Sunday 30 October 2011

The Horror, The Horror

I’ve never really been a huge fan of Horror. I saw one of the Child’s Play movies when I was obviously too young, and I can’t really remember much of it, except Dad stopping it halfway through and taking it back to the video rental shop. I think I’d convinced him that it was a cartoon, based on the picture of Chucky on the box, and in his mind cartoons were inherently childish. An animatronic doll possessed by the soul of a dead serial-killer probably wasn’t what he was expecting for his Sunday evening family viewing. Narnia it was not.

Thursday 27 October 2011

The Answer to Your Question is 'Almost Everything'.

Not to sound offensive, but the author of this piece is clearly a fucking moron. That’s how it works, isn’t it? I write ‘Not to sound xxxx’ at the start of a sentence and it’s like a magic wand, completely negating all the xxxx sentiments I follow it with.

This article reads as if the author has just tossed every exhausted cliché about Japan into a sack, given it a desultory jiggle and let the results come dribbling out. Though for the full set they should have illustrated it with a picture of cherry blossom on Mount Fuji, or a ‘geisha’ using a mobile phone because, y’know, Japan is just such a unique mix of the traditional and the modern.

Monday 24 October 2011

A Little Knowledge

So, here we are again. Having already said that this isn’t an Engrish blog I’m going to talk about it again. Or at least talk around it. It appears that the Japanese media have finally discovered Superdry, the British clothing company whose USP is the Japanese phrases they stick on the front of their shirts. Needless to say, if you can actually read this stuff it’s absolute gibberish.

Saturday 22 October 2011

Epistemologically Unsound Conclusions Concerning Japan and the Japanese, Based on Japanese Television

Number one in a series of some.

“Japanese people can’t taste bitter food.”

Look at this. And this. Also this. Oishii and Umai are (seemingly the only) two Japanese words for delicious. These are to be uttered either at a pitch and volume sufficient to make bats’ ears bleed, or in a muffled grunt as you spray your dining companions with the remnants of your half-finished mouthful. And it's the reason for the latter we're interested in here.

Friday 21 October 2011

"We're gonna need a bigger pan."

I generally want to avoid Engrish on this blog. Other sites have done it better/more authoritatively/to death, and I don’t feel there’s much to add at this point. Plus, after the initial giggling rush has worn off, it’s so pervasive that you barely even notice it’s unusual anymore. Like working in porn.

Yes, exactly like that.

So when I saw this little beauty in Deo Deo the other day, I didn’t really think much of it –

Departures

We went back to the UK this summer. Despite my wife and I being together for over eight years now, we’d never actually flown together before; a result of spending much of that time on different continents, so one of us was always flying to meet the other. We’ve had many tearful goodbyes and many joyous reunions, but we’ve never actually done the full day’s trek together - from our regional city in Japan to my hometown in rural England, or vice-versa. Door-to-door it takes pretty much 24 hours.

Given that the real point of this trip was for our son to meet my side of the family, we had to bring him along as well. This complicated matters, but not all that much, to be honest. I won’t go into all the details, except to say that Vantaa airport in Helsinki is lovely; clean, decent enough food, and compact. This last is an important consideration when you’ve got a tight transfer (‘You should see a doctor about that,’ etc). Charles De Gaulle, by comparison, is awful.

Manchester airport though, Manchester airport…