It’s fun to look up odd place names, like Intercourse, Pennsylvania, Climax, Michigan, Whiskey Dick Mountain in Washington State or the island of Poopoo in Hawaii. Naturally, there’s a large body of place names that sound naughty when pronounced in Japanese, too. Places like Nampa, Idaho, which is funny because 軟派 nampa happens to be a common slang term that roughly means “girl hunting,” what bored young men in Japanese cities usually do on weekends, asking random girls they encounter to go to karaoke or out for drinks with them. (If girls go hunting for boys it’s 逆軟派 gyaku-nampa or “reverse nanpa.”) Boyne City, Michigan holds a special place in the hearts of Japanese men, since “Boyne” becomes ボイン boin in Japanese, essentially the “boing” sound of boobs moving. There’s a mountain in Malaysia called Mt. Panty (Gunung Panti), one in Indonesia called Mt. Baka (Bukit Baka, baka of course meaning “stupid”), and good old Scheveningen in the Netherlands, which comes out sounding like スケベ人間 sukebe ningen in Japanese, meaning “perverted human being.” (I’m sure they could use some of our T-shirts there.) But the grand-daddy of funny-sounding place names is of course Eromanga, a mining town that’s the farthest point from the sea in Queensland, Australia, with a name that sounds like ecchi manga comics. I swear I will go here someday and write a J-List post about it.
I want to visit Eromanga, in Australia.
