Random Memories #63 - things I wish I'd kept or photographed - pt 2

This is part of a sequence of posts that I'll be making from time to time about things that I wish I had kept or at least had taken a picture of. These are memory fragments rather than full-blown stories, but they are things that have stuck with me which I want to take note of before I forget them. Part 1 is here.

Most people who follow anything about Japan know about "Engrish". You know, those funky combinations of words and pseudo-words that you see on signs and, perhaps more famously, on T-shirts. Ah, the T-shirts. The 80's and 90's were the golden age of such things. For reasons I'll probably never understand, they got a lot less funny and a lot harder to find as the years went by. Perhaps there was one lone writer who made it his goal in life to concoct the most surreal, bizarre, and suggestive comments possible. Well, it could have been that or simply someone who random grabbed words and phrases in a freeform mix and match.

I asked students on occasion why so much weird English was emblazoned on shirts in Japan. They always told me the same thing. That was that the words did not matter. The look of the English letters was the thing. It's the same thing in Western countries in which weird Chinese character combinations are used on shirts and tattoos. Just as Asian folks who can read those character snicker at our obliviousness, we snickered at the funky English.

Since it became more difficult to find funny English shirts and the number of those shirts in general seemed to go down, I really regret that I didn't hang on to or take better care of some of the best ones. The slogans on them stick with my husband and I to this day. Two of our favorites were a shirt that said, "Slurp, is that your foot" and another which said a ton of text which I recall and finished with "beat his monkey ass 'til it ain't no fun." When my husband and I are joking around and I pretend to be annoyed with him, I still say, "I'm going to beat your monkey ass until it ain't no fun... and that's going to be a very long time."

The shirt pictured at the top of this post comes from a "found" video. I was shocked when I came back to the U.S. and raided my in-laws video archives and discovered that there was a video that included my husband and I in 1988 talking about our future and our life in Japan. He was wearing the "Venus Soap" shirt in that video so I was able to take a screen capture of it. In this video he said, "Venus Soap, it saves rubbing... but we don't use it because that's the funnest part." Now you can see why I married him. ;-)

The only other shirt that I have a record of was also from the video and this one was being modeled by my sister-in-law. This shirt was a gift to her for her birthday in 1987. My husband had sent it to her. This particular message seemed goofier at the time than it does after years of working in Japan and hearing again and again about how Japanese people envy Americans for their (supposedly) long vacations and short working days.

You can look at our shirts, but not our faces. Sorry! My shirt says "And the wrong one" and "Creeping Creeks". There's also an enormous paragraph of nonsense at the bottom which is lost in time now, but it mentioned the Turkey (the place, not the bird).

There was also a pink and grey shirt which I absolutely loved, both for its fit and its message, which said in block letters on four different lines: Radical To Save Laid Back Walking. I remember that shirt because we had two of them and both my husband I wore our respective shirts when we went to Tokyo Disneyland and portions of it are visible in photos from that day.

My husband also found a T-shirt for me which was not particularly funny, but suited my situation at that time. I worked for a now defunct social services agency called "Transitional Living". It was common for us to refer to it as "TL" or to write TL instead of saying the full name. Somehow, a Japanese T-shirt cropped up which said the words "TL Connection" on it. I have no idea what it meant to them, if it meant anything at all. It could be that such an abbreviation had some special meaning (as KY does now) which fell out of favor by the time we knew enough about Japanese culture to understand such things. The Wikipedia page on Japanese abbreviations does not include it, so it may have meant nothing at all, but it was a great gift for me at that time.

I really wish I'd saved these shirts, or even scraps of them to sew into the craziest of crazy quilts. Unfortunately, not one of them survived and only a handful survive in picture form. I'm sure there are many that are lost forever in the cobwebs of my mind and will never be retrieved. I think we took them for granted because we figured there'd always be more of these crazy things. There are still some out there, of course, but not nearly as many or as funky.

If any of my readers have a notion about why the number of these things has gone down and why the quantity and type of wording have changed, or if your experience is that they are still available in abundance, I'd like to hear your thoughts and experiences in comments. 

Random Memory #27

When my husband headed off to fulfill his one-year-teaching-contract, and we embarked on a long-distance relationship separated by thousands of miles, neither of us knew what he would be seeing aside from perhaps some cool music collectibles. He didn't know about all of the weirdness in terms of the language because the internet hadn't yet been invented by Al Gore. Sites like Engrish.com weren't around to aggregate the experiences such that anyone could access the hilarity that ensues when non-native speakers attempt to communicate in English.

At that time, he found me a lot of funny T-shirts. One of the cool things (besides the funky English) was when you found something that just happened to have meaning for life here and somehow existed there. Rather cryptically, he also found a shirt which had nothing more than the words "T.L. Connection" written on it at a time when I was working for a non-profit social service organization that was called "T.L." (short for Transitional Living, a place that no longer exists). I also found, coincidentally, a business named "Sharon" in the last year we were in Japan. Sharon is my sister's name.

