Jokes That Japanese People Might Not Get:

With all of the effort you put into reading and trying to use our 四字熟語, imaginary readership, you might find yourself tempted to try and make jokes using them, or out of them. My advice is this: Don't.

Now that I'm back in Japan but not yet regularly employed, one of the things that I've been doing to make ends meet is working at a local bakery. I've actually been able to use a number of yo-jis in the course of conversation there:

切磋琢磨: (re: learning Japanese so I can shove it in Brett's face)
孤軍奮闘: (re: the boss's joke that I would have to come in to work tomorrow, even though the rest of the company has a day off)
画竜点睛: (re: the chocolate cream breads that someone (me) tried to put out for display before the chocolate cream was in them)

But today, when we were making these cow face cream pastries (モウモウクリーム), and I noticed that the chocolate ear spot had fallen off of one, the head bakery dude (パン長?) said 「いいよ。色々な牛がいるから、」and I replied 「そうですね。十牛十色,」　I may have taken things too far.

FAIL.

If you want to joke with your 四字熟語, there are a couple of things you want to make sure of first.

One is that the target of the joke knows you well enough to figure out that you are in fact, making a joke, and not just retarded. I've mentioned before the frustration of the non-native speaker in Japan. If you say something that doesn't match up to their imagined responses, Japanese people around you are more likely to assume that you made a mistake than to try to figure out if what you said has another meaning.

The second thing is that your yoji-juku-joke is an established one. Your best bet is to go with one of the common jokes that we've mentioned before in the comments, but would be good to include in a real post.

There's 焼肉定食, infamous for being the answer most Japanese students provide when given the following problem: Complete this 四字熟語：＿肉＿食.

And then there's 鹿素麺, which is a mangling of 四面楚歌.

Do you know of any other humor-fied yoji out there?

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！

Fun with yojis

I came across something today that's all kinds of fun and even somewhat relevant to this blog!

Check it out:
http://usokomaker.com/yoji/

Essentially, you put your name (or, I guess, anything you like...) into the little box and it creates a "yoji jukugo" that expresses your essence. I use the quotes because they aren't really legitimate yoji-jukugo, more like niji-jukugo that are put together in funny ways.

Post your funnier ones in the comments! I'll start with what I got when I tried putting the katakana spelling of my name:

http://usokomaker.com/yoji/?a=Maker&oo=%A5%CB%A5%E9%A5%F4