Jazzy Yokohama Bar

Here's some scenes from a live Jazz event I stumbled across in a small bar near the Yokohama city library.

This pic shows the artworks of Sogi that adorn the walls. He's back!


Mr. Grillman on giant sax:


And video. Less shaking than usual cause I actually used my gorilla pod! You may enjoy the HD if that kicks in...

[vid]
The story of how this jazzy bar revealed my spoiled self is here.

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A Japanese Riddle: When is a Verb Not a Verb?

Answer: When it's not.

When I first came to Japan, I had forgotten most of what I'd learned in my two college Japanese courses, which had been separated from each other by about a year and separated from my arrival in J Land by another couple years. When I touched down, I could pretty much only say はい (affirmative!).

I didn't have much to do during that first summer as a JET, so I stayed in the Board of Education in the town hall and tried to study the language. One of the first mistakes I made was saying あらん (aran) or あらない (aranai). It was my simple attempt to state the verb of existence (aru) in the negative. But unlike every other verb in Japanese, there is no negative conjugation of aru. My giggling bosses told me that the proper word was ない (nai).

Well, college only taught me the polite conjugations of verbs, so I knew you could say arimasen as an opposite of the polite arimasu. I had no idea that the masu ending itself is a type of verb, thus rendering arimasu and aru as two different words with the same meaning. It thought the same rules would apply to both words. So yeah, I was also confused when I was told to say nai because nai is an adjective. If you want the technical terms, aru is a doushi (動詞) and nai is a keiyoushi (形容詞). Course, adjectives have verbal natures in Japanese, but that's a whole different post.

Over the years, I came to accept this odd substitute-an-adjective-for-this-verb-instead-of-conjugating-it rule, but I never really got why things are this way. But I think I have found some good theories by asking and googling over the years:

1. Aru means "does exist" and nai means "does not exist", so they are perfectly opposed concepts
   
2. If negative conjugations of aru once existed, they were replaced
3. Furthermore, aranai may have been shortened to just nai
   
4. In older Japanese we more often may have heard 有り(ari, noun meaning existence) and 無し(nashi, noun meaning without existence) that may have been merely replaced by their modern colloquial equivalents.

Does the real explanation exist in this list? Well, I'm not in a position to say.

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Japanese Slang: I Like a Little Meat on My Grass

This post's title had so much potential for naughty puns, but I'm avoiding that for grandma's sake, who still writes to ask when I'm getting back from Japan. Recently, Invisiblegaijin told me that if I make it to 7 years, I'm here for life. He would know, he's been here long enough to be my Japanese grandma.

So, right, some kind of intro that actually has something to do with the slang terms today. Okay, before I introduce today's actual slang term, I have to cover two older ones that you may know, so bear with me. Last year everyone was running around yelling about the invasion of the herbivorous men (草食系男子 soushoku-kei danshi) and annoyingly translating the term as grass-eating men on their so totally non-hack blogs (I luv you guyssss!). Here is a herbivorous man:

When I see the sun I think of the rising sun flag and by extension all the uncomfortable comfort women...

Herbivorous men reportedly just want to talk about episodes of Trading Spaces. On the other side of the manliness spectrum, we have the meat eaters (肉食系男子 nikushoku-kei danshi), who actively pursue women, but not in the way of the safe guy you will eventually settle for and I HOPE YOU ARE HAPPY ABOUT THAT, STACIE, BECAUSE YOU BROKE THE HOPELESS ROMANTIC'S HEART AND HE WILL NEED TIME BEFORE HE CAN FORGIVE. I'm sorry... I didn't mean that. Please come back! Please?

Oh, so here is a meat eater guys pic:

Ve are so manly that ve will never regret these stupid sketches nor our insensitive comfort women jokes.

Right, you have the picture. Then this year we have our word of the day: omnivorous man (雑食系男子 zasshoku-kei danshi). What's his deal? Well, he's just kinda not either extreme. He may be kind enough to wash your car, but he will be making rude innuendos the whole time he's washing the headlights. Also, sans-the man bit, this term existed as a slang word before 2010, and meant person of various hobbies. This means it is a doubly safe word to describe yourself as on a date.

