JapanesePod101.com Blog

Recently, when I logged onto JapanesePod101.com to listen to some podcasts, a photo with big, bold, striking kanji stopped me in my tracks.

The lesson was about 過労死 (karōshi), “death by overworking,” but none of those kanji appeared in the photo. I knew 残業 (to remain + work) as zangyō, “overtime.” And I knew 風 (FU-, kaze) in several ways, often having to do with wind. But how did 風 factor into overtime? And what was 呂敷?

What Does サービス Mean Here? …

Because the characters appeared in a photo, I couldn’t copy and paste them into Breen, and somehow all other methods of kanji investigation failed me. What would the radical of 呂 be? It couldn’t be 口, could it? (Yes, it could and it is.) I refused to think that was possible, so I didn’t even try looking it up that way, instead preferring (why???) to flail around with utterly ineffective alternative methods. I got nowhere.

Searching for 敷 in Breen finally did the trick, but only after a loooong time, because I had assumed that this character would be a Jōyō kanji, which is true, only Breen hadn’t classified it as such, which hampered my search.

Anyway, I eventually deciphered 風呂敷 as furoshiki, which means “wrapping cloth” or “cloth wrapper,” which is what the ever-so-practical people on the resource-limited Japanese islands have used to wrap presents, purchases, and whatever else might need carrying.

Shibori Omiyage
Credit: Glennis Dolce
Shibori artist Glennis Dolce makes incredible silk shibori cloths for
a variety of applications, including furoshiki.
The kanji for shibori is 絞り.

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One might think of a jumble as a negative thing: a massive ball of knotted string that takes forever to untangle, a scrambled mind that keeps nothing straight, a mess of feelings and problems that you can’t sort out, a messy house where you can’t locate what you need.

But there are also positive jumbles, and for some reason (hunger?!), I can mostly think of examples related to food: an appetizer sampler plate, variety packs of candy bars for Halloween, a stew. In fact, when you cook and mix things together, a jumble is often the goal.

Hence the Term “Jambalaya”? …

Chaos of Color, the Big Hodgepodge
Photo credit: © John W. Hammond

Kun-kun 混 combinations formed with the yomi ma(zeru) often have to do with jumbles. They even sound like jumbles. Take, for instance, this word:

混ぜこぜ (mazekoze: jumble (of two or several things); mix)

Japanese usually write this word in hiragana.

The consonants z and k in mazekoze create the impression of chaos, just as the ateji term mechakucha (目茶苦茶: disorder, confusion) has the onomatopoetic feel of disorganization. Why should this be, when the repetition of syllables (ze in mazekoze, cha in mechakucha) create some semblance of order?

More on Mechakucha …

Loopy Glass Jungle
Photo credit: © John W. Hammond

With the yomi of ma(zeru), 混 plays into at least one compound with a pejorative sense, bringing us back to the downside of jumbles:

混ぜ返す (mazekaesu: to banter, make fun of (what a person says), jeer at; to stir up)     to toss + to repeat

Ma(zeru) can also mean “to toss.” Given the breakdown, I suppose 混ぜ返す is like throwing words back in someone’s face.

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Back in November, Dr. Matt Wachsman contacted us about his mnemonic system for learning Kanji using captivating and enjoyable flash movies. These movies involve multiple parts of the brain simultaneously, reinforcing memory linkage with visual associations, sequence associations, humor and rhymes. We hope these will appeal to people with a variety of learning styles and that you enjoy them. We plan to introduce about 6-12 new Kanji per week to cover the Kanji taught in the first 6 years of school in Japan and the JLPT levels 4 and 3.

This week’s animation is titled Speak!

Do you think of Old Japan as an orderly or disorderly place? My gut reaction is to think of orderliness: the constant cleaning of already spotless houses, the exquisite presentation of shōjin ryōri (精進料理: vegetarian Buddhist food served at temples, meticulous + to offer + cuisine (last 2 chars.)), the dainty washi wrapped around purchases, and the minute attention to detail in the tea ceremony.

And yet kanji calligraphy tends toward chaos! Only highly trained practitioners can read the flowing lines. And there’s the matter of twisting, narrow roads in Tokyo and how easy it is to get lost there, with the unclear or nonexistent indication of streets and building numbers. As Donald Richie wrote so beautifully in A Lateral View: Essays on Culture and Style in Contemporary Japan, plots of land follow natural topography, rather than grid lines:

One … sees this from the air, a good introduction to the patterns of a country. Cultivated Japan is all paddies winding in free-form serpentine between the mountains, a quilt of checks and triangles on the lowlands—very different from the neat squares of Germany, or that vast and regular checkerboard of the United States. The Japanese pattern is drawn from nature. The paddy fields assume their shape because mountains are observed and valleys followed, because this is the country where the house was once made to fit into the curve of the landscape and where the farmer used to cut a hole in the roof rather than cut down the tree. (19–20)

I can only conclude that Japan, old and new, presents an enticing combination of order and disorder. The following picture (which reminds me of a circuit board) is of Tokyo. On Flickr, the photographer’s caption says, “Japanese have a way of making even disorder neat, somehow.”

