Reagan's Heretofore Unknown Influence on the Youth of Ikebukuro
It's a long-standing tradition as a foreigner in Japan to laugh at some of the English one finds on t-shirts here. This is blatantly unfair, as anyone who lived through the entire "let's put Chinese characters on t-shirtｓ" fad in the UK should know. After all, while the middle-aged housewife wearing a HUSTLER t-shirt the other day may not have known what she was advertising, they probably at least thought it was talking about cowboys: frequently folks wearing, or worse tattooing, kanji on themselves didn't usually what they were actually saying. Then again, some of the shirts are quite funny, so I'll just hope that to balance my karma, some Japanese guy is laughing at some naff calligraphed t-shirt somewhere. [1]
Occasionally you see classics, mostly centering around sex in some way, shape, or form. (I've been told of a young girl with the t-shirt 1-800-FISTF---, and Dave Barry wrote about t-shirts from a band named King F----- Chicken, neither of which story I can confirm, but it wouldn't surprise me.) Rarely do you see one venturing into politics, however.
That changed today outside Ikebukuro's Red Wagon American Vintage Clothing Store. Hanging out front, in black typeset letters on a white shirt, was:
TAXES ARE EGREGIOUSLY HIGH!
HOWEVER YOU LOOK AT IT, TAXES SUCK.
For a moment I considered buying it, and then realized that on me, it simply wouldn't be funny.
[1]: My personal favorite was one of the spice girls, who got the characters for what she claimed was 'girl power' inked on her arm. Which was true, but I wondered if she knew that the characters she used for 'girl power' (女力) were roughly similar to those for 'horsepower' (馬力) or 'water power' (水力).
Comments
i've seen the energy glyph as a tattoo before.
vtofit is one of the few kanji i recognize, because i think, oh there's the plow symbol. as a= ox and b = yoke, the way i learned for a gaigin to learn a little japanese is to think of them as stylized kid's stick figures. sun, house, tree, plow, and so forth. of course there are nuances, and it is funny if the glyph mean energy/power in its most mundane form.
i liked the crow post.
i am reading and commenting at blogs in a desperate attempt to avoid work, not because i have much to say.
Posted by: arbitraryaardvark | June 17, 2004 05:32 PM
check out www.engrish.com. Some of this stuff is out of control.
njegvPosted by: kat | July 27, 2004 02:27 AM