Dripping drool

偽物 (にせもの) ー

It looks so delicious, but its all fake :(

Delicious!

手作りギョウザ！！！

頂きます！ヾ(＠⌒ー⌒＠)ノ

The sale aisle

It's so funny the differences that strike you when you're somewhere new. Minus the labels and cellophane, this is how the Japanese have gotten down for thousands of years...

Crazy Japanese Valentine's Day bear

For every ex-lover that dumps you just before the big day

ぬいぐるみ仇討ち (ぬいぐるみあだうち)

Stuffed animal vengeance.

Both those words are nouns, so this would grammatically equal the substance of revenge in stuffed animal form. Word power!

Chinese wine

30 proof - good wine.

It's very sweet and brown like brandy.

紹興酒 (しょうこうしゅ)

Old Chinese wine.

Probably can't read the text in the second image, but this wine is traditional when a couple has a daughter. Our little girl is now 15 months and this was the second trip to Japan!

I think we know

How the Japanese envision footballers. While it's probably true that a certain ethnicity makes up a large percentage of sports players across a variety of sports, this is a little on the prejudiced side.

Prejudice = 差別 (さべつ)

I guess the small one has a purpose

Small houses? Kiddie clowns?

I don't think I would fit in the middle one. They would have to just man-up and save my life on the spot.

救急車 (きゅうきゅうしゃ) Ambulance.

No wonder they read English so well

Who in the world uses "municipal" and how in the heck did that word make the final cut for a bus stop advertisement? I can think of at least five better words for the TOEIC to test on: hood, city, local, district, and latte.

Ok so not all of them work well in this context, but any of them would be used more frequently than municipal.

The tragedy here is that the kanji pictured just means "city" or "town" to us.

900円 for an app that isn't going to help you communicate more natively!

Wow they just keep coming

I think the translation on this one is a bit on the weak side personally:

買い物の割に遅かったな。どこぞでよろしくやっていたのか？

kaimono no wari ni osoka ttana. dokozodeyoroshiku yatte itanoka?

You're pretty late to have just gone shopping. Have you been making out someplace?

In the context that I'm used to hearing it, やる always takes on a more intense sexual connotation. I would probably translate the above something like "have you been screwing around?" because that feels far closer to the intention of the sentence rather than being simply a literal translation of the Japanese.

Probably best not to use やる when you're talking to a girl for the first time.

Unless you think she's down.

Sent from my iPhone 4

Another classic from the dictionary.

This one is for my friend wireball

私はエイリアンに誘拐されていた。

Watashi wa EIRIAN ni yuukai sareteita.

I was abducted by aliens.

Coincidentally I like the power of the kanji multiplier.

While 誘拐 is abduction, 幼児誘拐 yields kidnapping. Not that kidnapping is a serious issue here in Japan, but there may come a time where you see something on the news about a child having been kidnapped, and it would be good to recognize the kanji in that event such that you can keep an eye out.

If you do happen to see the child on the street with their kidnapper - do what I would do: run that bastard down and crack their skull (not the kid).

Kidnapping is bullshit.

Sent from my iPhone 4

This is hilarious

So my favorite iPhone dictionary is Kotoba! (get it on the app store) and the examples included come from the tatoeba project which is an open collection of examples sentences that have been crowd-sourced.

Sometimes you come across gems like this:

ちなみにここ一週間は、例えばフラグが立っていようとも、Ｈシーンが無い事は確定事項だからな。暫くの間、辛抱な！

chinamini koko isshuukan wa, tatoeba FURAGU ga tatte iyoutomo,H SHI-N ga nai koto wa kakutei jikou dakarana. shibaraku no kan, shinbou na!

By the way, this week - no matter what flags are set - it's a certainty that there will be no ecchi scenes. You'll just have to bear with it a while.

The Japanese in this post that I was focused on is 因みに (ちなみに) and it appears that someone in the community uses this expression to lament about the lack of sex scenes in movies...

Well who can blame them right?

Sent from my iPhone 4

Lockers

Touch screen lockers in machida station - nice!

And you can pay with your Suica card, •Ö—˜‚ȁ` (‚ׂñ‚è)

True Wagyu (和牛)

A friend of mine treated me to a real feast. A friend of his from Kobe runs a wagyu teppanyaki restaurant in Ginza. He had been telling me for years that he would take me there on one of my trips to Japan, and finally our schedules aligned properly such that we could make the trip.

This restaurant serves only the highest Kobe beef. It goes without saying that the meat comes from Kobe, with a pre-meal history of Kobe beef and Tajima beef written in English and Japanese (I got the English version - regardless how well you read or speak a language, it is nice sometimes to read something in your native tongue).

I'm not sure how the blog formats the images, so I'll just write everything here and ask that you refer to the images wherever they end up on the page.

My lesson on this trip was オウギュウ. I had no idea what he was saying. Big beef? King beef? Middle cut of beef? There are various kanji that have the reading "おう" but none of it made sense.

Turns out he was being a cheeky tart. It was おう for オウジ or "Aussie beef". After we ate he said "it was really Aussie beef." and watched my eyes grow wide. Then he said "ウソウソ" for "just kidding".

But was he really joking or not? I wonder...

Anyway - it was delicious!

Things you don't see everyday in japan

For some reason it took me this long to realize that I could update my blog from my iPhone and attach pictures. I'm not great in the common sense (常識 じょうしき) department, but I'm good with book stuff so I give myself a pass.

Here is a beautifully done wall on the outside of a bicycle shop in Machida (町田). Now that I realized the easy way to update my blog, maybe I'll actually do it more often.