Westerners seem hopelessly taken with the mysteries of kanji characters, often choosing to get exotic tattoos with Chinese characters on their bodies. This is a cool thing to do, though occasionally they find out that a character is printed upside-down or that the characters mean something different than what they intended. Recently one customer asked our native Japanese staff to “translate” something he wanted to get as a tattoo, which was “never forget, never bow, never give up.” The translation came out as 忘れず、媚びず、諦めず wasurezu, wabuzi, akiramezu, which is an accurate translation but one that doesn’t work well because it lacks any context, e.g. no one ever says these words in this way in Japanese. Another idea was changing the message to 決して諦めない kesshite akiramenai, which has much better balance and sound, meaning “never give up [no matter what happens].” Finally the staff settled on 不屈の精神 fukutsu no seishin, a very beautiful phrase that literally means “indomitable and unyielding spirit,” which we felt was going to work much better for the person than trying to force a translation directly from English. If you’re interested in kanji but want to think twice before getting any permanent tattoos, why not consider our custom hanko name stamps which allow you to make name stamps with your name in kanji, or our custom Japanese calligraphy message board, with any Japanese phrase you like written for you. Because our staff are native Japanese speakers, there’s no worry you’ll end up with something embarrassing like “raging diarrhea.”
This lovely Japanese tattoo says…tomato?
