As I returned to England for the summer, after an absence of about two years, look who is greeting me at the doorway of my house, beckoning me in….

This little fellow is a Maneki Neko (招き猫) or Beckoning Cat. He has many names though, I prefer the name Fortune Cat, and how he came to live in a house in England is not your usual story of jumping into a suitcase on the way home from Japan.

Maneki Nekos are often found in shops or restaurants and they beckon the customer in with their upright paw. This gesture may look a little like a wave but in Japan the signal to call someone over is to hold out your hand, palm down and repeatedly folding the fingers down and back up. Almost the opposite of the English way of doing it. They wear a little bell and a bib around their neck. I’m not sure of the significance but apparently it was common for cat to wear this attire back in the Edo period, perhaps the bell performed the same function as it does these days, to warn birds of incoming cat death.

These cats also commonly hold a coin, these coins are know as koban (小判) which were used in Edo period Japan. The value written on the coin is 10,000,0000 ryo (千万両), which as you can guess is a lot of money. An impossible amount in fact. Maybe it is not even supposed to be a quantifiable amount, the first two characters on the coin can be read senban (千万) means ‘very much’ or ‘a great many’. The value on the coins may simply be trying to infer Loadsamoney. This coin ties in with the idea that having a Maneki Neko in your shop will bring with it a large fortune and wealth.

Also related to money, these cats are often used by children as piggy banks. The piggy link does not end there though, the Japanese version of the idiom “pearls before swine” is “coins to cats” (猫に小判 neko ni koban).

The Maneki Neko living in my house is not Japanese at all but instead originated from Colombia.

When I visited Colombia as a youngster we would always get our photos developed at Foto Japon, the elite problem solvers amongst you will no doubt have worked out this means Photo Japan in Spanish. At that time their little mascot was a Maneki Neko holding their logo rather than a coin. I fell in love with it instantly and begged my mum to buy one. It turned out that they did indeed sell them but our usual shop was sold out.

All around Bogotá we went looking for one of these cats, my poor mother being dragged to any shop we happened to pass. Unfortunately the cat was nowhere to be found and I was left disappointed.

That was until we went food shopping a week later and in the mini Foto Japon in the supermarket was a lucky cat just staring at me. It was a proper one too, not one with the company logo on it. I was so happy.

Looking back, I don’t think that my need for a neko was driven by some sort of burgeoning love for Japan but I had recently played through Legend of Mystical Ninja on my N64, a game where you had to collect these lucky cat dolls. Maybe I just wanted to be like Goemon, the hero of the game.

In the years since then I have not amassed any fortune or wealth but my photos always come out really well. Maybe the origin of my Maneki Neko explains this.

Since I began trying to translate things laying about from Japanese into English (such as these), it can sometimes be very difficult to choose if I should go for a literal translation or one which conveys the general feeling. This is not too much of a problem when translating short sentences on the posters I’ve been showing you but with TV programmes and songs, when people are speaking naturally, it is difficult.

This children’s song, Fushigi na Poketto (The Mysterious Pocket), illustrates the problem well. Here is the song and my little translation:

ポケットの中にはビスケットがひとつ
poketto no naka ni wa bisuketto ga hitotsu
Inside the pocket there is a biscuit.

ポケットをたたくとビスケットがふたつ
poketto wo tataku to bisuketto ga futatsu
Hit the pocket and there are two biscuits.

もうひとつたたくとビスケットがみっつ
mouhitotsu tataku to bisuketto ga mittsu
One more hit and there are three biscuits.

たたいてみるたびビスケットはふえる
tataitemiru tabi bisuketto wa fueru
Every time I give it a hit, there are more biscuits

そんな不思議なポケットがほしい
sonna fushigina poketto ga hoshii
I want a mysterious pocket like that.

そんな不思議なポケットがほしい
sonna fushigina poketto ga hoshii
I want a mysterious pocket like that.

When I first looked up the song back in the day, the translations claimed that fushigi na translated to magical. Half learning the word this way, it led to a few confused faces when I tried to use it in conversation. According to the dictionary, fushigi means mystery (among other things). With this word therefore I chose to use the literal translation, half out of spite for learning the word incorrectly before.

Tataku is the next word that caused me bother, my dictionary tells me it means to strike or to clap but in the context of this song I don’t think that is really suitable. Probably being partially influenced by this video, I’m using to hit in my translation.

Grammar translation problems rear their ugly head next. ~temiru can easily be translated as to try ~ and this is often how it is used but more accurately it means ‘doing something tentatively’. I could have translated tataitemiru as try to hit but that gives off the impression that they might not be able to do it, which I don’t think the song is trying to say. I used ‘give it a hit’ instead, I’m not sure that works terribly well either however.

The last word to confuse me is fureru, here the dictionary says that it means to multiply or to increase. This is all well and good but does that sound right for a song for pre-schoolers? Not really. If I make the word multiply simpler I end up with the definition, ‘more of something’, so that is as good as anything to put there, I guess.

You may have noticed that the video above has its own translation, I don’t agree with it. Maybe because it’s strayed too far from the original and that the meaning of the words has been change a little bit too much. Especially with the 3rd from last line, just putting “biscuits, biscuits, biscuits” there kind of misses the point, I think. Also it may not have been done by a native English speaker as they couldn’t even spell ‘biscuit’ properly, which is quite the drawback when you are translating a song about them.

I have always known that translating things is hard and the more I do it myself the more respect I have for those who do it professionally.

