Now at Néojaponisme: my translation of the first chapter of Kanikōsen 蟹工船 ("The Crab Factory Ship", a.k.a. "The Factory Ship", a.k.a. "The Cannery Ship", but we decided to go with the Japanese title since it's become such a fad).

Kanikōsen is a proletarian novel by KOBAYASHI Takiji about folks on, well, a crab cannery ship. They toil ceaselessly in subhuman conditions (worse than Nakameguro even—I kid, I kid!) for their upper-class bosses, and get little in return. Many people in Japan, especially the young and "working poor" (a recent loanword to Japanese), see the book as an allegory for their lives..

Via Moji no Uradōri, we learn that Hakuba Lion Adventure have a great logo:

Can you see the ライオンアドベンチャー?

Bonus lion trivia to round out the post: "Echigo-jishi" (越後獅子, "Lion of Echigo") is allegedly the tune that kick-started Puccini's work on Madama Butterfly, and certainly one of the most frequently used Japanese melodies in the work—it pops up twice during the introduction of the title character alone, and the augmented-fifth rise-and-fall is one of the opera's most memorable Motives of Doom.

You can watch a bunch of kids playing Echigo-jishi on taishō-goto here, or just one kid (plus band) performing it surf guitar-style from about the three-minute mark here.

And actually this is totally unrelated, but while we're linking to YouTube: Etenraku 越天楽 on theremin and ryūteki.

I just ran across possibly the greatest Japanese surname ever: い, read "Kanagashira" or "Jigashara".

These mean "top [head] of the syllabary" and "top of the characters", respectively. This is because い comes first in the traditional kana order: i, ro, ha, ni, ho, he, to..., known as the iroha.

So it's like having the English surname "A" and pronouncing it "Firstletter".

(There's also an 一 read "Jigashira", because 一 ("one") comes first in most kanji orderings.)

Now the problem: does い as a surname really exist? Let's see...

1. I found it on this page, which seems fairly scrupulously edited as webpages go—note that the author crossed out 十二月三十一日 and 十二大晦日, both pronounced "Hizume", after learning that they were not real.
2. The author of that page also links to this page of "ghost surnames" (c.f. ghost characters), where "Kanagashira" is not listed as dubious. Some of the ghosts that are on the page are great, though:
   
   
   • 春夏秋冬, meaning "Springsummerautumnwinter", pronounced "Hitotose" ("one year")
   • 谷谷谷谷, pronounced "Tanikabeyatsuya", which is a bunch of different readings for 谷, "valley", mushed together
   • 世阿弥, allegedly pronounced "Seami". "At least say 'Zeami'," complains the exasperated author, before explaining that the "Zeami" in "ZEAMI Motokiyo" was not his actual surname.
3. Mais hélas, Wikipedia says that い is just a shikona, a Sumo name, albeit one from the Edo period. This page agrees. Bugger.

That doesn't rule out the possibility that someone with an old family connection to Sumo is living somewhere under the surname Kanagashira, but even if so it isn't as much fun if the name was invented by someone who knew they were fooling around.

Consolation prize: A few other fun shikona from that Wikipedia article.

Name	Reading	Explanation
九 九之助	Ichijiku Kyūnosuke	"Ichijiku" is a pun on "fig" (ichijiku) and "one-character nine" (ichi-ji ku, i.e. 九). "Kyūnosuke" is just a standard boy's name pattern with "Kyū" ("nine") inserted in the blank.
三ッ△ 鶴吉	Mitsuuroko Tsurukichi	"Mitsuuruko" means "three-scales"; here the △, not usually considered acceptable in names, stands in for "scale" (uruko). "Tsurukichi" is boring; it just means "crane luck" and I assume it is being used for the similar sound.
電気燈 光之介	Denkitō Kōnosuke	"Electriclamp Lightsalot"—note same second-name pattern as "Kyūnosuke". Would be very interested to learn when this name was invented.
文明 開化	Bunmei Kaika	"Civilization and enlightenment", a Meiji-era pro-Westernization slogan.

