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Cold Fish (冷たい熱帯魚 Tsumetai nettaigyo ) 2010 – Sono Shion 園子温
*/5
I believe it was Isaac Asimov who wrote, “It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.” Getting his commercial feet wet in the 2002 bloodbath Suicide Club
Caveat lector: I am note opposed to violence, sex, nudity, etc., in film. That said, I am aesthetically remote from splatter flicks in general; gore does not stimulate my cinematic taste buds, neither does graphic absurdity for its own sake. In short, I do not enjoy porn of this order. If you do, feel free to ignore the rest, because you may well enjoy it; if you do not, read on. Read the rest of this entry »
The above is hardly advertising at its best. But the value of this particular example lies in what it reveals about Japanese workforce’s mastery of the English language, as well as foreign staff–both are missing. Yet a blind infatuation with the exotic, foreign–read English–cool persists. The combination of the above lack of English and grasping attempts to harness its cachet precipitate the very definition of SNAFU, and the above harlequinade provides just a single example from a multitude. Rest assured this is the normal situation in Japan.
Also note that the store in question was in Osaka, the second-largest metropolis in Japan after the Tokyo-Yokohama megasprawl (Gibson fans may include Chiba). A similar display may be forgiven in Boonie-mura, Inakaville (pop. 1 man). Granted this Galerie store appears to be in Shinsaibashi, on Osaka’s southside, which has a bit of an edge. But this is s till a howler.
This is, of course, not a rare instance of inadvertent use of offensive English. The article might have mentioned a certain chain restaurant called First Kitchen, or fa-suto kicchin, which, contracted, went the way of Brad Pitt (Burapi) and the non-Osaka McDonald’s (makudo). Nothing like walking down the street and overhearing:
A: “Hey what you want to do?”
B: “Let’s go fakkin!“
Though the kitchen affair is at least an honest mistake. Not that the sale sign is really outrageous; Japanese people by and large have trouble comprehending expletives fully on a conceptual level, so even for that I could lift some of the blame. But this bit of news does tell us about foreign staff in Japanese companies the same thing the iPad told us about female staff at Apple. If there was an English speaker on staff (or German, Swedish, hell, French would do), the Daily Mail would have been a story short. Unless of course that English speaker was chef Ron Silver.
Maybe they could have picked on the Colbert Report (Jan. 11, 2012), when its editors chose to illustrate the discussion of the risk posed to New York, London, and Tokyo by earthbound debris of a Russian satellite with photos of the Empire State Building (New York), Big Ben (London), and Kinkakuji (Kyoto). Oh, that there were only anyone on staff with some knowledge of Japan, or a Wikipedia connection.
Add this one to the kannuki files.
Japanese crossroads sign
辻 (つじ) tsuji “crossroads”
Another wonderful kanji that looks exactly like what it means.
The image at right is the Japanese traffic signal for a crossroads. If we simply append to it the radical for “walk/road” (shinnyū/shinnyō 辶) [found in “way” 道, “advance” 進, etc.], we get: “the roads in 十-shape.”
How great is that?
Japonesque Blog 