Needing a sixth sense to communicate with people from other countries, this year’s kanji, and all about “smorking”

Talking with people from other cultures often requires a sense for words that’s quite unrelated to speaking a foreign language. Sometimes, someone says something to you that just makes no sense at all, and it’s up to the deep part of your brain responsible for language processing to make the connection. Before I started studying the language, we had a Japanese foreign exchange student who stayed at my house. Once she praised me for something by telling me I was “good head.” After more than a little confusion, I figured out that she was telling me I was smart, and this is indeed how you express this concept in Japanese (atama ga ii, lit. “good head”). Soon after arriving in Japan, I had a conversation with a student who was trying to tell me how good Mitsubishi vehicles were. “They are very good. They make…army’s car. You know, boom!” My cranial density kept me scratching my head, until I realized he meant tanks. Whenever my wife comes to San Diego she has varying degrees of success communicating with my American family, who can’t always figure out that when she says something about “the glass” being green all year round she’s really talking about grass.

“I hate it when someone smorks in my face.” For whatever reason, the English word “smoke” is often rendered as “smork” in Japan. The issue is how the Japanese perceive certain sounds, especially the “r” phoneme that’s not familiar to them. Because Japanese is a syllable-based language in which you can express sounds like ka, ki, ku, ke or ko, but not the consonant “k” by itself, English words like “hello” “goodbye” or “beer, please” must be forced through this rather alien phonetic system, resulting in haroh (the final “h” representing an elongating of the previous vowel), guddobai and biiru puriizu. The very first fast food I ate in Japan was a McDonald’s clone called First Kitchen (home of the world famous scrambled egg burger, yech), and I remember some confusion as to whether the company was First Kitchen or Fast Kitchen. Without the full repertoire of English sounds, the Japanese render the latter as fasuto and the former as fahsuto, with the longer middle vowel serving the role of the “r” in “first.” This rule gets over-generalized in some words, which is why the long middle sound of the word sumo-ku (smoke) ends up as “smork.”

Every year a single kanji character is designated by the Kanji Examination Association which represents the events of that year, and this year the character is…itsuwari, which translates as falsity, lies or deceit. It was a big year for being lied to in Japan, with many scandals in the headlines. First, the problems with missing Social Security payments, which meant that thousands of workers wouldn’t get credit for money they paid into the system decades ago. Learning that the freshness date on the food they order may not be accurate also shook the trust of consumers in Japan — McDonald’s got caught changing the dates on salads so leftovers could be sold the following day, and they’d been doing it for years. The scandal at the Ministry of Defense, in which Deputy Defense Minister Yoko Yamada demanded various perks in exchange for the awarding of lucrative contracts, resulted in a raid on the Japanese version of the Pentagon by prosecutors. Today there was an official ceremony at beautiful Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto in which a famous Buddhist priest wrote the character with a large calligraphy brush while hundreds looked on. The kanji for previous years have included inochi (life) in 2006, during which so many young people committed suicide; ai (love), after the birth of Princess Masako’s daughter Ai in 2005; sai (disaster), in tragedy-laden 2004; and tora (tiger), celebrating the Hanshin Tigers victory in the Japan Series in 2003.

And still, the crack team of J-List employees is churning out packages left and right, making sure that orders both in Japan and San Diego go out in a timely manner. J-List’s unique position, actually being based in Japan, really allows us to bring you a huge selection of mind-blowingly unique products from Japan, like our good luck Poop Hat, or those cool Santa Lucky Cat display items, or the cool Christmas ornaments we have on the site now. You can browse all new items using this link. Having trouble making up your mind what to give? We’ve got a few ideas for you.