In addition to updating J-List three times a week with slice-of-life news and observations from Japan and posting updates to our Facebook Page, I maintain a Twitter feed, posting site updates and random things that occur to me. I like Twitter because I can talk with customers directly, asking questions and getting feedback. The other day, one of my Twitter followers tweeted: “I’ve been meaning to ask, do you use iru or aru for the zombies in the impending corpse-ridden apocalypse?” This is one of the first puzzling areas of Japanese grammar students encounter, the rule that you express “to be (in a place)” with the verb iru / imasu if the object is living and moving, like a person or a dog, and aru / arimasu for inanimate objects like a house, a plant, or a car. I remember tormenting my Japanese teacher with similar questions. How about a freshly killed corpse? A plant that moves like a Venus Fly Trap? Robots like C3P0 and R2D2? (For the record, the Japanese staff of J-List reports that zombies and robots would use iru since you can interact with them, but all plants would use aru.)
Zombies present a challenge to Japanese grammar.
