Fun With Engrish, Part 2 - by Philip

In my last post, I promised to tell you some of the more entertaining language mistakes that I made while living in Japan. But in the interest of humiliating others first, let me begin by telling you about a few of the fun Engrish mistakes that I saw or heard instead. The fun started on my first night in the country. I went straight from the airport to a hotel in Tokyo where there was a sign above the bed that said, “Please feel free to take advantage of the chambermaid.” In my defense, let me just say that if they didn’t really want me to take them up on the offer, they shouldn’t have posted the sign – especially not right over the bed.



It didn’t slow down from there. On my first day at the junior high school where I would be working, I introduced myself to all of the other instructors in the teachers’ room and told them that my family included a sister, a younger brother and a twin brother. In response, the vice-principal said, “Oh, you are a penis.” Surely I had misunderstood him, so I asked him to say it again. He repeated, “You are a penis.” I turned to the young woman next to me, who was also teaching English there, and asked what the vice-principal was trying to say. She said, “Yes, you are a penis.” Now I was really confused, so I pulled out my pocket dictionary and asked her to show me which word they were saying. Thankfully, she showed me the word, “peanut,” which is one way in Japanese to say “twins” because they look as similar as two peanuts in a shell. Thus ended five of the most uncomfortable minutes of my life.



I spent every Friday afternoon in a board of education office with 12 other teachers, so in order to prepare for my arrival, they bought an English-Japanese electronic dictionary for every teacher in the office except for me. The point was to make sure that each of them could communicate with me so that I would feel welcome. I didn’t want to seem rude so I never did mention to them that it might have been a better idea to buy just one dictionary and give it to me.



Despite this fun little curiosity, I have to say that the head of that office, Mr. Furuya, was the greatest boss in the world. It quickly became apparent that he spent the better part of every Friday morning trying to think of something to say to me in English. When I would arrive, the office lady would offer me some tea and then Mr. Furuya would saunter over with his yellow legal pad covered in things that he had written in English and then crossed out. Somewhere on the page was one circled phrase that he would say to me. On my first day there, he came to my desk and said, “To have the tongue of a cat.” I would find out later that this is one way of asking if I was okay drinking hot things, like the tea that they brought me every time I arrived. A few weeks later, Mr. Furuya greeted me by saying, “To remove the astringency.” These are the little things that I miss about Japan.



T-shirts were always a good source of humor as well. One of my favorites said, “Chuckie’s true story of the fire sale.” How does a person even come up with something like that? But my favorite one simply said, “Murderer.” I wonder if the local police began all homicide investigations by questioning him. CDs sometimes had good Engrish as well, including the Frank Sinatra CD I bought that featured the song, “Fry Me To The Moon.” Thankfully, the fun didn’t end when I returned to America. I saw a great t-shirt for sale right here in San Francisco that said in Japanese, “I am a stupid American.” Touché, Japan.



But I promised you some mistakes that I and other ex-pats made in Japanese, so here you go. I was eating at a restaurant in Japan with an American visitor who insisted on doing all of the talking herself even though she didn’t speak a word of Japanese and I was up to at least a 4-year-old’s level by then. She wanted more ice in her drink, so she held up her glass to a terrified waitress and made the noise that she thought ice makes when it falls into a glass: “Chinko, chinko.” That’s the word for, “penis,” which, one assumes, is not what she wanted in her glass. Why do so many of these stories involve the word, “penis?” She later got up to use the bathroom in the restaurant and walked in on a woman in the stall. She wanted to apologize, so she yelled out the only Japanese word that she knew, which was, "Irrashaimase!" She knew this word because all of the workers in the restaurant were yelling it each time someone came in the door. It means, "Welcome."



My personal favorite language mangling happened when my principal asked me to give a speech to all of the students about racism. I hadn’t learned any Japanese yet (other than how to ask for more beer and the location of a bathroom), but I wanted to throw in one Japanese phrase to impress everyone. So I concluded my moving speech about the evils of racism by saying in Japanese, “I am not a white person or a black person. I am a carrot. We are all carrots.” I was trying to say “human being,” which is extremely close to the word for “carrot.” That explained all the laughter. Years later, my fellow teachers would come up to me and say, “Hey, Dyer-sensei, remember when you called us all carrots?” I always resisted the temptation to say, “Yes, but at least I didn’t call you a penis.”