from "I'm in trouble" to "Oh, this is so good!!"...やばい!!!

Yabai (やばい) has been evolving over the past decade.  Formerly, it was an exclamation of distress, along the lines of "Oh, no," "I'm in trouble," "I'm f*cked."  A short while ago, I was sitting next to one of my fellow teachers when realized that she didn't have enough classes before exam week to finish teaching all of the content she needed to cover for the tests.  She cried out, "Pinchi (ピンチ)だ!", short for "I'm in a pinch"--which, of course, who really says that?  I wanted to make sure I understood exactly what she was saying, so I asked her, "Do you mean it like, 'I'm in a pinch?'" and she said yes; she's quite tolerant of  my language questions, and always helpful, God bless her.  She went on to say that younger people would probably say やばい instead.

While the original meaning of yabai still stands, it seems to be used just as often now to denote very positive feelings about something or someone.  The first time I heard it used in this way was at a summer camp.  As we walked back from the campfire to the hotel (but yes, we still call it a camp), an infinite multitude of stars shone above us, and students screamed out to the sky "Yabai kirei!"  Later that year, I recall hearing it at a concert.  Velvet Revolver was performing (co-headlining a show with Marilyn Manson, which looking back is a pretty amazing occurrence) and some girls next to me, drooling over a topless Scott Weiland, kept saying "Yabai!  Yabai kakko ii!" throughout the show.

Really, though, I think it feels quite similar to an "OMG" in English.  Or how, when experiencing or witnessing something overwhelmingly good, we might comment that we're done for.  Or we might say we're in trouble when we find someone attractive to an extreme degree.  There's something viscerally expressive in this word.

Honestly, I'm not trying to promote this music, but here are a couple of examples of yabai's usage.  The first is a song entitled "Yabai," performed by the boy-group Arashi.  The guy pictured in the video is Jun Matsumoto, perhaps most well-known for his portrayal of Tsukasa Domyouji in Hana Yori Dango.


                           

and this is a Morning Musume video.  The caption under the video,

かっこよすぎてヤバい!

is another usage, stating that something is too cool.  To tell the truth, I was surprised at the heaviness of the guitars at the start of this clip.  It wasn't what I expected from Morning Musume. 


      





 In the caption under this one, you can see another way to use the word.

. . .キレイ過ぎてヤバいｗｗｗ 

by which the writer means that the actress, Kyoko Fukada, is just too pretty (!).

 

No new information in this video, but I liked it because she's going through the time and effort of posting herself dancing on You Tube, at the same time wearing a mask.  I had to smile at that.

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suru (する) verbs, part 5

bunkatsu suru, 分割 (ぶんかつ) する--to divide, split

I thought this was a pretty cool example.  I'd never seen them separate the train cars before.  The splitting up starts at about 2 minutes into the video.




In the video below, someone is showing us how to split a PDF file.

I just think it's nice that people go through the trouble of videoing and posting stuff like this, which I'm sure is helpful to some.
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bunseki suru, 分析 (ぶんせき) する--to analyze, break down



 

To tell the truth, I have no idea what he's talking about--I watched for about 20 seconds and moved on.  But even without comprehending his presentation,  I thought that the visual alone might help in remembering this word.

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  chikoku suru, 遅刻 (ちこく)　する--to be late, tardy


This one just made me laugh. Gorilla Man is definitely running behind schedule. . .

"Baigaeshi!"

This was from last year's TV show, Hanzawa Naoki, the story of a good man trying to survive a corrupt banking world.  I only got around to watching it this year when it reached the internet with English subtitles.  I liked it quite a lot.

The series protagonist is not to be messed with.  His warning to people, his philosophy in business and in life, is embodied in the line "Yararetara yarikaesu. . .Baigaeshi da!"  (やられたらやり返す 倍返しだ!)　　Yararetara is in the passive voice, so some of my friends' and students' attempts at direct translation come out something like "If it is done to you, do it back--double payback!"  A slightly less direct  translation would be "If someone screws you, give double the payback." Or if you want to go higher than double--Hanzawa Naoki goes up to jyuu at some point--then something like "If someone screws you, screw 'em back ten-fold.")

-bai (倍) is the suffix for times, as in nibai (二倍, 2 times), sanbai (三倍, 3 times), etc.    If you just say baigaeshi, it's apparently presumed to mean double the payback.  If you want to go higher, then you have to put a number, e.g. san (三), go (五), jyuu (十), etc. before the baigaeshi.

At the end of this video Naoki H. delivers the line:



This is a trailer.




 And this is a website where you can watch it with English subtitles.  To be honest, I don't think that the translators are native English speakers, but I'm not complaining--they did a good enough job that I could easily keep up with the story.

http://www.drama.net/hanzawa-naoki-episode-1

よろびこ (yorobiko)

I don't think this is officially a word yet, and it may never be. . .I recently learned it from one of my high school students.  よろびこ (yorobiko) is a mutation of よろしく (yoroshiku) よろしくおねがいします (yoroshiku onegai shimasu).  It's one of those words that, right now, maybe only high school students would know.

