Let’s Enjoy Japanese-English

‘Japanese-English’ is a phenomena that has invaded all levels and encompasses all walks of Japanese life, from bags and packaging to advertising, buildings, Japanese pop music, and particularly clothing.

I remember with slight uneasiness my first really good example of Japanese-English. This particular case was on a 12-year-old girl’s t-shirt, which was trying to state her love for pussycats, but failed to include the ‘cat’ part.

I have had one occasion where I have seen something so dirty that I had been forced to go up to the person in question – in a funky café in Harajuku – and actually ask the guy if he realized just how horrific and descriptive his jacket was in its telling of doing things of a sexual nature to his mother.

The ‘KinKi Kids,’ are a J-pop duo that make me laugh (music aside), they are certainly not kids either, grown men in fact, and have a rather unfortunate name when it’s put into English, even though in Japanese the word kinki refers to the western region of Japan they come from.

Other brand names such as the milk powder “Creap,” make me laugh. I would have thought, stupidly perhaps, that when a Japanese company went about deciding on a brand name using English they would firstly check out possible meanings, or closely related meanings.

I asked a friend why people in charge of advertising wouldn’t actually want the English used to be correct to give their product more credibility. He said that the reason was that a culture of Japanese-English exists because it was never meant to be correct. It is an accepted Japanese re-creation to the point of being distinctively part of Japanese culture that often makes things easier to express with one or two random words in English superimposed between the lines of Japanese. As the majority of Japanese people do not recognize its mistakes, nor more importantly care, it will continue to prosper in all mediums.

On the flipside, I have also seen some pretty equally alarming slights made by foreigners wearing faux Japanese kanji t-shirts and other garments. One friend in my first year here was walking around Shibuya getting loads of dirty looks and finally a kind man had the courage to come up to him and ask him if he knew what his delightful kanji t-shirt expressed. He had not a clue in the world and was slightly frazzled to learn that it said he ‘slept with dogs and loved it.’ It was a t-shirt that never again saw the light of day in Japan.

I have also heard an urban legend about a man in Shinjuku who sells fun kanji t-shirts catering to the foreign demographic telling them it says something like ‘I came to Japan and all my wife bought me was this lousy t-shirt,’ when in fact they apparently read ‘Fat American Tourist.’ I guess for many, (excluding perhaps my poor friend who does not enjoy sleeping with dogs), ignorance is bliss.

Adaptation and vernacular forms continue to multiply, in America many have classified African-American English into its own language and termed it Ebonics. Japanese-English sometimes appears that way, but it’s also oftentimes benignly cute and entertaining, and we all need a laugh sometimes.

Text: Antonia McLAUGHLIN

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