100 Japanese Things

Our own Jason Ho sent this from his commute to work today.

He would like you to know that he enjoys signs that depict mutant figures.

And they are cutest when in ambiguous spacial relation to a bike, aren’t they?

自転車通行可

通行可；つうこうか

This one means: Bicycle passage permitted [i.e. walking or biking okay, no cars though]

—

Alas, they are sometimes on their own.

歩行者用道路

自転車も乗れません

歩行者用：ほこうしゃよう

道路：どうろ

自転車：じてんしゃ

乗れません：のれません

(a road for walkers [i.e. no cars], bicycles can’t drive here either)

NOTE: That も　is kind of funny, right? But it’s just because it’s implied first that cars aren’t allowed.

—-

Ah, young mutant family, how we love your delightful hand-holding ways. May you instruct us eternally!

AND: Keep them signs coming.

PLUS: Thanks to Scott as always for proofing this for me. He keeps me sharp on them long and short “Oh”s. (ほこうしゃよう, etc.)

Ooh, our first sign submission:

Gah, it’s so wee and hard to make out! Do you hate it? *

From Scott, who works as a translator in a building a few hundred meters from my desk. He says:

the text reads: 月極有料駐車場
I think this is one of those signs that people see and understand, but might have a hard time reading because of the first two characters, which are read つきぎめ and mean monthly or by the month.

So, we have:

月極有料 ( つきぎめ　　ゆうりょう）

駐車場 ( ちゅうしゃじょう　）

(i.e. a parking lot that charges a monthly fee)

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SIDENOTE: Dude in my office said (rough translation): “Yeah, that’s a mysterious bit of Japanese, right? Lots of kids would get that wrong, pronouncing it like “tsukigoku” or something.”

Then he handed me a kanji history of 極 (**), which apparently　referred to a tree in a very high location in ancient Chinese. Yup.

* ‘Cause it’s pieces of you-ooh?

** We also see this kanji lots in words like 北極　(north pole), etc.

Oh, we’ll still be bringing you THINGS. But we’re also going to be bringing you signs. Starting immediately.

If you’re in Japan, you can play along. See a Japanese sign that you don’t understand? Take a pic and e-mail (or keitai-mail) it over to (type it just like that and you’ll save me the trouble of filtering it. Pop it on in your keitai now, you never know when you’ll need it.)

Better yet, just pop your sign up on flickr and mail me a link to it.

THEN: Me and/or the Japanese dudes in my office will post it here and write a quick explanation like so:

横断歩行者はボタンをおしてください。

（　横断：おうだん

歩行者：ほこうしゃ　）

（　Crosswalkers: Please push the button. )
からだの不自由な方の押ボタンです。

（　不自由な　方: ふじゆうな　かた）

（　押ボタン：　おし　ボタン　）

（Handicapped people’s button [this is])

NOTE: The translations will be quick and rough, just enough to get you able to understand the sign, and, more importantly, get you the kanji/ reading so you can look it up yourself if so inclined.

AND: As always, I make no claims to be some kind of kanji-supergod or anything like that. I’m far, far, far, from it.

BUT I work in an office full of Japanese folks, and they are all kanji-supergods and would find it fun to check and make sure that their handy foreign pal is reading the signs right/answer questions about obscure signs folks find.

—–

WHY ARE WE DOING THIS? I’m in Japan, and I like putting things on the internet that aren’t already on the internet.

PLUS: It’ll help me with kanji/actual Japanese signage.

PLUS: It might help you with kanji/actual Japanese signage.

PLUS: If you don’t live in Japan, this is some real stuff that you can study before you get here.

PLUS: If you’re an SRSer (or use any computer based flash card program), you can just drop the images into your flash card program. More fun than typing sentences, right?

PLUS: It gives me an excuse to pay more attention to all the signsI usually just ignore while walking around my town.

Send me any suggestions that you have. And, of course, signs.

BONUS POINTS FOR: Funny/ weird ones.

…and last of all, a SHOUT OUT: To Learn Japanese Through Advertisements. They focus on print ads, and do a great job of transcribing/explaining. Harvey seems to have the project on hiatus, but lots of good stuff there.

I’m afraid we won’t be explaining all the grammar like they do (props to them for doing it, though). Our strategy is more throw some Japanese at you and run away as fast as we can.

