The meat and guts of translation, testicle boxing and fake geisha.
I lost count of the number of companies I worked for in Osaka.
What with short business English contracts, intensive courses, steady part time hours and the never ending part-time work search, trying to neatly construct a liveable income together like fucking employment Tetris, I’m guessing it’s around 30.
NOVA had pretty much put me off working for a high street Eikaiwa again and I had no love of teaching kids classes after having to watch tongues wag back and forth like excited dog tails in attempts to ‘de-mucus’ the snail trail running into their gobs. Dear mums, please refrain from bringing your kids to class when they’re coughing like a coal mine worker, drowning in their own phloem and playing tongue tennis with snot balloons. I recall one kid at our NOVA branch feverish and itching like a flea ridden mutt lifting his top to reveal he was in the throws of full blown chickenpox! The mother still saw fit to drag him along to class though.
I hated teaching kids for the pure reason that the teachers with multiple kids classes spent half the year with fucking illnesses. Fortunately I had already had chickenpox but couldn’t stand missing the gym through colds, so refused to do them for years until I was forced to.
A favourite joke among Japanese kids is to clasp their hands together, index fingers extended, sneak around behind you – the unsuspecting victim, and try to penetrate your trousers by ramming their digits so far up your rectum they touch your breakfast, whilst shouting “KANCHO!” Which literally means ‘enema’.
Not being a giant fan of the ‘kancho’, I still would’ve preferred it over the experience of my first lesson at a privately owned little school in Juso, the pikey-chav area of Osaka.
After the initial introductions I found out this moody 8 year old girl and her 9 year old brother had karate black belts which I thought was cool, myself being a martial arts fan. The secondary introductions were less satisfying however; namely her introducing her best front stance reverse punch to my nut sack.
Slumped over the table, eyes welling up and balancing my testicles on the end of my tongue with the, “KI-AIIIIIIII!” Still ringing in my ears, I had an epiphany moment of,
‘You know what – FUCK KIDS CLASSES.’
If you’ve read my ‘Can’t spell student without stud…’ piece, I mention how you never remember student names unless they are the good, the bad or the ugly. You could probably add ‘first 8 year old girl to drop you with a nut punch’ to this list.
RISA – little bitch.
So, with kids classes and big Eikaiwa out of the equation I’d forced myself out of 90% of the job market but made ends meet and would take any kind of one-off job, of which there were a few strange ones. Just a shame they didn’t offer full time, especially the latter one.
Massage chair tester – for Panasonic. Market research in comfort
Plasma TV reviewer – payed to watch TV.
Professional party guest – wait, you’re paying me to drink beer, eat and mingle?
For the last year I supplemented my part time university job working in a small establishment dealing in 1 to 1 adult lessons and proof reading/translation services.
Mainly catering for touristed restaurants and shops needing menus and advertising in the Namba and Shinsaibashi area, the moronic shit that appeared on my desk was frustratingly hilarious.
For years a local cafe had been selling blowjobs and coffee for 500 Yen (see picture heading.) I was disappointed I never got to order Felato and coffee before I changed the ‘F’ to a ‘G’. (Insert various black, white, with cream, grande, double shot jokes here.)
Menus often posed problems in either language due to many of the outlandish food items having no direct translation as they didn’t exist in a western diet, and you couldn’t well have 30% of a BBQ restaurant menu labelled as ‘crap we sling in the dog food silo’. A very high end ‘Yakiniku’ (Korean BBQ style) restaurant menu I was working on had over 100 cuts of meat and offal. Some of the stranger parts of the seemingly totally edible cows farmers were breeding included:
Tongue – not so weird in itself, but inner tongue and outer tongue. Apparently inner tongue is softer. Where does outer tongue finish and inner tongue start I wonder?
Ear Base – the muscle at the base of the ear.
Fatty Aorta – maybe from a less exercised cow.
Fatty Lower Intestine – probably from the above cow again.
Vocal Chords and Esophagus
Lung
Tendons.
Forehead.
Diaphragm
Parts from the different stomachs and by far the worst thing on the menu,
UTERUS.
The menu was literally a bovine murder crime scene. I mean, there were some great looking beef cuts but seriously I’d love to hear someone ordering this.
“Yeah, I think I’ll start with some esophagus and forehead. Then for my main I’ll go with the uterus….and can you do me a side of fallopian tubes with that? And what do you want honey?”
“I’m just sticking with parts of stomachs 2 and 4 with a side of diaphragm.”
“Eeeeexcellent choice sir. I’ll be back with your Jeffrey Dahmer fridge contents before you can say fuck this, I’m turning vegan.”
Who performs these operations anyway? These cows didn’t end up in a butchers as much as they did a thoracic surgery ward.
Many, many, many hours were spent producing this menu which ended up being, let’s say, full of linguistic artistic license to make certain items sound semi-edible.
Fried, fat-laden lower intestine? Nope, ‘succulent tripe’ – literally.
