Don’t forget there’s a kanji for “shit”! Isn’t that awesome!
Apparently that post helped inspire some deviant behavior – slightly NSFW.
Don’t Forget – かわいそう
My folks are in town this next week, so I’ll be recycling ideas from a couple of my favorite posts – consider them spaced repetition reminders rather than sheer laziness.
Don’t forget that かわいそう is a difficult word to translate. I hate it when people just translate it straight up as “pitiful” or “pathetic.” Even “It’s a shame that…” can be off sometimes. I like to think of it as a truly sympathetic “It’s too bad that…” but it really needs to be handled on a case by case basis.
How to Alphabet
Now here’s some madness to play with your brain: Japanese have difficulty learning the English alphabet for the same reason that Americans have difficulty using the metric system – they already have a perfectly good naming/measuring convention of their own, so psychologically it’s more comfortable to stick with what’s familiar. It’s the same reason that it’s really difficult to adjust to Celsius or Fahrenheit if you’ve grown up with the other. I’ve come to understand what 10C means, but 50F still means more to me.
Yes, the alphabet has so pervaded Japan that they’ve found a way to fit it into their own language. And here is how it works:
A エー
B ビー
C シー
D ディー
E イー
F エフー
G ジー
H エイチ
I アイ
J ジェー
K ケー
L エル
M エム
N エヌ
O オー
P ピー
Q キュー
R アル
S エス
T ティー
U ユー
V ブイ
W ダブルユー
X エックス
Y ワイ
Z ゼッド
Follow this rubric with the occasional hint (ラビットのアル) and you’ll have no problem relaying the alphabet in Japanese, even if it means dictating your romanized name over the phone. I think the hardest ones for me to get used to have been V, R, L, M and N, but it’s amazing how much fater アル can relay information than “ARRGH.” Also, it wasn’t until I wrote down this list that I realized why my former students refused to give up the British “zed” – pronouncing it “zee” creates an overlap with the pronunciation for G. I was tempted to write ズィー until I remembered zed.
号外 – Bomberman Dissatisfaction
A 29 year-old delivery man was arrested yesterday for sending bomb threats to the video game company Hudson Soft.
号外 – Yes We Can Perversion of Meaningful Political Slogan
I always knew you could, Japan.
Four Random Wikipedia Articles
As previously mentioned, Wikipedia is a great place to check translations and Japanese usage. It’s also a fantastic source of study material. The Japanese page has over 500,000 entries, and as in the English version these are articles that have been written and edited by real people. (Unlike all the other written material in Japan which is made by robots.)
To prove these points, I’ll take a quick look at four random entries and show exactly how useful they can be. The only rule I’ll have is that I’ll skip any wacky mathematic formulas or nonsense like that.
First thing to note is that “Random Entry” in Japanese is おまかせ表示. That’s a nice localization; randomness is a somewhat difficult concept to convey in Japanese.
Article 1 – 福島町 (曖昧さ回避)
Ha, that’s a strange turn of fate. I spent three years living in Fukushima Prefecture, and the first article that pops up is the disambiguation page for Fukushima Town. While this isn’t an article, it’s still pretty useful. We get to see how Japanese deals with “disambiguation page”: 曖昧 (あいまい) with a さ to make it a noun and then 回避 (かいひ), which is a way to say avoid. This page shows how Wikipedia can be useful for tracking down the pronunciation of difficult place and people names.
Article 2 – 山形県護国神社
This appears to be a shrine in Yamagata Prefecture, and judging from the name of the shrine and content of the article, it’s clear that the shrine plays some sort of role with national protection or the enshrinement of national heroes/war dead. (Note that I’m using only the Japanese here. The other rule is that I can jump to other Japanese articles to figure things out. Just no English.) You get some good vocab here. 明治維新 (めいじいしん) and 第二次世界大戦 (だいにじせかいたいせん), or the Meiji Restoration and World War II.
The one word I wish had a link is 祀る. That is the verb the shrine is doing to the 英霊 of 殉国者. 英霊 is literally “hero ghost,” I think, and judging from the Wikipedia page for 英霊, it seems to be connected to the respect for war dead/Yasukuni debate. (This paragraph may seem like a bunch of stumbling, but that’s how you learn to read when you’re a kid. There’s definitely something to be gained from reading without bothering with pronunciation and meaning. You need a basic foundation, of course, but as some point you have to take off your floaties and swim in the deep end.)
