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Has it come to this? A blog post about an amusing misuse of English in Japan. I went back and forth on weather or not to write about this (as hilarious as it is) because it is surely well-trodden ground. In the end I took it as a challenge. Can I write something insightful about such a hackneyed subject. We shall see.

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On the one hand, it is amazing how much English has been absorbed into the Japanese language. Of course English is constantly pilfering words from other languages instead of creating their own and this is one of the language's great strengths. However, it seems to me, that the English usage usually coincides rather closely with the word's meaning in its original language (with some exceptions). In Japanese, often the word is twisted and shaped to fit the meaning they wish to express, the feeling they hope to convey. (for example, the word "gorgeous" is used to mean, not beautiful, but expensive or extravagant.) It's pretty impressive, really, how English is cut up, rearranged, and abbreviated to no end to create new words that often fall rather far from their English origins. English almost becomes a tool for creating words that strike the right mood or evoke an image that would be impossible to create if expressed in Japanese. In the end these English appropriations are not English at all. They are as Japanese as Japanese.

On the other hand, it is distressing at times how insular Japanese culture can seem. Absolutely no regard is paid to wether anyone outside of Japan will ever see anything that is produced within Japan. English, or any other language, can be used anyway one wishes because anyone who understands English will never see what you've done. The same holds true about how other races and ethnicities are portrayed with no thought about what these people might think about the way they are being portrayed. It's treated as a private conversation between 126 million people. Although I'm quite sure that these thoughts never rise above the subconscious level and are rarely considered outright. Japanese people are often shocked when any non-Japanese person knows anything at all about Japanese pop culture. They honestly can't imagine that anyone is paying attention to what they are doing, and therefore, pay no attention in return. In Canada, most thinking people ( tattoo artists are obviously not included in this group) would never throw together a magazine cover or ad with just some random Japanese phrases without doing at least a rough check to see if they don't accidentally mean " kindergarten masseuse" or " balls in mouth". For one thing, they don't want to offend, but more importantly they don't want to seem like ignorant asses. This doesn't seem to come up at editorial meetings in Japan.

Furthermore, J-off … tee hee!