無理矢理

むりやり
muri yari

Well, you guys seem to have figured out that the way to keep us posting regularly is by telling us how awesome we are in the comments section... and by visiting regularly. Our site traffic has tripled over the last few months, we've found links to ourselves on websites we use and enjoy, and you've given us great motivation to keep on with our JLPT studies.

And since people have mentioned in the past that some Yo-ji is better than no Yo-ji, today I'm tossing up this ateji one for everyone to check out and enjoy.

I haven't had a whole lot of time lately because I'm working two jobs, and trying to organize a bunch of side projects as well (a flamenco night, a photo contest, and a kid's cooking class) so today I thought I could try to find a 四字熟語 that means "burning the candle at both ends." You know, going overboard and working as hard as you possibly can until you exhaust yourself. Unfortunately it seems that in Japanese, you just call that "being Japanese."

So in lieu of that, we have 無理矢理, which, as I mentioned is actually not a real 四字熟語. It's the ateji for the much more common 無理やり.

Definition:
無理と知りながら強引に物事を行うさま。
Translation:
1. Forcibly.
2. To do the unreasonable.
3. Against one's will.

Used most often to refer to "forcing oneself." "無理やりせんでいい" or the less casual "無理やりしないで下さい" get used to let people off the hook when it comes to things like finishing food or drinks, translating roughly as "You don't have to do the impossible..."

無理やり食べる gets used a lot, but be careful, it doesn't just mean "eating too much," it includes the idea of eating something, or an amount, that you don't want to, 7even style.

It can also be used to talk about overwork, canceling personal plans to do someone else a favor, things like that.

As an added bonus, here's a few idiomatic uses of 無理やり：

無理やり押し込む：To force into, or to wedge into. This is what you would do to a square peg that you had to get into a round hole.

きついT-シャツを無理やり着る：Squeeze yourself into a tiny-t-shirt. You could probably use this with pants too...

ズボンを無理やり脱がせる：To depants someone! (Or to pants someone, which means the same thing, right?)

Japanese Language Trivia of the Day:

Do you know this kanji: 米? I bet you do. It means rice and America. I use it as a joke when I write my last name (米里; I tell them it means AMERICA village, which gets a laugh, but doesn't stop them from calling me　コメザトさん).

I remember learning a long time ago that the reason the kanji for "rice" also just happens to mean "America" is because the Japanese used to write America in kanji, and they would choose the Kanji based on their sounds, not for the meaning.　米　can be read as め so it became a part of 亜米利加. Other non-Japanese countries got similar treatments, 伊太利亜　is Italy, and that too is often shortened, using 伊 by itself to represent the nation.

If you've ever watched an English movie with Chinese subtitles, you'll know that they do the same thing: the characters names are often written in Chinese kanji. No, there is not a Chinese character that means "Tyler Durden."

So what I learned recently is the NAME for using kanji in this fashion:

当て字 or 宛字
あてじ
ateji

The man on the right, Natsume Soseki (pen name), is a famous author, and is also well known for being the man to come up with many, many of these 当て字。And they're not just used for names of foreign countries/ers.

Have you ever seen the kanji for sushi? Here you go: 寿司. I've seen it at tons of shops, on advertisments, on Brett's kaiten platinum card... but I never stopped to wonder why the kanji for sushi would mean "long life" and "government official." The meaning is arbitrary!

The same thing happens to hijiki:

鹿尾菜 or, translated, deer-tail-grass. Yum.

Sometimes, in extremely fortunate situations, the kanji can be chosen for their meanings AND their sounds. In fact, the way I got interested in ateji in the first place was when I asked a teacher if he could write the extremely difficult kanji for りんご. He could not, and since I had made the faux paux of asking him in front of his class, he was obligated to quickly explain this inability away by saying that NO-ONE writes apple in kanji; the kanji are ateji! I thought, man, if that's a legitimate excuse for not knowing kanji, I need to know which ones are ateji right away. And yes, 林檎 as the interwebs confirm, are substitute characters, albeit extremely fortunate ones. Their separate meanings are "forest" and... "apple." What?

Other fortunate examples are 合羽 (かっぱ, kappa) which, I did not know, comes from the Portuguese "capa" meaning "raincoat." The kanji can be thought of as "the meeting of wings: folding wings over yourself to provide shelter." It's a stretch, but, hey. It's cool.

If you're a foreigner living in Japan, and you're lucky enough to not be named Jeff or some other name with sounds that don't occur in Japanese, you probably have been given 当て字 for your name. If not, you should make your own! Take your name as you would write in in katakana, and then search a kanji dictionary looking for Kanji that fit you, phonetically as well as personally. I had some nice calligraphy framed for my new niece, with her name in 当て字：　蛍里「けいり」 - firefly village.

Then there's another type of　当て字：

熟字訓
じゅくじくん
jukujikun

熟字訓 are 当て字 but backwards. They're words spelled with kanji that are chosen for their meaning and NOT their readings. 煙草 means "smoke" and "grass" and SHOULD be read: ケブリクサ or ケムグサ or something like that. Instead, it's read タバコ。

These kinds of words have to be long and established to count as 熟字訓 though. A lot of times, in modern manga or novels, a writer will include 振り仮名 that suggest pronouncing 宿敵 as ライバル (rival), but because this word has it's own Japanese pronunciation and a Japanese definition that already means rival, it doesn't count as 熟字訓. It's just plain old 当て字.

My favorite so far, and the one that convinced me to write this post, is the one that the poor woman who sits next to me at school begged me to unlearn. It appears only in manga, fiction, and is very popular in graffiti. I like to think of it as what you would say to someone you hated before you had to fight them to the death. For your Japanese learning pleasures, I'll leave you with it.

夜露死苦おねがいします。