Category: Japanese Language

Huh? Where’s the Hospital?

Having a brain that still functions well enough and a ready stock of real-world experiences, I am not a frequent flier to AI destinations, but a confusion that happened (to someone else) the other day prompted me to see if ChatGPT would have been any less confused.

I was sitting waiting for a bus at the みなと赤十字病院入口 (Minato Red Cross Hospital Entrance) bus stop, when I saw a clearly confused young foreign woman looking alternately at her mobile phone and the name of the bus stop at which she had just gotten off a bus.

Seeing her confusion and that she was on crutches, I asked her where she was looking to go.

She pointed to the name of the bus stop and was wondering why she couldn’t see the hospital. Where were they hiding what was surely a substantial medical facility? The answer to the mystery lies in the way bus stops are sometimes named, and in the fact that other buses make a stop at a bus stop named みなと赤十字病院, without the 入口, which means entrance. Why does is a bus stop named XYZ Entrance not at the entrance and one without “Entrance” at the actual entrance to XYZ?

The Entrance in the bus stop name refers to it being at the entrance of the road leading to the hospital on a route that does not stop at the hospital itself.

Would ChatGPT, in all it’s wisdom, have solved this problem before forcing someone on crutches to wait for yet another bus or walk what would be a considerable and perhaps annoying distance on crutches?

My prompt to ChatGPT:

There is a bus stop in Yokohama with the name 赤十字病院入口. Where is that bus stop?

Here’s what it came back with:

The bus stop 赤十字病院入口 (正確には「みなと赤十字病院入口」) is located in Yokohama’s Naka Ward, serving the Yokohama Minato Red Cross Hospital.

[Wow, it could give me the formal name of the hospital !]

Here’s the detailed information:

  • Address: 神奈川県横浜市中区新山下3丁目15 (or nearby 3-1–6)

[I guess that’s right, but didn’t check]

[Who cares, unless you are planning on dropping a hospital buster bomb on the place?]

  • It’s situated along the bus routes that connect Yokohama / Sakuragicho / Motomachi-Chukagai stations to the hospital. [Correct, except that there is no Motomachi-Chukagai bus stop on some of the buses stopping where this occurred.] The stop is right by the hospital entrance. [Wrong. It was fooled just like the young lady on crutches. It’s nowhere near being “right by the hospital entrance.”]

ChatGPT proved that, just as a human without knowledge or experience regarding how bus stops could be named, it could mistake the name as being literally descriptive of its location.

Of course, I suspected that it would be fooled and knew the reason for the confusion.

People in the neighborhood who might frequent the hospital and have more general real-world experience riding buses (something that ChatGPT does not have and will never have) realize that the hospital entrance bus stop is not at the hospital entrance. The hospital stop is at the hospital, and the hospital entrace stop is about a five-minute walk away.

Most of them probably sense that bus stop as being right at the entrance to a  Manchinro shop, at which I frequently buy shumai, which is what I had just done when I encountered the confused visitor.

過剰仮名表記化を止めましょう

I nominateトクリュウ for a yet-to-be-established award for Japanese terms that need not be rendered—and are best not rendered—in kana.

Neither of the two characters of the Japanese expression 匿流, the abbreviation of the term 匿名・流動型犯罪グループ would be difficult to understand if left as kanji. Both are taught during the mandatory schooling years in Japan, and both kanji conjure up understandable meanings, not because they are “ideograms,” but because they are logograms used in other common expressions. One is 匿名, meaning anonymous, and the other, 流動 means flow or fluid. Both these characters are constituent parts of the longer, proper expression.

Is abbreviation called for? Perhaps. But there’s no need for kana, I think, since people not familiar with the proper original expression might not understand it, and that undermines the purpose of the communication, unless the purpose is to demonstrate the desire of the communicator to appear trendy.

The representation of this expression in kana might seem trendy, but it hides the terms behind the abbreviation. My guess is that many native Japanese speakers are not yet familiar with the proper underlying expression—quite similar to the situation with the Japanese term SNS (which I will discuss at another time)—and many probably could not provide a proper explanation of the term, beyond being able to either link the kana expression to specific recent crimes or generically describe types of associated crimes, nicknames of criminals, or places such as Myanmar or the Philippines from encountering the term in crime news coverage recently.

This trend to abbreviate in Japanese can get out of hand. It is sometimes useful, but when it combines with kanaization, it can fail to help even native Japanese speakers understand what is meant.