It’s still drizzling in Japan, as rainy season continues dumping an extra helping of precipitation on the Japanese islands. This morning while leaving the house I grabbed for an umbrella so I could make the 2-minute trek to J-List World Headquarters without getting wet. The umbrella turned out to be my wife’s favorite Louis Vuitton, and when she took me to task for using it, the inner reaches of my brain came up with a retort: “But honey, mi casa es su casa!” This was a play on the word kasa (casa) meaning both “house” in Spanish and “umbrella” in Japanese. For some reason, I’ve gotten very good at thinking of ingeniously bad puns in Japanese, called dajare (dah-jah-REH), and when we go for a drive on the weekends I’m known to torment my kids with joke after bad joke. Some of these linguistic puns come naturally in the course of learning Japanese, of course, like the word ikura which means both salmon roe as well as “how much is it?” making for the obvious gag ikura ikura? (“How much is this salmon roe?”), or how the word for “like” (suki) is pronounced similar to “ski,” which causes every student of the language to suddenly ask each other sukii ga suki? (“Do you like to ski?”). At least I’m not the only one with an odd sense of humor in Japanese. Currently California Governator Shuwa-chan is appearing in TV commercials promoting tourism in his state. The goofy slogan he recites combines the word nandemo ari meaning “it’s all here” with California, with the result being Nandemo Arifornia. It’s quite silly.
