意志堅固

いしけんご
ishikengo

My apologies to all of you for the long delay between posts(except for you, Sash the Red. I'm the prettiest thing on this website!). Now that school is back in session and I am looking for a job for the summer, finding time to write yo-ji's is getting more and more difficult. Hopefully things will calm down a little bit, and Jeff will get his internet back, so he can start carrying us again.

Now you see, that last sentence is an example of the EXACT OPPOSITE of what today's yo-ji is. If I were a better person, I would have said, ok, I'm going to keep to a schedule of x posts/week, no matter what! And then I would keep to it. That's the essence of 意志堅固 as I see it.

意 should be familiar to you from, if nothing else, the word 意味　(imi), which means... meaning or definition. 意 here, though, rather means desire, especially when added to 志, which means ambition. Fun fact: 志 is read in kun-yomi as kokorozashi. Break that into its components and you get 心 and 指す（さす）. Note that this is the same sort of construction as you see in the word 目指す, which means to aim for something as your goal. The two words are similar, although I would say that 志 is more serious. Anyway, put them together and you get 意志, which means "will or desire."

Both 堅 and 固 can be read in kun-yomi as kata(i). That's because, yes, they both mean "hard." The former has a connotation of "reliable;"　the latter means more along the lines of "stiff." That really does only hold to a point, though. Here, however, we don't have to worry about it, because this word contains both of them, although not their cousin 硬. One of these days I swear I will write out all of the differences....

Which brings us to our:

Definition
物事をなすに当たってのこころざしが、しっかりとしていること.

Translation
1) Strong-willed
2) With a solid sense of purpose

and....

例文：彼は勉強に関しては意志堅固で、その志が彼の真面目さで伝わるが、ブログのほうはもう少ししっかりしていただきたい。
He's got a good sense of purpose when it comes to studying, and you can see that in his seriousness, but I wish he'd take the blog a little more seriously.

Here I am, studying hard!

暴飲暴食 ・ 鯨飲馬食

ぼういんぼうしょく　・　げいいんばしょく
bouinboushoku ・ geiinbashoku

It's been a long time since I did a yoji and though I actually have a few stored away for the future (Read: Friday, if things go swimmingly), I was at school and didn't have by little stash at my fingertips. So I do what any good yoji-editor does and started groping blindly for a topic by hassling Tina, our resident CIR, ie the person who gets the same salary for doing nothing. She popped out a few that the Yoji has, to my joy, already covered...but also the second of the little gems above. The first one I knew from a long time ago, a yoji that would go on to inspire our third or fourth Ichiban Group t-shirts. Needless to say, these yoji have a special place in my heart, and are even better since they contribute the trend of looking for idioms that apply to the editors.

鯨飲馬食
Definition:
酒を飲む勢いは鯨が海水を吸い込むようであり、物を食べるさまは馬が草をはむようであるという意。
Translation:
1. Drink like a whale, eat like a horse.
















暴飲暴食
Definition:
度を超して大量に飲んだり食べたりすること。
Translation:
1. Excessive eating and drinking
2. Debauching
Make sure to click on the picture for the full-sized version: those shirts are important to the theme of this post.

This is a particularly good post with both Jeff's birthday and Nirav's one year "I'm leaving Japan" anniversary coming up. As with all the great things, Jeff and Nirav's influence on my life here is only understood in their absence. I remember 暴飲暴食ing and rampant hijinks. 応援団, beech parties, a Japanese superbowl as well as a Fourth of July, and a trip to the Asahi beer factory that was meant to be the first stop of the entire Japanese brewery circuit. What happened that made us rethink the other breweries? 鯨飲馬食.

Ex. 　このごろ僕は何事もほどほどに生活してる。でもそれよりもニラブとジェフと一緒に暴飲暴食すること良かったものだ。早く日本に戻ってお前ら！

Japanese Language Trivia of the Day:

As I like to work excuses for not posting into the sporadic posts I do make, today's trivia is very much in the spirit of Nirav: it's all about drinking.

All of my 送別会s are taking their toll, and when you add to that all the favorite restaurants and bars I just HAVE to hit one last time (before I leave for three months), I've been drinking almost EVERY night.

