What a difference an elongated vowel can make. Japanese is quite different from English, having had a totally unique developmental history — it’s supposedly related to Mongolian, Basque, Turkish and possibly Hungarian, don’t ask me how — and it sports concepts we couldn’t even conceive of in the language of Shakespere. One is a strong differentiation between short vowels (like the o in ocha) and long vowels (the first syllable of Tofu, the second syllable of Shirow’s name). If you’ve ever wondered why someone whose last name is Sato writes it as Satoh or Satou, it’s because he’s trying to express the longer second syllable as accurately as he can, even though it makes no difference when pronounced in English. Sometimes these vowels can cause transliteration issues. For example, shoujo (with a long vowel) means “girl,” while shojo (short vowel) means, er, a female who is pure as newly fallen snow, i.e. a baajin (a virgin). While the former spelling is more common in fannish circles, the latter isn’t really wrong, since the two terms are identical in pronunciation in English. U.S. shoujo manga magazine ShojoBeat uses the latter, more simplified spelling, presumably without a lot of confusion by readers thinking that it’s focusing on hip, well-drawn virgins. Accuracy can only be taken so far — otherwise we’d be wearing Doumo-kun T-shirts, cheering baseball star Ichirou, and listing Japan’s capital as “Toukyou.”
This difference in perception of long and short vowels cropped up back in my ESL teaching days in an amusing way. I had a student named “Yoko Ohno” (long vowel, meaning “big field”), so naturally I made the obvious joke about what a thrill it was to have a famous person in my class and consoled her on the loss of her husband John. She had no idea what I was talking about, though. It turns out that the more famous Yoko Ono’s last name was a short vowel (meaning “small field”) and this slight difference meant that my student had gone through her life never realizing her name was similar to the woman J-List’s own Tomo (a serious Beatles fan) refers to as “Bitch and Witch!” Another time, I was walking with a Japanese friend in a toy shop and we came across a large plush toy of Jiji, the black cat from Hayao Miyazaki’s classic film Kiki’s Delivery Service. I told my (non-otaku) friend the cat’s name, but she refused to believe me. It turned out she was mis-hearing my pronunciation, thinking that the cat’s name was jijii (with a longer vowel at the end), which is a very rude word for an old man. (The female version is babaa, similar enough to Babaar that they had to tweak the famous elephant’s name for the Japanese versions of his books.) Issues like this are part of the reason why I always recommend that anyone interested in learning Japanese make sure they’re using a textbook that exclusively uses hiragana, katakana and kanji rather than romanized Japanese, like the Genki series.
If you don’t have a subscription, I recommend you pick up the current issue of National Geographic, which has a great article on the Jamestown settlement of 1607 and the changes that it heralded for the “new” continent as Europeans (and their worms, introduced to North America for the first time in mud brought over as ship ballast) started moving in. It’s interesting, because it’s very near to the year of the Battle of Sekigahara in Japan (1600), so you can compare the changes in the two places side-by-side. In the last four centuries, Japan has moved from its “Warring States” period when every powerful lord and his brother was trying to become the military master of all Japan, known as Shogun; through the forced peace of the Edo Period, 250 years of separation from the rest of the world, which allowed Japan’s culture to mature untouched by outside influences but also stagnate technologically; and through the Meiji Period, bringing rapid modernization and a general wish that Japan was part of Europe, which is why both share DVD region code ‘2’ now. During the same period, one country was transformed several times, while another was built, totally from scratch.
We’re off to Los Angles tomorrow to get set up for the Star Wars Celebration IV convention, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, May 24-28. We’ll be selling lots of good things, from cool toys from Japan to our “Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend” T-shirts and watching Stormtroopers in their native habitat, as opposed to anime conventions where we usually see them. If you’ll be at the show, we’d love to have you to drop by booth 924 and say hi. We hope to see you at the show!
Remember that J-List has reworked the RSS feeds on our site, making it easy to use an RSS-aware browser like Apple’s Safari, Firefox or IE7, a dedicated feed reader, or a service like Google Reader to watch for new products on J-List. It’s really quite ingenious: you register the “feed” you want to watch and when it’s updated, your RSS-reader will display the new products for you automatically. You can watch specific J-List product pages for new or restocked products, watch for all new J-List products as they’re posted, or create a feed for a specific keyword, say, one that lets you know when new Pinky Street products are added to J-List, or when any new product that has the keyword “study Japanese” appears on the site. One of the coolest feeds lets you see what people are adding to their publicly-shared wish lists, and read their comments. Feed are available for both the J-List and JBOX.com (general product) domains, too. See all the RSS feeds that are available here.
Remember that J-List carries dozens of amazing Domo-kun products for you, more than any other company in the world, we’re pretty sure. Domo-kun is the ultra-cute spokesmonster for the “BS” (broadcast satellite) TV network operated by NHK, the BBC of Japan, and he’s as cute a monster as you could ever hope to see. Our products include the Domo-kun Pen, the Domo-kun Plush Keychain, Domo-kun straps for your phone, and of course the Domo-kun plush that was seen in the “Whenever I … God kills a kitten” graphic. We’ve also got the dynamite Domo-kun T-shirt and Hoodies that are great fun to wear!
