表現 Break: その場限り...

We've talked about 九州男児 on this site a few times before, but just to refresh your memory, men from the island of 九州 have a well-deserved reputation in Japan for being the epitome of masculinity in good and bad ways. The only concrete details I was ever able to glean about what makes a 九州男児 were these: They are very strong-willed and they make their women walk three steps behind them. Brett elaborated on them some in 亭主関白, but for an outsider, the definition remained elusive. It makes a great conversation topic, though, and just knowing about the existence of 九州男児 is enough to raise a few eyebrows.

So you can imagine how excited I was when I found a book on the topic in my local Kinokuniya! 九州男児の解説書：Manual of Kyusyu Man.

Now I can explain all sorts of aspects of the 九州男児 personality, like: they're quick to say whatever comes into their mind. They have a habit of referring to even people who they've just met as 「アンタ」 which, like 「お前」, is familiar at best, and insulting at worst; this gets them into trouble when they're outside of 九州. There's all sorts of good stuff, even things that apply to me and Brett, since we've had the benefit of being acclimated to Japan in Kyuushuu. 「とんこつ」以外はラーメンと思っていない； If it ain't Tonkotsu*, it ain't ramen.

For the purpose of today's 表現 post, we're going to focus on one that gives us an idiomatic use for an old grammatical friend: 限り.

その場限り
その　ば　かぎり
sono ba kagiri

九州男児の友情は「その場限り」と心得るべし。
You should understand that a Kyushuu man's friendship, while generous, can be fleeting.

That's an 意訳 that's informed by reading the rest of the section, but the idea of その場限り is clear: confined to a certain place, time, or situation.

Nagasaki, with it's rich history as Japan's 玄関口 and Fukuoka's busy Hakata, brought a lot of different kinds of people into Kyushuu. The folks there were exposed to a lot of commercial traffic, which meant a lot of fleeting relationships. It's not at all uncommon for people to meet, 意気投合して, have a great time, and have that be the end of it. その場限りの友情.

You can use this expression for pretty much anything that is contained or limited in a similar way. Check some examples below.

その場限りつもりだったけど：I didn't intend for it to keep going, but...

その場限りの嘘をつく：Lying, but only in those circumstances.

その場限りの付き合い、その場限りの関係、その場限りの愛情, all kinds of great usages.

See when and how you can use it. And hey, even if you're not in Japan or in Kyushuu, keep the 九州男児 in mind, in case you ever meet anyone from here. I promise you, the conversation will be well worth it.

* とんこつラーメン (tonkotsu ramen), originally from Hakata, I think, is made with a milky pork-bone broth that smells god awful and tastes like heaven. As the book explains, it's not that people from Kyushuu don't like soy-sauce based or other ramen broths, it's just that we don't consider them to be ramen. If you say ramen, we think tonkotsu.

Book Review: 水木しげるの妖怪事典

As promised yesterday, I'm back with more info about the cool new book I got!

I know I've mentioned it before, but I study in waves. When I'm in the mood to study, I burn through Kanji like nobody's business. When I'm not in the mood to study though, I pretty much just lay on my tatami for a month and a half... like nobody's business.

So one of the biggest challenges for me is finding things to help me study that don't feel like studying.

From what I understand, the reading portions of the 2kyuu JLPT can get pretty brutal, so I've gotten in the habit of picking up books in Japanese that look like the kind of stuff I'd be interested in anyway. I know a lot of people who use manga to practice like this. I recommend doing that too, although I personally find myself more likely to skip words I don't know if I can tell what's going on because of the pictures.

This book, though, is perfect for me. Only one picture per page with a nice block of accompanying text explanation, it catalogs the demons and ghosts of Japan without coming off too encyclopedia-esque. The writer, Mizuki Shigeru, is known for being the creator of the popular manga and anime ゲゲゲの鬼太郎 (GeGeGe no Kitarou), but is also considered THE leading expert/master of the 妖怪 (youkai: spirits, ghosts, etc) world. Try buying a book about 妖怪 that's NOT written by him. Seriously, try it. Cause I did. It was hard.

Well-researched and incredibly detailed (down to the 川獺's likely responses to a variety of questions), the book is even more valuable for its application as a study tool. Instead of taking the form of a usual encyclopedia, with formulaic entries that would yield the same pattern of words and phrases ad infinitum, Mizuki writes most of the pages I've gotten to so far in a kind of autobiographical style, relating his earliest encounters with the stories of these creatures, how and where he came across them, and how and where he believed he was likely to actually encounter them. While I expected a kind of specialized encyclopedic jargon that would be good practice for reading... other encyclopedias, I got a book that creates a short, but interesting, narrative for each creature profile with broader vocabulary that I can actually use and apply.

I'll note some of the examples of sections that you can find in his book below:

• 猫の神通力：The magical powers of cats! Hear about how all kinds of nekos, believed to possess abilities and knowledge beyond humans, have used their powers in days past: causing a small-town shrine to hover above the ground to bring back it's parishioners and save it from bankruptcy. (起死回生?)


• かに坊主:The Buddhist monk crab: A traveling monk stays the night in the abandoned Crab Temple of Yamanashi-ken. He's bothered by a strange figure in a monk's visage during the night, but finding nothing suspicious about this, he tells the figure to leave him alone and resumes his sleep. In the morning, when he learns of the mysterious disappearance of the temple's former inhabitants all in one night, he suggests draining the pond behind the temple building. When they do so, they discover not only the skeletons of the missing monks, but a gigantic evil looking crab!

