"You're fat!"

Or, How With the Best of Intentions, You Can Still Offend or Confuse

by Alex Kent
JapanTrans.com

I stood waiting for Tabata-san to exit customs at Kennedy Airport. I had not seen him for almost eight years, but I was sure I would recognize him. And I knew he'd remember me: I was his English teacher at the steelworks where he had worked as an engineer. Tabata-san was one of my most earnest English conversation pupils: Although he could never manage to utter more than a sentence or two of severely broken English, I recall that he knew English grammar far better than I, which fact he proved, to my chagrin, on more than one occasion. Now we worked for the same steel company, he in the Tokyo office, and I in the company's New York office.

Eventually I recognized Tabata, a short man in a dark raincoat, working his way through the crowd. He knew me instantly, smiled, and by way of greeting, called out: "Kento-san, yuu ahh fatto!" ("Mr. Kent, you are fat!") Not so much as a Konnichi wa (hello). Adding insult to injury, Tabata said this in Japlish, a virtually unintelligible hash of Japanese and English with which I am familiar because I am fluent in Japanese.

Like most Americans, my weight is a sensitive subject. No, I'm not obese, and although I could certainly afford to lose a few pounds, I am not fond of having attention called to my weight. It took me a moment to recover from Tabata's good-natured greeting. Yes: Over the years I had put on weight. But imagine walking up to an old business acquaintance and saying first thing, "Hey Bill, you know, you've really bulked out!" After that how-do-you-do, it might be hard to segue into, say, "Did you get a chance to review that consulting agreement I faxed over?" Still, to a Japanese of Tabata's generation (about 50 years old),telling your friend, even a fairly casual acquaintance, that he's put on weight is a perfectly acceptable ice-breaker. No hard feelings.

From the time I began learning Japanese 22 years ago, it was clear that to know the culture I needed to know the language. It's been an uphill battle ever since: Japanese is a hard language, about as different from English as two languages can be. And the culture is at least as different as the language.

Anyone who has been to Japan has stories about signs and other printed material supposedly written in English. I have my favorites: A fast food joint called "Fried Cook." Coke's slogan in the 1980's: "I feel Coke." A coffee shop called "Tasty Heart." A sign on a trendy bar that reads: "Aqua Bar for the drinks. But we make sure our drinks won't kill you. This is something you must remember." I'll be sure to remember. And this is just the food category.

In short, there are all kinds of ways to look foolish on venturing into the unfamiliar terrain of a foreign language. The art of looking truly ridiculous, however, is by no means limited to strange Japanese versions of English.

Traveling in Arizona with one of my Japanese clients the other day, I spotted a foursome of 20-somethings in the adjoining booth of a steakhouse. One guy had his baseball cap turned backwards so I could get a clear view of what was written on it. I told my client to turn around and take a look. There, embroidered neatly onto the cap, was a single Japanese character: Mushi. It means "insect." My client just laughed out loud.

Or how about the well-intentioned hotel chain that just wanted to be helpful to its Japanese guests: On the flip side of the "Do Not Disturb" tag, they printed"Jama shinai de kudasai," a common enough expression which means "Don't interrupt," or "Don't get in my way," a rude way of saying "I'm busy." Still, it's better than the hapless American who wanted a wake-up call from her Tokyo hotel. She phoned the front desk, trusty Japanese phrase book in hand, and said "Shichi-ji ni okashite kudasai," or "Please assault me at 7:00." (She meant to say "okoshite" for "wake me up").

Sometimes it's a question of how far a company wants to go in educating the Japanese consumer. Another client — a certain insurance company — is making a major push into the Japanese financial services market. Their symbol is, well, a great big rock, the Rock of Gibralter to be exact. This client wanted scripts for its television commercials translated into Japanese. Before I go any further with a job like this, I need to know how this translation is going to be used. Does the client want a simple translation, or do they need copywriting? The client hedged on this. "Just translate it. And just transliterate. ÔThe Rock'." OK: That turns into "ZaRokku."

There a number of problems with this: First, although "rokku" is used as a "loanword" in Japanese, it means "lock" (as in lock-and-key), or "rock" (as in rock-and-roll). Nothing to do with geophysical features. "So we'll tell them it means "rock"in the sense of "Rock of Gibralter." They'll learn to associate it with the company's logo." The problem with this line of reasoning is that the Japanese have almost no cultural associations with the Rock of Gibralter. The rock logo might as well be a big chunk of cheddar cheese. And besides, metaphorically, a rock has nothing to do with stolid reliability; it suggests a kind of unthinking, unyielding stubbornness, as in "Ishi atama no hito," a "rock-headed person."

A sigh of resignation. As they say in Japanese, "O-kyakusama wa kamisama," —"The customer is God." Or is that "king"?