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Good enough to eat

Garages and wisteria at North 26th and East Broad Streets

Ooo. Pretty flowers.

This morning, half asleep, I wrote (in my head) a haiku about wisteria, but I don't remember it now. Something about bees and the scent.

Other stories about wisteria.

In Japanese, wisteria is fuji (藤). Once upon a time I went during Golden Week to a festival in Tokyo at a temple famous for its wisteria. They had their wisteria trained over trellises built out over a pond. By the time Golden Week rolled around, the wisteria were dropping their blooms and the surface of the pond was solid purple. Those were the days of film and I don't have a scanner, so no pictures for you. Like a typical festival in Japan, they had booths of games and little things for sale. At one booth, selling marbles, the proprietress had stepped away and left her West Highland terrier in charge. I have a picture of the dog sitting at attention on the chair behind the array of marbles with wisteria in the background.

The character for fuji is also read tou when it appears at the end of a two-character compound word. My first year studying Japanese, our teaching assistant's surname was Katou (加藤). One day, to kill class time, we asked her to write her name out on the board since we'd never seen the characters before (at that point we were still learning the hiragana). The first character was a snap, but when she started on the tou, and the chalk kept tap-tap-tapping on the board, we were aghast. Then we starting whinging, "But.it's such a simple sound! Can't you write it phonetically?" And that was pretty much the story for the next four years of studying Japanese. You get resigned to it after awhile.

A story about a homonym. Well, a rant about a homonym.

Fuji is wisteria, but fuji as in Mount Fuji is completely different: 富士. You can see the difference? In Japanese, Mount Fuji is called Fuji-san (富士山). Note please: this san (山) is not the -san (さん) used as a status-neutral honorific to follow surnames (such as how we in English might use Mr. or Ms. only not quite). San is the Japanese version of the Han dynasty Chinese pronunciation for the character 山 (mountain), and thus that is one of the pronunciations applied to that character when it was adopted by the Japanese roundabout the sixth century. Got that?

山 and さん are not the same word. Okay? Easy-peasy.

So here's the rant bit: It has happened more than once that I'm reading a book written about Japan by an ignorant non-Japanese, or listening to a news broadcast by an ignorant non-Japanese (Marketplace, hello? I expect better), and they burble along about how Mount Fuji is the symbol of Japan and so the Japanese like Mount Fuji so much they even call Mount Fuji Fuji-san. At which point I screech, "It's not the same san! Not. The. Same."

Oz has heard this rant many times. Now whenever Mount Fuji makes an appearance on TV Japan he says, "Look, it's Mister Fuji!"

530 words | April 10, 2006 09:49 PM | Lost in translation