Category Archives: vocab

Osaka Recommendations

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I just got finished with a family visit to Japan and I haven’t put up a post of random Japan travel recs in a long, long time, so I thought I’d collect some of my thoughts here for this month’s blog post.

  • I’ll start with what may be the most controversial point. At this point in my life, I’d rather have 50,000 yen in taxi rides than 50,000 yen in shinkansen tickets. I put the 50,000 yen price tag on there because that’s the current price of the Japan Rail Pass. The price went up dramatically in 2023 from around 30,000 to 50,000 yen. Previously you could cover the cost of the pass with a single trip from Tokyo to Kyoto, just about. Add in a single day trip to Hiroshima or a quick stop in Himeji, and you’ve got a good deal. If you really wanted to cover ground, you could get great value out of it. But currently, unless you’re riding the shinkansen every day of your trip, it’s pretty difficult to get the economics to make sense. And is the goal necessarily to cover ground? I’d much rather pick a spot or two and dig deep rather than try to see everything in Japan. You might argue that the rail pass provides convenience, but the Hikari trains are so infrequent these days I’m not sure that’s the case anymore, and JR isn’t the same in Kansai as it is in Kanto; a JR pass (or even a daily subway pass) isn’t as helpful getting around locally as it is in Tokyo. Plus, if I’m traveling between Kyoto and Osaka, I’d rather be on the Hankyu Line because it’s going to put me in Kawaramachi and Umeda (not to mention that the cars themselves are nice as well). Instead, I’d recommend booking one round-trip shinkansen ticket to somewhere else (maybe Fukuoka or Hiroshima?), or potentially even a plane ticket, and then putting the savings toward taxis. Maybe my body is failing me, but having 10-15 minutes to sit and save time between destinations really helped extend my endurance over the course of the trip and helped us make full use of our limited time.
  • Speaking of taxis, Uber works well in Japan (at least in Osaka) and there seem to be a lot of promotions available. The Ubers here are tied in with the taxi system. There did seem to be some other cars available, but they were no cheaper than the taxis, which arrive really quickly. There are also vans available in the app for larger groups. For many of the rides we used, there were 75% or 35% discount promotions. In Kyoto, some areas (like Kiyomizu-dera) are blocked off and you need to set a pick-up location outside of them, and in Osaka some narrow streets required selecting a pick-up spot a short walk away, but this didn’t ever cause much of a headache. I caught an Uber at 4:45 a.m. on my parents’ last day here so that I could meet them at their hotel and get them to the airport on time for check in, so time isn’t an issue either.
  • Speaking of airport transportation, Itami Airport (the domestic Osaka airport) is pretty easy to access by public transportation, but it’s also a manageable taxi ride for a group. The “limousine” buses pick up near Osaka Station, but it’s not exactly the easiest location to find, and the earliest buses leave just before 6:00 a.m. and arrive at 6:20 a.m. So if you need to arrive earlier, or if transportation to Osaka Station is difficult, an Uber isn’t an unreasonable price to split. The costs I was seeing were around 5,000-6,000 yen, which isn’t terrible if you have 2-3 people riding. My family wanted something that would take reservations (which I learned later that you can do within the Uber app), so we ended up hiring a bus from Nihon Kotsu which was easy enough to set up, and we were able to get them to pick up at two separate locations at 5:30 a.m. It cost 20,000 yen, but we split it between five people. They were very, very easy to work with via phone and email, but you need to know Japanese.
