Seikyo 逝去 – to pass away

Everyday my inbox gets peppered with trivial announcements from the ‘General Affairs Department’ (総務部).  Maybe one in 100 times it may be something useful, but invariably it is banal stuff like this:

• Factory floor will be polished from 10am-11am this sunday
• Server XYZ123 will be rebooted this saturday at 11pm
• Bob Smith’s Dad died
• Sally Jones had a baby
• Roger Brown got married
• A new PDF manual for product A1SH-NL is available.
• etc…

These emails are always incredibly wordy, and are loaded with pompous old Japanese that I suspect few people can read without a dictionary.  Actually the mails look more like Chinese than anything else due to the sheer number of kanji (Katakana is rarely used).

If I can be bothered to read it, the wording usually goes something like this:

Dear Sirs,

This is [senders name] of the General Affairs Department of [company name].  I am humbly writing this mail to announce [email subject].  Please read this email if you are interested in [email subject].  If it is of no interest, please accept my sincere apologies and stop reading the message.

We are going to [email subject].

Yours Sincerely,

[sender]

That is if you are lucky.  Often it contains several large paragraphs of background and explanation all mixed together, plus several broken attachments to fill in (half of the attachments do not open on my machine because they have double byte Japanese characters in the filename, or the spam server has wiped them).

Anyway, it is quite alarming just how many peoples parents are dying, because I am getting at least 3 such emails every week. Of course, I filter out all these announcements to a new folder on my mail client.  Then I simply scan the subject of the emails for 逝去 and I know I can just delete those ones.

Translation Notes

Of course SHINU 死ぬ is the common way to say ‘to die’ or ‘to pass away’, but 逝去される seems to be the ultra-polite form that also has the nuance of ‘loss’.

Ikimu 息む – to Strain

I was chatting this lunchtime with some colleagues about a particularly unpopular manager who openly coughs and burps in front of his subordinates.  He also has a bad habit of clearing his throat every 20 seconds or so very loudly.  Actually these are just the more tolerable aspects of his character.

I proceeded to tell them about a time when I was next to him at the urinal at a business dinner a few months back, and he was straining as if trying to squeeze a melon out of his nose.  I guess he wanted to win some race with me or something, or maybe he just has some trouble downstairs.

Translation Notes

Anyway, I realised I don’t know the verb for ‘to strain’ so looked it up.  It seems to have two kanji for the same meaning/pronounciation:

息む

力む

Konketsu 混血 – Mixed Race

Barack Obama – “the first black president.”

Obama's Mum and Dad separated soon after his birth.

I find it interesting that he is considered ‘black’ when actually his mother was white.  Surely he is is half white and half black, mixed race?   I guess it is all relative…if he had been elected president of Kenya, perhaps they would have called him their first white president?

Anyway congratulations to him, he was surely far more electable than his opponent who was 142 years old and promised little more than to repeat the misery of W’s presidency.  I thought McCain made a huge gamble on his running mate – I guess he thought he could pick up all Hilary Clintons supporters and reduce the democrats votes in half.  Instead it seems he failed in that, and also alienated a lot of Republicans.  I think it would have been interesting to see if Obama could have won against a younger man (for me 72 is not an electable age) with a sensible running mate.  Maybe we find out in 4 years time.

Anyway I think its a huge moment for the US.  I wonder if the days of positive discrimination will soon be over?  How can anyone claim to be the victim of racism now that:

• the President himself is black
• 45% of white voters voted for him? (note that 95% of black voters voted for Obama)

It is going to be very interesting to see how things develop.  Personally I have good feelings about him.  He is promising ‘Change’ but I reckon this is just a buzzword and nothing radical will be done.  I just think he will be more sensible and fair than Bush was, and this will improve relations with other countries.  Maybe he will do for the US what Tony Blair did for the UK.  I think there is a similar feelgood factor going on, and already people are talking about ‘Cool America’ in the way of 90s ‘Cool Brittania’.  Maybe the US will start to churn out crap girl bands that cant sing/dance/interview/look pretty and lame rock groups that copy verbatim old Beatles songs.