Article 3 – 随何
Now here’s some crazy Japanese. 随何 is a Chinese politician, diplomat, and, I believe, a Confucian scholar. (I knew I should have excluded ancient Chinese politicians along with mathematic formulas.) I know he lived from the Qin to the early-Han periods, but most of it is nonsense to me, to be honest. You never know when you’ll find a small gems, though. For example: 儒者の冠を取り上げ、その中に放尿をしたという。Ha, sounds like an angry dude.
Article 4 – ウタツグミ
An animal – another turn of fate, since I previously noted that Wikipedia was useful for tracking down the translation of クモザル. Looks like some kind of small sparrow, some variation on the ツグミ famous for its voice, so it gets an ウタ in front. Not that difficult an article to read. Gotta love the efficiency of phrases like this: 雌雄同色である. And easy enough to get the English translation (“Song Thrush”) if you needed it.
I hope that gives you an idea of what Wikipedia can do, even randomly. Feel free to try the challenge yourself. Loads of good material.
遠慮:Prometheus:: 怠る:Epimetheus
遠慮, as mentioned previously, means to actively refrain from doing something. This is a nifty way around negative imperatives or having to reply with a very blunt negative refusal.
怠る (おこたる) is another wicked cool Japanese verb that means, fundamentally, not doing something. Unlike 遠慮, which has a relatively positive meaning, 怠る has a negative connotation – it means to inadvertently fail to do something.
The usage pattern is Nを怠る, N being any noun or nouned verb such as 〜するの or 〜すること. (“Nouned,” by the way, is a verbed noun.) I’ve run into it recently while looking at manuals for arcade games. One sentence that comes to mind is 定期的な掃除を怠ると、X – “Failure to undertake periodic cleaning will result in bad consequence X.” I can’t remember what bad consequence X was, but I think it was something along the lines of electrocution…or maybe just malfunction?
定期的な掃除をしないと、is a perfectly valid alternative except for that pesky ない hanging around near the end of the clause. The company providing the manual wouldn’t ever want to imply that the game center purchasing the game, the お客様 as it were, might not do something, so they instead suggest that they might fail to do something.
Japanese is awesome.
遠慮 and 怠る correlate nicely with Prometheus and Epimetheus, as suggested in the title to this post. For those of you unfamiliar with the myth, 1) your parents deserve a smack on the head – what were they making you read when you were a kid? – and 2) this is a good place to start.
Prometheus (literally “forethought”) and Epimetheus (“afterthought”) were given the job of divvying up cool traits to all the animals. Epimetheus went about the task with Japanese efficiency, giving elephants really long trunks, making giraffes super tall, allowing cheetahs to run really fast, and neglecting to save anything for humans. To help his brother, Prometheus made man in the shape and image of the Gods. This angered Zeus, so he denied humans fire. Prometheus stole it anyway.
怠る is perfectly Epimethean. I guess Prometheus didn’t really 遠慮 all that much, but 遠慮 definitely involves forethought, so perhaps this is still a useful analogy.
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.
Underrated Japan Vol. 3 – Tonkatsu
How to Japanese: Underrated Japan Vol. 3 – Tonkatsu from Daniel Morales on Vimeo.
I can pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love with tonkatsu: tired and probably slightly hungover, early afternoon on a clear, cold Saturday in February 2006, Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture. My friend said we should go to this restaurant near his apartment, but I was skeptical. I’m not sure if I’d ever had tonkatsu before that. I must’ve had katsu curry (rice and tonkatsu ladled with curry) at some point, but it didn’t leave much of an impression on me. We went, stood in line for an hour, and then sat around a table listening to oldies, eating the best food I’ve ever had.
From that day on, tonkatsu were a landmark on my Japanese culinary map. Growing up vegetarian (until I was 12 or so) and in a city with little other than sushi, there’s no reason I would’ve known about tonkatsu before coming to Japan. The yoshoku phenomenon (must read Norimitsu Onishi article on yosohoku) on the whole doesn’t really make it out of Japan. And I guess that’s not really a strange thing: why would an imported food concept be exported back to the area of origin? (I’m sure this happens all the time, to be honest, but…) It’d be like translating English into Japanese on Babelfish and then taking that translation and plugging it into the Japanese to English Babelfish translator. The result would only confuse the natives.
But what if it was an incredibly tasty confusion?