And that's how I picked up these two phrases.

無理強い
むりじい
murijii

Peer pressure; arm-twisting; compulsion; insistence; extortion.

迎え酒
むかえざけ
mukaezake

Hair of the dog.

無理強い is kind of the opposite of an extremely common phrase that you'll hear Japanese people say a lot, to be polite, "無理しないでください." Since 無理　means "the impossible," or "the unreasonable," 無理しないで is "Don't try to do more than you can, or more than is comfortable for you." People will say this to each other at meals ("Don't feel like you need to eat EVERYTHING,") or at work, ("Don't overwork yourself"). It's a really useful phrase to know.

無理強い is something that you do not want to be on the opposite end of. It's when people who don't have the tact to say 無理しないでください, insist that you join in the fun, whether it be drinking, karaoke-ing, or smoking marijuana which, to be fair, IS what all the cool kids are doing. As you'll notice, it can have harder meanings (extortion?), but if you use it in the right context, like being hung over, drunk, or a few kilos overweight　無理強いされた, will translate as "I was pressured into it."

迎え酒, on the other hand, is just plain old "hair of the dog." For those of you who aren't native English speakers, or who don't know this expression, "Hair of the dog" is alcohol that you drink when you are hungover. Drinking a beer the morning after drinking ten beers, is supposed to make you feel better. 迎える is to greet, meet, or welcome, so 迎え酒 is pretty easy to understand. It's the sake that comes to pick you up.

Why "Hair of the dog?" Brett looked this one up, and found out that it comes from an old expression/superstition: "The hair of the dog that bit you," was held to help heal dog bites. If you were bitten by a dog, if you could retrieve some of that dog's hair, and put it in the wound, not only would you heal faster, but it was also supposed to prevent infection or disease, like rabies.

I personally prefer this method of dealing with dog bites.

Japanese Language Trivia of the Day: 酒

Or, the post that only Nirav could bring you.

As many of you may already be aware, I'm visiting Japan at the moment. One of my favorite things about Japan, and probably what I was looking forward to the most before coming, is the alcohol. At first glance, especially to American sensibilities, that seems like an odd, if not downright alcoholic, thing to say. It's true that, when I'm in Japan, I have a tendency to possibly, sometimes, depending on how you look at it have an eency-weency bit too much to drink. However, when I say that alcohol is one of my favorite things about Japan, I don't necessarily mean the availability of it, the amount of it, or even the types of it available (don't get me wrong, though - I highly appreciate all of those things, too). What I mean is that I enjoy the way that alcohol is entwined with the culture here, how drinking and all of the other social customs play off of each other in some way or another. As one might expect, alcohol is also highly linked to Japanese language, so today's trivia is a list of お酒 related terms and phrases that I enjoy. Of course, there are far too many of them for this to be an exhaustive list, so I'll have to continue it some other time.

酒に飲まれる
さけ　に　のまれる
sake ni nomareru
This neat turn of phrase literally means "to be drunk by your sake," or, in other words, to have far too much to drink and end up doing something stupid or meeting some otherwise unpleasant fate. It is often used by itself, but is also present in the commonly voiced admonition:

酒を飲んでも飲まれるな
さけ　を　のんでも　のまれるな
sake wo nondemo nomareruna
When you get drunk, make sure the sake doesn't drink you!


酒は百薬の長
さけは　ひゃくやく　の　ちょう
sake ha hyakuyaku no chou
Sake is the best medicine. (It sure makes me feel better!)

酒は百害の長
さけ　は　ひゃくがい　の　ちょう
Sake ha hyakugai no chou
Sake is the worst of all poisons.

自棄酒
やけざけ
yakezake
Most commonly, you only see the "sake" part of this one written in kanji. It literally means "the alcohol of throwing oneself away," and might be put into English as "drowning one's sorrows."

利き酒
ききざけ
Kikizake
Sake-(or wine-) tasting or pairing
Often times, restaurants will have someone who is a 利き酒師 (ききざけし kikizakeshi), or essentially a sommelier specifically for sake.