Category: Japan

Things and observations about Japan, including the Japanese language.

Don’t Ever Misgender a Dragon or Its Rainbow

I have a constellation of diverse and only tenuously linked hobbies and interests that often take me down rabbit holes that are, for good reasons, seldom explored. One of my interests is the Imperial Japanese Navy, and particularly its ships.

One of the ships built for Japan by Yarrow in Scotland (at the time, I believe) just before the Russo-Japanese War was named Niji. People who know Japanese will correctly take this to mean rainbow, but there is a twist. It is not written with the commonly seen character used for rainbow, 虹), but rather with the character 霓, which cannot be read easily or at all by most people walking around these days.

You might wonder what the difference is, and I discovered down a rabbit hole that in China there was a distinction, not between rainbows, but between their imagined pre-carnations. The 霓 character represents a rainbow that is an incarnation (vaporization?) of a female dragon, and the more-common 虹 is the rainbow that represents a male dragon. Who knew? Certainly not me.

I won’t delve into the issue of a rainbow being either male or female, other than to state my minor disappointment at seeing the rainbow, an image I like, being hijacked as an emblem of the LGBTQ people. But I digress.

Some thoughts on foreign workers here in Japan

Much of the view of foreigners here can be attributed not just to social media, but also to the main news media. When you here ○×国籍の… (a … of XYZ nationality), because of being preconditioned by the frequency of such news in the major media, it is safe to think that you are going to hear a report of a crime. Where are the stories about the more common foreigners not doing things to get them in such news stories?

My experience with recent foreign workers here has been different.

The young woman who helped us change our smartphone plans recently was from Nepal. She handled the rather complex transaction in very good Japanese, as efficiently and competent as Japanese staff member could have been. The only clue that she was not 100% culturally native was when she referred to us as お父さん and お母さん. We thought that was cute and didn’t have a problem with it, even though she was a bit young to be even our daughter.

Language is a major problem for the majority of foreign workers. If your daily environment is mostly dealing with a compatriot intermediary or you don’t otherwise need Japanese to work—this is apparently the case with many foreign workers here—you will be less incentivized to learn Japanese.

Just some thoughts from this very non-recent arrival—50 years ago is not very recent, and cannot lay claim to being a “real” expat.

Taking care of 仁義

Around 1977, I was in a large cabaret on the west side of Yokohama station, the Hollywood, which subsequently morphed into a Yodobashi store.

It had a band and often featured previously well-known singers who were no longer a thing; 一節太郎, and the like. The Hollywood was sometimes used as the location of movie scenes. But I digress.

A young thug walked in, evidently heading to a table already occupied by others of his party. He made the serious mistake of passing by the table of someone he should’ve shown proper respect to, but ignored.

There was a kerfuffle that went on between two tables—I was one table away—and the ultimate resolution was that someone from the late-arriving thug’s table came to the offended thug’s table to make things right, doing something I had only ever seen in movies (仁義を切ったわけ), as the band played on.

If this had happened today, I imagine a bunch of jerks would take out their iPhones and take photos of it.