I just noticed this book Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Obama containing his feelings about his upbringing.  It has good reviews and seems to be non-political, so I’m going to try and get hold of a copy.

UPDATE (Nov 19 2008)

It seems many people are expressing the same opinion that Obama is mixed race.  One guy offers the curious and bizarre opinion that he is not black because he is not descended from slaves – Is Obama black? Anyway I think it doesn’t matter.  Everyone is mixed race to some extent.  Myself I am caucasian but no doubt a strange ‘mixed race’ of Anglo-saxon, Roman and Viking.

Translation notes

Of course in everyday life people in Japan refer to mixed race people as ‘haafu’.  Like ‘gaijin’ this is a controversial word, though it tends to be only the extremely uptight and self-righteous that get upset by it.  I’ve heard some people respond to it by saying ‘no not haafu, but double’ but this is surely ridiculous. Personally I think the way something is said counts much more than the word itself, and I rarely pick up any ill feeling when ‘gaijin’ or ‘haafu’ is used.  On the contrary, if anything I would say people mean it as a compliment most of the time.  My kids get worshipped everywhere they go, ‘haafu ha chou kawaii ne!  ningyou mitai!’ – it is never meant as an insult.

Today in a restaurant my daughter got bored and went walkabout.  She ended up getting coo-ed over by a group of 4 grannys and they were talking to her.  I went over and one of them said ’shes a haafu isnt she’ so I said ‘yes she is, actually I have another one over there, so I have two haafus – together they make One’ but they didnt seem to get the joke

混

KON – This seems to mean ‘mix’ or ‘blend’.  I wonder if it is used as cooking vocabularly (to mix the flour and water etc)

血

CHI – This means blood.

混血

KONKETSU

A mixed race child is KONKETSUJI 混血児 where JI means infant or child.

Agedashi-tofu 揚げ出し豆腐 – deep fried tofu with dashi

Tonight my wife prepared a white stew with a side dish of agedashi-tofu, my favourite dish.  It is a big block of tofu in tempura batter deep fried, then presented with a sauce made of dashi and soy sauce.  I like it because the tofu makes you feel like you are eating healthy, but the batter and the sauce give that nice kick of cholesterol, fat and salt.

The translation is straightforward as you would expect.  AGE means fried, DASHI is the dashi sauce and TOFU is tofu.

Agedashi tofu on wikipedia

Kimyou 奇妙 – Bizarre

Oh my God theres a Geisha trapped down t’mine!  And she has been enslaved!  Someone rescue her!

This is a weird scene I came across while visiting an old mine in Fukiya-furusato: the most deep, dark and scary inaka that Okayama has to offer.

Translation Notes

奇

The first kanji (KI　奇) in kimyou I remember from Heisigs ‘Remembering the Kanji’. I dont remember his story for it, but the story and image I created for it is of a ‘weird guy’ (top part) standing on a ‘platform as a train comes out’ (bottom part).  I always imagine myself standing at Archway tube station on the Northern Line of the London Underground, glancing uneasily across at some drunken dodgy geezer and wondering if he will jump or get into some other kind of bizarre behaviour.

妙

The second kanji (MYOU 妙) is also easy to remember thanks to Heisig.  He says something like ‘beautiful women are few and far between’ because the left radical means ‘woman’ and the right radical means ‘few’.  This kanji is also used in Myoko-san, a mountain on the border of Nagano and Niigata that I have hiked in summer and snowboarded on in winter.

Shitto 嫉妬 – Jealousy

Jealousy – this is another word I have often needed to know but not had at my disposal.

On Sunday there was a show on NHK about abnormal development in young children.  They started out by talking about kids with development problems and how they can be fixed with special attention and education at a very early age.

