Читать книгу Using Japanese Slang - Anne Kasschau - Страница 6

This is a book born of frustration. As a long-time student of the Japanese language and a long-time resident of Japan, I have been constantly frustrated by the reticence of my Japanese friends and teachers to answer my questions about slang and underground Japanese, especially as they pertain to matters sexual. This is in pointed contrast to the burgeoning number of books on sale in Japan about colloquial and even vulgar English.

Probably most of you reading this book have had the same experience. Questions such as "How do you say fuck in Japanese?" "What's the word for penis?" or "How do you tell someone he's an asshole?" are invariably met with an embarrassed smile and the immediate response that the Japanese don't have words for these sorts of things. This reflects the honne and tatemae nature of Japanese society, in which reality (honne) is almost always subordinated to appearances (tatemae). And, as the more than 200 pages that follow will amply attest, this assertion simply isn't accurate.

The number of foreigners living in Japan continues to grow, and interest in the Japanese language is strong all over the world. But even those who have lived in Japan for decades have no idea how to make love in Japanese, how to express their displeasure when cut off in traffic by an overeager taxi driver, of derogatory Japanese language, or of the slang and jargon used by the younger generation.

In Susumu Eguchi, my co-author; I finally found a Japanese person willing to be open about such terms. Thus, the 200 columns entitled "Unspeakable Japanese" came to be. Susumu, a journalist and scholar having written several books on the Japanese language under the pen name of Oh Yamanaka, did the formidable job of researching the words and their history and etymology. I am also a journalist who has studied Japanese for more years than I would like to admit. To me fell the task of rendering the work into English and editing each column, as well as re-editing them into book form.

These columns ran from April 1979 to December 1982 on the Friday Page in the Mainichi Daily News. Several reader surveys conducted during this period proved them to be the most popular feature of the paper. Not surprisingly, they were also the most controversial.

To this book we have added some of the more scandalous expressions that we were not able to publish in the newspaper. We have also emphasized the spoken language rather than written words, concentrating on expressions, many of which are not yet covered in prestigious Japanese dictionaries.

The basis for our choice of expressions is that they were in use as of the spring of 1994 and can be expected to be around for a while. We have decided to include older and less fashionable expressions only when they are necessary in order to understand the general trends.

There has been little organized slang and jargon research by scholars, in spite of the fact that Japan has experienced a boom over the last ten years in Japanese-language studies and general interest books. With increased interest in Japan overseas as well, several books on colloquial and slang Japanese have been published. We are often surprised, however, to find that most of them don't go into the origins of the words or how their meaning has developed and changed over the years.

Words are a clue to human psychology; they also provide a window on the culture from which they have originated. In our research for this book, we have examined as much literature as possible and have limited the expressions to ones on which most opinions agree. We offer here what we believe is the most comprehensive and most scholarly research to date on Japanese slang, swear words, underground and sexual terms, scatology, and colloquialisms. We hope you find this book helpful in deepening your understanding of Japanese language and culture.