イギリスではクリスマスは家族のお休みです。
In England Christmas is a family holiday.

家族は一緒にたくさん食べたり、プレゼントを交換したり、ゲームをしたり、口喧嘩したり、します。
Families do stuff like eat lots of food, exchange presents, play games and argue.

そんな訳でクリスマスの食べ物はたくさんあります。
For that reason there is a lot of Christmas food.

美味しい食べ物が多いけどきらいな食べ物もあります。
There is a lot of tasty food but also food I don’t like.

美味しくない食べ物は芽キャベツとかミンチパイです。
Unappetising food includes Brussels sprouts and mince pies.

ミンチパイはすごい悪い奴です。
Mince pies are really evil buggers.

僕はミンチパイが好きじゃないでミンチパイも僕がだいきらいです。
I don’t like mince pies and they really hate me.

ミンチパイだけが僕をアタックした事がある食べ物です。
Mince pies are the only food which has ever attacked me.

中学校の時、家庭科を勉強しました。その授業では色々な料理をしました。
During secondary school I studied Home Economics. In those lessons we cooked various things.

クリスマスの時ミンチパイを作りました。ミンチパイがきらいだから、僕は嬉しくありませんでした。
At Christmas time we made mince pies. I was not best pleased because I don’t like mince pies.

オーブンを開けた時、ドアの内側に手が触れて熱かったのでパイのトレイを落としてしまいました。
When I opened the oven door, the inside of the door touched my hand and because it was hot I dropped the tray.

手が痛かったけど反射的にトレイを拾ってまた手を火傷しました。
My hand hurt but by relfex I went to pick up the tray and burnt my hand again.

だれも見てなかったけどミンチパイは僕を笑っていたと感じました。
Nobody saw me but I’m sure the mince pies were laughing at me.

その上ミンチパイは嘘つきです。
On top of that mince pies are liars.

ミンチパイの中にはミンスミートが入っているけどこのミンスミートには肉が入っていません
Mincemeat is inside mince pies but this mincemeat has no meat.

ミンチパイのミンスミートにはぶどうとかアプリコットとかさくらんぼとか甘いシトラスの皮とかナッツとか色々なスパイスが入っています。
Inside mince pie mincemeat is stuff like grapes, apricots, cherries, sweet citrus peel, nuts and various spices.

何でミンスミートと言うか分かりません。
Why it’s called mincemeat I’ve no idea.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

As I have pointed out before there are three different alphabets used in Japanese. One of which is called katakana and is generally used to emphasise words and to write words of foreign origin. There are many, many words that Japanese people say which come from English but unfortunately these can be difficult to understand. This is because the Japanese pronunciation is often very different from the original word and this has a tendency to fry English speakers brains. It is probably better to treat such things as new completely separate Japanese words.

This katakana problem inspired one of my house-mates to think up a Katakana: Does it work? game. He thought that due to the fact there are less vowel sounds in Japanese, words written in Katakana can be impossible to read and work out what they refer to. For example, you can take a word like バン, it might represent ban or a van or maybe even a bun.

This leads to this little word:

This word is the title of the first Tokyo Jihen song in the video above and without context it is impossible to romanise. It could mean either lamp or ramp. Is Little Miss Ringo singing about light fittings or skating? When I first heard the song many years ago, I didn’t have enough Japanese knowledge to realise which it was.

The reason for this problem is that not only is there no ‘l’ sound in Japanese but no ‘r’ sound either. The closest sound the Japanese make is somewhere between the two. A ‘lr’ sound, if you will. This sound is VERY HARD for English speakers to say, if you want to attempt it here is Koichi of Tofugu fame to teach you. For the same reason when Japanese speakers talk in English this half ‘lr’ sound rears its ugly head in all sorts of ways (probably where that old ‘egg flied lice’ joke comes from). So the problem isn’t that Japanese speakers aren’t just mixing up their ‘l’s and ‘r’s but also saying neither and English speakers simply can’t comprehend the sound they are saying and our brain processes it into one or the other.

