Got on my gentsuki and rode today. It was a beautiful fall day. It was nice and bright and warm all afternoon and actually reminded me of California in the fall. However, as soon as the sun started going down it got chilly and I'm writing this in front of an electric heater. The fall colors are not generally California-like, either. The mountains turn red and gold in Japan this time of year.

The pictures here are from a place called Kamakitako. Kita is 'north' and 'ko' is lake. I think 'kama' refers to the iron pot used in a tea ceremony, maybe describing the look of the small, kind of round lake.

I went up there last month, thinking that the leaves would turn in October, but they didn't. I'm glad that today was such a nice day, and a Sunday, so I had the time and weather to go back. It's only 10 minutes from my apartment, anyway.

I got some nice shots and included a few of them here before going on to write a bit about language.

And here we go...

A while back there was a picture featured in a column in the LA Times of a store in Japan displaying a prominent sign that read 'American Guts'. There seemed to be some question (not to mention shock) as to just what the shop owner was trying to say and the columnist wanted to know what his readers made of it. Well, no problem. For 'Guts' just read 'Goods' and 'Goods', of course just means 'Things'. The sign was just saying that the shop sold stuff from the U.S.

I have to admit that my immediate comprehension of the ad was not due to any particular intellectual jump, but can be laid totally to experience. Having been an ESL instructor for the past 20 (!) years, I'm fairly fluent in English as a Second Language English.

I do enjoy the oddities, I have to admit. To be fair, misuse of English is by no means just the province of new speakers and when I get back from Japan, I’m planning on writing about things I hear in the U.S. that I find amusing, as well.

For now, I’ll stick with where I am and give you some examples of things I’ve found interesting here.

In a small town outside of Tokyo, close to where I live, there is the small, unprepossessing edifice with the humble name of the Hotel Bob. I, personally, find this very funny. Not realizing the inherent cultural casualness of the word 'Bob', the owner of this particular establishment probably just liked the name. It has an American flavor that he wanted for showing sophistication to his clients.

Sometimes things just get lost in the translation, if that's not too overworked a phrase. In the dining room at the Hotel Bob, the management has gone out of its way to create a menu in English. I guess it, too, has to be for the cachet. I seldom see other foreigners in the area and I can't believe it was done exclusively for me, although this falls under the same heading as train announcements in English and Jehovah’s Witnesses with signs in English that I wrote about earlier.

Anyway, about halfway down the breakfast side of the menu, you will come across the entree entry 'Fungus Omelette'. Well, someone had been looking up 'mushroom' in their bilingual dictionary and while it's not exactly incorrect, I'm sure you agree that this is not the type of comestible offering that will exactly get the taste buds tingling in one of the English-speaking persuasion.

There's probably not any sort of a mold subtext going on incountry, even though Japan can be damp in one way or another just about any time of the year, but that reminds me of this. A popular Japanese fast-food chain fashioned, in a fashion, after an American hamburger joint sports the decidedly unappetizing moniker of 'Mos Burger'. Spelling aside, it's not really a name to stir the appetite. Even though conjuring up the idea of a Mos Burger is unlikely to inspire a late night munchies run, it should be noted their hamburgers are actually very good.

Japanese companies that choose to name themselves in English often just seem to marching to a different drummer. In Kawagoe, a similar small city close to the Hotel Bob, you can find Smell Fashion Designers. I don't have a clue how they came up with that one.

Just down the street from them, there's a branch of the electronics chain Hard-Off. Insert your own joke here... and here. Actually, 'hard-off' refers to deeply discounted merchandise, as any Japanese consumer knows.

My personal favorite I just noticed from the window of a friend's car as we drove through the endlessly fascinating streets of Tokyo.

Let me set this up a little.

Some language professionals subscribe to the idea that English found in non-English speaking countries is just another dialect. After all, the English aren't all that happy with what Americans have done to the language, but we still call it English.

One thing that's done to the Mother Tongue on both sides of the Atlantic is to shorten words and change them in many ways in order to adapt to particular situations or tastes. Take the word 'wizard'. Since the days of Merlin, we've lopped off half of the word and changed the meaning to the point where 'wiz' now just means someone who is very good at something... and that other meaning.

The shop in question, the one I observed from the car a few sentences back, was obviously trying for the first association. Unfortunately, it seemed to specialize in items connected to the canine species and there above the front windows, in letters approximately 6 feet high, were the words 'Dog Wiz'. Someone HASN’T been looking in their bilingual slang dictionary.

That makes rather a good segue to product names...

Such as Calpis Water... This Japanese soft drink sounds only vaguely disgusting, but I don't believe an American marketing research company would say 'Yeah. sure. Go ahead with that name. Sounds good to me'. Then add to that the fact that it is a soft drink which boasts milk as its main ingredient . Rather surprisingly, this too is pretty tasty. I much prefer it to Pocari Sweat. Yep, that's a name for another drink. Since it's a sports drink akin to Gatorade, you can see the logic behind the christening. Nothing like a nice cold bottle of Sweat after a good workout. We should consider the fact that Gatorade probably seems like kind of an odd name to the Japanese. I seem to remember it sounded strange to Americans when it first came out, too.

I once saw an a Japanese pencil case shaped and designed like an enlarged roll of lozenges that had the arresting slogan 'With a fresh pine taste'. In the U.S., of course, we reserve pine for scent alone and it has this connection with bathrooms that may tend to take away one's appetite. Displayed among other small oddities on a shelf at my house, you can see a box of Tobacco Candy. Just so there is no misunderstanding, the label also includes the words 'Tobacco Flavor'. Apparently it's a diet candy, because the makers also marked it clearly as 'non-sugar'. Of course. Who would want to eat sugar with their tobacco?

You may have noticed that the examples I'm coming up with here aren't really broken English, but just English that is used differently than you might expect. It's a big culture thing, the way language is used and you can't say it's being used wrongly, just ... oddly.

More next time...