Check out this shamisen face from Otono WATANNA (Winnifred EATON)'s A Japanese Blossom:

NOGUCHI Yone called A Japanese Blossom "one of the saddest literary creations which ever attempted to pass as a Japanese story", singling out for particular scorn Eaton's bizarre attempts at Japanese-accented English. While Noguchi was no innocent when it came to books about young Japanese girls speaking oddly, I have to agree with him on Blossom; the kids in it sound like they're doing an Allan Sherman bit with a head cold.

How de do! Ver' glad to see you two days. Thanzs you healt' is good. Most honorable welcome at Japan. Pray seated be and egscuse the most unworthy house of my fader.

The full plate, for your reference:

Nanji is a Japanese pronoun (yeah, they totally exist) that means what "thou" does in modern English: "you [+archaic]". If you call someone nanji, you are speaking in the voice of either an ancient religious text, a venerable Chinese poet, or a long-dead Japanese nobleman*.

The na- part is an OJ second-person demonstrative, as seen in the Man'yoshu:

石室戸尓 立在松樹 汝乎見者 昔人乎 相見如之

ihayato ni/ tateru matu no ki/ na wo mireba/ mukasi no hito wo/ ahimiru gotosi

Pine that stands by the mouth of the cave
I look at you; it is like coming face-to-face
with somebody from long ago

(Fun fact: Author Hakutsū Hōshi is talking about the Mio caves in Wakayama.)

And of course it had a -re form like kore, ware, etc:

朝井代尓 来鳴杲鳥 汝谷文 君丹戀八 時不終鳴

asa wide ni/ ki naku kahodori/ nare dani mo/ kimi ni kohure ya/ toki ohezu naku

Kaho-birds that come and cry at the dam at dawn
Can you be in love with them too?
Ceaseless in your cries

Note use of kimi to mean "my lover" in a third-person rather than second-person way. Also note that the kaho in kaho-tori might be onomatopoeic (which might in turn make it the cuckoo).

The -nji comes from muti (that is, nanji was originally namuti), which Bjarke Frellesvig explains as meaning "'esteemed person; honorific suffix in names and titles', cf. mutu- hon. prefix)." Ōno agrees, citing sumemutsu kamuroki as an example. (I think that particular phrase was used to for the emperor's grandfather.) This is the mutu- that survives in modern Japanese as mutsumajii, "harmonious".

Unfortunately there aren't any good examples of namuti in the Man'yoshu—the sound appears a few times, but only in ohonamuti, which was another name for Ōkuninushi and elsewhere appears in enough variant forms like ohonamoti ("possessor of the great name") and ohoanamoti ("possessor of the great hole") to make any direct relationship with namuti seem unlikely.

From Iwanami Bunko's new paperback edition of Yakuchū renju shikaku (訳注聯珠詩格, "A translation with notes of Lianzhu Shige"), KASHIWAGI Jotei (柏木如亭)'s early 19th-century vernacular translation of selections from Lianzhu Shige, an early Yuan anthology of pre-Yuan poetry: a poem by HUANG Tingjian (黄庭堅 a.k.a. 黄山谷) entitled 青奴 (seido in Japanese, also known as "bamboo wife", a kind of body-length woven basket that you sleep with at night to keep cool.)

Original

穠李四絃風払席
昭華三弄月侵床
我無紅袖堪娯夜
正愛青奴一味涼

English translation

Nong Li plays the four-stringed lute, the wind blows away the matting
Zhao Hua plays the flute, the moon seeps into the floor
I have no red-sleeved girls to make the night fun
My true love: the seido, with its unmatchable coolness

Kashiwagi's Japanese translation

Shikimono o ba kaze ga harai, toko e wa tsuki ga sashikomu hodo
Biwa o hiitari fue wo fuitari shita
Jō Ri da no Shō Kwa da no to iu geisha mo atta
Ore wa sonna mekake no togi o shite kureru mono mo nai kara
Chikufujin o daite neru, suzushimi ga icchi kawaii