Neat Disorder
Photo credit: Poagao

We saw last week that 混 (KON, ma(jiru), ma(zeru), ma(zaru)) can mean “to confuse” and “to mix.” As ma(jiru), “to be mixed or blended,” 混 shows up in several terms that remind me of cooking, seeming to contain a dash of this word, and a dash of that word—true mixes! Take, for example, this word:

混じり気 (majirike: a dash of (something), impurity, mixture)
     to mix + a trace

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Back in November, Dr. Matt Wachsman contacted us about his mnemonic system for learning Kanji using captivating and enjoyable flash movies. These movies involve multiple parts of the brain simultaneously, reinforcing memory linkage with visual associations, sequence associations, humor and rhymes. We hope these will appeal to people with a variety of learning styles and that you enjoy them. We plan to introduce about 6-12 new Kanji per week to cover the Kanji taught in the first 6 years of school in Japan and the JLPT levels 4 and 3.

This week’s animation is titled Gate!

When I came upon the compound 混沌 (konton: confusion, chaos, disorder), I couldn’t fathom why this word had taken on so much water (). I wondered whether the moisture had anything to do with the “swirling waters of confusion” to which English speakers refer. As it turns out, yes! Check out some of the meanings of these kanji (the second of which happens to be rare):

混: confused
沌: swirling water, to be blocked, primeval chaos

Primeval chaos?! Burbling bodies of water must have terrified some early people!

Swirl
Photo credit: Ray Byrne

Henshall says that 混 originally referred to water rushing and swirling with no fixed course, as in a flood. Then “confused waters” came to mean “confused” in a broader sense. He also says the 昆 inside 混 means “multitude” and acts phonetically here to express “to spin, swirl.” The element 昆 even lends its own idea of confusion, because people in a crowd mill around chaotically.

Swirling Waters
Photo credit: eatzycath

If this sounds entirely negative, never fear. The kanji 混 also means “to mix.” This associated meaning came about because impure elements often find their way into the swirling waters of confusion. This idea of “mixing” is not inherently negative. Just consider these appealing mixes:

雨混じりの雪 (ame majiri no yuki: snow mingled with rain)     rain + to mix + snow

混合酒 (kongōshu: cocktail, mixed drink, blended liquor)
     to mix + to join + alcohol

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Metropolis, Japan’s No. 1 English magazine, selected JapanesePod101.com as its first ever Website of the Week. Metropolis is a weekly English Magazine for foreigners with a focus on entertainment, events, and Japanese culture.

Back in November, Dr. Matt Wachsman contacted us about his mnemonic system for learning Kanji using captivating and enjoyable flash movies. These movies involve multiple parts of the brain simultaneously, reinforcing memory linkage with visual associations, sequence associations, humor and rhymes. We hope these will appeal to people with a variety of learning styles and that you enjoy them. We plan to introduce about 6-12 new Kanji per week to cover the Kanji taught in the first 6 years of school in Japan and the JLPT levels 4 and 3.

This week’s animation is titled What Box!

In English, “tail of the yak” and “tale of the yak” both make sense but mean very different things. This is nothing compared with the profusion of Japanese homonyms. When you type YAKU in hiragana and convert it to kanji, any of the following characters could pop up, as all have the on-yomi of YAKU:

約 (to promise, shrink, about)
訳 (to translate)
薬 (medicine)
役 (service, serviceability)
厄 (misfortune)
躍 (to leap)
疫 (epidemic)
益 (benefit, profit)　

This leads to a plethora of homophonous YAKU compounds.

There are three more types of yaku:

焼く (to burn, roast, grill, bake)

In this case, ya(ku) is the kun-yomi. Some compounds include the kun-yomi of this kanji, but the form is always yaki or yake. This kanji therefore doesn’t factor into the YAKU homonym confusion.

妬く (to become jealous)

This kun-yomi is uncommon and seems to play no part in any homonym problem.

ヤク (yak)

I believe this word also causes no compound confusion.

Yak Near the Sacred Yundrok Yumtso Lake, Tibet
Photo credit: Dennis Jarvis

Yakity Yak
Photo credit: Valerie Abbott

Yet Another YAKU …

YAKU Words with Great Internal Rhymes …

Kanji with Both EKI and YAKU as On-Yomi …

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