Finally, as it is a children’s song, it is ripe to be perverted, much like the fellow does in the video below. He made me laugh out loud on the train.

Following on from the men’s win in the Asian Cup, Japan’s soccer success continues with the Japanese women’s football team winning the Women’s World Cup in Germany. Well done to them, I didn’t watch any games but I am told they played well and deserved their victory.

Going by this video on Time Out Tokyo, it seems that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t really know much about them.

The main thing that stuck out for me though was their choice of nickname. The women’s team is often referred to as Nadeshiko Japan.

Nadeshiko (or なでしこ) is the Japanese name for a plant whose scientific name is the very unladylike Dianthus Superbus. It grows in northern Asia and also in Europe. It’s English name is the far fairer but still not really that feminine, Large Pink.

However, the Japanese ladies team was not called Nadeshiko because of their desire to be a really convenient mass transit system or a building in Portland. It was called this because of the Japanese ideal of Yamato Nadeshiko (大和撫子).

Yamato Nadeshiko is a term for the ideal traditional Japanese woman. Perhaps this is now an antiquated notion but the model Japanese lady was once considered to be feminine while being chaste and devoted to her husband. She would never disagree publicly with her husband but if she felt she could guide him on the right track without him losing face, she would. Also she would appear to be delicate (like the nadeshiko) to the outside world but actually be strong enough to raise children and do the housework. The term comes from Yamato (大和) which is one of the many words referring to Japan (the two kanji mean ‘big’ and ‘harmony/Japanese style’) and the aforementioned Nadeshiko.

Being the big geek that I am though, the word Nadeshiko stood out for me because it flung my mind back to an old anime series which went by the name of Martian Successor Nadeshiko. This show not only keeps up the anime tradition of having silly names for everything but also has big giant robots too.

Released during the Evangelion boom, when I was basically hoovering up every anime I could get my hands on, it somehow passed me by. Apperently it didn’t take itself too seriously (which is how I like my fiction) but for some reason I didn’t take to it. Maybe it was simply because my local library didn’t have it available to rent, I’m fickle like that.

Elsewhere in the world of anime and manga, there is a Japanese comic and animation going by the name Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi Henge. Again, I’m not sure about the plot but what is interesting here is how the title was translated. Rather than translate it directly, the original title being something to do with perfect Japanese women and kabuki dances, they chose to call it The Wallflower. According to the urban dictionary a wallflower is “A person nobody pays attention to, and fades into the background, but are really genuine and interesting people if you take the time to get to know them”.

Perhaps Wallflower then is the perfect name for the English women’s football team, given how coverage in the UK was hidden away behind the red button. If they follow Japan’s lead with a flowery nickname, maybe one day they will win something.

Most of my research for this post was basically taken from links stemming from Wikipedia’s nadeshiko disambiguation page.

During the summer months here in Japan, when it is far hotter than any self respecting place really should be, it is really refreshing to come home after a hard days work and pour yourself a nice cold beer.

Only the drink pictured above isn’t beer, it isn’t even alcoholic. It is the wonderfully titled Kodomo no Norimono (Children’s Drink).

Kodomo no Norimono is a drink designed to look like beer when it is poured into a glass but it is in fact an apple flavoured fizzy drink. It even makes a head when you pour it. I wonder what sort of reaction this kind of drink would garner if it was released in the UK. Probably some sort of Daily Mail inspired ‘won’t somebody protect our children from this evil‘ letter writing campaign.

Perhaps this kind of thing exists here because of Japan’s group drinking culture. When the entire family is tucking into a specially prepared feast, the children can pretend to act like mum and dad and drink their own ‘beer’ too. I very much doubt that this kind of thing promotes alcoholism.

What is and isn’t alcohol can be very confusing to someone just arriving in this country. Take this very popular drink as an example:

When I first saw a young boy walking down the street drinking from a bottle of it, I got one hell of a shock. His mum was next to him acting all blasé about it and I began to think this was one clear case of bad parenting. That was until I discovered that cider in Japan is just another of the many words out there for carbonated soft drink and nothing to do with something that Magners would produce.

The taste of Mitsuya Cider is very similar to something like Sprite and definitely does not contain any alcohol at all.

Unlike this:

When I first came to Japan I became obsessed with Calpis and would always try to sample all the various types of it as I came across them. Once I was on my lunch break and picked up a can of Calpis Sour, something I hadn’t seen before. As I drunk it returning to my classroom I noticed it had a bit of a strange after taste and I wasn’t too fond of it.

It wasn’t until weeks later that I realised that the strange after taste was a result of vodka being mixed in there. I can’t imagine what my students were thinking when they spied it on the table behind me. The main reason I didn’t cotton on to the alcohol present in the can was that I had never associated the word ‘sour’ with alcoholic drinks before. In Japan however it refers to a drink containing a soft drink mixed with shochu.

If you come to Japan and you are unsure if the drink you have just picked up contains alcohol, I wouldn’t go by the name of it, that may confound your expectations. Instead have a look on the packaging for this symbol: 酒. It is the kanji for alcohol and thus is a sure sign that the drink you are holding is some form of liquor.

It may also be worth knowing that sake, traditional Japanese rice wine, is not called that here either, it is known as nihonshu. Sake is the generic Japanese term for alcohol.

This post has been a submission to the July 2011 Japan Blog Matsuri hosted by Nihongo Up.

Actually it isn’t.