Japanese Engrish

I don’t mention it a lot on this weblog, but I am awash every day in Japanese English.

I guess the reasons I don’t mention it too much are:
1). I see so much of it that after a while it doesn’t even affect me and
2). If I tried to list every bit of Japanese English I saw, it would take over this blog.

Not to say I haven’t dabbled in it from time to time. I’ve touched on the subject in one of the first entries I wrote, as well as here and here.

I think my favorite example of Japanese English is my friend Brenda’s shirt, which reads, “I want to wake up next to you, isn’t it?”

“Did you buy that in Japan?” I asked.

“Of course I bought it in Japan,” she replied. “Why does everyone ask me that? Where else could I have gotten a shirt like this?”

My second favorite was a cigarette vending machine I once saw, with a long English message written on the front. Unfortunately I didn’t write it down, and I can’t remember it verbatim, but it was something like this:

“ ‘Have a smoke’ is a popular Japanese greeting. Many Japanese say to each other, ‘How is your smoke today?’ which is Japanese way of saying ‘How are you?’ Many young Japanese enjoy smoke in the afternoon. So, relax and have smoke with Japanese people.”

In comparison to those beauties, I’m not sure this next one lives up. In fact I feel a little guilty writing it, because once this is posted, I’m going to have opened the floodgates and will feel obligated to post every funny bit of Japanese English I see.

At any rate, I was sitting in the teacher’s lounge, and I noticed the teacher next to me had a desktop calendar with a picture of a dog in a cute pose on each month. At the bottom of the calendar was written: “Bow Wow Doggy: Many dogs are in this calendar.”

At the top of each dog picture were the words: “The sight of its back of the little doggy which goes up stairs.”

And each picture was captioned with the words: “I like the dog which listens to what said.”

Okay, now with that little guilty pleasure out of the way, I promise not to write about Japanese English for at least another couple of months.

Link of the Day
Forgive me from changing moods from the trivial to the very serious:

Many of you reading this know of Andy Schrier, a friend from Calvin College, who died of Cancer a couple years ago.

Before Andy died, he sent out a series of mass e-mails describing his faith as he struggled with the prospect of death. They have all been archived on the net here.

If you have the time and inclination, they are probably all worth reading, but of particular note is the e-mail dated Dec 14, 2002, which begins with these words:

I’m not going to apologize for the length of this email, but it is a lengthy
one. You may not want to open it work because it may take you awhile to read
Idon’t want your boss to get mad at you. But I would appreciate it if you
wouldtake the time to read it. I think I’ve been waiting to write this my
wholelife; it has been an entire lifetime of stuff that God has been teaching
me. In short, I feel that I’ve poured my very soul into this writing. I truly
hope andpray that it will point to God and not to me.

I remember this e-mail particularly well because I recieved it at a time when I was struggling with my faith, and I really took a lot of inspiration from it. It didn't clear everything up like a magic bullet. I'm still struggling with a lot of the same things I was struggling with two years ago, but I always thought it was very strange the way I found this e-mail in my inbox on the same afternoon that I had been thinking a lot about these type of issues.