Homeless Japanese Dudes Really Like Me

Well, I suspect they just like Western-looking people in general. The reason being somehow they caught on to the fact that Western culture has a strong tradition of charity. Japan, on the other hand, has a culture of 恩返し (ongaeshi,gratitude+return). Someone gives you a gift and then you try to return it or pay it forward to someone lower on the pecking order.

Odd image via Nippon Cinema

When NOVA went under, we started to hear stories of out of work English teachers getting food from their former students. But a lot of those students then sat themselves or their child down for a free English lesson. Expecting something in return is not charity, so if you want charity a foreigner is a good person to go to.

Often I am accosted by gentlemen of the homeless persuasion at larger train stations around here. They always address me in English to ask for money. I, having mixed feelings about what they will spend their money on, often counter with, "おにぎりは?" (How about a riceball?). They always walk away, though I genuinely am offering.

Tonight I walked into my local Dokihotei to buy some weights. A rather unwashed-looking gentleman followed me in, said "HELLO!" and thrust out a left hand, bedecked in fungusy nails, for me to reluctantly shake. I tried to wave bye-bye, but he followed me throughout the store, cornering me near my quarry, a set of adjustable dumbbells. After a weird show of strength with forearm exercise pincers, he started to ask me in Japanese for money. I gave my usual onigiri counter offer, and he raised for bread. Deal. He wanted to carry my heavy purchase for me, but as I am not from an ongaeshi culture, I couldn't let him. Maybe that was insensitive of me; I don't know the rules that well. Anyways, he got the bread, and I got to to thinking, so the end result is a blog post.
--
Virtue is its own reward.
徳はそれ自体が報いである。

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Tama Hoooooooooooooome

Japan rips off Deep Purple. I rip off Japan. Vid:


So you can see one Tama home CM in that video, here is a new one where they prove my point and replace Tama Hooooooome with chirashi (flyer, as in the damn flyers I get shoved in my mailbox everyday):

If you want more of the Kuraray CMs, visit this post.

This isn't the only vid I've made with a guest recently by the way. This one stars butt biting bug of Japan fame more prominently:

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A Couple TRICK CMs Starring Yukie

Two things remain constant: My love of the dorama TRICK and the willingness of Japanese celebrities to appear in commercials. These combine into the embedded videos below, two of which star Nakama Yukie.

First we have a tricky cup noodle CM, which came out in time to promote the new movies this year:


Here we see Yamada utter a variation on her famous line "I see what you did there!" (I may have changed the nuance on that line a bit ;-):
And no, I can't tell you how something made out of wheat and hops is different from beer.

And next an ad for the DS game. I need to get that.

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Japanese Horse Guy Buys Himself a Very Special Present

I am scheduling this post way ahead of time, so if I die or something and it shows up, know that I am not posting from beyond the grave. Yet.
Anyways this is technically a Christmas video in which a guy buys himself all the energy drinks and tries to drink/eat them.

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Karaoke: The City Lights Make One Yearn for Companionship

While perusing my copy of 常識として知っておきたい日本語 (Japanese Everyone Should Know), I ran across 巷の灯り (chimata no ikari, the lights of the streets). It refers to the glow of a city at night, and maybe worldly delights/the profane (I'm not always clear at what the author is getting at because he waxes poetic about phrases).

It's not a phrase that lends well to googling the nuance thereof, but I did discover an nice old song with a related title: 街の灯り (machi no akari, the lights of the streets). Yeah the titles are one kanji apart and the nuance I can only guess at, but the song makes me feel all good and lonesome, especially as I sit here trying to figure out what to do for Christmas break and lament the lack of blog readers that could fill me in on the nuances of 巷 vs 街.　Make my linguistic Christmas dreams come true, Hopeless Readers.

So a karaoke vid is embedded below (my preferred singer is here in case you need to know how to sing it):

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Karaoke: The English version vs the Japanese

Check it: The English language version of Save the Last Dance for me:

Versus the Japanese:

A bit different. Sing those back to back for fun.

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Japanese Zombies Are the Standard

I used to think the plethora of anime out there represented the fact that the Japanese are creative. Then I taught their middle schoolers, who couldn't imagine their way outside of an... imaginary... box thing. After that I started to look at anime and Japanese culture a little more scrutibly. I scruted the heck out of it. My conclusion is that the culture stifles creative impulses. But such impulses are human nature, and so they will come to the fore in some way while still remaining true to the national idioms. I leave you with video evidence, but before I do, let me make it clear I still love living here. One friend of mine said something understandable on the subject: "I love living in Japan, but I hate the boring Japanese people I have to live in it with."

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About Being an Extra in Japan

The teeming masses of readership of this blog (my aunt) have been bugging me for a while to share my extraing experience. I've done only one gig so far. I didn't even get paid for (not) appearing in Zebraman II.
But here is the video:





And now some pics cause I just talk in my entertainingly quaint way in the vid:

A view of the track field and camerateers

A view of your protagonist getting ready for his big scene in the bleachers

In the train on the way home I spotted a Takashi Miike spot on a tabloid advertisement. As his film was the first thing I ever extra-ed on, I thought it a nice nod by the universe. Sup, Universe! I see what you did there.

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In Japanese, White People Have No Experience

What? The post title sounds like what-ism? Wait, I haven't even talked about the black people part. Hello? Did you just hang up in the middle of my blog post? How do you even do that?

