Japanese Slang
Authors: Peter Constantine
Japanese Slang
Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd., with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, VT 05759 U.S.A. and 61 Tai Seng Avenue, #02-12, Singapore 534167.
Copyright© 1994 Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Company, Inc.
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ISBN: 978-1-4629-0477-8 (ebook)
First edition, 1994
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Acknowledgments
I WOULD like to express my deepest gratitude to the many individuals who over the years have provided me with the candid cultural information and the plain-spoken language data that were necessary for this book. I am especially grateful for the frankness with which they faced my grueling interrogations and for their generosity in offering to discuss private, personal, and often sensitive aspects of their life and work. Because of the delicate nature of their trade, many of the individuals who have contributed most to this book, have wished to remain incognito.
Among my American friends, I owe the greatest thanks to Burton Pike for his encouragement and inspiration, and for his constant advice and help. I am also grateful to my literary agent, Raphael Pallais, whose interest in medieval Japan proved to be most valuable, and to my editor Sally Schwager, whose profound knowledge of Japanese language and culture has been of great help.
I am grateful to Mark Peterson for sharing his intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of the New York street scene and its language. His analytic discussions
of American street life helped me put my Japanese data into a Western perspective.
Among my Japanese friends, I owe special thanks to K. Inoue for the hours of sifting, dissecting, and analyzing the stacks of information that came pouring
in, and to W. Ishida for our many frank discussions and for the many investigations that she tackled on my behalf. I am also thankful to N. Ichizono for her generous help, and to T. Yoshioka for her enthusiasm, encouragement, and for the fact-finding expeditions that she undertook.
I am especially grateful to the individuals who helped me in my research into slang expressions of ethnic Korean and Chinese extraction: I would like to thank L. Kim, S. Yang, and J. Ma, and Mr. Park, whose intimate knowledge of both the Korean and the Japanese scene helped me track the etymology of some of the more sinuous Japanese-Korean expressions.
Finally, a very special word of thanks to Dr. Lundquist, Chief Librarian of the Oriental Division of the New York Public Library, and to Ms. Kim, Section Head of the East Asian Division, whose scholarly council and advice on Japanese and Korean publications were of great help.
Introduction
CURIOUS FOREIGNERS who prowl the darkest alleys of Tokyo, who dart into secret red-light bars in Osaka, or bolt up the stairs of the corrugated slum brothels near the port of Yokohama, quickly realize that there is much more to the Japanese language than meets the ear. What they have stumbled on are Japan's fascinating secret languages: the
ingo
(hidden words) or
ago
(jaw) used by looters, car heisters, prostitutes, pimps, bag snatchers, muggers, and wallet swipers. As one descends deeper and deeper into the Japanese underworld, the language becomes more potent and rich in clandestine trade words and covert metaphors.
At the street level, everyone uses the same rough and unbridled slang. But by the time the sub rosa crowd secretly congregates in its back-alley clubs and bars, each group slips into its own exclusive, razorfine argot. Secrecy is of paramount importance: delicate heists need to be mapped out, strategies analyzed, financial matters discussed, illegitimate meetings set up, and bands of looters returning from a successful stint might want to recap their triumph over a few loud and festive drinks. What, however, if the person
who is quietly nursing a drink at the end of the bar is
aori
âan undercover cop?
One wrong word can unleash a shower of handcuffs.
It has been this professional need for utter discretion that has played the most important role in the fast-paced development of Japan's “hidden” languages. A careful criminal will linguistically only trust his or her closest peers, which is why bagsnatcherese is so different from pickpocketese, and why brothel, sex-bathhouse, and massage-parlor talk, although closely related, will veer off and become unintelligible when hot technicalities are broached.
Another important reason for the heated development of underworld slang has been the day-to-day need for special criminal trade expressions. Japanese looter slang, for instance, stocks its lexicon with long lists of labyrinthine terms, ranging from hundreds of nouns for house doors and alarm systems to verbs covering every conceivable method of breaking and entering. The lock specialists, on the other hand, have a name for every segment of a lock or a bolt, and strings of exotic words for lock-picking needles, master keys, and the top, bottom, or side sections of tumbler pins. Pickpocketing verbs can name every larcenous flick of the wrist, and special nouns specify wallets by their position in a pocket, their size, the visibility of their outline through the trouser material, the degree of their emptiness or fullness, and whether they are brimming over with bills, or merely heavy with small change.
