I have already told you about Japanese stereotypes of British people but how do you think Japanese people think we (and by we I mean non-Japanese) see them?

That may seem like an odd somewhat convoluted question but it is exactly the topic covered by the 1989 song Funk Fujiyama by Kome Kome Club.  Just how accurate are they? Lets find out.

ワタシハ NIHON ハジメテデス
watashi wa nihon hajimete desu
It’s my first time in Japan.

GINZAトッテモさんデスGOOD!
Ginza tottemo-san desu GOOD!
Ginza is very GOOD!

ジャペーンのLADY 女性ミンナUTAMAROデス!
jyapeen no LADY jyosei minna UTAMARO desu!
Japan lady women are all Utamaro.

YOSHIWARAトッテモさんデスGOOD!
YOSHIWARA tottemosan desu GOOD!
Yoshiwara is really GOOD!

A’ha A’ha 空を越えて
A’ha A’ha sora wo koete
A’ha A’ha Cross the sky,

A’ha A’ha 海を越えて
A’ha A’ha umi wo koete
A’ha A’ha cross the sea,

A’ha A’ha 丘を越えて行けばガイジン
A’ha A’ha oka wo koete ikeba gaijin
A’ha A’ha cross the hills and if you go you will be a foreigner.

GET’S YOU! GET’S YOU! MAN

—Chorus———————————————–
えーびばでい SAMURAI SUSHI GEISHA
eebibidei SAMURAI SUSHI GEISHA
Everybody samurai, sushi, geisha.

びゅうていほーる FUJIYAMA HA! HA! HA!
byuuteifuuru FUJIYAMA HA! HA! HA!
Beautiful Mount Fuji, HA! HA! HA!

コンニチワ サヨナラ コレイクラ
konnichiwa sayonara kore ikura
Hello, goodbye, how much is this?

カミカゼ HARAKIRI HA! HA! HA!
kamikaze HARAKIRI HA! HA! HA!
Kamikaze, harakiri, HA! HA! HA!
———————————————————

カケジク好きDETH ミソスープ
kakejiku suki DETH miso suupu
I like hanging scrolls (DEATH!) , miso soup.

きゃめらハダイジョブ さんデスGOOD!
kyamera wa daijyobu san desu GOOD!
The camera is fine, GOOD!

OCHA SAKE HIROSHIMA NARA KYOTO
Green tea, sake, Hiroshima, Nara, Kyoto.

ですこじゃ ぎゃるに
desukojya gyaruni
Disco girl,

もぉてんDETHグーッと!
mooten DETH guuddo!
modern, death, goooood!

A’ha A’ha 虹を越えて
A’ha A’ha niji wo koete
A’ha A’ha Cross the raindow,

A’ha A’ha 夜を越えて
A’ha A’ha yoru wo koete
A’ha A’ha Cross the night,

A’ha A’ha 時差を越えて ボケテ ネボケテ
A’ha A’ha jisa wo koete hokete nebokete
A’ha A’ha Cross the time zones, you will be befuddled and only half awake.

GET’S YOU! MAN

(Chorus)

『ワタシニデンワシテクダサイ
watashi ni denwa shitekudasai
Please phone me

デカケルトキハワスレズニ…』
dekakeru toki wa wasurezu ni
when I go out I won’t forget!

A’ha A’ha 空を越えて
A’ha A’ha sora wo koete
A’ha A’ha Cross the sky,

A’ha A’ha 海を越えて
A’ha A’ha umi wo koete
A’ha A’ha cross the sea,

A’ha A’ha 丘を越えて行けばガイジン
A’ha A’ha oka wo koete ikeba gaijin
A’ha A’ha cross the hills and if you go you will be a foreigner.

GET’S YOU! GET’S YOU! MAN

(Chorus) x2

With regards to the translation, the first thing that stuck out for me when I copied the lyrics from a well known Japanese lyric website was that the English bits were written in Hiragana (mostly) and the Japanese bits were written in Katakana, which is the opposite of how things are usually written. I thought that was (kind of) clever. The next thing is that I guess this is supposed to be sang as though it is a foreigner singing so there is a lot of random English words in there and not only that, they are doing some funky things with Japanese as well.

Sometimes there are adding a random さん(san) to adverbs. In Japanese using san as a suffix basically means “Mr”, for example “Tanaka-san” means “Mr Tanaka”. I’ve no idea why they were adding it to the end of adverbs. Also, on occasion, they say “death” seemingly randomly. I think they did this because “death” sounds very similar to です(desu) which means “It is” and often used at the end of sentences. Their little joke is pretty impossible to translate.