That’s exactly what tonkatsu is. To be more accurate, tonkatsu is pork cutlet battered in egg, covered with panko, and then deep fried. It’s served with white rice, red miso soup, cabbage salad, and some pickled vegetables. The cutlets are covered in sauce and dipped in karashi, a spicy horseradish mustard. The result is almost sinfully delicious. For anyone who thinks Japan is a tofu nation perfect for vegetarians, tonkatsu are one of many dishes that will prove that you are seriously misinformed – the Japanese are, in fact, carnivorous, deep-frying motherfuckers.
Rather than have you all risk clogging your veins with less than the absolute highest quality tonkatsu, I have sought it out for you:
とんき (Tonki) 目黒区下目黒1－1－2
大きな地図で見る
Tonki is supposedly the most famous tonkatsu-ya in Tokyo. The main store is just a quick walk from Meguro Station. They open at 4pm everyday, and generally the seats are full by 4:15. I went on Sunday, January 4th for 初カツ, the first tonkatsu of the New Year, and was the second person in line. There was only one guy behind me, but somehow the place still filled up by 4:15.
The store is lit by an array of clean, white lights that hang from the ceiling. The staff all wear crisp white uniforms and keep a careful watch on all of the customers seated at the smooth, wooden counter – the only seating in the store. Tonki easily had the best service of these three restaurants; I was offered refills on rice and salad almost immediately after I finished eating them.
As in most tonkatsu-ya, there are really only two things to order – ロース or ヒレ. ロース comes from the word “roast,” and ヒレ from “fillet.” The former is a fatty cut, the latter a lean cut. Teishoku of either cut at Tonki cost 1800 yen.
Tonki batter their katsu pretty good and fry it up nice and crispy – the fried edge was falling off of the pork. Interestingly, they also serve their teishoku with 豚汁, a miso-based pork soup, rather than the standard red (dark) miso soup with clams.
Tonki is legendary for a good reason: the place is an experience. The katsu themselves might not have been my favorite, but this will probably be the first of these three that I revisit. The decor and service are amazing, presentation is exquisite, and all the little things are taken care of; the toothpicks are covered with a small, glass beer cup and they serve you a small dish of peanuts with beer – details like that.
まい泉 (Maisen) 渋谷区神宮前4-8-5
大きな地図で見る
Maisen is the second most famous tonkatsu-ya, according to bento.com. The main restaurant is in Aoyama, not far from Omotesando Station. The building is huge; there’s a counter on the first floor and tables on the second floor.
The service is not quite as top notch as Tonki, but Maisen has a menu with more options, including a gluttonous cut of 黒豚 – black pork. For whatever reason, black pork is popular in Japan at the moment. It will run you nearly 3000 yen for a teishoku, but it’s a thick, juicy cut, and probably the one that impressed me the most. (Their normal teishoku are more fairly priced but don’t include the mikan-flavored ice cream you get at the end.) They also bring out a special sauce jar just for the black pork, which has, I think, grated daikon in it.
They didn’t provide any karashi on the plate, although it might have been in a jar on the counter – I was so hungry that I didn’t notice. It was so delicious that it was almost unnecessary, but I love karashi, so I imagine it could have been even better. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to go back some time and find out.
勝烈庵 (Katsuretsu-an) 横浜市中区常盤町5-58-2
大きな地図で見る
Katsuretsu-an (it almost looks Chinese if you write it Katsuretsuan) is, according to Japanese Wikipedia (which cites an interesting-sounding book on tonkatsu), one of the restaurants that is often associated with the invention of the term “tonkatsu.” There are two other restaurants that also seem to claim the term as their own, but Katsuretsu-an is the oldest – the Bashamichi location opened in 1924.
Compared to Maisen and Tonki, Kasturetsu-an was relatively quiet when I went on a Saturday for lunch. The place is very nice on both the outside and the inside; it is equipped with a similar wooden counter as in Tonki.
It also shares a relatively limited menu with Tonki. The special named after the restaurant is really a ヒレ cut, but ロース is also an option. The katsu were thinner than the ones at Tonki and Maisen. Karashi was serve yourself, which made me very happy. Overall, they were nice and light and didn’t sit heavy afterwards at all. Perhaps not katsu with much impact, but definitely worthy of a pilgrimage at some point.
号外 – Yeast
Was out at Popeye tonight, sitting at the counter and talking with the guy next to me. He mentioned that he made some beer at one of the craft breweries near Tokyo. I thought that was pretty cool until he told me that he was only allowed to participate until the yeast were added – everything after that had to be done by a professional with a special license. Boo for Japanese alcohol laws.
Read more about the asinine Japanese beer tax laws over at Mutantfrog Travelogue.