This week I’m taking a break from the regular bazaar to bring you four new Turkanese photos I’ve collected over the past few weeks. If you read Japanese or can shed any light on the meaning of these items, I‘d be very grateful.
These first two items are of course in the same faux-sports-team series as the previously featured Hanshin Tigers and Nagoya Dragons. The guy who sells these seems to have no end of them— every time I look at his stock he’s got different cities and towns available. Of course, this particular shirt is a bit different in that Nippon is just another word for the country of Japan itself, not any particular city. But what are those kanji about? I know the first one on its own is “fish,” but I don’t know what it means in combination with the other one, and once again I have no idea what any of this has to do with any sport, unless it’s the national fish-wrestling team.
Honestly, who doesn’t feel brave after a Sapporo or two? And notice these are the same two kanji as on the Nippon Fighters shirt.
This van was parked on the street near the bazaar a couple of weeks ago. I’ll be surprised if whoever put those decals on knew what he was doing, but you never know… we’ve got a mixture of kana and kanji here, anyone got a translation? Why would this be on a car door in Turkey?
This one makes me laugh and I don’t even know what it means yet. Just the thought of writing stuff on a bath towel for no reason… I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. But I bet this has to be nonsense. What could you print on a bath towel that wouldn’t be at least somewhat ridiculous?
Anyway, thanks for tuning in— the bazaar archive is here, and if you’d like to purchase a shirt or two don’t forget to stop by the store and have a look around. また、あした！
Actually, the Hanshin Tigers, Chuinichi (Nagoya) Dragons, and the Nippon Ham Fighters are real professional baseball teams in Japan. In Japan, teams are not named after their home cities, but after the companies or corporations that own them, so Nippon Ham Fighters aren’t ham-fighters from Nippon, but fighters employed by Nippon Ham, if that makes any sense. There used to be a team called the Braves, but that team has since changed its name to the Blue Wave.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMKCLyhBBwI
Only thing I can think of re fish + fighting
@scrivener: I see… but what about the kanji, any idea? I assumed it was some kind of nonsense since all the shirts have the same two kanji on them.
@Sara: *lol* it’s been ages since I’ve seen that.
Hi. I’m writing this comment too late but I’ve just discovered this blog of you. I liked it a lot…amusing and interesting.
The Kanji written on the tees are the kanji for “Abalone”-a kind of fish. It’s one character, left part is the radical that’s something like the meaning marker, right part is…well mostly the pronounciation marker. I’ve seen those Japanese sport team t-shirts myself. One of them for instance was read Tokyo in Roman alphabet, whereas the Japanese kanji said “Hokkaido” (the northernmost island in Japan, almost the distance between Antalya and Edirne…maybe). As for the other tees, the last one has a chopped character, I think cut-and-pasted from a Chinese text.The second character means “Season”. The car has a katakana word “Monohochiho”, the last kana missing a stroke, no meaning whatsoever.
There’s a blog site run by a Chinese guy named Tang seeking after those mistakes about Chinese characters used in Chinese and Japanese, made outside Far East. Maybe you can post them for that site too.
By the way Hanshin Tigers is not a company name, the word Hanshin (阪神）means Osaka-Kobe area, the kanji for Osaka is 大阪 and Kobe is 神戸, hence the combination. Japanese has a great deal of abbrevations like this.
oh, I forgot….the blog is called Hanzi Smatter and is at the URL: http://www.hanzismatter.com
@ulas: yeah, the Hanzi Smatter blog is an old favourite on my RSS feeds… I know it well. I’ve sent stuff to Tang before, but he’s a busy man… perhaps you could volunteer to be our Chinese/Japanese character translator? I see a lot of stuff down here, and most of it is probably nonsense, but I only have very basic knowledge of kana and kanji, and none of the Chinese meanings/pronunciations.