The other important initiative behind the growth of Japan's secret slang has been the herd instinct,
defined in trendy Japanese as
uii-izumu
(we-ism). Japanese criminals prefer to operate out of an association or gang, in which private language or jargon becomes the invisible club badge. To be one of the boys you first of all have to speak like one of the boys. When teenage roughnecks are initiated into the bottom ranks of a gang they frantically imitate the dashing language of their power-wielding elders, who themselves had imitated the locution of their elders. When youngsters join a criminal association they immediately cleanse their vocabulary of all trendy English words and jingly adolescent expressions, and adopt the gang's tough and mature vernacular. It is this orthodox traditionalism in the Japanese under-world that has led it to conserve long-forgotten medieval and even pre-medieval expressions. A
shintabukuro
(money sack) is still a wallet on Tokyo's streets, just as it used to be in the good old samurai days, and a
shintagamari
(from
shinta kamari,
“the money lunges in”) is still a wallet that is brimming over with cash. Some groups call a snooping policeman Sakubei, the name of some medieval lawman, while a long-forgotten idiot, Kinj
r
, is still invoked in criminal circles as an unpleasant insult.
When gangs bring up sexual organs, elegant and elaborate ancient words abound.
Kintare
(golden dangle) and
suzuko
(bell child) are general synonyms for testicles, while
katakin
(side gold) is the one testicle that dangles visibly lower than the other.
Kenke
(pickles) refers to scrota that pull themselves up into stiff small balls during arousal.
In the West, we expect slang to change with every high school graduation class. What is new is decided in teenage circles, and we turn to the MTV channel to
keep up with the seasonal changes. We find out that “Whoops, there it is!” was the summer-of-1993 term for “Nice ass!” or “Gosh, her shorts are short!” For an introduction to American street speech, we tune our sets to the post-L.A.-riot tirades of youthful West Coast gang members. As round after round of unintelligible phrases pour out, we are increasingly convinced that slang is an impenetrable, if transient, mechanism of the young.
On Japan's streets, however, it is the older criminal generation, the men in power, who decide what words are in and what words are out. New slang must be constantly conjured up, as the streetwise Japanese police eagerly snatch up all the clandestine expressions they can find. The captured words then make their way into the police's own private jargon, with the result that what is fashionable in the under-world one season is bandied about in police boxes the next.
But where do illegal brothel associations, pickpocketing leagues, bands of looters, drug pushers, and pink-salon masseuses turn to for new words?
One favorite method is to take existing slang words and revamp them with new associations.
Teka
(bright), for instance, has been used for generations on Tokyo's streets to mean “fire,” and soon arson came to be known as
teka o tsukeru
(adding the bright), which then changed into a dialectized
deka o tsukeru.
The next playful step was
tekkari
(twinkle): robbing and then torching the building to cover one's tracks. Then
tekkari
took on the meaning “summer,” then “unseasonably hot,” then just plain “it's hot today, isn't it?” The most irreverent use of
tekkari
has been for matches:
â¢Â  Â
Oi, tekkari motteru ka?
Yo, you got matches?
An even quicker method of creating a neologism is to invert existing words, rendering them incomprehensible in quick speech. This characteristic is also prevalent in French, Argentinian Spanish, Korean, Hindi, Indonesian, and Javanese street slangs.
K
hii
(coffee), and
baibai
(bye bye), are playfully flipped over into
hikkand
ibaiba.
On a grittier level,
chinpo
(penis) becomes
pochin, shiroi
(“white,” i.e. cocaine) becomes
roishi, hero
(heroin) becomes
roha,
and
keibu
(police) becomes
bukei.
This trend, known as
gyakugo
(topsy-turvy words) is often taken further than just simple syllabic reversal.
Yato,
for instance, a malignant street word for razor, sprung from
yatoko,
which is the inversion of
tokoya
(barber shop). The case of how the southern Japanese town of Shimonoseki became a popular train station-thief word for luggage involves an even knottier web of word changes. The standard
kaban
(bag) was first reversed into
banka,
which then developed into
bakan.
The station crowd looked at the new word and realized that it could be written with the characters
ba
(horse) and
kan
(barrier), the same character used for the
noseki
portion of the town of Shimonoseki.
This art of capsizing words, however, had been quickly mastered by the police, and the street crowd set out to marshal new expressions of a more covert nature. The handiest source of impenetrable words turned out to be the ethnic Korean and Chinese gangsters who had poured into the Japanese under-world in the post-World War II years. The abrupt
Korean word for dog
(k
)
came to mean “police,” while
kujuri
was used as a secret Korean word for “money,”
hza
for “wallet,” and
higehachiya
for “murder.” No Japanese policeman, the gangsters argued, could possibly guess that
tjitari,
Korean for “pig's leg,” means gun. The Chinese words, the Japanese gangsters felt, were even more exotic:
tsumaimai,
Chinese for “going into business,” came to mean “looting,” and
ryahiyatan,
Chinese for “swatting insects,” was redirected to mean “blasting down walls.”