I had trouble making out what they were saying in the line “mooten DETH guuddo!”. Going by the fact it is in Hiragana, I think they are trying to say an English word but I have no idea what it is. As a result that entire line makes no sense. What do you think they are saying there? Please let me know.

A new piece of grammar for me was the 〜ず(~zu) ending for verbs. After a bit of internet digging I found that using “-zu ni” makes it a ‘without’ kind of negative, someone did something without doing something else prior. For example:

牛乳を飲まずに給食を食べる。
gyunyu wo nomazu ni kyushoku wo taberu.
I eat school lunch without drinking milk.

So in the song he goes out without forgetting to call.

Ginza and Yoshiwara are places in Tokyo, while Utamaro refers to Kitagawa Utamaro an old Japanese painter.

——————————————————–

This may be a very silly song but I feel that they are spot on. They are trying to say the things that non-Japanese discuss when they think of Japan. In the song they mention stuff like samurai, geisha, harakiri and kamakazi. In my experience these are exactly the kind of things that people talk about when I tell them I live in Japan. I spent much of this summer back in England and Colombia and when Japan was brought up they would often make some kind of weak joke about this stuff.

In fact, in Colombia such talk was often accompanied by this pose, which was disappointing.

Anyway, I discovered this song from an internet show which goes by the name of You Can Play This. The fellow on there shows us some video games which were only released in Japan but lets us know that, with a little bit of effort, we can all play them. This song really is a perfect fit for the show’s theme tune and I encourage you to check them out if you like video games at all.

In other news, I can’t wait to sing this song at karaoke. It’s another to add to my Karaoke Hit List.

Given my enthusiastic review of the recent Senna film, you may have noticed I’m a bit of an F1 fan. Over the years I have seen many great drivers race but there was also a time I have only really heard stories about.

The 50s, 60s and 70s were crazy times for F1. Drivers thought that wearing a seatbelt made you a chicken, those who wore helmets were considered posh and drivers expected to go to the funerals of a least 3 of their peers a year.

The drivers of that time had to be very confident in themselves to do what they did. No more so than Graham Hill, a man who once said:

“I am an artist. The track is my canvas, and the car is my brush.”

You have to be pretty cocksure to come out with a statement like that.

I have never seen too much of his driving but he is the only person to have completed the triple crown of motorsport, he also won 2 F1 world titles. Not too shabby then. Like many of his contemporaries he is no longer with us but unlike some he didn’t die on a racing track but on a runway, crashing his private jet in thick fog.

Or so I thought, when I came to Japan I noticed the posters on the various train lines advertising Navitime, a sat nav system for cars and mobiles among other things. And there low and behold, was a man in Navitime branded helmet and overalls who was the spitting image of Graham Hill.

Sure, he is a bit greyer than photos of Mr Hill from the old days but we all have to age some time. That cocksure expression and glorious moustache are there for all too see. This begs many questions. Was this done on purpose? If so, why not play up this angle? Was Graham Hill any good at giving directions?

Examples of Graham Hill showing people around, note his assured pointing.

This is just one of the many random lookalikes I’ve seen here, I still regret not having my camera to hand when I saw Boyce selling jewellery and the Japanese Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall asleep on a train.

Take a tour of the High Wycombe Heritage Trail, see such wonderful sights as scaffolding, Primark and ‘The Shambles’.

Now that I’m back in Japan I have managed to wrangle enough money into my bank account to be able to by a nice shiny new laptop. Not least because being out of the country for a month, I had a month’s wage just sitting there untouched. So now I can use a computer without worrying about it running out of hard drive space or slowing to a crawl just at the moment I want to do anything with it.

While I was considering which computer to get I came across a post on the website Surviving In Japan (look it’s there in my blogroll down the right side) which discusses how to get hold of a laptop with an ‘English’ keyboard. Just to let you know, I think that SIJ is a great website with all sort of useful tips for foreigners living in Japan but I really have to disagree with the need to look for a computer with a non-Japanese keyboard.

Firstly I should say that I plumped for a laptop with Japanese keys, mostly because it looks cool with all that Hiragana on it but also because there are buttons on there that switch between Japanese and Latin text. Pressing those buttons, which are located either side of the space bar, is miles easier than reaching for the two handed combination of command+F11 I had going on before.