Exhibit A)

Japanese text reads:

カンヌ映画祭

あなたの映画の大ファンです。ぜんぶ海賊版にしちゃいました！！

Exhibit B)

１）やれやれ！あっちも悲劇、こっちも悲劇だ！

２）ガソリンの値段がこのまま上がり続けるなら私もバスを使わなければいけなくなるかも！

Exhibit C)

１）考えてみたんだけどオバマとクリントンの「ドリームチケット」で2番目になるのも悪くないかなって

２）ばか言ってんじゃないの！

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Kind of hard to understand Japanese political comics, because to get the joke you probably have to understand concrete lobbies, LDP, etc. But (for Americans), American political comics in Japanese equal=Not so bad.

On Exhibit A:

All you need to know is that 海賊　（　かいぞく　）means “pirate”　(in both the swashbuckling and downloading sense), and you’ve already got that one.

On Exhibit B:

悲劇　（　ひげき　）　is a tragedy, and the newspapers in frame 1 (note: Japanese comic readers are used to reading from right to left, hence the numbers) lists a bunch of world tragedies, earthquakes, etc.

If you’re a flash-carder…

1. ひ‐げき【悲劇】
   １ 主人公が運命や社会の圧力、人間関係などによって困難な状況や立場に追い込まれ、不幸な結末に至る劇。トラジェディー。喜劇。２ 人生や社会の痛ましい出来事。「貧困がもたらした―」喜劇。

Exhibit C:

A little confusing, right? But if you miss the nuance (a bit hard to catch what’s happening in this version, I thought I got the joke but wasn’t quite sure until I verified), you can take advantage of the…

MOST EXCELLENT BONUS:

Original English versions of Exhbit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C

Yeah, I know, you’re not supposed to read translations, etc., but it helps sometimes when you get a political cartoon with the kanji for ’superdelegates’ or some such. You can just google the cartoon’s author, dig through the archives and find the original.

Japanese Newsweek is on newsstands everywhere (uh, in Japan), fun to flip through whatever level you’re at.

DOUBLE BONUS FUN TIME:

The Japanese Newsweek site has an area where they list the week’s best quotes from news worldwide in their original English versions.

The catch is they’re only in English on the site, and only in Japanese in the magazine. They intend for Japanese readers to entertain themselves (and improve their English) by trying to match the quote in the magazine to it’s original.

We can, of course, flip that game. There’s some really dang fun sentences there

ジャガイモのことを考え、ジャガイモを育て、ジャガイモを食べよう。

“Think potato, grow potato, eat potato.”

(The slogan for a recent potato festival in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where the government is trying to get the population to adopt the humble spud in place of pricier diet staples like rice and wheat .)

—

子供よりビールを優先するなんて、前代未聞のケースだ。

“This is the first time beer has taken priority over a child.”

(Australian constable Wayne Burnett, on the arrest of a driver who had buckled up his load of beer―but not his 5-year-old son―for a trip across the Outback.)

—

TRIPLE BONUS:

For those of you who aren’t in Japan, here’s a couple sentences that you can try and match for kicks. OriginalEnglish page here.

「地球外生物の同胞」について話をしてもいいではないか。それも神が創られたもののはずだ。

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そのこどもたちがうまれたら「ゆかいなブレディ家」と同じくらい子だくさんになるね。

—

Sidenote to my mom: Hi Mom! Just writing to make sure you know that I didn’t write the underwear post that appeared on this site before! That was the other guy (note the byline)! I don’t write about underwear because I’m an innocent angel! Hope all’s well - Saleem

UPDATE: Thanks to Scott for correcting my careless typing on the　”神” quote. Now fixed. Because while aliens might have been made by God, they almost definitely were not made by paper

If you’re a Kurt Vonnegut fan, you’ll know that homeboy urged us to:

please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

Which seems nice, and is easy enough to do back home. But how does one murmur that in Japanese?

Which brings us to the January 1st issue of Brutus Magazine.

Yo, what? Yes, that’s correct, it’s no longer January.

But BRUTUS magazine’s stuff attempts to be ‘classic’ rather than just timely, so if you’re in Japan you can get recent back issues at most big book stores.

(In Japan you can also order back issues online. In America subscribe through Amazon (expensive) or get individual issues through Giant Robot.)

Each issue is themed. An art issue, a Music vs. Rakugo issue, a movie issue, etc. And the magazine’s design is hot (compare their covers to those of American upscale men’s mags, 95% of which feature a large picture of George Clooney with weird hair).

In many of these issues they ask famous people what their favorite nani-nani is, and let them chat a bit about it. There’s pictures of the things the famous people like, so all you have to do is find some famous person who likes the same things as you, and then you can get their other recommendations, kinda like low-fi J-Idol Netflix for intellects.

