There are some pretty hilarious place names in the world, like Hell, Michigan, Hookersville, West Virginia or Lord Berkeley’s Knob, Scotland. There are some that sound funny to the Japanese, too. The second largest city in Idaho is Nampa, which happens to be a common slang term that roughly means “girl hunting,” what bored young people in Japanese cities usually do on weekends. The Boyne Valley near Dublin, Ireland causes snickering when rendered into katakana, since boin is the sound of soft, round things going, well, “boing.” In Holland there’s a town called Scheveningen, which comes out sounding like sukebe ningen in Japanese, meaning “depraved human being” (I’m sure they could use some of our T-shirts there). In Texas, Michigan and Alaska there are towns with the name of Onalaska, which happens to sound like onara-suka, which is “Did you have flatulence?” in polite Japanese. The prefecture of Siliana in Tunisia gets more attention than it otherwise would, since it sounds like shiri and ana, a person’s rear end and hole, respectively. The most common “catch-all” Japanese insult is baka, meaning “stupid,” but in Osaka they prefer the term aho, and I’m sure the town of Ajo, Arizona gets at least a few additional tourists each year because of this name. But the strangest accidental place name would have to be Eromanga, a mining town that’s the farthest point from the sea in Australia, with a name that sounds like manga comics that are naughty. Similarly, there’s an island near Australia named Erromango, which got miss-transliterated as Eromanga in the Nintendo Wii weather program, making it an instant legend in the eyes of Japanese gamers.
Why Is Japanese So Similar to Spanish? Let’s Compare Both Languages!
Everyone knows that Japanese is a hard language to learn, right? But I found it surprisingly easy, partly because it...
