My first Japanese textbook was Foundations of Japanese Language by Soga, a book which I’m thankful for now but which was frustrating to use at the time, teaching us the term for the Chinese Zodiac before useful words like “man” or “woman.” In one of the first chapters it explained how kanji characters often have hiragana written beside them to show how to pronounce them, which are known as furigana, lit. “attached kana.” Since the prefix furi sounds like the English word “hurry,” the textbook author went out of his way to describe how you could think of furigana as “hurry-gana” for people in too much of a hurry to look up the proper reading for the character in a dictionary. I didn’t know at it at the time, but this was my first exposure to the silly category of joke known as dajare (dah-jah-reh), a bad kind of pun that middle-aged Japanese men are especially known to make. Now it’s my turn to make bad jokes in Japanese, and I’m quite good at it (which is to say, my Japanese jokes are quite bad).
