There’s nothing that lifts my spirits quite like a walk around the local mall. If I’ve had a bad day, I don’t head for a vanilla/chocolate deluxe at the ice-cream stall, or even the crocodile bash game at the arcade, no I make a b-line for the t-shirt rails. What’s so uplifting about a bunch of t-shirts? I hear you ask. Well, search the rails of most clothing shops in Japan and you will more than likely come across t-shirts that feature hilarious English.
Now I’m not mocking the translation skills of the people that work on these t-shirts (God knows my language skills are embarrassing) but I have literally laughed out load at some of them. The best one-word design I’ve come across by far involved a picture of a man with his mouth open in a shout, and the word ‘Molested!’ shooting out in bold black. This is possibly the best t-shirt I have ever seen. Another design found on the same day, in the same shop no less was emblazoned with the request: ‘We need 10 young people’, and features in one of the scariest photographs I have ever taken. It’s of my mate Dave holding it up and giving his best ‘creepy sexual predator’ look; truly disturbing. I would have accompanied this article with said picture, but I’m sure Dave would be less than impressed.
Getting back to t-shirts with one word prints, another favourite has to be one I saw on a guy in Sendai city centre, one sunny October afternoon. He was a pleasant looking guy, in his mid thirties I’d say, clean shaven, smart, he had a bounce in his step. Across his chest in luminous blue however, was the word RAPE. Who knows, maybe to this man about town rape holds a different meaning, it could be an acronym; Really Adorable Pink Elephant perhaps. Or maybe he’s inviting those that understand the demand to carry it out; he was just going through a dry patch. Either way, when I saw it I couldn’t help but giggle. Yet another unintentionally smutty t-shirt I saw recently was actually worn by a non-Japanese friend of mine. I missed a night out at the bowling alley so thought I would check out the pictures. About 6 pictures in I was greeted with an image of her in a brown t-shirt, and the words ‘Dick’s Wipe: a tamer trainer of wild animals’ scrawled across her chest. I quickly minimized the screen before any of my colleagues at the school I work at could see it.
The t-shirts are not all lewd statements and demands, there’s also room for the super cute. I bought a top a few weeks ago with a cartoon rabbit love scene on the front, and the sentence ‘good times ahead, lets ride the love highway always’ above it . I have to say, I bought that one mainly for the picture of the rabbits getting it on in a car, and not the cute English. I also have a bag with a picture of a Labrador puppy and the question ‘when are you coming back house to touch me?’ I suppose this could be filed under lewd, but the puppy is adorable so I’m going with super cute. Another super cute tee I saw was on a kid in a ramen place. He was sitting with his back to me and I could make out the sentence ‘I feel happiness when I eat a potato’; adorable.
This hilarious translation is of course, true for most t-shirts in the UK and America which feature Japanese. I have Japanese friends who have been abroad, or seen gaijin on TV with complete nonsense written all over their clothing. I myself went through a phase of wearing t-shirts with kanji on, and now I cringe to think what I might have been strutting about advertising. So if you’re ever going about your everyday business, feeling cool in your Japanese tee which you assume means something like ‘peace and love’ or ‘Tokyo University class of 99′, and the Japanese guy on the train is sniggering, you know why. You’re more likely to be adorned with something absurd like ‘abortion and ice-cream’ or ‘Moron University class of now’.