When I mentioned this to other adults, they recalled that around ten years ago, よろぴく (yoropiku) was the word of the day.  Just a cute alteration of the very-important yoroshiku, I guess.  These adults tell me that yoropiku is "so old."

One of my fellow colleagues at school, when she heard me asking about yorobiko, looked on with some disdain.  I think it's an understatement to say that not everyone here likes the morphing of words and phrases that the younger generation is into.  Personally, though, I find it a bit impressive for its creativity.  As with many things in Japanese culture, the creativity manifests in doing new things with old things.

A couple of links of people using it on their blogs.  (I wanted to check around to make sure that it wasn't only my student using this expression. . .)

http://ameblo.jp/1818abc-0822/entry-11374083579.html

http://now.ameba.jp/gaobaba/1478576234/

procrastinate

Today the new school year started in Japan.  In my two jobs, though, classes don't actually begin for a few days.  I went to one of the campuses, though, hoping to make all of the handouts and mentally run through what the first day of school would be. . .But it was hard.  After spending three weeks in Hawai'i, I'm not in a Tokyo state of mind.  I spent a lot of time today wandering about, having pleasant conversations that put off getting to work.  Just a little before 2pm my friend told me that the Japanese word for procrastinate is hikinobasu. 

vocabulary of cherry blossoms

Anyone who spends a spring in Japan surely learns sakura, the word for cherry blossoms; and hanami  (or ohanami, more formally), which is defined as a "cherry blossom-viewing party."  I suppose it would be as accurate to define the hanami as a picnic under the blossoms, often a drunken gathering, for many.  The best time is when the cherry blossoms are mankai (満開, まんかい）, or in full bloom.

During my first year here, a good friend (a New Yorker and fellow Beastie Boy listener) once likened cherry blossom season in Japan to Christmas back home, at least in its effect on our temperaments.  People are friendly and sociable even to strangers, and the spirit of the season seems to prompt the expectation of this phenomenon.  The air warms, and so do we.  And people are generous; more than once have I been offered and given free drinks, beer and chu-hai mostly, by fellow hanami-ers who happen to be sitting next to me on the glorious earth under trees topped by an illuminated white canopy.  The giving inspires giving, and before long we find ourselves sharing and talking and laughing.  Whenever gusts of wind blow the petals into a shower falling on us, we let out Oohs and Aahs, as mesmerized by this vision of spring as we would be by any winter snowfall.

The sakura, I've been told, is symbolic of the fleeting essence of life and its beauty, something to be enjoyed and, ideally, grasped for what it is while it remains with us, a temporal wonder.  Sakura and Sakurako are popular names for girls.

Most of these pictures were taken at Yoyogi Park (Yoyogi Kooen, 代々木公園).

 

 

 

The majority of eople in Japan, in my experience, are really good about not littering

 

 

Lastly, a music video by Morning Musume with today's vocabulary.  Honestly not the kind of music I usually listen to, but there are obviously people who like it.  For those not yet indoctrinated in the world of Jpop, Morning Musume was a sort of precursor to today's AKB groups, over a decade ago.
                       

suru (する) verbs, part 4

bougai suru (妨害する、ぼうがいする)= to barricade, disturb

In the two videos below, this verb is being used to describe people who get in the way of emergency vehicles.




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boushi suru (防止する、ぼうしする) = to prevent, keep in check

 And the speaker in this video shows us how he prevents dehydration in his wonderful bird


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boshuu suru ( 募集する、ぼしゅうする) = to recruit, collect

And this is a recruiting video for the group Morning Musume.  It's not my kind of music, but culturally I think they deserve recognition as being the precursor to AKB and all of its offshoots.

飲み放題 (nomihoudai)

Also important in the language of nomikai is nomihoudai, or All-You-Can-Drink.  The nomi- part of it means drink, while the -houdai is the all-you-can.  (Tabehoudai, All-You-Can-Eat, is the other essential to know in dining out.)  I sometimes hear people abbreviate nomihoudai as nomihou.

An average izakaya charges maybe ¥1200-1500 for two hours.  Western foreigners often go nuts over this in an "oh my God I can't believe it" kind of way, at least at first; I certainly did.  Every American I know here cannot fathom an American establishment implementing nomihoudai and staying in business for long; just the nearest college population alone would set off bankruptcy alarms.  But of course we probably exaggerate in our minds the extent to which our home country is alcoholic.  

I've seen a few blogs and vlogs about nomihoudai and I agree with them that generally the Japanese people I know don't go all out to get their money's worth in this situation.  It's just usually the more economical option if you're going to be drinking for a couple of hours.  And, being of Asian descent myself, I don't think I'm being unfairly stereotypical or a self-hating racist when I say that Asian people, on average, don't drink as much and probably can't tolerate as much alcohol as some of the larger-livered people from other parts of the world.  (I don't mean it disparagingly to anyone, and I know there are a lot of heavy, hard-slamming Asians in this world. . .)  Anyway, it is nice that the Japanese food and drink industry can offer this and continue to offer it.

Some videos about it--the first two are by a couple of fellow expats I've never met.