One thing that we both realized as time went by was that the English that was cropping up wasn't nearly as butchered as it once was. No, we didn't think it was being proofread. I think, in general, that having things like Google's translation algorithm as well as better technology in electronic dictionaries has made it easier for people to get it right. There is also the chance that people just copy better English now than before because they have a much broader world to find and copy text from.

Frankly, it was a lot more fun when the world was smaller and Japan was more isolated. The picture above is from a toy store in 1988. There aren't even as many toy stores around in the 2000's, let alone any that sell "Strong Dumps" or "Violence Boxes". Of course, while it was funnier back then on a micro level, life as a foreigner on a macro level got a lot easier once we all grew into bosom buddies via the worldwide exchange of bits and bytes. Communication back home got faster, easier, and more intimate. Access to pop culture was expanded. Still, there was an essential quality to life in Japan in those days. It was isolating, but not terribly isolated in a way that is unlikely to ever happen again.

Will Miss #5 - funky shop names (reflection)

For disco dogs. No cats allowed.

I never took much notice of the way stores were named in the U.S. until I'd spent many years in Japan (mostly Tokyo). In the suburban California area that I currently live in and the neighboring areas that I have visited, I'm shocked at the bland and generic look and feel of most of the stores. Many of them are strip malls and shopping centers with nondescript names and typefaces. I'm talking about places with just "Salon" written on them in a san serif font against a dull-looking edifice. I'm amazed that such places can attract any customers at all. I certainly am not drawn to them. It could be that I'd see a lot more color if I were living in a major city, and I did see some more interesting shops in San Francisco, but even in the outskirts of Tokyo, things seemed to have more of a life and identity than what I have been seeing here.

I knew I'd miss the chuckles I got from shop names in Japan, but I think I miss them more than I could have expected because things are much more boring here than I remembered (or than they were when I was last here).

Random Memories #12

One of the only good things about having had a boyfriend in Japan while I suffered the difficulties of a long distance relationship was that the gifts were awesome. More than one of my female friends expressed envy and outright jealousy at what they saw as the opportunity afforded me by his location, especially in regards to KISS collectibles.The funny thing was that I was less interested in the KISS items than I was in Japanese stuff, including robes and those oh-so-well-known T-shirts with funny sayings. That is not to say that I didn't love the KISS junk that I got. In fact, I had the best collection ever because my boyfriend could only show his love with cassettes of him talking, written correspondence and gifts. One of the easiest options in terms of gifts was those collectibles.

For my first birthday, my future husband gave me a shirt which said "lusty members club" (among other things). That wasn't the last shirt that I got, and many of those early shirts are ones that we still quote to this day. One of our favorites had the line, "beat his monkey ass until it ain't no fun." Another, less obvious one was, "Use Venus Soap, It Saves Rubbing." My future husband said that we never used said soap because the rubbing was the funnest part. That's the sort of talk that made me fall in love with him.

At the top of this post is a tag from one of the funny shirts my then-boyfriend sent me. The tags were as good as the shirts. The back of the tag, just above this paragraph, shows the size as "F". That's as in "free" size. I'm not sure what size "free" was, but I guess it was supposed to fit nearly any Japanese physique. I didn't see any shirts using this sizing system near the end of my time in Japan, which may mean I didn't look hard enough or they had changed over to the S, M, L, and LL system which seems more common these days.

The odd thing about the "Engrish" shirts is that they got a lot less funny as time went on. There were fewer of them, and they were less nonsensical. I'm not sure why that should be. Maybe I just didn't go to the right stores as I got older, or maybe the English in Japan really did get better. At any rate, I do have fond memories of those shirts, and wish I hadn't worn them all until they completely fell apart.

Will Miss #468 - songs with random English

If this is the proper embedded video, you'll see what I mean. If it's not, you'll wonder why this is here. The song is Inside Your Head by Daichi Miura.

It's pretty rare for me to listen to an English song and hear a random word in Japanese thrown into the lyrics unless that word is something for which the English is also the same as the Japanese (like "sushi"). In Japan, however, it was not the least bit unusual to hear pop songs which would toss in English phrases or words for no reason other than they felt it would be cooler to sprinkle in a bit of their second language of choice. It would seem incredibly incongruous to hear a steady stream of Japanese punctuated by the odd bit of English. It's one of those things which I will always see as very "Japanese" because it reflected the way they absorb and incorporate foreign culture, but twist it to suit their sensibilities.

It always amused me to hear the bits of English and consider how it reflected the benevolent incursion of Western culture into Japan, and I will miss it. 

Won't Miss #393 - using Japanese English

I don't mind if Japanese people use Japanese English (as opposed to "Engrish", which is a whole other kettle of fish) because it is understandable that they do. If I'm teaching them, I just point out that they shouldn't use it and tell them the correct words or phrases. Unfortunately, sometimes you find yourself being unable to make yourself understood unless you resort to using it yourself. At my former job, we used to ask people what their "outstanding feature" was in regards to their appearance. The Japanese translation that we were told to use, tokucho, was confusing because the students would answer about their personalities, not their countenance. The best way to get what you wanted was to ask the student what his or her "charm point" was because this was a Japanese English term that was popular at the time. Sometimes, when you've struggled to get your point across in English and then Japanese and have still failed, you find yourself resorting to using these terms and it always makes me feel bad for doing so. I'm supposed to be teaching proper English, not using weird phrases because it expedites understanding.

