I'm rewatching Shingu. There are a lot of unusual people in this series, but two stand out in one particular way as being the most unusual.

It's a subtle thing that I noticed a long time ago, but in anime girls and women virtually always have lighter skin than boys and men. Apparently light skin on a woman is considered an element of beauty, or so I've been told. I've heard that skin lightening creams are a common costmetic.

So getting back to Shingu, the two most unusual characters are Weinnul and Isozaki. Weinnul is male, but he's so fair he's nearly albino. His skin is lighter than that of any of the female characters. Isozaki, the PE teacher at the school, has distinctly dark skin by comparison to the majority of the male characters.

They're both foreigners, though. (Ahem)

On a different note, I recently started noticing how many wonderful words Japanese has that are three syllables which can be used alone as complete sentences. ("Three syllables" to the ear of a gaijin, of course; in terms of overt cadence they vary quite a lot.) So I started making a list:

tashkani -- you have a point / naturally / of course
sasuga **
yappari -- as I thought
shou ga nai -- it can't be helped (resignation) (short for shikatta ga nai)
mattaku -- for crying out loud (frustration)
yokkatta -- thank goodness (gratitude for good outcome)
shimatta -- darn (annoyance)
mochiron -- of course (confirmation)
wakatta -- I understand
yameno -- knock it off (imperative form of yameninaru "to be discontinued")
bakana -- that can't be right! (disbelief)
urasai! -- shut up!
masaka! -- of course not
maitta na -- you got me!
shikari -- get it together!
ganbatte -- Go for it! You can do it! (imperative of ganbaru, to persist)
abunai -- watch out!

What got me thinking about this was sasuga. It's a wonderful word, a magnificent word, and one which is a bitch to translate into English. In Card Captor Sakura when someone said "sasuga Sakura-san" they'd translate it as "Nothing less from Sakura". More commonly translators say something like "just what we'd expect from..."

It's such a wonderful word; it's interesting that you have to use a pretty complex phrase in English for it.

Yappari is a closely related concept, in some uses, but there's a difference. When used in those kinds of contexts the main difference is that sasuga means someone is living up to expectations, whereas yappari usually means someone is living down to expectations.

UPDATE: Another one is so da ne which often translates really well as "ain't that the truth."

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 07:28 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 445 words, total size 3 kb.

1 I love finding neat words like that in different languages. My favorite is german- 'Tatsächlich' (taat-ZECH-lish) which loosely translates to 'Well whaddaya know?' or 'Why, so it is!'.
I use it all the time.

Posted by: Gothmog at December 05, 2007 01:27 PM (ANvHH)

2 Scriptwriters in Shingu in particular like "atari", which means "correct" when stands alone. I heard it at least twice.

It's too bad that "omigoto" is 4 syllables, eh?

BTW, "yameno", I suspect, was misheard. It should be "yamete" or "yamero". The "yameni naru" is honorific. The normal word is "yameru". Everything is "~ni naru" with your social superiors, they can't fart without naru.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at December 05, 2007 06:14 PM (cFJHG)

3 Ah, yes, the translation nighmare that is "sasuga."  I first ran into it twenty years ago on my very first job, "The Legend of Kamui," and it was a wakeup call that manga translation was sometimes going to require thinking until beads of blood popped out on my forehead.

Posted by: Toren at December 05, 2007 07:34 PM (lgKMF)

Hide Comments | Add Comment