I am mostly a fan of Meredith WEATHERBY's translation of Mishima's Shiosai (潮騒, "The Sound of Waves"), but I think his decision to totally ignore the dialect the characters speak was the wrong one. Mishima sets his exquisite Standard against kanji-assisted islandish to striking effect:

「もう恥ずかしくないやろ」
と彼が詰問するようにはげしく問いつめたので、少女はその言葉の怖ろしさも意識せずに、思いもかけない逃げ口上を見出したのである。
「ううん」
「なぜや」
「まんだ汝（んの）は裸になっとらんもの」

But Weatherby renders everything in a fairly neutral English:

"Now you're not ashamed any more, are you?" He asked the question at her as though cross-examining a witness.

Without realizing the enormity of what she was saying, the girl gave an amazing explanation:

"Yes..."

"Why?"

"You—you still haven't taken everything off."

Dealing with dialect is tough, though, and I have no idea what drove this decision for Weatherby, so he gets a pass. But it did make it all the more surprising when he left some dialect in—and in Japanese, no less:

"Immorality?" asked Hiroshi. "What do you mean?"

"Don't you know, Hiroshi? I mean what your brother Shinji did to Miyata's daughter Hatsue—I mean omeko—that's what. And that's what the god is angry about."

"Omeko"—in the original Mishima gives this the ateji "交接", which would normally be pronounced kōsetsu and mean "sexual intercourse". So it's pretty clear to the reader what this means, even if they haven't heard that particular slang before.

Having a dirty mind, I looked it up; turns out it is used all over western Japan (and as thieves' cant in the east by the Taisho period at latest), and that it originally referred to the female genitals rather than any particular use to which they would be put. MAKIMURA Shiyō's Osakan dictionary has this to say:

Derogatory term for the female genitalia. Perhaps from 女子 (meko, woman-child)? In women's language, ososo. [Osakans] never said omanko, bobo, etc. In the Sangetsu Hall of Tōdaiji in Nara, there is a wooden statue of Daikoku known as the "Omeko daikoku". This is because his right hand is forming a kongō-ken, which looks like an me-nigiri ["woman squeeze"], in which the tip of the thumb protrudes from between the index and middle fingers of the fist [representing, again, the vagina].

The more you know!

Persimmons are crazy in season where I live, that is to say the south end of eastern Japan, so I thought I'd share this sagashie (searching-picture) by, I believe, TAKEHISA Yumeji (竹久夢二):

"This is a bad child," sez the caption, "And so, thinking that no-one is around, he is stealing someone else's persimmons. But someone is in fact watching him, as all good children should know."

I am sure there is a paper at least and more likely a thesis in illustration-based moral instruction for pre-war Japanese children. As far as I can tell, it was invariably based on the "someone could be watching" hypothesis rather than the "it's wrong" axiom.

Or perhaps the explanation is too simple: Japan lacks the Judeo-Christian God who is always watching and, in a manger two thousand years ago, always in tears at your wickedness.

(Yes. Yours.)

More navel-gazing at Néojaponisme: Missives on Outlander Japanese.

[W]hat I am arguing for is the goal of fitting in as opposed to blending in. The Platonic ideal of the NHK announcer on beta blockers is not something I aspire to. I want to speak a Japanese free of errors (for some practical definition of "error") but not one free of any remarkable quality whatsoever. When I can get away with it, I use the occasional archaicism in my English. Why not in my Japanese too?

File photo: A foreigner uses keigo

As some commenters towards the end observe, both David and I are white males which means that our shared perspective is not as broad as might be hoped. One of the main themes of our article is a rejection of the "I don't speak Japanese" card that some people use to short-circuit arguments and ignore rules. But of course neither of us can stop playing the "I am not Japanese" or the "I am male" card, both of which affect how we are seen by others. These cards are always at our foreheads even if we forget that we are holding them there.

Japanese-looking and/or female foreigners get dealt into different games with different rules—rules which are, I hear, on balance less punter-friendly than the ones I live with, even if they do permit some strategies that are forbidden to me.

(Jade Oc, if you're reading this, I feel you. Don't give up on 乍, friend.)

I am pleased today to introduce the old Japanese children's game, "Watch your butt" (お尻の用心).

How to play

1. Pull the rear hem of your kimono forward through your legs. Tuck it into the front of your obi.
2. Frolic with some friends—close friends—singing the "Watch your butt" song below.
3. When you see a chance to pull someone's kimono back through their legs, flip it up and expose their behind, do so. Meanwhile, be careful not to be so shamed yourself.

Yeah, that's it.

The "Watch your butt" song

O-shiri no yōjin, koyōjin
Kyō wa nijūhachi-nichi
Ashita wa okame no dango no hi

Watch your butt! Better take care!
It's the twenty-eighth today
Tomorrow's turtle dumpling day

This is the main version recorded in OBARA Akio's Nihon no warabe-uta (日本のわらべうた, "Children's songs of Japan"), although he notes that the details vary from prefecture to prefecture. Perhaps, he muses, each regional version preserves a unique local bottom-related custom.

It seems unlikely that this game began as mere naughtiness... the mysterious specificity of the lyrics and the brazen exposure of the bottoms of others, an act not usually permitted, suggest that it evolved from some old folk custom or ritual.