They then spent the bulk of the time focusing on Marc Yu, the so called ‘Little Mozart’ who is only 9 years old but is already well on the way to being a classical pianist.  The title of the show was ‘My Brilliant Brain’ and was basically 30 minutes of fawning and adoration for this kid.  The show was supposed to be investigating how and why kids become so brilliant, using a lot of scientists to talk about left brain right brain, nature vs nurture and so on.  But I thought the show missed the point completely.  Consider the following points:

• The boy has no siblings.
• His mother was (until very recently) single
• His mother seems quite well off.

As a result of these three things, obviously the mother can give the boy so much more attention than a regular boy would get.  There’s no distraction from a sibling, no Dad to cook for and clean up after, and no job to take mum out of the house.  I am just guessing, but I can imagine she poured a massive amount of time and attention into the boy and this is the reason the boy became ‘The Man’ on the piano.  Of course nature helps (if he had no hands it might be something of a disadvantage for example), but I believe it is 90% nurture.  If any of the three items above were not true, I believe he would not have turned out to be this child prodigy.  And I believe if genetically different children were put in the same situation they would turn out similarly.  (Now a really good tv show would take some babies and make them into Plato’s “Philosopher Kings” – that would be something to watch…)

Obviously, I am just jealous because the boy is so good at the piano But this is an issue quite close to the bone for us because we are always trying to teach our own kids various things, but it is difficult when you have two little ones around the same age.  Its very difficult to get a nice quiet environment where they can study something alone without the other one smashing them over the head with something.

“Two kids = three times the work” as I always say.

Translation Notes

I have just checked on ALC for the translation of Jealousy and I can reveal with much glee that the translation is SHITTO!

Interestingly (and amusingly) both of the kanji in shitto (嫉 and 妬) have ‘woman’ as the left radical.  I wonder what those kanji mean in isolation.

Jealousy can also be translated as NETAMI ねたみ or just plain old katakana JYERASHII ジェラシー.

A more obscure translation is YAKIMOCHI 焼きもち, literally meaning ‘cooked or burnt rice cake’ which is also easy to remember.  In English there are often two ways of saying the same word: the coarse Germanic way or the romantic Latin way.  In Japanese I notice a similar thing sometimes: the standard way and the “yokel farmer” way such as above.

Those annoying phrases like ‘nebaneba’ (sticky, viscous), ‘tekateka’ (shiny), ‘pikapika’, ‘garigari’ etc sound babyish to me and (without any evidence or study to back it up!) I blame the yokel farmers totally for their existence.

Down with the yokels.  Let them eat shitto.

Nintai 忍耐 – Patience

Today I went to a kind of fete for the kindergarten my son will be attending from April next year.  We arrived at lunchtime and started to queue up for one of the many food stalls. We choose yakisoba and spent about 40 minutes in the queue.  About 10 people were cooking up a storm, but for some reason at some point they stopped serving the yakisoba and started to pack it away into boxes.  They started to whisper amongst themselves and look nervously out at the queue of 30-odd hungry parents standing in line.  For about 10 minutes, no food was given out and the queue was growing longer.  Suddenly, calculators were whipped out and a worried looking young lady was pushed out in to the queue to ask people how many portions they wanted.  Things were looking bad.  Sure enough, a few minutes later it was announced that they had ’sold out’ and that we had effectively been queuing for 40 minutes for no reason.  Amazingly, no-one bawled them out for hording the food for staff (this is obviously what had happened to all the yakisoba they cooked and stashed in the boxes) and the queue just dispersed into other queues.  I thought to myself, in this way the cliche may be true that Japanese are patient. I cringe to think what would have happened if it occured in the UK.

On the whole I think its true that Japanese are quite patient, however on the other hand, I can think of a few examples of where Japanese are not patient at all.

Old ladies seem to never bother to queue up and just barge their way in where-ever they like.  I wonder if this is some kind of custom that I do not know about, because they are just so shameless about it.  Ironically you often hear the Chinese criticised by Japanese for bad manners in this way.

Another example is queuing to get on a train:

• Train stops and doors open
• 30 people try to get off train, but cannot because 30 people are standing in their way and trying to squeeze on as they get off (in order to get a seat)
• Result: it takes twice as long as it should for people to get on/off the train, and it is stressful.

