where wordplay goes to die

Did you know "hippo" in Japanese is "kaba?" While pouring our drinks, the barkeep went to great lengths to explain the clever hilarity in spelling kaba backwards to make out "baka," or "idiot" (terminology already too familiar to amongst certain pockets of baka gaijin across Japan). I'm not sure if this was his revelation, or the one of someone more brilliant before him, but I still didn't follow.
So naturally, in the interest of facilitating potential comedy, I referred back to my own English experience--a practice I've come to rely on in such moments of cultural eyebrow-raising.
In the time between lifting the tumbler of crystal gin & tonic from its rubber coaster, and raising it to my lips, the following thought process occured:

So... That'd be like saying if "oppih" really meant "idiot" in English, then that would mean... No... Still not particularily funny. Well, what if "norom" was actually how you say "hippo," then that spelled backwards would still be... Hmm...
Not at all very funny.

Cool liquid, bitter, and wooden to the tongue, but with just the right amount of citrus. Refreshing. Traded the lime for a lemon. To his pun, I smiled instead. To the Japanese, I'm sure, our biting English sarcasm, and silly memes appear just as cryptic and unfunny.
Perhaps that was the approximation I should have made in the first place.

First month of the new year has come and gone. And cripes, it was a long one.

tell all your friends of the boy from which your accent comes

Have you ever thought about humble pie? Wondered if it were actually a dessert dish? I mean, pie should just be pie, right? Apple, peach, blueberry, lemon meringue, key lime--a fruity universe of choice. But what if it were more of a meaty, crusty, zesty, dinner-worthy entree? An agonizing chore to douse with ketchup and choke down before going to watch Full House? I oft wonder if the response to this humble conundrum is not unlike the "glass half-empty/full" metaphor. Well anyway, it's taken me the better part of 18 months to eat all the way down to the pie tin, and I still have no idea. Seems like all I've got to show for it is an unpleasant metallic aftertaste, and these ketchup stains on my shirt.

Time in the Japanese language has taught me a lot about my own native English--usage of adjectives and their synonyms, mostly. The ongoing process that began a little over five years ago, has been an exhausting trial in patience and frustration, as well as a grim lesson in frivolity, complete with all the haphazard convenience most often tucked behind a blaring red "As Seen on TV" sticker.

I've recently begun to liken the experience of learning a foreign language to a human being learning to walk (a period in my life I remember with miraculous clarity, smartass). It begins with painstaking first steps, as learning patterns are established, and a basic foundation is laid. With the passing of time, your ability and confidence slowly grow. Then, knowing neither physical limitation nor fear of failure, you learn to run at a reckless, broken pace. Head filled with pride, naivety, and the reassurance that you've finally got everything figured out, you pack your life in a suitcase and move to a land of fellow walkers to put your newfound ability to the test.
Upon arrival, you find that it's a place where everyone already knows not only how to walk, but how to run, how to climb up and down, how to balance the low-wire, the high-wire, and the checkbook. They can cartwheel, shimmy, samba, and perform a nearly unlimited range of other movements available exclusively to those with long legs and a pair of feet (ostriches, kangaroos, and Jesus lizards notwithstanding). But somehow the expectations were different. You hadn't expected them to take these gifts for granted. Your raging hard-on for bipedal locomotion quickly deflates with the enthusiasm on which it rode, as the realization that all the time in the books was spent towards giving you a skill that everyone else has innately possessed since spilling from the womb.

So the hastily-concluded moral to my anticlimactic shitpile of a story, still fresh in its telling?

Two feet, do not a record-setting Olympian make.

  

Hazardous to your mental health

Cripes, and I thought I was a bit down in the dumps on Okayama. Apparently, I have it pretty easy, according to this morning's headlines.

I had friends and coworkers who were on their way home through the station when it happened too.
Thank God for the obvious.

All of the obvious.

This Hard Land

I'm sitting in my room on a Thursday night, in front my computer listening to Bruce Springsteen and eating Pooka creamy vanilla chocolate fish. Actually, they're "Pucca" fish. But "Pooka" looks funnier.
Anyway, I'm here to deliver you this week's News in Briefs.
And I may or may not be a bit drunk.


News In Briefs
WYWS Edition

* To anyone who may have asked me about "varying cultural marketing strategies across the globe," last time I saw you, here is further proof.
You owe me $20.

* It's been snowing intermitedly all week.
Like the return of an old friend, there's something reassuring about seeing snow again. Even if it fell in small, Japanese doses. Sunday night, we received the biggest treatment, as the evening streetlights awoke to find their empty byways and alleyways covered in several inches of wet, sticky snow. Made my usual charinko sidewalk dickery several shades more difficult, as the tires slipped and slid all over the place.
But the most interesting thing about Japanese people and snow?

They still walk around with their umbrellas.

Sure, it makes sense, and all. Keep the snow out of your hairspray, and off your Louis Vuitton bag.

"Excuse me strange foreign person, are you walking around without your umbrella!? In the snow!!? Good god man! Have you lost your damn mind!!? Moisture will be the death of you!"

* There's this cheesy Japanese drama called "SP" on the telly, about this team of elite bodyguards who dive headlong into crowds, slide over slippery shit, and then throw themselves into oncoming bullets to protect their VIPs. Maybe "SP" is the moniker for the dude who gets his squibs ruined no fewer than four different occasions--and that's just the show's opening montage. How the hell do you pitch an action/drama pilot to studio execs when your main characters are getting blown away every episode? "Every episode is a dream." Just roll with it.

* I learned tonight over fried nankotsu and beers that "okosu" means "to sit up" and "okasu" means "to rape" or "to violate."

I wish they'd fuckin' told me that before I finally tried asking little Oka chan to sit up in class this afternoon.
No wonder everybody was laughing.

I suck at Japan.

Today's Japanese lesson:"Do not learn Japanese"

"Is that everything? Are you sure?
It seemed like he said quite a bit more than that..."
If you watch closely, you'll find a number of things at work in the fifth chapter of the "Go-En Chronicles."
The first, and most obvious, is me trying to get my $600 doorstop either repaired, or outright replaced.
You may already know that such attempts were expectantly unsuccessful.

Anyone who has ever studied it at length, can probably tell you a whole hell of a lot about the "say one thing, mean ten" mentality of the Japanese language. On one hand, it's fascinating. On the other hand--the hand smacked repeatedly against one's own steaming forehead, is how irritating and exhausting reading through all the fluffy subtext can be. As with any other context-heavy languages, in Japanese, a compliment, a suggestion, an assertion, an insult, or an outright verbal pimp-slap could very well be cunningly tucked between the politely apathetic folds of the same statement. Translation boils down to a lot of contextual approximations, which may vary from time to time depending on your relational distance to the speaker, or on the audience.
Or sometimes simply how annoyed you are with the lack of progress being made.

The following video is a short compilation of lowlights and frustrations from a 45 minute phone call, by the end of which, if it were physically possible to stab someone in the mouth through the phone line, I'm sure SCEJ's "Toyota" and I both would have thrown down in spectacular no-holds-barred fashion. In their defense though--I didn't expect Sony Japan to attempt service on an American machine (I assumed the attempt would fall apart as soon as they requested the serial number, but it was unfortunate that my operator kindly waited until the end of the call to obtain this information). Lucky for them, I still picked up the phone, being bored, hopeful, and totally stoked about giving Docomo another hefty chunk of my tiny paycheck last month.

Japanese speakers may pick up on other thinly veiled attempts at satire within, but for most everyone else, this is simply me being juvenile about my situation, and how calling Sony Computer Entertainment's J-train tech support just made it worse.

You're welcome.