And Sometimes Why

Category: Japan

  • Engrish threads

    Since there’s no way I’m going to let a whole month go by without a blog post, I thought I’d toss up a quick post about clothes here in Japan. Specifically, clothes that have Engrish on them. There seems to be no market for clothing with correctly written English, as it’s used almost exclusively as a design element rather than a method of conveying meaning. That, combined with the facts that English is “cool” and that the vast majority of Japanese people can only derive a rude meaning from a string of English words, means that there are a lot of Japanese people showing off their “English” (and very often pseudo-American) clothes without knowing what abuses of the English language are actually written on them.

    When I see English in Japan, I’m genuinely surprised if it isn’t rife with errors. I couldn’t possibly hope to document it all, but when I have my camera, I try to capture the gems. The first few pictures you see are pictures of my students I took in my classroom. You can’t really read all of them in the scaled down versions, so I typed out the contents. I tried to help as much as I could through punctuation, though it didn’t often help.

    LEFT: Surf riding goodstream, Professing skilled profession
    RIGHT: Stinson Beach, California: The Wave is Forever
    From left to right:
    Individual For Pleasure Only
    Guaranteed to fit better D.O.Daddy 65
    Twist frontside [Remainder illegible due to shirt fold]
    It takes a little more to make a Champion. Champion authentic athletic apparel
    STAYING, you are on the verge of salvation! You are on the verge of salvation! When it is made to revive vividly, ground at a sense beyond the word stands up and appears that shaft line the world.
    LEFT: [New York Yankees logo on polo shirt breast]
    RIGHT: SAMURAI Japan
    Impregnerade SAMURAI säkerhets-tandstickor safety matches
    LEFT: Wask 22
    RIGHT: Pour les enfants hushush Avoir le coeur leger

    Included just because they’re goofballs. 🙂
    Long and [obscured] condition (?) PARADISE for the sake of attaining SUNSET BEACH, surfing least much comes
    The Eastboy go in the future begin to walk. The words that give me hope. A friend in need is a friend indeed. When I was troubled, I encourage it. As for you, how many “friends” are there?
    Engrish isn’t limited to clothing, as this bag proves. I love the American Nutrition Facts label.
    IT’S NEW, Honey sweet. Would you like a NATIONAL BISCUIT? You will be crazy about Rich Flavor! Special Value
    Burger Special
    GLUTTONS Special mega burger
    From left:
    [top illegible] 1970 GRATEFUL ROSES: It’a [sic] Beautiful In Black
    Pia angel 08
    [upper French obscured] esprit de paris 1998, TRÈS BON!!
    GRATEFUL ROSES: It’a [sic] Beautiful In Black
    I certainly can’t fault my students for wearing clothes with broken English. Here’s what they have to choose from when they go shopping:
    CRESCENT- Full of energy, Galaxy Grobal [sic] Universe, Starry night, Catch your dream
    Cleared up, it is fine today. THE SKY CLEARED UP BEAUTIFULLY. The tree leaves glistened after the rain.
    Lustrous Cherry lips from you
    WIND PURSUE lack of ability
    Excellent Clear Sight, Magnificent Scenes
    I MADE A PROMISE WITH HER ON THURSDAY
    Artlessness & Fleckle
    Delight smile and friendly competing with each other
    Let me take a moment to give you an example of the “height” of fashion in Matsuyama. Note the “man bag” clipped to a belt loop, embroidered jeans (with bonus sewn-up hole) tucked into cowboy boots, and poofy, bleached “Lion King” hairdo.
    Rock the World with you [the text is from a song of this name]
    We gotta know we’re on the run
    I just grab your stuff, and in a minute we’ll be gone
    We’re gonna pull away like strangers,
    but soon the world will know
    How far this kinda love could ever go
    Remember what I say
    Baby don’t matter what they do

    There’s always more Engrish to be had, so I’m sure I’ll post plenty of it in the future. I need to get some sleep though, so I’m going to pull away like a stranger. 😉

  • Hi Ho, Silver!

    Horse Meat Sashimi Last night I ate at a new restaurant with some JET folk. Like most restaurants in Matsuyama, the menu was in Japanese. Some restaurants have pictures, and luckily, this one had many.

