What if you met a Japanese person who went around telling “knock knock” jokes in English all the time? It would be pretty strange, I’d wager, and you might not know what to make of them. But that’s essentially what I do in Japanese: making wry Japanese jokes called dajare (da-jah-reh), although in my family we call them dadajare, since I’m the Dad. As a strange side-effect of learning Japanese, my brain has developed the subconscious ability to come up with strange jokes whenever I hear a word or phrase that acts as a trigger, quite unrelated to what I’m thinking about at the time, and when the family does something together they know I’ll probably be making little puns until they’re groaning for me to stop. For example, one way to say “I don’t have it” or “there aren’t any” in Japanese is nashi, which also happens to be what those delicious Japanese pears are called, so naturally I might reply “Japanese pear” if my wife asks me if I have her car keys. In Japanese, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is called Pisa no Shato, and since the final word sounds like the French word for castle, I might make a bad joke about how I’ve always wanted to go see the famous Chateau di Pisa. The other day I was watching TV and needed to switch the sound from Japanese to English, and as I looked around for the remote control, my wife asked me what I was searching for. The Japanese word for “sound” is onsei (OWN-sei), which my brain told me is similar to the word for “eleven” in Spanish (once). So I said, “I’ll give you a hint,” and proceeded to count from one to ten in Spanish. The next number was eleven, and suddenly everyone knew that I was looking for the remote control so I could change the sound on the TV. For some reason, telling dajare jokes is the domain of middle-aged men in Japan.