  • Overall, Osaka is a great place to visit. We had an awesome time with my family. I won’t say it’s a forgotten part of Japan—we do get our fair share of tourists—but we’re not bombarded like Tokyo and Kyoto, except for a few main tourist districts, notably Dotonbori, Shinsekai, and Umeda. Many of the other neighborhoods were super easy to get around. Only Dotonbori rivals the worst of Tokyo and Kyoto’s crowding. I will say that it’s difficult to say where to take people here. Sure, we have Osaka Castle and Dotonbori, but I’m not sure if anything else has the same awe factor as the temples in Kyoto and cityscapes of Tokyo. Personally I’d take the quiet backstreets and 商店街 (shopping arcades) of Osaka almost every day, but tourist expectations are a bit of a different beast. If you’ve got a discerning eye for weathered urban Japan, come see us in Osaka. In the newsletter this month, I call Osaka a “matte finish” city, which I thought felt appropriate, compared to the glossy finish of Tokyo and the lacquer finish of Kyoto.
  • The Tenjinbashi-suji Shotengai and the area around JR Temma Station is the best and most underrated neighborhood in Osaka. I put my parents at a hotel near the shopping arcade, and they had a great time. It’s a well-trafficked, healthy area with a combination of businesses that have been there forever and some that turnover, bringing new life to the neighborhood. On a random Tuesday weekday at midday, there were a steady stream of locals walking up and down the arcade, I imagine transferring between subway stops and the JR or vice versa. There are cafes, restaurants, bars, boutiques, a lovely shrine in Osaka Tenmangu, and all of it is within a five-minute bus/subway ride or a 30-minute walk of Osaka Station. The weekend vibes in the Temma area in particular are probably what most tourists want in a visit to Japan: narrow alleyways, groups talking loudly over ホルモン hotpot or kushikatsu, wine bars, craft beer pubs, random back-alley takoyaki. It’s got everything.
  • Nakazakicho is a curious little neighborhood! Near the northern terminal of the Tenjinbashi-suji Shotengai, Nakazakicho Shotengai shoots off perpendicularly to the west and ends just before the heart of Nakazakicho, which then blends into Chayamachi, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Umeda. Osaka is basically a grid city, but the grid breaks down in Nakazakicho, and it feels like Tokyo 下町 (shitamachi) combined with Brooklyn; there are countless cafes, boutiques, izakaya, antique stores, used clothing shops, and other businesses that speckle the neighborhood. The strange part is that it doesn’t feel overtouristed, for whatever reason. One of my brothers stayed in an Airbnb in the neighborhood and had a great time exploring. Personally I’d prefer to be closer to Tenjinbashi-suji if I was a tourist, and as a long-term resident the neighborhood would feel a little too “loud” for me (but it’s not actually loud in terms of volume…just foot traffic), but you might prefer something closer to Nakazakicho if you’re visiting.
  • It’s really easy to get a suit made quickly in Japan! My parents forgot their wedding outfits, so we had to get my dad a new suit. Suit Select had one for us with the pants hemmed within an hour. Obviously it’s not going to be a perfect fit, but it looked really nice, and only cost 60,000 yen, which feels like a much steeper price in JPY than it does in USD at the moment. I think there are probably more affordable options to be had at retailers like Aoyama (洋服の青山) or even at Uniqlo, which can also hem pants very, very quickly. I just didn’t think putting my 70+ father in a Uniqlo suit made sense, ha.
  • We had to get much luckier with my mother, and what bizarre luck we did have. I did a Google Maps search around their hotel, which turned up the appropriately named 着物再生工場 (Kimono Reuse Factory). This is a small company that takes old kimono and repurposes them into dresses. Their main location is in Tokyo, but their (very small) Osaka branch happens to be three blocks from where my parents were staying, which was incredibly convenient. I emailed with them and arranged a time to look at a few options. My mom thought them through, and we went with one option which looked really nice. This, combined with a friendly, neighborhood salon right across from the shrine which did my mom’s hair the morning of the wedding, created an easy solution for what could have been a nightmare situation. My mom actually wants to have a dress made with them now, so I might be hunting for used kimono in the near future. I’d highly recommend their dress rental services and their dress making, if you’re in the market. The rental only cost 20,000 yen, which seems very reasonable compared to some of the tuxedo rental prices I was seeing (upwards of 40,000+ yen), although having a dress made with them would cost a good bit more.