English translation of Kashiwagi's Japanese translation

There were geishas called Nong Li and Zhong Hua

Who could pluck the biwa and play the flute
Fit to blow away the rugs and let the moon shine on the floor
I haven't got a woman like that to keep me company by night
So I sleep with my bamboo wife—keeping cool's what I love best

The Iwanami edition includes an essay about the history of the original Lianzhu Shige, which can be summarized as follows: It was compiled by CAI Zhengsun [蔡正孫], building on the work of YU Ji [于濟], as a fuck-you to the Yuan Dynasty: all the poets in it are Tang and Song, and Cai made the personal political by listing himself as a Song poet. For a variety of reasons, some better understood than others, the book made it across to Japan and remained popular right up through to the Edo period (Buson was a fan). Kashiwagi's edition was notable for its translation style: clear, everyday language that owed nothing whatsoever to the long-established rules of yomikudashi, in which the absolute bare minimum of particles and word-by-word glosses are applied to yield sentences that conform to the letter if not the spirit of classical Japanese syntax.

Here's another of Kashiwagi's translations, a LI Po work called "Answering someone in the mountains" (答山中人):

問余何意棲碧山
笑而不答心自閑
桃花流水杳然去
別有天地非人間

Dō iu ki de yamaoku ni sumu? to ore ni kiku kara
Nikoniko mono de aisatsu mo senu gurumi, kokoro ga shizen to hima da
Momo no hana ga nagare e chitte, tōku e iku tokoro
Betsu na sekai ga atte, ukiyo to wa chigatta mono sa

"What's the deal with living so deep in the mountains?" they ask me
I beam but don't even answer; my soul is naturally free
Peach blossoms scatter onto the stream; into the distance they go
There is another world, unlike this floating one we know

Like most short poems by Li Po, this one is a popular target for translation into English, too. But note that where the English translators calque "green mountains" (碧山) and "heaven and earth" (天地), Kashiwagi provides true translations: "deep in the mountains" (yamaoku) and "world" (sekai).

(Of course, this isn't an entirely fair comparison, because he wrote these words as furigana to the original kanji, an option English translators generally don't have—more's the pity.)

(Edited for clarity on 20080814)

"Jugemu" is, as Wikipedia puts it, "one of the most famous rakugo in Japan." The setup is simple: a couple can't think of a name for their baby, so the father goes to the local temple and asks the priest to think of an auspicious name guaranteeing his child long life.

"How about 'Jugemu'?" suggests the priest. "It means 'limitless life'."

"Not bad," says the father. "Got any other suggestions?"

"Sure, okay. 'Go-Kō-no-Surikire'? That one's from a story about a heavenly maiden brushing a rock with her garment once every three thousand years. It takes five kō to rub the rock in two (surikire). Five kō adds up to about twenty billion years."

"Hmm, that's okay, but I feel like there has to be something better..."

And so on. Eventually he stops pestering the poor priest and decides to just give his child all of the suggested names. So the kid's name is:

Jugemu Jugemu Go-Kō-no-Surikire Kaijari-suigyo no Suigyō-matsu Unrai-matsu Fūrai-matsu Kū-Neru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yaburakōji no Burakōji Paipo Paipo Paipo no Shūringan Shūringan no Gūrindai Gūrindai no Ponpokopii no Ponpokonā no Chōkyūmei no Chōsuke.

Well, eventually Jugemu etc. grows up, makes some friends, and gets into healthy little-boy fights with them. One day he whacks his pal Kin-chan a good one on the head. Kin-chan, developing a lump, runs off to tattle to Jugemu etc.'s parents.

