Feb 27, 2025
Guests:
K, M
Discussion Content:
M arrived first. The ladies like to have a spare chair to place their handbags on – rather than putting them on the ground – so I said we should get those S-shaped hooks that some restaurants use for people to hang their bags on.
There were some coat-hangers in the salon room and I wondered if we could use those, but when I said “coat-hanger”, M didn’t catch what I was saying at first, because Japanese people pronounce it like “cort-hunger”. I said that sounds more like a “court” as in a “tennis court”, etc.
Just then, K arrived, and she had some vegetables in her hand that they buy from the Indian restaurant next door. Today she bought turnips. M said there’s a famous fairytale called “The Enormous Turnip”, but I had never heard of that. After checking on Google, it seemed to be originally a Russian story, about a giant turnip that could not be pulled from the ground, so many people had to cooperate and pull-together, which is the basic moral of the story.
Next, we talked about “Anpanman”, the famous Japanese cartoon character for children. The nursery school teachers had been singing a song about Anpanman, and I said it got stuck in my head. When I repeated the song to M and K, they said it was originally a different song with different lyrics, so I guess the nursery school teachers changed it to be about Anpanman.
This led me to wonder about the origin of the Anpanman story, so I asked the ladies to look it up and tell me about it. And it turned out to be a pretty interesting story…
The creator, a man name Takashi Yanase, who was born in 1919, first had the idea for a superhero who would bring food to hungry people – of which there were tens of millions, both during and after the war. He considered extreme hunger to be one of the worst things a human could experience, and thus, one of the greatest services any “hero” could perform would be to bring free food to people in need.
From this basic idea, the cartoon character of Anpanman, which was first published in 1969, evolved into the current version over a period of about 15 years.
Further, it turns out that the next series of NHK morning dramas, starting on March 31st, will be about Takashi Yanase and his wife, and called simply “Anpan”. K said she doesn’t like the current series – she thinks it’s trivial and boring - so she is looking forward to the next one. I said that my wife also doesn’t like the current one, but she still watches it every day while eating breakfast.
We then talked about some of the common features of TV dramas and movies – “cliffhangers” and a “big reversal” or a “big twist” (大どんでん返し). I said that the term “cliffhanger” – meaning when an episode ends with some kind of mystery that makes you want to see the next episode – literally came from a movie where someone was actually hanging from a cliff, and you are left wondering if he fell down, or was able to climb back up.
M said that in the movie “North by North-West”, there is such a scene with a man hanging from a cliff, but then suddenly in the next scene he’s in a different location, with no explanation given for how he was rescued.
When listening to someone speak, Japanese people often make the sound “え～”, which sounds like “air” in English, to express interest and/or surprise. I said that, because I’ve heard and used it so much myself, that I will also probably make this sound when speaking English – which would sound very strange to other English speakers. The equivalent expression in English would be things like, “Oh?”, “Really?”, “Wow”, etc.
Finally, M asked about the English phrase, “Catch-22”, and what it means. It was originally the title of a book and then a movie, and it means a “no-win” situation where in order to do a certain action “A”, you have to do action “B” first, but action “B” requires that action “A” is done first.
The most common example is when someone is looking for a job. They are told they need experience first before they’ll be hired, but the only way to get experience is to first be hired.
Useful phrases:
hook
coat-hanger
turnip
enormous
The moral of the story is…
pull-together (cooperate)
haggle (negotiate a price)
A song was stuck in my head
superhero
hunger
trivial
boring
cliffhanger
a twist in the story (a surprising change)
a “Catch-22” situation