The January issue is about books, and features Hikari Ota of the most excellent 爆笑問題Podcast .

He, like me, is a big Kurt Vonnegut fan.

In said story, Hikari quotes the Vonnegut line as:

これが幸福じゃなくてなにが幸福なんだ。

（幸福：こうふく）

A pleasantly idiomatic translation of, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

If anybody actually tries saying this around happy Japanese people, please let us know the results.

Remember last week, when we were young and in love and you frequently called me up to say, “Oh, 100japanesethings.wordpress.com, I cannot stop reloading you!”.Well, I would like to inform you that THINGS HAVE CHANGED. By which I mean our URL. Because now it’s just 100JapaneseThings.com.

The love, however, remains.

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But soft! Did you fear that I would leave you without a smidgen of Japanese? Never! Even our metaposts have Japanese things. Such as…

The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affair’s Ambassador Kids Website

They’ve got this lovely little page with pictures of all the flags of the world and each contry’s katakana name.

Some are easy.

Samoa? サモア, of course.

Some don’t have English as the root, so you get, for example, the well known Germany=ドイツ

The tricky to remember ones are just a touch off from English:

Holland？　オランダ

Jordan？　ヨルダン

But what’s that, old veteran? All that is cake?

Well, can you say, THE REPUBLIC OF KIRIBATI? Huh? Well, can you? Now you can.

–

NEXT UP: Something less practical.

Okay, so there is no ‘Japanese Wives’ Guide to Lunchbox Revenge’.

But there IS this amazing post on the Japanese version of Yahoo! Answers (Yahoo! 知恵袋） concerning ways in which one can get back at one’s husband by sabotaging his lunchbox.

The question comes in like this:

主人と大喧嘩しました。明日のお弁当で仕返ししてやろうと思います。

(しゅじん　と　おおげんか　しました。　あした　の　おべんとう　で　しかえし　してやろう　と　おもいます。)

Yesterday my husband and I got in a big fight. I’m thinking of getting revenge by doing something to his daily lunch box.

どんなお弁当だったらギャフンというでしょうか？

(どんな　おべんとう　だったら　ギャフン　という　でしょうか？)

What kind of bento would leave him feeling defeated/speechless?

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Now, in America, this would have likely lead to some crazy cruel suggestions.

For reference: A high school acquaintance of mine once put a dead squirrel in his neighbors’ mailbox as an act of revenge. I was thinking I’d see something along those lines.

Instead (note, what follows are very rough translations just to get you hype, but far better to go ahead and jump over there yourself):

玉子焼き・目玉焼き・ゆで卵とご飯。
塩ッ気なし。

(たまごやき、めだまやき 、ゆでたまご　と　ごはん

しおっけなし )

An omelette-y egg, a fried egg (sunny side up), a boiled egg.

Without salt!

-

白飯に

(しろめし　に )

梅干

(うめぼし)

On top of white rice… a sour-plum.

–

The above was a pretty common suggestion. There is something funny about opening one’s lunchbox to just a sour plum, though some took a more critical path…

–

お弁当って、女性の優しさとか妻の愛情の象徴ですよ。

（おべんとう　って、じょせい　の　やさしさ　とか　つま　の　あいじょう　の　しょうちょう　ですよ。 ）

それでガッカリさせられるというのはツライ。

A bento is a sign of a women’s kindess, or of a wife’s love.

To make him feel disappointed (through a bento) seems tough.

-

Some lacked creativity…

前の晩と、全く同じ おかずを詰めてあげる・・・・

（まえ　の　ばん　と、まったく　おなじ　おかず　を　つめてあげる）

Give him the exact same food as last night!
-

わざと箸を入れ忘れる・・・・

(わざと　はし　を　いれわすれる）

イジメになっちゃうかな？？？？？？

Forget his chopsticks on purpose…

But would that be bullying?？？？？

-

…and some had plenty…

ご飯の上にのりで大きく「バカ」と書き、おかずなし。

（ごはん　の　うえ　に　のり　で　おおきく　バカ　と　かき、　おかず　なし。）

On top of the rice, write a big ‘Stupid’ in sea weed. Give him no other food (i.e. accompaniment to rice).

-

ハムをハート型に切りぬき、のりで「畜生」と書く

（ハム　を　ハート　けい 　に　きりぬき、　のり　で　ちくしょう　と　かく）

Cut a piece of ham into the shape of a heart and use sea weed to write ‘Dang you!’ on top.