"Waa! Waa! Jugemu Jugemu Go-Kō-no-Surikire Kaijari-suigyo no Suigyō-matsu Unrai-matsu Fūrai-matsu Kū-Neru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yaburakōji no Burakōji Paipo Paipo Paipo no Shūringan Shūringan no Gūrindai Gūrindai no Ponpokopii no Ponpokonā no Chōkyūmei no Chōsuke hit me and gave me a lump on my head"

"What? Our Jugemu Jugemu Go-Kō-no-Surikire Kaijari-suigyo no Suigyō-matsu Unrai-matsu Fūrai-matsu Kū-Neru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yaburakōji no Burakōji Paipo Paipo Paipo no Shūringan Shūringan no Gūrindai Gūrindai no Ponpokopii no Ponpokonā no Chōkyūmei no Chōsuke hit you and gave you a lump on your head? I'm so sorry! Honey, did you hear that? It seems that Jugemu Jugemu Go-Kō-no-Surikire Kaijari-suigyo no Suigyō-matsu Unrai-matsu Fūrai-matsu Kū-Neru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yaburakōji no Burakōji Paipo Paipo Paipo no Shūringan Shūringan no Gūrindai Gūrindai no Ponpokopii no Ponpokonā no Chōkyūmei no Chōsuke hit Kin-chan here, and gave him a lump on his head!"

"Really? Our Jugemu Jugemu Go-Kō-no-Surikire Kaijari-suigyo no Suigyō-matsu Unrai-matsu Fūrai-matsu Kū-Neru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yaburakōji no Burakōji Paipo Paipo Paipo no Shūringan Shūringan no Gūrindai Gūrindai no Ponpokopii no Ponpokonā no Chōkyūmei no Chōsuke did that? We'd better call Jugemu Jugemu Go-Kō-no-Surikire Kaijari-suigyo no Suigyō-matsu Unrai-matsu Fūrai-matsu Kū-Neru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yaburakōji no Burakōji Paipo Paipo Paipo no Shūringan Shūringan no Gūrindai Gūrindai no Ponpokopii no Ponpokonā no Chōkyūmei no Chōsuke in here and sort this out. Can I see your lump, Kin-chan?"

"It took so long to explain, the lump's already gone down!"

Rimshot. Here's a full version on the story in Japanese.

Being able to recite this name (or at least having kids who can) is a traditional party trick in Japan, and there are plenty of sites that explain what the various bits and pieces mean. But there aren't many in English, so here's your handy guide to the various parts of Jugemu Jugemu Go-Kō-no-Surikire Kaijari-suigyo no Suigyō-matsu Unrai-matsu Fūrai-matsu Kū-Neru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yaburakōji no Burakōji Paipo Paipo Paipo no Shūringan Shūringan no Gūrindai Gūrindai no Ponpokopii no Ponpokonā no Chōkyūmei no Chōsuke's name:

Word	Japanese	Meaning
Jugemu	寿限無	Limitless life
Go-Kō-no-Surikire	五劫の擦り切れ	Length of time it takes to break a rock in two merely by rubbing it gently occasionally (approx. 20 billion years)
Kaijari-suigyo	海砂利水魚	Gravel in the sea, fish in the water (limitless things)
Suigyō-matsu　Unrai-matsu Fūrai-matsu	水行末 雲来末 風来末	Where water goes, where clouds and wind come from (things with neither beginning nor end)
Kū-Neru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro	食う寝る処に住む処	Place to eat and sleep, place to live (vital things for humans)
Yaburakōji no Burakōji	ヤブラコウジのブラコウジ	verbal Riffs on yabukōji (Ardisia japonica), a hardy plant which sprouts leaves in spring, flowers in summer, fruits in the autumn, and goes red to guard against frost in the winter
Paipo	パイポ	Allegedly a kingdom in ancient China
Shūringan	シューリンガン	Long-lived king of Paipo
Gūrindai	グーリンダイ	Long-lived concubine of Shūringan
Ponpokopii	ポンポコピー	Long-lived eldest daughter of Shūringan and Gūrindai
Ponpokonā	ポンポコナー	Long-lived younger sister of Ponpokopii
Chōkyūmei	長久命	Very long life
Chōsuke	長助	Just a regular boy's name, although the chō means "long" (implying "-lived")

The other day I found a copy of the 1910 book Eibun nikki no hanashi (英文日記の話, "The English Diary"), which was written to help Japanese folks keep diaries in English as practice using the language. ("That the writing of the diary must be simple is the usual rule, but [...] the use of difficult 'Johnsonian words' in certain situations is not objectionable.")

