06/16 - Ladies and Gentlemen

Standing six foot two,

from Calgary, Canada

Paddy Wa-ta-son! 


Exiting Ikebukuro Station this morning, as I do every morning, albeit from different exits, I was greeted by a line of women holding signs. They seemed to be championing some sort of good cause and they were all holding their hands up for high fives. Most people were ignoring their requests to "high touch!" A high five is known here as a high touch, in "Katakana English" or the adopted terms from foreign languages into Japanese. Not sure why they couldn't just use high five, but high touch does make sense. Some students have expressed confusion, thinking that high touch was an English term not a bastardized version, and also at why it was five, I guess not thinking about there being five fingers on a hand. I did not ignore the line of women, instead slapping high fives with them all the way along. The combination of reaching the top of the steps and entering the daylight and the street to a line of high fives was hilariously similar to a player introduction at a college or NBA basketball game. As a result, I couldn't resist writing todays haiku in the style of a stadium PA announcer hyping up a player. If you think it's cheating to write my normally two syllable last name as the three syllable "Wa-ta-son" then you should know that's exactly how everyone says it here. On my bank card and identification my name is written in Katakana resulting in a phonetic based proxy of my name. The pronunciation ends up being "Pa-ta-ri-co To-ma-su Wa-ta-son". In the Japanese language all the words end in vowel sounds or an "n" sound.

Another couple interesting sights, carrying on with yesterday's theme of interesting clothing articles. I had a student come to class wearing a shirt that said only "Do I give a shit!" in large block letters. She definitely did not know the shirt was profane and I didn't want to permanently ruin it for her. Not sure why they went with that punctuation choice either. More startling, in the cafeteria today when I finished lunch I saw a girl with a large leather and canvas duffel bag. It was navy and cream coloured, and looked quite nicely made. On the side, embroidered on, it said "Pougue Mahoune". It was definitely not merchandise for the band The Pogues and it's existence is beyond belief. What bafflingly mislead designer or company decided to stitch that onto their classy looking bag? If you're unaware, "Póg mo thóin" means "kiss my arse" in Irish.