Check out the newsletter for a deep dive into 筋 (suji). And here’s the podcast with more on this interesting kanji and everything above:

The Various Forms of うかがう

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The newsletter and podcast are online:

The Japanese verb ukagau.

This month, the core topic I looked at was how easy and broadly useful is 伺う (ukagau) is, especially for folks struggling to gain a handhold with keigo: This is your handhold.

伺う means so many different things at once: to listen/hear, to ask, to visit, and to detect/view. There are a number of set phrases that you should start to memorize, and once they become more familiar, you’ll hopefully find yourself reaching less frequently for more complex verb permutations, which gives you more time to become familiar with those complex verb permutations, making them more familiar and less complex, enabling you to reach for them more easily…it’s a cycle, and you just need a way in.

However, 伺う is more complex that it may first appear, likely because of how broadly it can be used. There are actually (at least) three different kanji that get used for うかがう.

The first and most frequent is 伺 which gets used for those core meanings above.

The two additional kanji take on these meanings:

窺う
「そっと（気づかれないように）様子を見る」という意味
“To secretly watch (so that you aren’t noticed”

Kenkyusha also lists several other definitions: to peer into/through something, to watch/wait for an opportunity, to infer/surmise. So it appears as those this meaning can be rather broad as well and loses some of the deference in the other definitions.

覗う
「何かを通してのぞいて様子を見る」という意味
“To peer through something”

While 窺 can mean “peer into/through” something, this kanji tends to take on more of those meanings because it’s also associated with the verb のぞく (nozoku), which is the more frequently used word for “peek/peer” and gets used with compounds like 覗き穴 (nozokiana, peephole).

Kanjipedia also notes that 候, 偵, and 覘 are also used in various situations with うかがう, but judging from my cursory searches, these are less frequently encountered.

I think the best way to understand these as a whole is to think of all these additional kanji as (most likely) an extension of the “view/detect” definition in intricate different ways that writers can choose to take advantage of. I imagine that うかがう gets used in hiragana form pretty regularly as well, so keep an eye out for that as well.

Impossible Pairs

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The newsletter is online, which means the podcast is also here:

The core of the newsletter is about “impossible pairs,” in particular 4日 and 8日. Do you know the difference in pronunciation between these two without looking it up? The good news is that Japanese mix these up as well. So don’t sweat it too much, but it can be good to try and “brute force” pairs like this if you can establish a clear mnemonic or set of phrases that click for you. I also took a look at the difference between 確か (tashika) and 確かに (tashika ni).

I ended up rambling a bit at the beginning of the podcast about my usual nonsense: letting yourself follow the ebbs and flows of motivation as it comes to you. Although the one key point that I hope didn’t get lost is stop and check out the neighborhood around you in Japan. There are likely a ton of excellent restaurants, cafes, and bars for you to enjoy.

I found a reading cafe not far from me in Osaka and it’s given me at least one solid new author to read in Kakuta Mitsuyo. She seems to have had a couple novels and short stories translated, but no nonfiction. Worth taking a look at her writing! And the cafe, which is on Instagram here.

Click through to the newsletter to find a link to some of Kakuta’s nonfiction writing online that we’ll be reading for the October USJETAA Japanese Reading Group, and join us if you can.

How to Japanese Podcast – Episode 45 – コロケーション

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I finally managed to see John Wick: Chapter 4. It only came out in Japan in September, six months after it’s initial release. In the newsletter this month, I give some impressions and analyze one specific subtitle that reminded me of the importance of collocations. Check out the newsletter for the definition of collocation in both English in Japanese and some good resources, although there is a spoiler warning because I spoil one major (minor?) aspect of the movie.

I have a spoiler warning on the podcast this month as well. But you can listen to the first part at least, which addresses other content. Including:

– The nerds have won. Congratulations.

– Was Sekiro inspired by Automatic Eve?

Send any questions for future episodes to howtojapanese at gmail dot com!

甘えたい

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A bit late, but 新年おめでとうございます！

The newsletter went out a couple weeks back, and I wrote a little about 甘える (amaeru), a word that is extremely difficult to define in English absent of context. Give it a read!

One additional 甘える wrinkle I wasn’t able to get to was 甘えたい. I think this is difficult for a couple reasons. First, when the speaker/convey of 甘える is the person who also wants to 甘える, then it can complicate the equation for who is doing what action to whom; in other words, sometimes it’s easier to understand when the speaker is talking about someone else doing the 甘える. It always takes a second for me to calculate who is doing what in any case, and 甘えたい　makes calculation more complicated.

Second, I think part of the reason 甘えたい feels complicated might be due to the fact that 甘える is, in general, a somewhat negative idea. It does have neutral nuance, as I think some of the examples in the newsletter show, but by and large the idea of being dependent on someone or trying to manipulate someone into acting a certain way is negative. So why would someone want to 甘える?

This is an interesting tweet I found:

I opted not to dig into it too deeply in the newsletter because I don’t really know the background of the account or exactly what this guy is implying about women here. Essentially he suggests that eldest sisters often want to 甘える, but don’t know how. A kind reading of this would be something along the lines of, “They want to be taken care of, but don’t know how to make themselves vulnerable to do so.”

