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Welcome to Japan: Name Edition

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Matt here. So for some reason Japan thinks English should be on everything, despite having two alphabets and thousands of ideograms of their own. In much the same way that Western idiots tattoo themselves with kanji they think say WARRIOR OF PEACE but actually read FLAT COMBUSTION CONCERN, the Japanese put nonsense phrases on their signs that ramble on about how THE STYLE WHICH IS UNCOVERED IS BEST or whatever because they think the presence of English adds gravitas. There is a photoblog devoted to it called Engrish (the only slightly racist moniker for this phenomenon) that you can check out.

We thought we might keep a running tally of some of the best examples we run across in our travels. So let's start with this, shall we?

FUN ENGLISH NAMES

Crunky Nude Balls: your new favorite snack food
Dog Torimming: a pet grooming place
Spic Salon: a hair salon chain (ouch, huh?)
Rough Unity: oddly enough, a car place motto
Hard\Parts: display title at a discount book/dvd/game store
Help: another hair salon?
BizTime: banana yogurt
Creap: cream powder...
Next-Hair: yet another salon (enlarge picture above for a special treat)

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Comments

  1. Rosie's adventuresSeptember 2, 2010 at 7:18 AM

    I think I like Biztime the best. How does this all come about, is it really that hard to translate from Japanese to English? Or do people just half ass these translations?~Amy

    ReplyDelete
  2. AbigailSeptember 2, 2010 at 8:04 PM

    Matt says: it's both. Sometimes it's just that certain things sound or look cool to Japanese people, just the way that their characters sound or look cool to us. The grammar is backwards from English so the translations can be difficult as well, or perhaps they don't fully understand the meaning of a word so it gets misused. Just wait until you see the Flench!

    ReplyDelete
  3. StevenSeptember 4, 2010 at 5:03 AM

    The Crunky Nude Balls look ... nutty.

    ReplyDelete

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