About the following video, I agree with almost all that's said. . .Only things that are different in my experience are:  1) the nomihoudai deals I encounter are a bit less than the $35 that he mentions early on in the video (but maybe it's because I usually go to less expensive places),  2) I don't see beer vending machines much any more, mostly only in hotel lobbies, and 3) in parts of Tokyo there seems to be a visible effort for the law to discourage underage drinking.  It's certainly not a "crackdown" or any such thing, and undoubtedly teenagers are drinking, but things don't seem to be as lax as they were ten years ago.  All that said, I'm not disagreeing with Moteki Texan in what he's saying, just saying that we encounter different things, have different experiences.





 And this video is for the dancing

飲み会 (nomikai)

This was one of the early and important words when I moved here.  Nomikai (飲み会, のみかい ) is usually translated as "drinking party" among my Japanese friends.  There's a lot of drinking in Tokyo, but I don't know that more alcohol is drunk per capita than in, say, the state of Michigan or the city of Moscow.  I don't know statistics on this.  But I feel comfortable in saying that there's been drinking (of alcohol) at every get-together I've had with friends in restaurants, izakaya and, of course, bars.  

Having a pretty great  train/subway system helps a lot.  Whenever my friends from back home come to visit, they're always sort of giddy over the fact that they don't have to drive home.  To have the freedom to drink as much as one wants. . .

I do have friends here who don't drink.  Not all that many, but they live.  The nomikai system can be financially tough on non-drinkers because generally people here split the final bill equally.  This may be unfair to those who don't eat or drink much, but it's part of the group ethic, I think.  And it can be liberating, in more than one way.  But not everyone is into it.  One of my (Japanese) friends who doesn't partake in drinks of merriment regularly says to me "I paid a lot for my Oloong tea tonight" when others (especially girls) aren't listening.  Of course drinks generally drive up the bill, so I take his point.  Generally, a night out at an average izakaya or restaurant seems to cost me in the neighborhood of 3000-4000 yen; of course, at theme places or more extravagant settings it'll be more.  To the drunken, I guess this sits as par for the course or better.  But for teetotalers, I can see how it would seem expensive.  Heavy drinkers know that it's a bargain for them, and I've known a few who take advantage of the night.

My first year here I didn't want to rock the boat or cause ill feelings, but now when I'm at a nomikai where there's someone who doesn't drink, I don't mind coming out and saying (no doubt because I'm drunk, as I do drink) to everyone that the non-drinkers should pay a bit less.  It feels like the right thing to do.

suru (する) verbs, part 3

bengo suru ( 弁護する、べんごする ) -- to defend, testify for

I like the word testify.  It reminds me of this now-classic RATM song.  Sweet that someone put Japanese subs on this version.



benkyou suru ( 勉強する、べんきょうする) -- to study


Today was the first time I've seen this lady (below) reciting Japanese on You Tube waves; she sure has a lot of viewers.  It's the video that came up at the top when I You Tubed the kanji for benkyou, I guess because of its title and number of hits.  As I started watching, at first I didn't know if I should continue till the end, but in the middle of it she breaks out a rather large slice of pizza.  I have to admit, it made me laugh.



 This is one of the verbs learned pretty early on by most people learning Japanese.  I'm sure I learned it in class, but I don't remember learning it.  I do remember hearing it in the anime below, though, because it was the first time I heard the word benkyou used outside of the classroom/textbook.  They used to air this show on the Japanese cable network back home, a long time ago, and I watched it once or twice.  It was back when I used to get really excited hearing a word I'd learned being spoken in the outside world.  I'd practically jump out of my seat, "I know that one!"

Anyway, this anime is about a boy named Kintaro who's cycling around Japan in search of new experiences.  He's a good-hearted guy but so uncool around women, especially beautiful women.  He loses control, although not in a dangerous way.  When he gets worked up, he'll cycle furiously repeating to himself "Benkyou benkyou benkyou!"  He often uses "Benkyou ni narimashita!", which basically means "I learned something," or "It was educational," etc.

Just to warn you, the humor is a little erotic.  It isn't a violent eroticism, but definitely at least PG-13.  (For those outside of America, PG-13 is one of the categories to which movies are assigned in the ratings system.  It means "Parents Strongly Cautioned. Some Material May Be Inappropriate For Children Under 13"; the PG originally meant Parental Guidance suggested.)  It's also unapologetically cheesy.  The Japanese I find somewhat easier to understand than a lot of other anime, perhaps because it's everyday life (instead of robots or pirates or some of the more otherworldly themes that populate much of Japan's animated realm).
 





benshou suru ( 弁償する、べんしょうする) --to compensate, repay for loss

tenjikai (展示会)

Tenjikai ( 展示会、てんじかい ) is an exhibition, e.g. an art or fashion exhibit.  My friend just had one today for his new company.  It was held in Omotesando, one of the more upscale areas in Tokyo.  I had a hard time finding the place, so I was happy when I finally did. . .A lot of stores and businesses in Omotesando and Harajuku are housed in places that don't look like stores or businesses.  This was the front end of the exhibition, which I think could easily pass for a kids clubhouse.

Inside, it looked like this

Lasonic--a boombox for the i-Pod.  It has a karaoke function

a table with built-in speakers, pretty good sound