Okay, post over, girly internet boys. I am off to find a 肉食系熟女.

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Evangelion Rocks Fuji

You kids don't know how good you have it. In my day, we had just two of those funny Japanese cartoons in our Midwestern, supermarket-based video store. One was a Yuyu Hakusho movie, and the other was a random episode of Evangelion in which this whiny boy was hanging out in a robot's womb or something and then the robot woke up and ate another robot and creeped 16 year old me out.

So much to my chagrin as a Japanoblogger, I never have seen the entirety of Evangelion. These days, it's just too mainstream for me to bring myself to watch it. So I don't know if this Evangelion exhibition from the news has anything to do with the plot of the series in the sense that I don't quite get the location of said exhibition.

Link to original Japanese article/vid

Yoshida City— At the foot of Mt. Fuji, starting on the 25th,there is a giant robot head waiting for you. At 9 meters by 16 meters, this thing would likely send me back on a bad VHS trip as I imagined the robot coming to life and eating my flesh. I really hate robots in Japan.

You can see horrifying robo-video by clicking the picture.

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Heidi Trance Music Brings Back Tokyo Club History

First off, if you don't know the Heidi (ハイジ) Nissan commercials, go here. And if you don't recognize the animation as being from the same studio that did Golden Eggs, well... we can't be friends.

Today's post is about a song from a discotheque established in Tokyo in the decadent 90s. Wikichan says,

Juliana's, also known as Juliana's Tokyo, was a Japanese discothèque that operated in Shibaura, Minato, Tokyo^[1] in the early 1990s. It was famous for its dance platforms, on which office ladies dressed in "bodycon" (abbr. (wasei-eigo): "body conscious" (ボディコン, bodikon^?, "sexually flattering clothing")^[2][3]) clubwear would congregate, as amateur go-go dancers (professionals were also employed).^[4]

Apparently, Juliana's had a techno mix that was so overused it remains locked in the Japanese consciousness to this day. It's kinda the Japanese equivalent, in terms of moronic techno that we can easily recall, of the Mortal Combat song. Here 'tis (I recommend only about 30 seconds of this stuff):


And here is a Heidi commercial featuring it:


The word they use in the CMs is 低燃費 (low fuel consumption). If you aren't technoed out, DJ Ozma has a pretty funny take on the song too that you can see here.

Hat tip for this post goes at to Mayu.

EDIT: A Twitterer has the title figured out.

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Nth Video from a Washed Up J-Vahblogger

See that. 200 videos from the guy that runs The Hopeless Romantic. 200 testaments to how shoddy a vlog can be.

I wanted to wait until I had 4,000 subbers to do the vid, but the last 50 have been stubborn etc. etc. Oh yeah, still not a YouTube partner. My body of work, my choice!

So I'd appreciate it if youtube would stop bugging me to be one.

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Karaoke: Ayaka Hirahara Will Rock Your Worlds

Though she seems to have done it way back in 2003, Ayaka Hirahara's Jupiter is pretty popular right now. I don't know why, so edifiy me in the comments Dear Reader. Anyways it's brilliant! A take on Jupiter from Gustov Holst's The Planets suite. I am more familiar with Mars, but this one rings a bell. You can hear the original orchestra pieces here.

And here is Ayaka's version with Japanese lyrics and subs so you can practice at home:
[vid link]

She seems to do a lot of such adaptations of the classics. Here is her rendition of Ave Maria. This and Jupiter both appear on her 2009 collection my[sic] Classics! Maybe the momentum has carried over into the current Hirahara boom.

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Jamiroquai and Tom Sawyer, Two Big Names in Cup Noodle History

Um so Jamiroquai has what to do with noodles and polystyrene? Who cares? Throw a few Japanese lyrics in at the end of the CM! Bah. Youtube is bragging that Boingboing already featured this. I'm the only person on earth that doesn't read that blog. So this post, like all of them, are for the biggest market share of my readership (my own two eyes).

