride and groom. We also wanted to get them a bottle of booze but failed to plan ahead. The champagne at duty free was too expensive, so we looked for a bottle once we got to China. We got in late on Friday and didn’t have a chance to look around, so Saturday morning we were pleasantly surprised to see a building right next to us with a big name in kanji on the top; it ended with the two-character word 酒店. Nice, we thought, and headed over to see what the selection was like, but when we went into the building all we found was a lobby and reception.
Turns out, 酒店 is Chinese for hotel (loosely pronounced jo-dien). I thought that was interesting. Kind of the opposite of the Aussie "hotel pub," which confused the hell out of me when I went to Sydney.
