What's the deal with people getting kanji tattoos? It certainly has to be one of the sillier trends in our culture. I think it's a rather safe bet that most of the people getting inked with Chinese or Japanese characters are doing so with very little knowledge of the language, or even the culture it comes out of. It's certainly a big risk to take, getting a permanent tattoo that you can't even decipher.
I've heard that Britney Spears got a Kanji tattoo on her back that translates to "stupid girl," or something like that. She apparently wanted it to mean "mysterious." I don't really have the desire to check out whether this story is true or not, but I did stumble across this blog today, which has great photos of real people with kanji/hanzi tattoos that are either complete gibberish, or extraordinarily embarassing. My favorite was the poor, yet deserving bastard with the "crazy diarrhea" tattoo.
The intercultural craziness goes both ways, though. One of my favourite websites is Engrish.com, which is chock full of photos of the ways English gets butchered in and on Japanese pop culture artifacts. Sometimes the mangled English is sublimely poetic, like this t-shirt, which bears the caption:
Let's eat breakfast
firmly
If breakfast is said
It is bread
I am bread
Well eat
"I am bread"? Sounds like eucharistic theology to me. The best picture on the site has to be this toy robot, named "God*Jesus." I haven't laughed that hard in days.
I've heard that Britney Spears got a Kanji tattoo on her back that translates to "stupid girl," or something like that. She apparently wanted it to mean "mysterious." I don't really have the desire to check out whether this story is true or not, but I did stumble across this blog today, which has great photos of real people with kanji/hanzi tattoos that are either complete gibberish, or extraordinarily embarassing. My favorite was the poor, yet deserving bastard with the "crazy diarrhea" tattoo.
The intercultural craziness goes both ways, though. One of my favourite websites is Engrish.com, which is chock full of photos of the ways English gets butchered in and on Japanese pop culture artifacts. Sometimes the mangled English is sublimely poetic, like this t-shirt, which bears the caption:
Let's eat breakfast
firmly
If breakfast is said
It is bread
I am bread
Well eat
"I am bread"? Sounds like eucharistic theology to me. The best picture on the site has to be this toy robot, named "God*Jesus." I haven't laughed that hard in days.
My Japanese prof often laughs when people ask her to write the Kanji for a certain thing - she always warns them to be careful because there are sometimes several different readings/meanings ascribed to a single character. She is usually pretty decent with English grammatically, though spelling trips her up once in a while. Even she makes fun of the Japanese marketing ploys and their attempts at "hipness" - she showed us some commercials during class for beer and cough syrup, to illustrate Western influence on Japan's culture. On the other hand, she thinks that some things are made "funny" intentionally to target American kitsch-seekers, which is something to think about next time you see an error on an East Asian take-out menu, perhaps it's a savvy technique to assign colloquial charm to the business, and therefore charm your pockets as well...
My favorite label though is BlackBlack caffeine gum "Hi-technical excellent taste and flavor" .
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