…and it never fucking stops raining!

I believe this will only work against very short people. Very short people unable to locate a small box so they can jump over it. My inseam is taller.

But it could have been so cool! (Yes, I know the sign means something else.)

No, this is not some exclusive beach where I was taking shots with a camera hidden in a sack. I was standing on sidewalk of Margit Bridge, as these people were tanning on the southern, paved tip of Margit Island. What was funny, or sad now that I think about it, was that just before I took this picture, I saw people hiding behind posts or trees with telephoto lenses.

Thing is, none of the people bathing without their tops were even that hot, and it’s just so much easier to download stuff from the internet.

We all know we call the country in which I live “Japan” because of a medieval game of Telephone that started with Marco Polo, right?  It’s a bit odd, but I think that word is almost as widely known here as the native one (Nihon or Nippon – just in case).  If that doesn’t strike you as odd, consider how many other world languages you can say the name of your country of residence in.  What is USA in Mandarin?  Hindu?  Russian?  I know how it’s written in the first, but probably wouldn’t recognize it if some random Chinese person said it in front of me.

Well, in Japanese it’s either アメリカ AMERIKA, アメリカ合衆国 AMERIKA GASSHUUKOKU, or 米国 BEIKOKU.  The second one includes the equivalent of “United States of”, and the third is their equivalent of us calling them Japan.  It’s a kanji compound formed of a phonetic approximant of the “ME” in “AMERICA” plus the kanji for country.  Literally, and also a bit ironically, it means “rice country”.  A lot of countries have these kind of phonetically formed and accidentally hilarious names, like 和蘭 (WARAN) for Holland, which means “harmonious orchid”, or 仏蘭西 (FURANSU) for France, which means “Buddha orchid West”.

Not many people use these names nowadays.  In more common use are katakana creations such as オランダ (ORANDA) or ポルトガル (PORUTOGARU).  What’s a bit odd though is how they’ve adopted something close to the country’s name in its own national language for some countries, like イタリア (ITARIA) or ドイツ (DOITSU) but for others chosen simply to adapt the English exonyms for others, like キューバ (KYUUBA) and スペイン (SUPEIN).  I’d guess it has something to do with the countries that first had contact with Japan getting to designate Japanese names of their liking to all the Perry-come-latelys, but that little theory does nothing to explain how England can end up as イギリス (IGIRISU).  Who calls England anything within the equivalent of 10 phonetic football stadiums of IGIRISU?

By the way, if you still harbor fears that this country may someday resume the role of fearsome death-cult eugenic empire of death, behold the state of popular Japanese nationalism:

(it includes the line “this country thought up karaoke!”, which should be all the translation you need)

I might be exaggerating a bit here but I believe upwards of 99.9% of Japanese last names are some combination of the following characters:

山(yama, mountain)  藤(fuji or to, wisteria)  本(moto, base)  野(no, field)  田(ta or da, paddy)  木(ki, tree)  中(naka, middle)  井(i, well)  川(kawa or gawa, river)  and 佐(sa, help).

All the classics, such as 山本(Yamamoto), 田中(Tanaka) and 佐藤(Sato) use these characters exclusively.  There are a few oddballs like Suzuki (鈴木, bell-tree) that refuse to conform, but by and large, they’re some description of unfortunately nearly ubiquitous geographical features.  Lord knows there were plenty of middles of fields lying around for people to name their families after around 1870, when common folks first got last names.  There aren’t many occupational last names, and those that do exist are famous families of craftsmen, kind of like being named “Baretta”.

What tends to be more interesting is given names.  The well-known Yokos and Taros are a bit antiquated – not so many girls are being named -ko anymore, which is just fine with me, since the character for that, 子 means “child”, making it not exactly a 21st century raised-consciousness type of name.  Any male name with the character 郎 (ro, boy) sounds like the equivalent of “John” to me, either deliberately traditional or just lazy.  Males of my generation seem to have a lot of 4-syllable, 2-character names like Yukinobu or Hirofumi.  Kind of self-important-sounding but it’s not like they chose it.

Kids less than 6 years old have names seeming to comprise any random 2 syllables the dart happened to strike.  I suppose this represents a growing dissatisfaction with the limits of traditionalism, but in my mind no amount of throwing off the chains of a culture past its time is worth being named Raku or Era.  I’ve actually heard tales of kids being named “Komugi” and “Kokoa”, which mean “wheat” and “cocoa” (pronounced coco-ah) respectively, or maybe unselfrespectively.  It all comes back to my feelings on katakana in general – either find a way to say it with dignity within one language, or switch languages.  Stop trying to escape Japanese via uglier Japanese.

I went with a friend to the latest incarnation of Budapest romkert West Balkán a couple weekends ago. Currently it’s in a temporary location that I think will be left as a playground for kids in the apartments currently being built in the area. This image lets you see the remnants of an old building on the bottom left, with a new building under construction across the street.

The picture was a 15 second exposure with a Canon SD1000. I can’t give more technical details, since the camera does it automatically, even when I’d rather it not. But I liked this photo.