In addition to these anecdotes, there's tons about mermaids, giants, oni, mysterious apparitions, and more detail on the varieties and habits of かっぱ than you EVER thought possible.

This book is one in a series, so if you're interested in 妖怪 of China, or 妖怪 of the world, Mizuki's got your back.

Further recommendations for those of you who like 妖怪 too:

• About 水木しげる.
• ゲゲゲの鬼太郎.
• This movie: 妖怪大戦争by Miike Takashi, inspired by and featuring a cameo by 水木しげる.

人面獣心

じんめん じゅうしん
jinmen juushin

Let's pose a picture challenge for those of you reading at home. Before you scroll down to read the definition below, take a good long look at today's kanji: 人面獣心. Now try to guess which one of these pictures best suits today's yoji:


Your options are Beast, from the TV series Beauty and the Beast, Adolf Hitler, and the best non-erotic centaur I could find on Google images. I'm sure it's someone's avatar or something.

If you picked Adolf Hitler, you are correct! While Beast is a man with an animal exterior, and the centaur is a hodge-podge of animal, man, and otaku fantasy, Adolf Hitler is the best accompaniment for these kanji: the surface is that of a human being, but the heart is that of a beast.

Definition:
人の顔をしていながら心は獣同然であること。人情のない無慈悲な者のこと。
Translation:
1. A beast in human form
2. One who is mercilessly cruel
3. Inhumanly evil.

This is used to describe people who are capable of inhuman acts, so as you can imagine, it gets applied to shocking crimes that make headline news, and to the particularly nasty despots and dictators of history. If you'd like to see a particularly interesting mixture of results and Japanese perspectives, try doing a google search for 人面獣心 and 南京事件 (The Rape of Nanking).

I do have to admit though, that I got excited about this yoji because of the idea of it in its literal form. As I'm a bit prone to geeking out over magic and myth and demons and such myself, I like the idea of a beast that takes human form, like a werewolf but backwards. A wereman, I guess. But one animal that I would never immediately associate with 人面獣心 is the otter.

*Random Trivia Warning*

In Ishikawa-ken however, there are old, old stories about the 川獺 (かわうそ；kawauso: otter), who was often blamed when local fishermen had a bad run. It was thought though, that in order to get the fish and to perpetrate other shenanigans on the townsfolk as well, the otter would take on the guise of a small child or an old man, donning clothes and speaking in a human-like voice. It never managed to speak any intelligible Japanese words, but it got close, responding to questions of 「誰だ」 with 「オラヤ」 which might mean something in otter speak...

Forgive the digression, but I got this cool new book about Japanese ghosts and stuff. Will post more on it later in the week.

Check the sentence below for yoji usage!

例文：小さい子8人を殺した親父は最初に人面獣心の犯人に見えたけど、結局あの殺された8人は現実に子供じゃなくて、魚を奪おうとしている川獺8匹だった。
That old man who killed those 8 little kids seemed like an inhuman criminal at first, but in the end, it turned out that those 8 "kids" were just otters, trying to steal the fish!

Book Review: KY式日本語

I'm always looking for ways to make my Japanese studies more fun, and therefore easy to remember. My latest endeavor is trying to read The Spiderwick Chronicles entirely in Japanese. Since it's probably the kind of book older elementary school students are reading, so far I've been doing okay.

When I went to the bookstore to pick up the first volume, I came across another interesting looking book.
This one:
Forgive the blatant borrowing of the picture from Amazon.jp, but it's a direct link to the page too, so click away.

Most of you have heard the term KY. It's a 略語,　an abbreviation or acronym, and it stands for 空気読めない、 meaning someone who's socially awkward (literally: they can't read the air). I first heard this a while ago, and while I thought it sounded like the sort of silly thing a 笑い芸の人 would think up as a gimmick, it did help me learn a new phrase. I started to hear more from my students. PK was パンツ食い込んでいる, used to describe someone chubby (or someone who just happens to be wearing too tight underwear, the elastic "eating into" their waist). JK was 女子高生, which made JK nanpa (the act of trying to pick up high school girls), a very dangerous phrase for a teacher to repeat, even when he's just trying to ascertain the meaning. Whoops.

While I have yet to power through the full introduction, I get the sense that this book supports the inclusion of these kinds of 略語, a number of which have made it into the new edition of Japanese dictionaries this year. The bulk of it is made up of hundreds of other abbreviations, some in use now, some that it either suggests or imagines might be popularly used in the future.

• FK abbreviates the already abbrieviated ファンデコイ, which means your ファンデ　(foundation, as in make-up) is 濃い (too strong, as in flavors, smells, or make-up applications).
• HT means 話ついて行けない. Someone who can't follow a conversation.
• And the RIDICULOUS "I"T means 'I'す食べたい。　アイス食べたい。 Gurrrrooooan.

I recommend it. I recommend carrying it around and showing it to your Japanese friends. It will produce some GREAT conversations about Japanese phrases, a lot of laughing, and a lot of head shaking followed by "日本人はそのこと言わない。" And it'll put a lot of new things in your head, which is really what it's all about.