I can never understand why people do not simply stand to the side of the doors, let everyone get off, and then get on and take a seat.  This seems so much more civilised.  I punish the heathen when it is my turn to get off the train and I have my huge suitcase in tow – I take great pleasure in chopping peoples ankles or shins with it as they stand in my way.

A final one is driving manners.  It always stuns me how people are so aggressive here in protecting their space in the queue for the traffic light.  Some poor sod is trying to turn into the main road and no-one stops to let them in.  They prefer to be that 3 meters closer to the traffic light, let that guy just sit and wait another few minutes.

Hmm this is a becoming a bit of a ‘Japan-bashing’ post today so I’ll stop here, blame it on the terrible hayfever I had today, and move on to translation notes…

Translation Notes

Patience seems to be usually translated as ‘gaman’ but I normally feel unsatisfied by this.  Gaman seems to be more like ‘put up with’ or ‘endure’ where the object is quite unpleasant.  But I think patience also has a meaning of ‘to bide your time’, ‘wait for the right moment’ or ‘restrain yourself’ which perhaps is where Nintai is used.  The NIN in nintai seems to mean restraint.

Tsui ni ついに – Finally

I just found out that the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) is finally going to undergo some much needed changes.  Everybody has been saying for years that they need to do more than one test per year, and that there needs to be a new level between 2kyu and 3kyu, and finally they are going to put these changes in place.

These are the new levels to replace current levels 1-4.  Note the addition of the N3 level:

• N1: Approximately the same passing level as the existing Level 1 test, but designed to enable slightly more advanced abilities to be measured as well.
• N2: Approximately the same passing level as the existing Level 2 test.
• N3: Positioned at a level bridging existing Level 2 and  Level 3 tests.
• N4: Approximately the same passing level as the existing Level 3 test.
• N5: Approximately the same passing level as the existing Level 4 test.

They will also offer ‘multiple test dates’ though it seems this will not happen until Dec 2010.

Full official details of the announcement can be found here.

The donkey finally gets the carrot

So “finally” they got their bums in gear to make these much needed and called for changes.  I have been familiar with the translations of “yatto” and “iyoiyo” for “finally”, however when looking it up on ALC I noticed it can also be translated as “tsui ni”.  “Tsui ni” is one of those words I had heard a lot and often wondered what it meant, now I know.

Seishoku-noryoku 生殖能力 – Virility

Today I went to Osaka to drop off a few big items I had sold to a fellow gaijin over the internet.

Turns out that the guy is about 60 and has just moved back to Japan.   I was a little taken aback when he said his wife has just given birth to a daughter!  I didnt have the nerve to ask him, but I presume his wife must be half his age.  And at 60, that is some virility!  I wonder if it was one of these ‘viagra babies’…

Anyway, this inspired me to look up the word for Virility.  It turns out there is no good translation.  The only ones on offer by ALC are:

• Virile (as in ‘macho’ or ‘manly’): otoko-rashii (男らしい) danseiteki (男性的)
• Virile (as in ‘reproductive power’): seishoku noryoku (生殖能力)

Nesage 値下げ – Price Reduction

Today I heard that Japan’s Prime Minister, Mr Aso*, has announced an economy stimulus package that involves giving each household about 38,000yen and offering a price reduction on highway tolls so it costs a maximum of only 1000yen to travel any distance on weekends/bank holidays.

This is great news for me and my family because we often drive 7 hours on the expressway to see the inlaws – this is going to save us about 14,000 yen a time.  I wonder if it is going to be only for ETC users.

This word ‘nesage’ is often banded around on the news in relation to the price of gasoline.

* Mr Aso is a mean looking dude whose name reminds me of:

• Mr ‘A-hole’
• Mr ‘Ah so…’
• ‘Aso-san’ (a famous semi-dormant volcano in Kyushu. Quite apt for someone who spends most of the time blowing hot air.)