Of course the main attraction is the selection of sample diary entries. Many different styles are explored. First up comes the straightforward and picturesque:

HARUO'S DIARY

Sunday, Jan. 1. Fine.

New Year's Day dawns bright and brilliant. Every house is trimmed with branches of pine and bamboo, and flags are flying everywhere. The scene of the streets is gay and peaceful. After taking "Zonimochi" I said "Omedeto" to parents and then went to school to attend the New Year's Ceremony. The Imperial Rescript was read and then the principal made a speech for the occasion, but it was so tedious that I could not help yawning. Spent the whole afternoon in flying kites with friends. Brother-in-law came and gave me two yen as a present. That made my purse very heavy.

Next we meet the stoic Umeo, who translates the -kun used for classmates as "Mr."

UMEO'S DIARY

Wednesday, Feb. 8. Cloudy.

Got up at 5. It was a cold morning and the water in the buckets was found frozen. It was hard for us to take a cold bath as usual. Had words with Mr. Fujino about the Japanese translation in the English class. Though our teacher stood by him yet my opinion seemed right. In the evening reviewed to-day's lesson. Went to bed at 10.

In March, we attend Hinako's psychedelic tea party:

HINAKO'S DIARY

Friday, Mar. 3. Fine.

It being the Girl's Festival Day to-day, I was very busy assisting mamma in cooking "Gochiso" for dolls. Went to Momo-chan's and looked at her dolls. They are all pretty. In the evening invited many friends and gave a great feast. Momo-chan tasted just a spoonful of shirozake and crimsoned to the roots of her hair. "You are like a Kintoki," laughed my mamma heartily. How happy we were! Beautiful dolls! Crimson blankets! Gold lacquered furniture! All were reflected by the brilliantly lighted candles and made us dazzling. I wish the Festival would come more often.

In May, we meet the Godfather:

A BUSINESSMAN'S DIARY

Friday, May 5. Fine.

A fire occurred at Nishiki-cho, Kanda and fifty houses were reduced to ashes. My two rented houses were also burned down. But as the houses were covered by an insurance of ten thousand yen, the net loss I sustained is two thousand yen. Presented each tenant with a sum of money as a present of sympathy.

And then in August, the book blindsides us with incredible tragedy:

TSUKIO'S DIARY

Thursday, Aug. 4. Rained in the evening.

Called at Mr. Kanzaki's in the afternoon and had a pleasant chat with him about English. As we are bosom friends the time sped in our chat without our being aware of it. Startled at the clock striking nine I took leave of him. The sky was pitchdark and rain began to fall. This gloomy aspect suddenly reminded me of my beloved sister, which sent a chill through me. No sooner had I entered the porch than brother rushed out and said, with tears in his eyes, "Brother, sister is at death's door!" Rushed I into sister's bed-room and found the doctor with a syringe in his hand feeling her pulse. I approached her pillow and asked her, "How do you feel?" "I feel like dying!" she faintly said. "Nonsense," I cried, "cheer up!" The injection apparently took effect, and she fell into a slumber. "When I am cured...." she murmured in a dream. At this mother buried her face in her sleeves. As for me it was hard to suppress my tears. Silence reigned in the room. Sometimes she awoke and tried to speak, but her spirits were too low to do so. When she was on the point of breathing her last she opened her eyes wide and said, "Brother! Thank you for your kindness. Mother! I, I........" With these words she left this World of Misery for Heaven. It was 3 a.m. on the 5th. She was seventeen years of age...... For the rest I have no no courage to describe....

I particularly admire that he had the strength of will to note the weather at the beginning of the entry.