Bizarre urban legends of Japan, funny English words the Japanese invent, and where are all the pregnant women?

Urban legends are funny things, sometimes leading millions of people to believe something that just isn’t true. When Gerber started selling baby food in Africa, people there assumed that the picture of a baby on the package meant that it contained ground-up babies. Walt Disney was put into cryogenic suspension and sleeps there even now, deathless. The Titanic sunk because it carried a cursed mummy in its hold. Michael Jackson bought the bones of Elephant Man John Merrick. Richard Gere had that thing with the gerbil. All of these are examples of stories that had no basis in fact, but many people believe them nevertheless. They have urban legends in Japan, too, and some of them can be quite fascinating. An old legend passed down by the Kiristans (what Christians in Japan were known as in the 14th century) states that after he was resurrected, Jesus came to Aomori, Japan, at the top of the main island of Honshu, where he lived out the rest of his life and died, and you can visit his grave in the town of Herai, a shortened form of the word Hebrew in Japanese. Another interesting myth that most smokers here believe is that the Lucky Strike logo was designed after the bombing of Hiroshima in World War II, made to look like a mushroom cloud when viewed from above…which is false, since the logo was being used back in the 1920s or earlier. Last week the Internets were buzzing with news that over 2000 Japanese had purchased imported sheep from Australia thinking they were poodles, but the story, too, turned out to be completely false.

Everyone knows that adding ‘y’ to the end of a noun can turn it into an adjective, like silky, messy, rainy, or healthy, and since Japanese usually study six years of English before finishing high school, people generally have a working knowledge of the grammar here. It’s common for makers of products to play with English in ways that can be very creative, spawning a line of ladies’ support stockings that bears the name Supporty or a deep-cleaning shampoo called Rooty, or how about the slogan for a construction company, “Home, Homer, Homest”? Japanese also reverse engineer the grammar of English to create new slang terms. For example, new words are commonly made by, say, removing the “tic” ending from a word like “dramatic” or “aromatic” and tacking it onto a Japanese words, creating otome-tic (oh-toh-meh-CHI-ku), meaning something that a girl would do, like having a pink box of tissue on her desk; or gaijiin-tic (gai-jin-CHI-kku), meaning something that you’d expect a foreigner to do, like enter a house with his shoes on. (For phonetic reasons, the “tick” sound comes out as “chick” in Japanese.) These hybrid words are often embraced by plugged-in otaku, resulting in words like Akiba-ism, which encompasses all anime, manga and game culture, as seen in Tokyo’s Akihabara region; or the maid cafe called Mail-ish, which means, hmm, well, it doesn’t mean any damn thing, but it sounds kind of cool in an “email-ish” sort of way, and maids are pretty.

My Japanese mother-in-law once remarked to me that, “I don’t see many women with big stomachs these days.” At first I thought that women were getting thinner, but my wife said no, her mother had been referring to the dearth of pregnant women in Japan. It’s true — the birthrate here is the lowest in the industrialized world, just 1.25 children per couple, a problem known as shoshika or “declining number of children,” and it’s getting more and more common to see companies offering products and services to those over 65 rather than baby-related items. In some rural areas, the population shrinkage is causing hospitals to change the way they treat patients. In Mie Prefecture, for example, the maternity wards of three separate hospitals were combined in one location to more efficiently utilize resources, but this wasn’t welcome news for expectant mothers who now had to travel an hour or more to have their babies.

Remember that J-List carries the most hilarious wacky Japanese T-shirt in the world, our “Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend” design, which would perhaps most accurately be translated as “Now accepting applications for a Japanese girlfriend.” Available as a classic T-shirt, a fleece hoodie, an embroidered hat, an alternate calligraphy style, and rather kinkily, a fitted girl’s T-shirt. Whether you are interested in meeting Japanese females or just want a fun conversation starter with Japanese who happen to see it, our T-shirt will be a fun addition to your wardrobe. We also make a “Japanese boyfriend” line.