Here are a few variant lyrics, also courtesy of Obara:

• It's the twenty-eighth today/ Watch your butt, better take care (Late Edo)
• It's the twenty-fifth today/ No butt-flipping allowed! (Kyoto)
• It's the Day of the Ox today/ Got your butt, pardon me (Wakayama)
• It's the fifteenth today/ I wanna see a lot of butts (Shimane)
• Guard house, guard house/ Pull in your butt, guard house (Aomori)

So Leah Dizon just got married (English; Marxy@NJ) to a stylist named Bun. One widely-reported exchange from the press conference:

Asked what made him fall for her, Dizon answered loudly and somewhat cryptically in two English words: "Big peach."

"It is a little bit, sort of, difficult to explain," she said when she was pressed for the meaning of the phrase.

The Japanese press is uniformly reporting this in katakana ("私のビッグ・ピーチ"), usually appending the gloss 桃尻 ("Peach-ass"), God bless 'em.

This takes me back to reading the Tsurezuregusa, which also contains the word 桃尻:

御隨身秦重躬、北面の下野入道信願を、「落馬の相ある人なり、よく／＼つゝしみ給へ」といひけるを、いと眞しからず思ひけるに、信願馬より落ちて死ににけり。道に長じぬる一言、神のごとしと人思へり。さて、「いかなる相ぞ」と人の問ひければ、「きはめて桃尻にして、沛艾の馬を好みしかば、此の相をおほせ侍りき。いつかは申し誤りたる」とぞ云ひける。

When the attendant (zuijin) HADA no Shigemi said to the venerable (nyūdō) SHIMOTSUKE no Shingan of the Imperial Guard, "You have the look of one who would fall from a horse; be very careful," it was taken as nonsense, but then Shingan fell from a horse and died. This superb prediction was thought a very miracle. "What kind of look was it?" one person asked Shigemi. "He had an incredible peach-ass, but he loved spirited horses," came Shigemi's reply. "This was the 'look' I considered. At which point did I err?"

It turns out that momojiri is an old word meaning "bad at horse-riding, unable to sit firmly in the saddle". The metaphor here is not "two shapely rounded halves, like a peach", but rather, "unstable when placed on a flat surface, like a peach". But I'm sure you can imagine how that passage read to me originally.

The word makes another appearance later in the 'Sa:

ある者、子を法師になして、「學問して因果の理をも知り、説經などして世渡るたづきともせよ」といひければ、教のまゝに、説經師にならん爲に、まづ馬に乘り習ひけり。輿・車もたぬ身の、導師に請ぜられん時、馬など迎へにおこせたらんに、桃尻にて落ちなんは、心憂かるべしと思ひけり。

A man made his son enter the priesthood, saying to him, "Study, learn the laws of cause and effect (inga), earn your living by reading sutras and such." The son resolved to do as he was told, and the first step he took towards becoming a priest was learning how to ride a horse. His reasoning was that as a priest with neither palanquin nor carriage, a horse or other animal might be sent to convey him to some function; and that it would be a miserable thing indeed to fall off, peach-assed, while riding.

(Note: This is the beginning of a longer tale with the moral "Don't procrastinate". Kenkō is not actually advocating equestrian training for all novice priests.)

This is an interesting little anecdote from SAKAGUCHI Ango about the pronunciation of ン, moraic /N/.

The setup is this: Sakaguchi writes occasionally for the pseudonymous criticism column in the Miyako Shinbun (since renamed the Tokyo Shimbun). Usually he lets the editor make up a name to publish his work under, but this time he has a great idea: use the pen name ン. That way, he can have all the intelligentsia talking about what ン wrote this morning, and sounding like a bunch of doofuses because ン isn't a proper word. (Sakaguchi was kind of an asshole sometimes.)

So he tries it out on KITAHARA Takeo, talking it up as the perfect way to make fools of their readership.

Kitahara stares at it for a while, then cautiously says:

"This is the character un (ウン), right?"

"Huh?"

"Isn't it just the character un?"

This set Sakaguchi reeling, as if "shot by a pistol". "Who knew that anyone would pronounce 'ン' 'ウン'?!" he thinks. He ends up using the name, but only once, and more out of stubborn pride than anything else.

Friends, I published a pretty detailed piece on the history of the word genki at Néojaponisme earlier this week. It's true that it relies mostly on one paper's worth of research, but matches my experience as a reader perfectly. (I ran across that example in Dōgen myself.)

Word for today: noroshi 狼煙, "signal fire/smoke".

The kanji mean "wolf smoke", but have nothing to do with the Japanese word's etymology; they're borrowed from an old Chinese synonym. The Chinese word did really mean "wolf smoke", apparently, due to the fact that folks sending up a signal fire would mix some wolf dung in the fuel because it was said to make the smoke rise straight up.

The actual etymology of noroshi is surprisingly murky given that it isn't even attested before the 16th century. Most sources seem to agree that the noro- means "field" or "wild[erness]", closely related to the nora- in noraneko (stray cat) and noragi (fieldwork clothes). The -shi is variously attributed to shirushi (symbol), ki (air), or hi (fire).

(It's interesting to note that in Edo dialect they actually didn't distinguish hi from shi in speech—some people still speak this way in Tokyo. But I assume that this isn't directly related to the genesis of this word, since noroshi predates the Edo period itself by a century or so and in any case educated Edo folks still usually wrote the mora hi.)

Go check out my latest Principal Skinner* impression at Néojaponisme: a review of Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt's new (to the US!) book Yokai Attack!

[I]f you were baffled by the part in John Bester’s translation of Yoshiyuki's Dark Room where the narrator casually likens an interlocutor to "a cat that's turned itself into a pretty young woman and been caught in the middle of the night, lapping the oil out of the night lamp," Yokai Attack! is the book for you.

Also recommended to those who enjoy the human emotion codenamed "fun."