Adventures in Japanese Commercial Exegesis: The Passion of the Dog/Man/Thing
Published: March 28, 2010
Look, I know this is a fool’s errand. People who post things on a blog titled WTF Japan, Seriously do not, in fact, want to seriously know what the fuck, Japan. They just want to giggle at the indecipherability.
But on the other hand, there are ads like the one below that simply beg for an attempt at elucidation. So join me, but first make sure to take a gander at the truly fascinating / heartrending / strangely moving potato chip commercial below!
One of the earlier memories I have of Japan took place during an “orientation” seminar I attended as a part of the first exchange program I participated in, which was designed to brief us on general rules of behavior and the like so as to avoid at least the most obvious embarrassments. Scattered amongst the customary warnings about
As promised, this week’s column is on one of Japan’s most spectacularized exports, the pornographic genre Wikipedia rather demurely refers to as
It is with the precious, ever-so-mannered “reluctance” of the self-appointed expert that I find myself approaching the writing of my inaugural column on Japan here at Wordsmoker. But as I thought about it, my apparent conundrum began to seem hardly unique to my situation as “Japan scholar” and “translator,” but indeed was something everyone faced, all the time, at all levels.