    One of the things I try to do when I eat out is try many different kinds of food. If I’m eating out and can’t decide between two dishes, 99% of the time I’ll choose the one I haven’t had before. In fact, it was just recently that I had to start relaxing that guideline, as I ran out of untried dishes in the restaurants in my neighborhood. I like takoyaki, I’ve eaten whale sushi, I eat raw eggs over my gyudon, and I do actually eat plenty of squid, despite my earlier experience with squid heads. I’ve even had natto recently that I didn’t mind at all. (For the record, the only thing I refuse to eat is shrimp in the shell. I don’t mean “peel and eat,” I mean “eat the shell with the shrimp”— unlike Ms. Semba, who sees it as another opportunity to get Calcium.) I’m an active and avid explorer of the culinary landscape of Japan. 🙂

    Anyway, we went to a yakitori restaurant in the Okaido shopping arcade I’ve mentioned a number of times. I couldn’t read much of the kanji on the menu, so I just ordered by picture. I wanted a sushi dish to go with my chicken skewers and gyoza, so I ordered what looked like a deep red fatty tuna.

    When it came, I was a little surprised at how much more it looked like beef than the picture. Not the squeamish one though, I plunged in after a brief moment to consider whether I trusted the restaurant’s preparation. I was interested to see what beef sushi tasted like.

    It tastes exactly like you think it does. You know when you open a plastic tray of (fresh) raw beef from the supermarket, and you can smell the beef? It tasted about like that. Not really all that appetizing, but not enough of a turn off to not finish the three pieces I got.

    After the meal, I was flipping through the menu to see how much I owed for my three small dishes; and relaxing after my meal, I realized I could read more of the kanji than I originally thought. Looking up at my beef sushi, I couldn’t find the character for “beef.” After a few puzzled seconds, I realized what it did have though, was the character for “horse.”

    Yes, I ate horse sushi. My stomach turned just a little bit at the realization.

    I’m happy to report that I’m feeling no ill effects of last night’s meal- not that I really anticipated any. Overall, I’d say it’s worth trying just to do; maybe order one dish between a couple friends so everyone gets just one piece, though. I was piling on the wasabi when I thought it was beef. I think I would have needed twice as much had I known it was horse.

  • Never ever buy squid heads

    Okay, maybe this goes without saying, but seriously? Don’t buy stuffed squid heads thinking you’re going to find some neat new dish just because your Japanese manager recommended them.

    I don’t know where you’re from, but the Karaoke Box establishments in Las Vegas serve squid-flavored snacks. Some people can’t stand squid-flavored anything, but I think they’re edible after a few drinks. Anyway, Ms. Semba recommended I try these stuffed squid heads that are sold in vacuum packs in the supermarket near my office. They’re hollowed out squid heads with the eyes removed, filled with seasoned, precooked rice. You’re supposed to boil them for five minutes and eat them, presumably with a knife and fork, as they’re not tender enough to pull apart with chopsticks.

    I knew as soon as I broke the seal on the plastic package that I’d made a tactical error, as the familiar scent of squid invaded my nostrils. As I already had the water boiling, I figured I might as well go through with it and just try it- who knows, maybe they’ll turn out to be great, right?

    No.

    No. I psyched myself up and took one bite of said squid, and that was all I could take. The outer texture was slightly less chewy than octopus sushi, and the flavor of the rice inside reminded me a little of kasha, but not in a good way.

    No, and though I turned on the fan over the stove, my apartment is now saturated with the smell of boiled squid.

    No, and I had to put the squid head I didn’t touch and the one missing a bite in a ziploc bag so the smell doesn’t linger any more than it already will.

    No, no, no. Oh my god, no.

    Here’s an appetizing picture of said squid heads after I sealed them for disposal. Each one fits easily in the palm of your hand. Or in the garbage can, your choice.

    Let this be a lesson to you. Don’t buy squid heads.

  • Japanese Red Bull

    While I’m posting odd pictures, here’s one of a drink I tried a few days ago called Ripobitan D (リポビタン D). It’s produced by Taisho Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd, and comes in a little glass bottle that looks and feels just like a medicine bottle. I bought it from a vending machine in front of my school when I was looking for a quick pick-me-up and wanted to try something new.

    The first thing I noticed was the flavor’s similarity to Red Bull. At 100mL, the bottle is considerably smaller than a standard 250mL Red Bull, but it tastes like they used almost the same amount of flavor syrup. I wonder if that’s to mask the higher concentrations of uppers also present.