This time I am going to talk about something that was one of those things where I turned to the J girl I was dating and was like, I bet x is true about the Japanese language. And she was like what are you talking about. And then I looked it up and was all, yeah I was right! Kind of. For the dumb luck reasons. And then she's like, huh.

See there is this word, 素人 (shirouto) that means beginner, and this other word, 玄人 (kurouto) that means expert and they are antonyms. Know that the 人 in both of them means person. Based on their pronunciation*, I figured that they were at one time written as the much more intuitive 白人 and 黒人. Of course, if you can read simple Japanese you know that 白人 and 黒人 mean white person and black person respectively, and these days they refer to races. But back in the day they referred to beginners and experts.

From the sources I looked into, it's not clear how 白 (white) became 素 (foundation) (I had just figured it was to avoid confusion once white dudes started visiting Japan, but don't see any support for or against that). 素 could refer to the baseness of the beginner. The character for white used back in the day referred to a white-painted performer (I would hazard they mean geisha-like performers).

I also folk-etymologized myself into thinking that one gets a little dirty with experience. Nah, they just used the opposite kanji character than that of white.Gogen says that 玄 has "profoundly not plain" nuance, as opposed to 黒 (black). Even though Gogen wasn't sure about why they switched up the white kanji, it's cool with the reason for the black one.

白人 and 黒人 came along later, I guess, but it's amusing to this white boy to note that 白人 is still listed as being both a racial classification and a reference to beginners even to this day. Also, prostitutes. 黒人 is just a race. Or at least a skin color; I don't know if it implies geographical or anthropological concepts. Race is kinda silly and divisive concept anyways.

*: To summarize phonetic and kanji changes:
白人 shirohito -> 白人 shirauto -> 白人 shirouto -> 素人 shirouto
黒人 kurohito -> 玄人 kurouto

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Two Posts in a Month? Unheard of for This Blog (Etymology Post)

A short post this time. At least that's the plan. Never know when I am going to type up a bunch of stuff no one really cares about. Why just this morning I did a writeup of ways the Monster Manual monsters could be incorporated into Athasian cosmology. That is just one example of things I do all the time that-- hey, nice trick Claytonian, but we are getting to the meat of the post now! You sure? Yes I'm--D'oh! Stop that!

I was curious as to how 未曾有 (mizou, unprecedented) came about. So I looked it up on that Gogen site from the sidebar of this blog. Here's what I found. In the form of a breakdown, cause I love those.

未曾有 Breakdown

未 mi: heretofore
曾 zo: once
有 u: exist
gloss: not existing once before
origin: from the sanskrit adbhuta, via Chinese transcription, referring to the miracles and pious acts of the Bhudda. Towards the end of the Kamakura era of history, It became twisted to mean both good and bad unprecedented things.

I first noticed this word around the time former PM Aso Taro was mangling it. See, readings are hard sometimes for native speakers with elite educations too. I found an article about him and good breakdown for this word after typing the previous sentence. See, this post is not actually unprecidented at all. I leave you with a video of Asoisms:

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My Take on a Womb-a-Snatching Yoji

Did you ever watch a show and think, hey I've seen this plot before! Are all writers hacks these days or what? Well hack is an appropriate word as you will see when I dissect tonight's yoji in a macabre fashion just in time for halloween!

換骨奪胎 kannkotsudattai Breakdown:

換 kan: change
骨 kotsu: bones
奪 da(tsu): rob
胎 tai: womb (embryo)
gloss: adaptation of a previous creative work
part of speech: noun, suru verb

Change the bones, rob the womb? Yup. Make a frankensteinian monster and call it art! We only have so many ideas to go around anyways.

The recollection collection of a monk, one Eko of the Song dynasty, entitled 冷斎夜話 (reisaiyawa, Uncle Eko's Bathroom Reader of uh... Cold and Holy Trivia?) gave us this word's genesis about 1,000 years ago. It says,

その意を易（か）えずしてその語を造る、これを換骨法という。
Without changing the meaning, make that story. This is the bone-change way.

その意を規範（きはん）（手本）としてこれを形容す、これを奪胎法という
Using that meaning as your model, make a form. This is the steal-womb way.

[source] Well, thank goodness they spelled that out for us, or I wouldn't know what to steal and what to change.

Of course, examples of 換骨奪胎 are all around us. For instance, the American adaptation of Ringu may be considered one. A cool one I ran into recently is the GiantRobo remake, which in turn inspired The Big O (the ultimate 換骨奪胎 anime). Here's the intro:

If you are looking for more Halloween yoji, may I suggest the mountains of blood one. Also, I just added the Ancient Chinese Secrets tag to the blog. Check out those secrets to clean the blood out your clothes after you literally interpret this post.

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Bad Luck with the Ladies? Maybe You Should Consider Jewelry

 

I told you these old pic posts would fail to be daily. I took this pic with my cell in some magazine in a conbini. You need to click-zoom this one to see the guy's secret wrist magic, world-conquering laugh, and wonderful teeth.

Totally Awesome Product Literal Breakdown:

金も女も benjamins and hoes

自由になる will be freed up

次々と広がる one after another spreading out

幸運の good fortune's

連鎖爆発 chain of explosions

実現する realized

願望! dreams! 

巻き起こる swirling around

幸福の luck's

数々!! muchness!!

Yeah, I did it literally, but it still takes a lot of interpretation and the occasional making up of words to translate sales slogans.

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