-

And taking the very high route…

いつもより心を込めておいしいものを作ってあげると、反省してくれないかしら？

（いつも　より　こころ　を　こめて　おいしい　もの　を　つくって　あげる　と、はんせい　してくれない　かしら？）

Make an even better than usual lunch for him, likely to make him reflect a bit, won’t it?

–

All of which seems a little soft and, dare I say, cute to most Western viewers. But beware, here comes some…

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NOT SUBTLE FORESHADOWING: More examples of bento web-iness later coming over the next few days! Truly shall you know the supreme-ness of the average Japanese lunch, and properly shall you be able to compare it to mere white rice and sour plums!

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BONUS CHALLENGE: In keeping with the theme of eatabug’s last post, there is one totally awesome suggestion over on today’s site that involves poop, or something like it.

If you can find it and drop it in the comments with your best translation, we’ll laugh and give you a shoutout and be your friend.

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(shoutout to AJAT for turning me on to Yahoo!知恵袋)

As frequently pointed out by the Economist, Japan’s politics are dang confusing. Even more confusing when you have to keep straight political terms for government bodies, party names, etc., in two languages.

You might begin here: 参議院キッズ　(House of Councillors Kids) website .

Admittedly, not an enticing web site name. But a good start if you want to up your J-politics vocabulary and general J-political understanding.

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Key terms to get you started:

国会　(kokkai): In English this is known as “The Diet”. It’s Japan’s legislative body. Members are elected directly by citizens.

参議院　(sangiin): The House of Councillors, the ‘upper house’ of the Diet, where councillors serve 6 year terms

衆議院　(shuugiin): The House of Representatives, the ‘lower house’ of the Diet, where representatives serve 4 year terms

-

Phrases you might learn:

国会ってなにするところ？

kokkaitte nani suru tokoro?

(This Diet you mentioned, what do they do there?)

note: the ‘this… you mentioned’ implication comes from the ‘tte‘ sound

どんな話し合いするの？

donna hanashiai suru no?

(What do they discuss/consult about there?)

note: The “no” makes the question sound cute and little kid-ish.

-

More English background reading at the Economist Japan Political Structure page.

BONUS: If the kanji is overwhelming, might I recommend running Firefox with the Rikai-chan plugin? Gives you a popup dictionary right in your browser window, just mouse-over the kanji and a (usually accurate) reading and definition pop up.

NEXT UP: Something more fun than Japanese politics. Jeez.

What’s that you say? Facing a page full of science based Kanji makes you want to cry and poo?

Bladow: Gakken Kids! Science : a science site for Japanese kids.

On the top right of the page, you’ll see a button labeled ‘ふりがな’　and then ‘なし’ and’あり’. (Furigana are hiragana or katakana text above a kanji to help you read it even if you don’t know how.)

Punch ‘あり’ and all the ‘hard’ kanji (as judged by the site’s makers) will magically have furigana letters to help you read along .

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Phrases you might learn:

「どうしてあくびがでるの」

doushite akubi ga deru no?

(Why do yawns happen?)

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「宇宙（うちゅう）はいつどうやってできたの」

uchuu wa itsu douyatte dekita no?

(When and why did the cosmos come about?)

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… both useful phrases for confounding little Japanese kids or supervisors.

Reading this stuff is also a good way to bone up on science terms for 2kyu and 1kyu tests. If you’re into that sort of thing.

FUN FACT: Type キッズ into Google, along with any other Japanese word, and you’re likely to come up with an easy to read site on that topic. (キッズ　is the katakana spelling of ‘kids’ that’s used in lots of Japanese kids products).

I’ll look for more of these sites and post the best ones that I find.

Hey Person,

Do you

• want to learn Japanese?
• from real Japanese stuff?
• And you’re not particularly into anime (not that there’s anything wrong with that)?

I(soon to be we) am just like you, at least regarding the above.

A few years ago, I moved to Japan without knowing a lick of Japanese. I just didn’t know how to find the good Japanese stuff. I’d walk into stores and see lots of… things.

Some that looked cool. But not speaking Japanese made it hard to know what the hell to buy.

The information on the internet skewed toward anime and martial arts, and those are both cool things, but I just happened to not be too into them. And my Japanese friends would sometimes recommend me things that seemed way beyond my level or unapproachable, either too hard or hard to get.

So here we’ll review 100 Japanese things (for starters), from the point of a Japanese learner. How’s it work? We’ll tell you:

• what the thing is
• where you can get it
• what kind of Japanese you might learn from it
• a phrase from it that you can use right away

We’ll make no claims to be critics or Japanese experts, just people sharing 100 Japanese things. Here we go.