    The ingredients I can read:
    1000mg taurine
    5mg each of vitamins B1, B2, and B6
    50mg caffeine

    Anyway, what made me post this is that for about two hours after drinking it, I felt lightheaded and my heart hurt. But I was certainly no longer drowsy, I’ll tell you that.

  • Japanese sensitive to atomic bomb images in Crystal Skull

    Lego Jones and the Exploding Chicken of Doom

    You’ve seen Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, right? I haven’t, but there’s apparently a scene at the Nevada Test Site that shows Indiana surviving a nuclear blast by hiding inside a lead-lined refrigerator. Some Japanese people are upset that Spielberg would include what they construe to be gratuitous depiction of atomic weapons and disregard for their aftereffects, as Indiana is right as rain after a quick spray-and-scrub, while many Japanese families are still dealing with the long term effects of radiation exposure, sixty plus years after the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I guess it’s still buzzing around the Japanese blogosphere, a little over a month after the film was released here. From a Japan Today article:

    Film critic Ken Terawaki criticized Spielberg for including scenes of a nuclear blast ”just for fun” at a time when the world is struggling to do away with nuclear weapons as ”a common enemy of humanity.”

    As I mentioned, I haven’t yet seen the film. However, I think it’s an easy conclusion to reach in saying that Japanese people would collectively be the group of people most sensitive to depiction of nuclear weapons in the world, and however inconsequential the bomb is to the actual story line, I imagine no other group has the same reaction.

    http://www.japantoday.com/category/entertainment-arts/view/nuclear-blast-scene-in-indiana-jones-film-puzzles-japan-viewers

  • Japanese Crash Lab

    I don’t know the name of the show I’m watching right now, but it’s really neat. It’s kind of a cross between Mythbusters, Crash Lab, and one of those shows that capitalizes on the embarrassment of its hosts.

    They started by creating a remote control replica of the Mach V car from Speed Racer (“マッハ　GoGoGo!”, “Ma-ha GoGoGo!” here in Japan), and tried to replicate a stunt where he drove upside down inside a tunnel. They added some carbon fiber aero parts to create lots of downforce and created a neat ramp that twisted to align the car with the tunnel wall, but their experiment just ended in a spectacular spread of carbon fiber and miniaturized electronics. The professional who hand crafted the car looked like he was ready to cry when the meter-long car fell from about fifteen feet up in the air. The slow motion playback was great.

    The second segment had them trying to replicate an egg cutting scene from a TV show or movie I’ve never seen, where a swordsman cut through a raw egg suspended on a string. What made it remarkable was that the cut was clean and sharp, and the slow motion replay showed the egg actually draining out of the shell after it was cut, rather than the whole thing exploding as you might expect. Anyway, they got some sort of master swordsman (this is Japan, after all) and he not only replicated the stunt, but then proceeded to cut edgewise through a 0.4mm thick sheet of what looked to be galvanized aluminum in one smooth stroke. I guess the sword must be really sharp.

    In the third segment, they recreated two of the three little pigs’ houses, each about five feet tall. They made one out of bunches of straw and one out of 1″x6″ wood planks, then blew the houses to smithereens with a swamp boat fan hooked up to what looked like a big V8 engine from a car. The great part was the woman with a microphone standing right in the airflow holding a pocket anemometer in front of the houses. As you can imagine, the straw house blew over pretty easily, but not so the wooden house. This poor woman was standing in hurricane-force winds, shouting readings into her microphone, struggling to stay on her feet, until the house finally blew over and fell apart, in winds somewhere upwards of 100kmph. I’m sorry I don’t remember the exact number, I was laughing too much.

    Japan really has some crazy TV shows, with very dedicated hosts.

    Oh, like the female host who went in for a colon polyp removal and had the entire thing broadcast on national television (including video from the scope itself showing the hot wire actually removing the polyp), all the while commenting on her experience and talking to the doctors.

    You know, I think it’s about time I wrote a full post on Japanese television programming. Maybe I’ll do that over my vacation in the next ten days or so.

  • The Perils of Public Bathing

    Ms Semba likes going to local onsen pretty frequently, five or six times a week. Sometimes she goes to the onsen I’ve been to near my apartment, Himehiko Onsen. Last week, while coming back into the locker room, she saw one of our students.