I also found this example about “The many ways children say ‘I’m tired,’” which seems more clearly deserving of good faith analysis:

One of these ways is 甘えたい, which I think translates to “I want someone to take care of me.”

甘える is a complex verb, but going through the calculations each time to ensure that you’re understanding it is an important step. Eventually you’ll realize that you no longer need to do those calculations, but until that point, I know I at least plan to slow down as I approach this linguistic speed bump.

Cool Compound – 悠々自適

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Hard to believe that 2020 is finally coming to an end…or is it?

I’ve had a couple of tweets do pretty well the past week, and I’m going to attribute most of the success to sheer luck. I happened to be transcribing a 悩み (nayami, problem/distress/sorrow) from Higashimura Akiko’s podcast (same episode I mentioned in the newsletter this month, just an earlier call) the other day and came across the great compound 悠々自適 (yūyūjiteki), which felt incredibly appropriate to share:

This is definitely my personal goal for 2022, although I do feel like it’s a luxury to be able to completely tune out the outside world. Once I get through the program I’m in, I’m planning to make phone calls for the governor’s races in Georgia and Florida, and I hope you contribute time or money as well.

As for Japanese language study, I do think it’s incredibly helpful to transcribe native Japanese audio from time to time. I find myself doing this for my writing every now and then, usually from NHK or Higashimura-sensei’s podcast, which provides good balance between 報道 (hōdō, broadcast) language and more natural language. It’s obviously helpful to listen to these without transcribing to practice your listening skills at a native pace, but transcription forces you to get in there and confirm particles and verb forms in a way that enables you to then implement the patterns more accurately. It’s not fun work, but if you can set a schedule to do this once a month or so, I promise that you’ll find yourself improving.

I hope that you all find the time to take a breath at the end of the year. I was really looking forward to spending the New Year’s holiday in Japan. There’s really nothing like relaxing in Japan during that period. I will admit that I’ve enjoyed the 80F/24C days in New Orleans I’ve had the past 10 days, and I’m also looking forward to returning to my monastic existence in Chicago. I’m probably putting together a virtual hang for New Year’s Eve, so if you’re a friend of the blog, reach out and I’ll share the link. Otherwise, 良いお年を！

Japanese Stonks

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I’m in The Japan Times with a look at the language of investing: “Put your yen to work with the language of investing.”

Initially I was hoping to find out the Japanese equivalent of “stonks,” but it became clear that while there has been a boom in retail investors, not all of them are tuned in to the GameStop madness. Bloomberg has one report in Japanese (a really good read!) which says lack of English skills limited Japanese participation in the mania, but they just put out a new one in English about a bar for stock pickers that suggests maybe there has been some effect from GME.

They point out Satoshi Uehara, and I found another Twitter account X1_droid who is also investing in popular U.S. stocks. I found the term ジャンピングキャッチ (“jumping catch”) initially from their account. I also found an account/bot that translates Elon Musk tweets, and there seems to be a contingency of Japanese followers shadowing some of his moves. However, as the Musk-followers might suggest, these are all fanatics, not the Japanese public more broadly.

In terms of explaining what’s going on, there’s a blogger over at Note who’s been providing some solid Japanese language explanation of “stonks” and GameStop. There may be some other useful posts if there are any slang terms you’ve been trying to communicate to Japanese friends and family.

Cool Word – 仕事納め

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I’m back in Chicago after the holidays, the temps have dropped again, and there’s a dusting of snow on the ground, but I’m on the inside looking out, sipping on a hot mug of honey ginger lemon, so no complaints.

I’m done with work for the year!

A Japanese friend’s Facebook post reminded me of the excellent Japanese word 仕事納め (shigoto-osame)—finishing up work for the year. It makes sense that Japan — where New Year’s is absolutely the dominant national holiday — has a word that means wrapping up for the year.

Nothing too crazy going on here – just 仕事 (work) plus a nominalized form of the verb 納める (to complete).

納める is one of those verbs that can have a ton of different meaning depending on context. In fact, the Japanese dictionary provides nine independent usages. Dictionary posts like this are complicated but really helpful if you’re trying to get a true sense of meaning. The dictionary post for 仕事納め is much simpler and good reading practice for beginners.

Update: Check out the 仕事納め hashtag on Instagram for a nice contextual definition of the word and a cool glimpse of how Japan is wrapping up the year.

