A long time ago now, I was watching my favourite (and sadly discontinued) Japanese TV show Eigo De Shabera Naito and in that particular episode it interviewed a few half-Japanese people who ran a radio station in Kobe. I was pretty shocked when almost all of them stated that they didn’t like having it mentioned that they were half-whatever.

You see, I am half-Colombian. So even though my character is as English as hell I am proud to say that I have some Colombian in me. Being half-English and half-Colombian makes a very special, more unique whole and is a lot more interesting than being simply of just one culture. This is the way I have always thought about things and so I was surprised when the people being interviewed didn’t like it said.

Fast forward a little and in the process of learning Japan I learnt how to introduce myself. Obviously being half-Colombian is quite important to me so I learnt how to say it in Japanese: “coronbiajin no haafu desu”. I didn’t really think about it again for a while.

Fast forward until more recently and I discovered that when the Japanese talk about someone who has one Japanese parent they simply refer to them as haafu with no more explanation. At the time I put this down to quaint Japanese historical reasons that I don’t really want to get into here. Whatever the case it seems that whatever their other half happens to be is not important.

Leap forward one last time dear chrononaut to a few weeks ago and my house-mates were discussing a 4 or 5 year old student who lived in Canada when she was younger and comes out with some quite funky sentences. When one asked the other if both her parents were Japanese and this was answered in the affirmative he said “I thought she may have been a half“.

Suddenly those interviews I had watched years earlier made perfect sense. How offensive does it sound in English to be referred to as only half a person? Maybe there are other reasons for their shunning of the term but maybe if you are a half-Japanese, half-English speakingplaceperson and understand what these words mean and imply in both languages, you can’t help but be unhappy.

It’s strange how words can be loaded with so much meaning.

Have you ever thought about the front of lift doors? Those imposing grey portals are, in a way, a waste of space. This is not communist Russia, it’s nice to have an injection of colour instead of boring grey. Tower Records is one of many shops that have started to put adverts on their elevator doors.

Most are inoffensive enough, at the moment there is a nice one advertising the 70th anniversary of Puffin Books and a little while ago, there was one showing Unit-01 from Evangelion destroying Shibuya Tower Records. Which is an interesting way to advertise a DVD (and Blu-ray!) disc.

Yesterday, while waiting around for friends in Shibuya (which seems to be something I have to do a lot) I popped into Tower Records and was greeted with this:

Here the guy is saying something along the lines of “Do you want me to stop?” while I think the girl is saying “When will you stop?”. Then at the bottom it states in English “How long does a kiss take?”

Hmm….

Move along 1 lift and you can see this:

Here the guy seems to be saying “But I dare not stop.”, while the English at the bottom says “But I don’t let you stop”.

Hmmmm……

CONTEXT PLEASE TOWER RECORDS!

No wonder manga gets such a bad press sometimes in foreign countries with stuff like this plastered all over lift doors. I’m sure to those who know the story and characters presented here this is all sweet, innocent, lovely and bunny rabbits or whatever but to me it looks like someone being sexually assaulted in a lift.

Which is not what I want to see while shopping on a Sunday afternoon.

These days people are constantly taking photos, it’s just so easy with the likes of digicams and camera phones, everywhere snap, snap, snap. With all this amateur photography going on, I picked up pretty quickly that the Japanese also say cheese before taking a photo.

Armed with this knowledge I was very happy that during my first trip to Odaiba, a Japanese family asked me to take their picture. So I put the viewfinder up to my eye and shouted “Say CHEESE!”.

I got nothing, no response, no reaction.

Slightly embarrassed I took the photo, gave them the camera back and made a hasty retreat. You see, Japanese people do indeed say cheese, or more accurately “Hai, Chizu!”, before they take a picture. However it seems to be for no apparent reason. Saying cheese is an attempt to get the person whose picture you are taking to smile but in Japanese the ZU sound will only ever get people to make an O with their mouths and all look as though they have just solved a difficult problem.

Although it seems impossible, there is a way to get Japanese people to smile when taking their picture. All it requires is a simple maths problem. Just say “1+1 is?” (ichi tasu ichi wa?) and people will reply “2!” (ni). The “ni” should create a nice wide smile in your quarry.

Ironically if you tried this in England people would just say “two” and look as though they had just solved a difficult problem.

桜

What does the above look like to you? If you don’t have Japanese text installed, it’s probably just a big question mark but for those who do, please take a nice long look at it.

Say what you see.

I see a shocked woman looking at a tree.

Confused? Welcome to the wonderful world of Kanji.

I’ve been learning Kanji for a while now and because it can be so bloody difficult, people employ many different methods to get them in their head.
Each Kanji is a pictogram, so in theory each one should be a picture which represents things. Sometimes this works quite well, such as this example:

So there you are, “tree” is something that looks vaguely like a tree, “woods” is two trees and seeing that a forest is bigger than a wood, three trees is “forest”.

All very neat and tidy, however sometimes it seems to stretch logic a bit.

So a picture of a “cliff and a piece”, which becomes something that vaguely looks like an elephant if you squint a bit, means “stone”.

In all fairness however, every Kanji book uses different pictures and some work better than others. Here is my book’s attempt at “woman”.

So, some indistinct lines, followed by more ill-defined lines becomes “woman”. Really? In other books I have seen pictures as varied as a woman in a hat and my personal favourite, a woman on all fours scrubbing, somehow transformed to that symbol for “woman”.

Some other kanji are made by combining two different ones such as this:

It’s rather clever but at my stage of Kanji knowledge I only realise this once I’ve learnt it.

So it all comes down to how you yourself best visualise each Kanji, everyone is different after all. Which brings us neatly back to this:

桜

This Kanji means sakura (cherry blossom). So what I see is a lady walking into a park, she spies a lovely pink tree covered with blossom and exclaims, “Ahhh! How beautiful”. So there you go, a shocked woman looking at a tree. It all makes sense really, all you need is to look at things in a certain way.

I live near a train station called Odakyu Sagamihara, as you can imagine this is rather a mouthful. As a result it has become known by everyone as Odasaga. So much so it has been plastered on signs everywhere around here.

This is just another example of how Japanese people just love to combine and contract words. This kind of thing has been going on for years. For example, Tokyo Shibaura became Toshiba, Nippon Sangyo became Nissan and Pocket Monsters became Pokémon.

This phenomenon applies not only to crazy long Japanese words but also to loan words. There is a huge amount of loan words in Japanese, originating from various places, but once they have been through the portmanteau cycle they can become almost incomprehensible from the original word.

See if you can work out what this small selection are in English.

terebi = television

rimokon = remote control

rabuho = love hotel

pasokon = personal computer

eakon = air-con (same as English, kinda)

Scroll over the text to see the answers