I was at an enormous Asian supermarket called Super H today and I saw, among all the shelves of miso, tofu, and kim chee, a new kind of iced coffee from Japan called “Let’s Be Bitter.”  (There’s a companion brand called “Let’s Be Mild.”)  Although I resisted the impulse to buy either variety, I was inspired by the names to dig up some old files of strange and astonishing “Janglish” I collected the last time I was in Japan.   All of the following are real, as hard as some of them may be to believe: 

On a sweatshirt worn by a six- or seven-year old girl:  “He illegal did autopsy on dead body and removed the head.  This was in 1962.”

On the inside lining of a windbreaker:  “It was in the arid hills of a Southern California desert that the nudist colony flourished.  In the clubhouse — perched high above.  The bitter punishment that these great American political symbols took is now making each wince with pain at the slightest wiggle.  Tension people.  Tension people.”

On a package of snack cakes: “We Fujiya would like to give new image to confectionary which is as a dessert, the reason is that the dessert is one of the most important things to keep your life style which is most abundantly, more rich, more happy, more beauty, more tasty, and more funny.   Experiences of new “House,” “Family,” and “domesticity” are memorized by the dessert.  In other words, dessert means, Love itself.  Please leave a tasty affection of Fujiya’s dessert “Farm” “Farm” is just for healthy family.  Please come over and try “Farm.”

A sign above a bathroom in the Mt. Fuji area: “Ravatry.”

And a notice on the front door of a bar in Okayama:  “The nudest club.  Welcome to the freedom new world.  Let’s throw off your clothes.  You’ll be take freedom in our place.  But if you make disagreeableness things you are drived this place.”

I entered that bar with high expectations, but found no “nudest” people (nor wiggling politicians, for that matter.)  As I eventually learned, in some cases the Japanese use English language purely for its decorative effect, with no regard to its meaning.  So the manufacturers of that windbreaker probably weren’t trying to make some kind of political point, nor did they have any intention of “making disagreeableness things.”  

In other cases, as with the “Let’s Be” brand of iced coffee, they’re after an actual meaning, but don’t care if the words don’t quite mesh.  I had a personal experience along these lines a few years ago when I encountered a stock exchange (in Korea, as it happens, not Japan, but I think the approach to using English is similar) that employed as their slogan “Take a Flying Leap into the Korea Stock Exchange.”  When I pointed out to a marketing person at the exchange that the phrase had unsavory connotations, she said, “but we looked up ‘flying’ and ‘leap,’ and both of them were appropriate.”   

I should note that, in pointing out these odd bits of language, no disrespect is intended.  After all, at least the Japanese make the effort to study our language in school.  If Americans were suddenly to start using Japanese or Korean as a decorative element in our products, does anyone doubt that we’d screw it up a whole hell of a lot worse?    

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