Cool Word – オブラート

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I’m in the Japan Times this week with a look at a couple of websites that I’ve noticed popping up whenever I search for a polite way to phrase something: “When stumped in Japanese, go where the stumped Japanese go.”

The websites are Mayonez and Tap-biz. Mayonez seems like a more fleshed-out, coherent project, but they’re clearly very similar. I wondered how they were funded, but further investigation has shown that the articles are really just cover for the job hunting websites that likely fund the whole shebang.

Still, the articles are pretty interesting, and I think they offer pretty effective language tips.

In the course of reading through the Mayonez article about 希望しない alternatives, I saw the phrase オブラート包んでお断りすることがマナーです (Oburaato tsutsunde okotowari suru koto ga manaa desu, Saying no in a roundabout way).

オブラート (oburaato, oblaat) is a very interesting word I hadn’t heard before. Oblaat are those thin, transparent layers of rice starch that are used to wrap things like dagashi.

So the phrase オブラートに包む, then, means to kind of mediate a phrase in a way that makes it more palatable/handleable. Pretty cool.

And of course there’s a ridiculous Yahoo Chiebukuro site involving オブラート: “「死ね」 をオブラートに包んでください(“Shine” o oburaato ni tsutsunde kudasai, Say “Go kill yourself” in a polite way). Some pretty funny answers.

And on a side note, next month is the four year anniversary (FORTY EIGHT consecutive months!) of the Japanese Reading Group that I’ve been running through the JET Alumni Association Chicago Chapter. We’ve been meeting on Google Hangouts for the past year or so, and it would be great if you’d join us! Check out the event details here.

Yahoo Chiebukuro Deep Cuts – わいせつ

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waisetsu

This post is belated, but I was in the Japan Times last week with an article about the kind of language used to translate Trump into Japanese: “Japanese translators forced to grab the Trump bull by the horns.”

I feel like this piece could have been stronger if I had been paying closer attention the whole way through, but unfortunately I hadn’t. I spend most of my time at work reading about politics and didn’t have the energy to do more in Japanese when I got home. So I was forced to upload as many Japanese sources as I could in a single weekend after I pitched the column to my editor.

Fortunately I’d had the insight to listen to that first NHK Radio podcast which, combined with the email, from my host mom gave me the introduction I needed to carry me through an article that makes sense, hopefully. Got some good comments, which is always nice!

A couple notes:

1. わいせつ (waisetsu, obscene/obscenity) is an interesting word that was combined not only with 発言 (hatsugen, remark) as mentioned in my article, but also 行為 (kōi, act), as Toranpu went on to be accused by several women. A quick search on Twitter for トランプ and わいせつ gives you a pretty interesting play-by-play of how it all went down. (On a side note, I really wish Twitter searches had Google-like controls, such as specifying date ranges.) Here are a few interesting tweets I came across:

https://twitter.com/search?q=トランプ%E3%80%80わいせつ&src=typd

Looking at the translation of “pussy”:

Random Twitter punditry:

An alternative for ロッカールームトーク:

How one website translated “totally made up nonsense”:

Japanese are amused by strange English:

2. わいせつ is also notable for being used exclusively in hiragana. This seems related to the definition of the jōyō kanji, which is connected to Japanese legal language. There’s a closer look at the kanji themselves at this link.

I knew there would be a Yahoo Chiebukuro entry related to this word, but I had no idea that it would be as epic as this page.

The questioner asks how to write ワイセツ in kanji and what it means. The best (and only) answer does provide the requested information (猥褻, vulgar/obscene), but then goes on to be kind of a dick and ask why the person couldn’t find the information on their own: これは、携帯で変換したらでてきませんか？ (Couldn’t you convert [these kana] with your cell phone?) And then…これも、ググれば、辞典で出てきませんか？ (If you had googled this, wouldn’t it come up in a dictionary?)

(Deep aside: Note the most excellent ググれば [If you googled] above!)

The answerer goes on to give a lengthy supplement about what exactly consists of a わいせつ act and what the punishments are under the law.

But the crowning jewel of this crazy post is the questioner’s follow up:

waisetsuyahoo

Translation: “My reply is late. I’m sorry. I’d gotten wrapped up in the categories for figurines. Thank you.”

Translation implication: This guy was trying to categorize his anime figures, wanted to know how to write “obscene” in kanji so he could properly categorize his dirty figures, gave up when he realized it was a difficult task, and opted to crowdsource on Yahoo?

The world may never know.