Japan is a subtle place, where people often substitute vague, indirect language when discussing things they don’t want to talk about openly. This takes many forms, for example the omitting of sentence subjects entirely, allowing a situation where a boy who wants to confess his love to a girl is able to start to say the words but switch them to mean he was really talking about the cake they’re eating if he loses his nerve. Then there’s the word are (ah-ray), which means “that thing over there” and which can serve as a catch-all object for vague conversations, sort of like the word “they” in English. When riding the train in Tokyo, it’s an all-too-frequent occurrence to have the trains stop suddenly, the conductor announcing a jinshin-jiko or “an accident involving physical injury” which is a roundabout way of saying that some troubled person decided to jump in front of the train. The most common way to refer to a woman’s menstrual cycle is seiri, a word that means “biology,” although there are many other alternate names, like Anne’s Day (a bizarre reference to Anne Frank) or “Japanese Flag Day” (because, well, have you ever looked at a Japanese flag?). Finally, perhaps the most famous euphemism used in Japanese is the English letter “H,” usually pronounced “ecchi,” which stands for anything to do with sex (i.e. a person who thinks about sex to much is ecchi, to do the act is ecchi suru and so on).
Does this mean that Haruhi is “H”? Not that I’d mind at all.