You thought bringing that song back to pimp noodles was odd? Try an 19th century book. From the 80s CM vault, I give you Tom Sawyer, who I didn't even know made it across the cultural divide.

Hey, if that isn't an old enough foreign tale for you, there is always Journey to the West where we find temptresses and Cup Noodles. Here's another one in that series. And another.

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Unico=Nightmare Fuel

In my the dim recesses of my memory as an 80s child, I can recall the awesome horror that was Unico and the Island of Magic. I especially remember the people being turned into brick-dolls and enduring a fate worse than death as living walls.

Unico is a creation of the grandfather of manga, Osamu Tezuka. Enjoy this playlist, if you dare!

[vid]

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Karaoke: What Not to Sing in Front of Other Foreigners

Don't worry Susan Boyle, Kimutaku will protect you from the abstract jokes!

So during my first (and so far only!) trip back to America, I convinced my friend that we needed to go to a karaoke bar. We were in the north of Denver on a snowy night and Google maps directed us to a nearby one in a strip mall. The decor and customers were rather country, but heedless of this I chose to sing Sukiyaki. It was a song I was well familiar with, but the lyrics on the display came out in romaji, which really threw me off. I gave a horrid performance and half expected a cowboy to punch me.

Later in the night I did Mr. Roboto which went over a lot better. Someone even shook my hand after that one. The moral of the story is: Know Thy Audience. Wait, saying it all in King James English makes "know" sound a little biblical. I cannot vouch for the effectiveness of knowing your audience in the biblical way. What? Oh, I'm getting the wave from my producer to move on with the rest of the post.

Here we have a French version of Ameribrittania's Got Idolatrous Talent. The singer has daringly decided to go with the theme song to an anime. Let's see how it goes.


Now here's the original, which you can practice and sing freely if you live in Japan. You can see how environment makes all the difference when Franco-America Wants to Marry an Millionare man is mashed up with it:

Okay... it still sucks. But I felt the power.

Bonus torture:
A Spanomerican Idol gets the same treatment from the philistines.
Also, bonus Susan Boyle.

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Japanese Slang: The Deer that Turned Away

Okay that title is horrible, because it's fish that get away, but let's ignore that and carry on.



See the deer in this image? This is from a Japanese card game called hanafuda. The deer (shika) shows up on the card for the tenth (tou) month, and from the we got shikatou (鹿十） which went through a phonetic change to shikato (シカト) over the years.

Now, you already know this if you can also read the description on the image, but shikato means to ignore something, because the deer looks like it is turning it's head away. More accurately, it seems to be used like snub in English.

You may have also caught that this was a "chivalrous" word. Yeah, in Japan, chivalry is something a romantic yakuza would use, so this was once underworld slang. Gogen says it was gamblers' cant. That's not really surprising, as hanafuda have a long history of being used in yakuza gambling dens. The zokugojiten says it spread throughout the delinquent world, until everyone was using it.

Finally, it seems to be a good word to use for being turned down when you are out nampaing, as this YouTube video shows:


So it is neither deer nor fish, but the birds that get away. Unless you are a dog. Wanna 'nother animal in this post? Get this, since the crane (tsuru) on the first (ichi) month's card is also turning away, sometimes tsuruichi is substituted for shikato, but only by someone that is probably making a mistake as a joke.

Usage examples I found and took a stab at glossing:

しかとうとぼける [old example] gloss: turn one's head, whistle a little tune, and play dumb.
しかとしよう gloss: Forget about that creep.
しかとかよ gloss: Hey, who do you think you are ignoring?!
しかとすんなよ gloss: Don't you walk away from me!
ツルイチされた! gloss: I had an endearing conversation with the hand.

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Karaoke Mission: Localized Dancing Queen

Think you are hot stuff in the karaoke box? Try singing custom lyrics to a favorite tune then. This youtuber is constantly localizing lyrics into his native nipponese. I can't wait for him to take on Rock Me Amadeus. Anyways, even if you don't plan to sing, this Dancing Queen cover is a nice little way to study the language.

[vid]

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