barryg@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Lee Gold) (12/21/85)
Baka yatsu or Baka-me are also insulting terms.
Or just call the other guy kisama and call yourself ore.
Or use polite verbs about yourself and humble verbs about him.
Or if you really want to be gross: read Seward's JAPANESE IN ACTION, An
Unorthodox Approach to the Spoken Language and the People who Speak It.
Chapter 21 "How to be Insulting in Japanese" lists such lovely phrases as
shogakko chutai no hana-hoji-kurime (nose-picking grade-school dropout)
and several hundred more.
Warning: These really are insults. One idiot programmer in Japan put
a couple of phrases together, shiwakucha no shagaregoe no baba (wrinkled,
coarse-voiced hag) or some such and called the Japanese secretary that.
She wouldn't speak to him until he'd apologized for several days and
explained he hadn't realized how much it would hurt her.
Of course, Japanese get shocked easily at foreigners using the language.
One time I happened to spend a few minutes before Barry went off to work
drilling him on the ultra-polite answer (also in Seward) to be asked about
one's health. ("O-genki des' ka?" "Okage-same de, genki des'.") The
secretary who knew he was working on lerning some Japanese happened to greet
him tht way when he came to work. He answered politely, turned to go to
his office, and then stopped to notice tht she'd frozen in total freak out,
her tea cup motionless, string at him much as we'd stare at a talking cow.
Some students seem to respond to the intense work required to learn Japanese
by becoming hostile to the culture. Certainly, it's quite different than
ours and it's not surprising to get culture shock. In any case, I ran into
one guy who'd taken four or five years of Japanese and ran into a Nipponjin
in Europe at a youth hostel. They chatted in Japanese for awhile, and the
Nipponjin expressed his surprise at my friend's knowing the language. My
friend told him that where he came from all people were naturally expected
to learn Japanese.
At one point while we were in Japan, a Japanese programmer, doubtless
meaning to be kind, asked if we'd been to Tokyo Tower yet. (It's a ripoff
of the Eiffel Tower, chiefly notable for a second rate Madame Tussaud's.)
I said no, we hadn't; last weekend we'd gone to Sengakuji and seen the graves
of the 47 ronin instead. Did he really think Tokyo Tower was that interest-
ing? He ended up inviting us to go out with him to Nikko, to the Toshogu
Shrine for Tokugawa Ieyasu. (Well, more precisely, one of the Toshogu
shrines. Ieyasu's spirit is also buried in Ueno, near the Zoo. So the
Shogun could visit it mroe conveniently.)
--Lee Gold