I won't miss how I feel like I've failed miserably when I resort to using Japanese English to make myself understood. 

Will Miss #344 - new word inventions

"First food, fast food", "to-may-to, to-mah-to".

Because I spent over a decade doing work which required me to correct written English, I have a very good grasp of what Japanese people commonly mishear when they listen to my native language. They not only write these odd concoctions when they take dictation, but they use them in their own expressions without checking the dictionary to see that what they are saying are actually words or phrases in English. Among the things I experienced people writing again and again were "firstable" which is what many people though "first of all". I sometimes wonder if there are English-Japanese dictionaries out there with "firstable" as a word considering how many times I've heard/read it.

I'll miss the amusing ways in which people invent new "words" based on what they thought they were hearing.

Will Miss #193 - sound translation mistakes

When I first started working in Japan, I worked in Ikebukuro not too far from a large building called "Sunshine City". One of my earliest experiences with the sound translation problems from Japanese to English came when students talked about this building in lessons. In Japanese, "si" and "shi" are often used interchangeably so people would say, "Sunshine Shitty". I never laughed when the students said this as it would have been rude, but I always smiled inside because, frankly, it's funny. It's not funny because they're speaking incorrectly as their errors are natural and understandable, but because it's a strange word combination. Another pronunciation problem which was especially amusing included a student saying "fact" as "fucked" (because a/u are a sound problem from Japanese to English). I also once got an obscene call from someone who knew I was a foreigner who said, "fack, fack, fack" instead of "fuck, fuck, fuck." That was by far the funniest because he meant to intimidate me, but I just laughed because he spoke so incompetently that I barely registered his intent before he gave up and hung up the phone.

I'll miss these unexpected, yet amusing mistakes that arise from the differences in how sounds are pronounced in Japanese and English.

Won't Miss #178 - English graffiti

Almost all of the graffiti that you see in Tokyo is in English. It's very rare to see any Japanese characters at all. I believe there are several reasons for this. One possibility is that they feel more freedom to express themselves in a foreign language. Another possibility is that the vandals are either intentionally or unconsciously trying to distance themselves from their actions (which are criminal in Japan) or trying to mislead people into thinking a foreigner is doing these things. The chances that a foreigner is actually creating the graffiti are close to zero.

Whatever the cause, I don't like the fact that a criminal act, albeit a petty one, is linked to a language other than the one the criminal speaks as a native as I think it draws an unfair connection between crime and foreigners in the minds of the Japanese.

Won't Miss #125 - having my English "corrected"

When I have a conversation in English with a Japanese person, I pronounce Japanese words that are frequently pronounced differently in English in the Japanese way. For instance, I properly pronounce things like "karaoke" and "Nikon" which are said as "carry-okey" and "Nigh-con" in English. However, I say English names and words in the way they are properly spoken in English, not in some Japanized katakana manner because the origin of those words is not Japanese (and we're speaking English, not Japanese - if we're speaking Japanese, I say them the Japanese way). Occasionally, I will say something like "Costco" and the Japanese person I'm speaking to will look at me strangely and say, "oh, "Ko-su-to-ko" in a way which indicates that they would have understood me if I'd said it properly in the first place. This is something which is driven home by their repeated refusal to use English pronunciation throughout the remainder of the discussion of the topic (despite my correcting them when it is an English lesson).

Similarly, I've had experiences with Japanese people in positions of authority at my former office when we were writing English textbooks and they would insist on using incorrect grammar or words because that's what someone in the Japanese school system taught them eons ago and the bad grammar was permanently petrified in their brains as "correct". We always ended up using the improper English in such cases as the correct English as offered by my Australian boss and my American self were not trusted.

I find it irksome to be "corrected" in my own language because people refuse to accept the way the words are presented and arranged in countries where English is spoken as a native language.

Will Miss #26 - humorous misspellings

I've seen pictures of plenty of misspelled signs in America, but they don't carry the same charm as those in Japan. In America, it's just sad that people aren't educated enough to spell basic words properly. In Japan, it's smile-worthy in the same way that a child misspeaking a word can be. It's an innocent error based on language differences rather than a product of ignorance and laziness.

I'll miss the humor and charm of the misspelled words in Japan.

Will Miss #10 - weird English T-shirts

Part of the funniness of seeing a Japanese person wearing a shirt with strange English is the underlying notion that they may not have any idea how funny or weird it is (and definitely don't care). While you see people wearing funny shirts back home, the humor is undercut to some extent by the fact that they intend to communicate their humor to you. The latter carries a hint of irony, pretense, or trying too hard, the former of entertaining obliviousness.

I'll miss seeing people wear English T-shirts with incongruously funny messages on them.

Will Miss #5 - funky shop names

There are a great many shop names with nonsensical English (or katakana English) names. We're never sure if they make their mismatched choices intentionally or if it's just the whim of the owner because he likes the sound of the English. Either way, these are always good for a chuckle.

I'll miss the number of shops with funny names.