Fat-laden aortic valve? Nope, ‘juicy upper heart cuts’.
Esophagus? Nope, ‘crunchily textured inner neck cuts’ to name but a few.
There was just no getting around the uterus problem though. Succulently elastic baby grow sack maybe?
As frustrating as not knowing a dish and having to translate it into something remotely edible was, it was often easier than amending an already translated to ‘English’ menu. Even with my below average kanji reading skills, it was still easier to understand than:
‘A tomato and cheese grilling vegetables’ is a dish I would pay to see being prepared. I know the young demographic of Japan is decreasing and it may have become a little more difficult to find the staff, but I don’t think hiring a tomato and and cheese slice to run your kitchen will ultimately be beneficial for your restaurant.
The dish you are looking for is, ‘cheese and tomato stuffed, grilled bell peppers’.
‘Rice on root vegetable, jelly with cream on’.
What? In the desserts? What is this, the worlds worst fucking trifle?
Turns out it was tapioca.
A lot of the time though; from understanding common Japanese style dishes, you got it instantly. Or if you were lucky, the menu had illustrations.
‘Hot fish on Italian noodles with eggs.’
Ha! Got you this time bitch. ‘Spicy cod roe spaghetti’.
And sometimes the dish explanations just needed shortening somewhat. Especially the,
‘Special chef’s salad of 12 kinds of freshly careful selectioned vegetables and a raw ham which the vegetable sommelier chose this morning’.
And on occasion, I found the sexual preference of seafood was just unnecessary.
‘Nice, straight octopus’.
I can’t even begin to go into the 100’s of wines, sake and sho-chu I’ve written in sommelier-like detail without even seeing the fucking bottle, let alone tasting them.
Just trust in the Japanese menu.
I was charged with writing a subtitle transcript for a short TV program featuring 2 ‘maiko’ (trainee geisha) walking around Kyoto’s Fushimi-Inari shrine.
The historical explanations were well out of my league and I was left to ‘have a go, do as much as you can’ regarding the conversations between the 2 maiko and store holders around the area.
It became apparent that the young 20 year old girls were neither maiko, or in fact in possession of a brain between them. Within the first 30 seconds of the show I surmised that verbatim subtitling would transform it into a 1980’s sit-com of clueless idiots.
Donned in full kimono and shuffling around with expressions that could only be described as, ‘this is the 1st time I’ve ever left my my house and everything is amazing’, the first opening lines were:
“There’s so many foreigners here.” Strange that, considering we’re at a popular Kyoto shrine in summer.
“Yes, they are so big.” Again with the ‘everything’s amazing’ face.
“Look, that one is eating fried noodles!”
“Ooh, that’s great!” More amazingly, we are also known to eat rice.
“How do you say where are you from in English?” This is going to be special.
“Let’s try.”
Slowly they shuffle up to the nearest tourist.
“………are you from?”
Well done! In a 4 word question you’ve managed to miss the most essential word. Literally any other arrangement of that sentence would’ve sufficed. Where you from? Where from? From where? You from where? You are from?
The bemused traveller stands there in silence waiting for the missing country name to complete the sentence, which doesn’t come, causing the twat brigade to start panicking, get flustered and start waving their hands about.
“Where am I from?” Asks the giant sized average height European.
“Yes.”
“Austria.”
“Greeeat….Kangaroo!” Oh Jesus. Really?
As the dismayed day-tripper’s eyes darted back and forth in bewilderment; just out of shot I imagined the director shouting instructions through a megaphone like a police negotiator.
“That’s it….keep smiling….don’t make eye contact….now slowly back away from the idiots!”
Not to be deterred by unsuccessful first human contact, they proceed onto the fortune cookie stall where the eldest of the 3 generations working there gives a brief history of his business. First question from one of the vacant sisters,
“Are there fortunes in these cookies?”
I sat there wishing please say, “No, you have to buy those separately” just to confuse the shit out of them. Didn’t happen. However, he would be the one on the receiving end of confusion after explaining the production process, when the other girl picks up a bag of cookies and asks,
“Are there fortunes in these cookies?”
There were now a few double takes between the family members, but unfazed he answers and carries on with his informative cookie trade spiel, to be met with unaware short term memory deficient presenter number 1 asking,
“Are there fortunes in these cookies?” AGAIN!
He gave up answering and just pointed to his store billboard that not only had the information written, but a picture of a half cracked cookie complete with tiny paper fortune hanging out of it.
There were deliberations as to what title this show should carry and they were almost as bad. I particularly took a shine to ‘Maiko loving in Kyoto’ which I thoroughly endorsed sounding like some traditional lesbian pornography. Personally I’m going with,
‘2 complete giggly fuckwits pretending to be maiko destroy the reputation of classical geisha, upset 3 generations of store holders and freak out a quasi-German on holiday’.
Land of the Aggravating Sun 