I, however, am someone who likes Japanese, what about those in Japan looking for a quick bargain (unbelievably my computer worked out £300 cheaper than in the UK). Well, perhaps the main reason people are scared is that the keyboard layout is different. I must say it really isn’t an issue at all. All the letters are in their standard QWERTY alignment, only a bit of the punctuation is different. Give yourself a few weeks to get used to it and everything will be fine.

I know this because I have been in that position before, when I bought my creamy white Macbook back in the day I was shocked to find that the keyboard is a slighty different layout to the standard UK keyboard for windows computers. My disgust lasted about 3 hours, I quickly learnt to deal with it.

That brings me to my next point, for any Britishers out there (and perhaps people from other English speaking countries too) , the only English keyboard you will ever be getting out here is a US one. This will almost certainly be different to what you are used to. You will not be spared the ‘Just Where Is The Percent Sign On This Bloody Thing’ dance that our fingers have to do when met with an unfamiliar keyboard.

I can’t say having a Japanese keyboard has left me with no frustrations. The inverted comma (some say a must for any informal writing) has annoyingly been placed as shift+7, this plays havoc with my typing speed. Also when writing this very piece I discovered the pound sign (£) was nowhere to be found, leaving me having to desperately search for it around the internet to copy and paste.

Don’t let those two foibles put you off though. If you are in a country long enough to be considering buying expensive electronics from there you should be willing to accept all aspects of their culture and more and more these days where you put the @ is a major part of your national identity.

I’m fairly late in the day with this but back in the Spring huge earthquakes were not the only thing to attract Japanese people and the news’ attention. On 1st April Ueno Zoo reopened and for the first time made it’s panda enclosure open to the public.

The pandas had arrived from China on 21st February meaning that they not only got here just in time for the Tohoku earthquake but as they had previously lived in the China Giant Panda Protection and Research Centre in Sichuan, they also experienced the 2008 quake which happened there.

These two quake veterans, named Li Li and Shin Shin, where thought to have been spooked by the quake but are happy as Larry now. Ueno Zoo did not have any pandas in it’s park for a period of 3 years before these new arrivals and when I visited the park back in June 2008, I was greeted with an unfortunate sign explaining the situation.

Picture the scene, I arrived at the zoo, paid my way, went through the ticket gate and entered a narrow tunnel which lead to the park. The tunnel was filled with lovely pictures of pandas frolicking and making sweet faces while eating their bamboo, I was just about to experience cuteness overload when I spied the sign. It contained Japanese text which I couldn’t read at all at the time, under that was what I assume to be the English translation, which read:

“There are no pandas in the park, they are dead”

That was an instant downer, after all those cute pictures I could almost have cried and it really highlighted to me the importance of having a native speaker of that language to advise you when you translate something. Technically there was nothing wrong with the translation but it was just so blunt about the death of the previous panda tenants that it became odd.

With that in mind, lots of posters started popping up around Tokyo advertising the new pandas so I thought I would have a go translating one for myself before someone from the park does it and makes me cry again. This poster is by JR and photographed by Jesse at Jesse-san in Japan.

行こうよ！
Ikou yo!
Lets Go!

列車で上野へ
Ressha de Ueno e
By train to Ueno

リーリーとシンシンが待ってるよ！
rii rii to shin shin ga matteru yo!
Li Li and Shin Shin are waiting.

This poster is fairly simple Japanese, the only issue I have is with the よ (yo) at the end of two of the sentences. よ, when used by itself at the end of a sentence is used to emphasise things. It has a light friendly tone and one common use is to give information that you think is new to the listener (especially when you think the listener needs that information).

In English we don’t have an equivalent particle so you have to get a bit creative when translating. This is certainly the case with the last sentence, it’s letting you know Li Li and Shin Shin are there so I decided to remove the exclamation mark, I think it makes this sentence seem a bit manic in English. I didn’t replace the mark with anything else though, perhaps I should have.

Sometimes よ just shows the speaker asserting themselves more strongly than if they made the statement without よ, the first sentence does not giving any new information so I felt that the exclamation mark was good there, because I reckon that whoever is speaking is really excited about going.

However, the question I really need to ask is, just who are the pandas in the picture? They can’t be Li Li and Shin Shin, they are waiting in the park while these pandas appear to be running for the train. Are Japan Railways, the makers of this poster, implying that pandas roam free, wearing clothes and travelling on trains?