More Negative Thoughts

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Thinking about 遠慮 and かもしれない has also made me wonder recently whether or not the へん from the Kansai dialect plays a similar role.

For those who don’t know, the Kansai dialect is prevalent in and around Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe. One of the major features of the dialect is changing negative ending from ない to へん like this:

できない    　→   できへん
わからない 　→   わからへん

There’s more detailed information here, but the site makes no mention of why exactly they do this or how it came about. I’m sure there are longer, more extensive reasons it developed that way, but it’s interesting that the dialect has what is essentially a ない-replacer.

号外 – How to Basketball in Japan – International League Pass

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I should have mentioned it when I first ordered it a month or so ago, but the NBA now offers International League Pass. It enables you to stream games live or watch them on replay for up to 24 hours. At $99, only about 9200 yen these days, it’s still worth it to watch the second half of the season. There will be a separate playoff package if you, like the San Antonio Spurs, wait to turn it on in the post-season.

Avoiding the ない

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I’ve got a short piece on 遠慮 over at Néojaponisme. It’s a rewritten version of one of my first posts  – “How to Say No by Saying Yes”. Don’t forget that you can also make use of お断り as a “Hell no” for comedic purposes.

遠慮 is a useful phrase for avoiding ない, but かねます is a far more blatant dodge. It is a verb ending that attaches to the stem (most often to the verbs できる, する, 致す, and 負う) and means “can’t” or, more appropriately in this case, “unable to”.

So rather than use できない or できません, you can say できかねます which has the same fundamental meaning. This is, as you can probably imagine, an incredibly polite, serious way to say something. Personally I find it hilarious that you can just replace the unpleasant negative ending with one that isn’t negative and make it all better. I’d like to meet the first guy who did that.

(Oda Nobunaga: おい、お前。パイ作ってきてくれ。
Advisor: えっと、あのぅ。パイ、作れなーあっ。作ることができなーあっ。作り．．．かねます。
Nobunaga: かねますって、一体何なんだ？
Advisor: はっきり言えば、できないということ。
Sound of head falling on tatami.)

In every case, the speaker finds him/herself unable to do something that puts him/her in an unfortunate position. かねます almost has a built in “unfortunately” along the same lines as 〜てしまった as well as a “we ask for your understanding” as in ご了承ください.

An extremely useful set phrase I learned in college is わたくしどもでは決めかねます, which can be used if you’re ever put on the spot to make a decision that is outside of your immediate jurisdiction; it literally means “I alone am unable to make that decision”, but it also sort of implies that you will consult your superiors.

する, 致す, and できる are generally attached to other verbs. For example, 賛成 (さんせい) – そういう考えもあるかもしれませんが、賛成できかねます。 “You may think that, but I (unfortunately) am unable to agree.”  

負う, as ALC tells us, is often used to duck responsibility – 責任を負いかねます.

Very much like 遠慮, かねます is one of those secret code words/patterns that is able to convey a lot of meaning efficiently because everyone knows what it really means. You, too, can tap into all the trappings of かねます, as long as you know when you need to use them.

Hot Peppers

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There are two types of people in this world: those who can get used to it and those who can’t. Those who are flexible enough to go with the flow and learn from their surroundings, and those who struggle and fight, holding on to what they know and refusing to let go.

I was ordering Subway for lunch the other day and had a strange moment of realization: I was asking for jalapeños by saying ホットペッパーもお願いします. Whether or not this is a proper pattern of request aside, why ask for “hot peppers”? Why not ask for jalapeños? Japanese can approximate the pronunciation – ハラペーニョ.

I thought about it for a while and dug up some memories from when I was studying in Tokyo five (!) years ago. I vaguely remember asking for jalapeños at the Subway near the Waseda subway stop and being met with vacant stares or  えっ, the Japanese noise of disbelief or confusion. I’d point, and they realized what I was asking for. Eventually somebody must have responded with “ホットペッパー？” because to this day I still use that term at Subway. It works like a charm. Just say the magic word and your sandwich too can look like this:

I got curious, looked around a little and found that the term ホットペッパー is in fact Subway terminology:

If you want jalapeños on your metaphorical Japanese Subway sandwich, don’t fight it; make things easier on yourself and get used to the way they do things here.

号外 – Uncool Compound – 盗作

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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

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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!

How to ドーナツ

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As alluded to in this video, Krispy Kreme is not the best place to get foreign donuts in Japan. That honor goes to Doughnut Plant. One of their cream-filled gourmet doughnuts will carve nearly 500 yen out of your wallet, add several hundred calories to your waistline, and soak the inside of your arteries with fried sugary goodness.

Their current seasonal offering is 和ドーナツ, starring this 抹茶あんドーナツ:

It wasn’t as good as the Pumpkin Cream one I had last fall. I would go for the Vanilla and Green Tea Cream if I was going to order again. Fortunately there is a Doughnut Plant inside Shinagawa Station, which is dangerously close to where I live. These are only on sale until the 15th and can also be found at Dean and Deluca.

(I spent a few minutes wondering why どなつ only 変換s to 度夏. The moral of the story? Know your long vowel markings in katakana.)

Cool Word – 渋い

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One winter tradition in Japan is 大掃除 (おおそうじ) – “big” year-end cleaning. Don’t ask me why they do it when it’s cold outside. Doing it in the spring is far more pleasant. My roommates and I cleaned up our place last month on the 23rd. We clean every couple of months or so to prevent the place from getting too dirty. We set バルサン, insect foggers, and go out for a big breakfast somewhere while the smoke dissipates.  This time we went to Coco’s, and for the first time ever I heard a conversation where both meanings of 渋い (しぶい) were used in natural conversation.

I hear it more frequently used to describe a person’s taste in food, music, movies, clothes, bars – anything really. Five of us ordered plain old breakfast sets with Western-style food, but the last roommate ordered a Japanese-style set meal, prompting another roommate to say 渋い！Shochu, bourbon and scotch, high quality enka music, pop from the 70s (especially this super funky version of 東京砂漠), Elvis, drinking tea instead of coffee, tweed – all of these things are 渋い.

A few minutes later another of my roommates was steeping tea. She poured a cup of deep brown tea, took a sip and grimaced a 渋い！ The tea was too strong, too astringent. This is the meaning that there is hardly ever occasion to use. Japanese green tea is generally steeped very briefly, but even if it is steeped for a long time, it never produces that astringent flavor present in darjeelings and assams.

Keeping this fact in mind, now we have to figure out a way to use astringent to describe a person’s tastes. Maybe certain senses of the words “strong” or “extreme” would work. ALC provides “refined,” which also works but probably has a different range of connotations than 渋い. It does overlap at points, though. I guess the main difference is that refined in English is generally a positive term whereas 渋い can probably have some negative connotations. The committee of refined and cool works in most contexts, but there is definitely that sense of someone’s tastes being sort of acerbic, different from the mass populous that is hard to get at in English.

Cool Kanji – 罰

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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.