Wasei-Eigo, Japan-Made English

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

How are you doing? This is Leo Mendoza in Tucson.

I’m doing great, Leo. We’re glad to have you.

What’s on your mind?

Well, you know, I was thinking about some experiences I had when I lived in Japan as a scientist. And among them, they would use words that sounded like English, but they weren’t really English phrases or words.

So one time the fellow said to me, oh, you are so scareful. And I said, what’s careful? He said, that’s not English. And basically it meant that I was worried.

Yeah.

And I said, oh, okay. And then another fellow said, oh, that guy, he’s just a paper driver. And a paper driver, what’s that? He said, oh, that’s not English? So he said, that’s a guy who drives, has a driver’s license, but doesn’t have a car.

Oh.

Nice.

He’s just a driver on paper.

On paper.

And they had a lot of other funny, strange phrases like that. And I was thinking, you know, are there other places that have similar kind of phrases or words? But those are just a couple of the ones I came across when I lived there, but it’s been a while.

Leo, yeah, so you know there’s a term for this kind of Japanese-made English. Wasaigo.

That’s right.

W-A-S-E-I-E-I-G-O, two words. And this Japan-made English is so common. A lot of it has to do with the American occupation of Japan after World War II and then the increasing cultural and commercial ties in the many decades thereafter.

But there are so many of these terms, and it really has to do about, like I said, these strong cultural and commercial ties where we are both, I think, the English-speaking world and the Japanese-speaking world, are kind of enamored of each other’s cultures. We like each other’s food. We like each other’s language. We like each other’s entertainment. And we just borrow willy-nilly from each other, both from ideas and from technology, but also in language.

So there’s just so many of these. You have a simple word like haibijun, which means high vision, but it also means modern. So it literally translates into English as high vision, but it means moderate. So they take the word high, they take the word vision, and they just kind of twist that meaning a little bit.

Yeah, I like the word for corndog.

What is that?

Do you know the word for corndog?

American dog.

American dog.

Yeah, right, American. Or I had a coffee maker that was there, and on top, you know, it said in the katakana, it said strong.

Strong.

And then when you turned it way down, it said American.

Oh, that’s funny.

Americans like a weak coffee.

Yeah, we are kind of known worldwide for our bad coffee, supposedly. And I remember when I was young, my grandmother used to say skosh.

Oh, I’ll just have a skosh. And then when I lived there, you know, of course, skosh just means a little bit in Japanese. And so that was a word that we borrowed.

Yeah.

And a lot of people just assume it’s like a Native American word or something or even Yiddish. But no, it’s from Japanese.

There have been some movements by the various Japanese governments and governmental bodies to kind of take English out of the language. But one study which tracked more than 11,000 names of government projects found that 25% of them had words borrowed from Western languages, European languages. And it’s not only English that shows up in that way.

So French will also show up and Spanish will also show up in Japanese borrowed and turned into something else. It’s really, there’s many wonderful books written on this topic because it is, again, it’s the areas that we have in common like food and entertainment and technology. These are the places where the words tend to be borrowed.

Leo, thank you so much for calling. I’d love to hear more of these sometime.

Sure.

It’s a lot of fun.

Thanks for having me. I enjoy your show.

Bye, Leo.

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