So back to that song and as I said without context it is impossible to translate its title. Due to the very handy cheat sheet below I have managed to work out that Ringo is using a lot of car vocabulary: windscreens, wipers, motorways, indicators and the like. Therefore ランプ must refer to the off ramp of a motorway.

Unless, of course, she is talking about the car’s headlamps.

Gah…

It turns out that in translation, context is everything and even then it can still be confusing.

Over that last couple years AKB48 have become some kind of giant cultural behemoth here in Japan. There is no escaping them, their faces appear on TV, kid’s stationary, billboards, in newspapers, magazines, almost everywhere you look one of them will be there attempting to sell something.

Shockingly I am only actually aware of one of their songs, Heavy Rotation. I’m sure that I have heard others around and about but am pretty ignorant over whether it is them singing or not. Not so with Heavy Rotation though, a song that seems to be playing somewhere by someone 24/7. Like all good examples of horrible pop fluff, it is a song that can really get in your head and refuse to leave. At first you will hear it and dismiss it, only for it to return to your brain, spin round and round and refuse to get out.

Imagine my surprise when I learnt the Japanese for ‘music stuck in one’s head‘ is ヘビロテ (hebirote). Which, you guessed it, is a portmanteau of Heavy and Rotation. That AKB song therefore was designed from the get go to sit in your skull all day, devouring your brain.

Test whether it happens to you….

Japan has quite the drinking culture, in many companies you are expected to go out with your colleagues after work, get smashed with them, get back home at 1 in the morning and then come into work the next day at 6am fresh-faced. To do anything else would make you a bad worker. Quite what effect this has on Japanese society I have no idea but it does result in a few unusual posters in bars. Once, upon going to the loo, I was confronted with this, staring me in the face.

It made me very confused, let me break down why…

お体を
okarada wo
Your body

大切に。
taisetsu ni
carefully

注意
chuui
Caution

いつまでも美味しいお酒をのみましょう
itsumademo oishii osake wo nomimashou
Let’s drink delicious alcohol forever.

As you can see, what I thought everything meant really didn’t make much sense. I really didn’t have any idea how to approach the xxをxxに sentence structure but luckily, for some reason, suddenly started to see it everywhere. From the TV shows I was watching to posters drawn by school children.

From these I discovered that when this grammar is present on a poster often the verb しよう (shiyou) is dropped. The meaning of this verb is Let’s do. This turns the sentence into an informal command. So when you put it all together the sentence becomes…

お体を大切にしよう。
okarada wo taisetsu ni shiyou.
Treat your body with care.

This all makes sense given the picture but what about that last sentence on the poster? “Treat your body carefully, Let’s drink delicious alcohol forever.” That’s either incredibly mixed messages or I’ve missed something there too.

Traffic lights are pretty much the same all over the world as far as I am aware. Three lights, red for stop, yellow denotes slow down and green for go. Everyone seems to have come to a consensus on this. Except of course Japan, ask anyone here the colours of a traffic signal and you will get a different response, red, yellow and blue.

If you cast your eyes to the set of lights at the top of this post you will clearly see that it is not the case. They are proudly displaying a colour that can only be described as green. It seems the reason for this is that historically green was simply considered a shade of blue in Japan. That however is not important, I wish to show you something which affects every traffic sign in this country.

Hats.

Have a look the pedestrian stop sign on Japanese traffic lights.

If that is not particularly clear here is the little green man.

Your eyes are not deceiving you, they are both wearing hats. I seems that in Japan every silhouette pictured on a traffic signal is showing off some kind of head gear. Quite why this is I’ve no idea. Perhaps hat manufacturers sponsor the Japanese road network, I’ve always noticed that people wear hats more commonly here, maybe it is because of the ever so subtle advertising. Just look at these examples…

In the UK there is a thing called the Green Cross Code, a set of guidelines for road safety that goes a bit like this: “Stop, Look, Listen, Live”. I guess the Japanese version is as follows: “Stop, Look, Buy a hat, Live”.