    A male student.

    His mother was finishing getting ready to go out to the pools while he stood there waiting for her. They were both also wearing their birthday suits, but the boy was the only one looking around. Semba-san realized he was one of our young students after she realized he was looking at her oddly. He’s eight or nine years old, and the cross-gender bathing limit is ten years old, so technically they weren’t breaking any rules.

    Personally, I think this is a bit tacky. I don’t know of any students at my school whose parents are not married, so I have to assume it was a choice rather than a matter of necessity. At any rate, Ms Semba was understandably mortified. She was still a bit flustered the next day, which was, perhaps unfortunately for her, Parents’ Day. The boy’s mother ended up leaving halfway through the lesson without saying a word to anyone on her way out of the school.

    She must have had to make a really important phone call.

  • What the heck is a gust front?

    Here’s the result of a query I threw at the USGS National Earthquake Information Center database, showing all earthquakes stronger than 5.0 for the year so far in the region.

    Mother Nature is really toying with Japan right now. I’m not sure how much press the recent Japanese earthquakes have gotten in the states, but they’re pretty big news here. First of all, last month’s huge earthquake: When I woke up on Saturday the 14th and turned on the TV while eating breakfast, it was on every channel. The earthquake was a magnitude 7.2, and totally reshaped the landscape in some areas. The eastern and western tectonic plates that meet at the earthquake fault line moved toward each other up to 28cm and 29cm respectively in some places. Because of the specific planting grid pattern layout of rice fields, it’s easy to see where they buckled and formed small hills where the ground pushed together.

    A number of roads were not just destroyed, but erased- the land they were on is now gone. One landslide moved 5 million cubic meters of soil – enough earth to fill the Tokyo Dome 40 times over (as repetitively reported by a number of news agencies here). Some landslides left gaping holes in the ground that look like the Grand Canyon. Fifteen “quake lakes” formed from landslides blocking rivers. The power involved is really awesome, in the more traditional sense of the word.

    One local onsen was completely erased by the earthquake. The family that owned it and a few patrons were inside when the building was crushed and carried downhill in a landslide. So the building is gone, the owners and their family are gone, and the spring is now buried under a mountain of mud.

    Everyone interviewed says that they couldn’t remain standing during the quake, they had to lay down or fall down. Videos from security cameras show everything in stores just collapsing and falling to the ground. Twelve people died, ten are missing (now presumed dead), and 358 injured.

    Some bridges collapsed, and land under some national highways has risen by up to 50cm, disjoining sections of roads and bridges. A number of bridges that weren’t destroyed will need to be replaced because of damaged underpinnings. It seems a lot like a Sim City earthquake, with long ripples in the topsoil, and everything above the quake just wiped- trees, roads, and buildings alike.

    So that was June 14th. A week ago, on July 22nd, there was a 5.2 off the coast, and then the next day, a 6.8 on eastern Honshu (the largest Japanese island) on the 23rd injured 200 people and damaged 90 buildings.

    As if a series of powerful earthquakes wasn’t enough, a few days ago there were wind gusts strong enough to uproot trees, knock over light buildings (temporary offices, sheds, unfinished construction), and injure people with flying debris. A huge deluge today dumped so much rain that four people died in flash flooding, and the government evacuated 50,000 people from central Japan. One river rose 1.3 meters (~4 feet) just in the span of ten minutes. They didn’t even have time to close some flood control gates it was so fast.

    I know I haven’t been here very long, but I can’t imagine this is normal. It can’t be.

    Right??

  • Japanese customs officials give hash to random passenger

    Here\'s the type of box the hash was inWhile training drug-sniffing dogs at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport, two Japanese customs officials routinely put drugs in regular passengers’ luggage instead of the specially marked training bags they were supposed to have been using. Until May 25th, the dogs in training had always found the drugs. As the bag was unmarked and on a moving conveyor belt, the 124 grams of hash planted by the officer were lost almost immediately when not detected by the dog.

    I know it’s not as timely as it might have been, but it’s no less funny. The “recipient” of the drugs was eventually found at a Tokyo area hotel, without even realizing their bag had been tampered with. Incidentally, the image you see was taken from the news as reported by Asahi, one of Japan’s largest brewers and beverage makers. 🙂