The other day my daughter asked me if I wanted to play Mari-Suma with her, and I replied that I’d rather watch an episode of Ame-Fani instead. She was speaking of playing Mario Smash Brothers on the Wii while I was talking about America’s Funniest Videos, and we were both engaging in a rather strange Japanese custom of shortening words into smaller chunks. Like everyone, the Japanese don’t want to use words that are long and clumsy so they developed a system of reducing words into (usually) four kana characters to make them easier to use. Foreign-derived words can be especially awkward, and so it’s common to hear shortened words like Ame-komi (American comics), Yafu-oku (Yahoo auction) or pasokon (personal computer). The abbreviations are often created as terms of endearment by fans, and you could almost measure popularity based on which stars have these shortened Japanese nicknames and which do not, i.e. Brad Pitt is more popular than Harrison Ford because everyone says Burapi but no one uses Harifo. Anime series and games often receive the abbreviated name treatment, too, like Mari-Mite for Maria Watches Over Us or Sukisho for the game “I Like What I Like, So It Can’t Be Helped” (also a slogan on a popular shirt we make). Some of the words you already know are actually the result of these Japanese word reductions, like the Nikkei stock average (short for Nihon Keizai Shimbun, or Japan Economic Newspaper) or Pokemon.
A book explaining the rules of Ame-Futo, or American Football.
