First of all, thanks to everyone who weighed in on the mystery of the Hiragana shoes.
I also contacted JP over at japundit.com about the shoes, and this is what he had to say about them:
I took a look at the text, and it is, indeed bogus hiragana.
I also read it as dzu-me-da as you did, with improper diacritics on the second character.
I also had my wife take a look at it, and she read the first character as “u”. The following shows the difference between “zu” and “u” (I hope your computer can handle Japanese text).
zu =づ
u = う
Based on what my wife said, I guess that someone tried copy the Japanese name Umeda (うめだ) and got the diacritics wrong. As the text is written, I does not really mean anything, but the story behind it is pretty interesting so I will write something about it on Japundit with a link back to your site.
By the way, did these characters come on the shoes when they were purchased?
Thanks for sending this along, and please keep us in mind if you run across anything else that might interest our readers.
Well, funny you should mention— as it turns out, I saw this yesterday at the bazaar:
Again, for various reasons I suspect at least some degree of nonsense (as you would on any $2 t-shirt that says “Dolce & Gabbana fashion company”), but as I mentioned before I’m hardly an expert, so I thought I’d leave it to my Japanese-savvy readers and the kind folks at Japundit to tear it apart. What do you make of this one?
Oh, and yes, the Hiragana shoes came that way from the bazaar… and I’ve just today discovered that my housemate actually has two pair of them, both with the same nonsense message. I guess he really really liked them.