Libertarian musings from just inside the M25.

Another brief observation today – it’s to do with the trend in what I can only describe as utterly nonsensical expressions plastered all over the clothes of the (probably self-defined) ‘trendy’ Japanese people I’ve come across in the ‘cooler’ areas of Tokyo, most notably Ikebukuro and Shibuya. I’m not really referring to the weak innuendos and borderline cataclysmic humour that pervades Western equivalents – the sort of vomit-inducing Primark slogans like “Tackle me” or “Learner”, or the faux-cute “Little Princess” or “Daddy’s Girl” found increasingly on the bibs and t-shirts of children who haven’t even made it to the age of 1, worn fairly often by women devoid of any sense of public decency who are also nearing the age of retirement. I’m talking more about a cross between the ‘lost in translation’ effect seen famously on Chinese attempts at English translations of various traffic signs, which have generally found their way onto, and are now plastered all over, the internet forums and chatrooms of a mocking Anglophone public, and the sort of vacuous phrases found in more sober clothing ranges of the main high-street chains of continental Europe. I’ll give you an example: I own a bunch of t-shirts with some pretty incongruous but ultimately bland phrases on them – “LRS Production Inc. – MIS Polar B LRN 2054 NT rctic [sic] Operations” or even “Western Sails 33 Yacht Hire Port Authority Est. 1964” (the second one is actually an M&S creation). I am neither a member of a conglomerate engaged in exploration around the North Pole, nor do I have even the remotest interest in boats or sailing – yet I own the t-shirts because they fit, they are comfortable, they look half-decent, they were affordable and they fulfil all the basic functions I expect from an item of clothing. Am I making a statement about my job or interests? No. Do people use writing and symbols on clothes for just such a purpose? Yes. Is there therefore a discrepancy here that I can blog about? Yes.

By extension, I assume that plenty of the wearers of the more outlandishly-decorated clothing here gave as little thought to the content of the writing on their clothes as I did, and merely chose on the overall impression (colour, shape, fit &c). If anything, I reckon I can safely say that they probably gave even less thought than I did, since while the Roman alphabet is familiar to me from my mother tongue, Japanese people are understandably reticent about learning romaji. So they might not even be able to read, let alone understand or interpret, what the statements on their clothes are essentially implying about them. Let me illustrate with some of the better examples. One of the most elaborate I’ve seen was the phrase “My body is a temple but it sometimes needs a little paint”, displayed on the back of a black t-shirt worn by a Japanese ex-metalhead with hair dyed blonde, a leather beret, a lot of rock-bling, tight leather trousers, a huge belt, and a vacuous but vaguely pretty girl half his age on his arm. Since I was stood behind them on one of the longest escalators in Shibuya station, I had plenty of time to observe and muse over the phrase. Is it a sexual innuendo? Is it talking about plastic surgery? Or maybe tattoos? Is it just supposed to be a play on the Confucian equivalent of mens sana in corpore sano? No idea, if I’m honest. At least it was a grammatical sentence though… the next one to stick in the mind was “Crazy Slowly Walking”, on the front of a demure-looking Japanese woman, possibly in her mid-20s, who had indeed apparently never learnt the meaning of speed. But why “crazy”? What, in a linguistics sense, is it supposed to be modifying? Ostensibly, “walking” – but with the presence of “slowly”, “walking” is no longer a noun but a participle, which should make “crazy” an ‘advective’ (a word that works as both adverb and adjective, e.g. ‘fast’, or ‘good’ and ‘real’ in non-standard English), and ‘crazy’ is not a word that really fits into that category very well…

Even less grammatical was “Run You Run”, which I saw on the t-shirt of a woman who for reasons of physionomy would have had serious trouble following this advice – the absence of punctuation, specifically of at least one comma (which might imply an explanation) or even two (which would result in a double-imperative) caused me so much grief that I spent a fair distance between train station and apartment spluttering irascibly to myself, to the obvious surprise of numerous passers-by. The oddities aren’t restricted to English either – at the start of my stay here, I saw a man wearing a t-shirt that proclaimed “Je m’appelle Théodore”, who, judging by his ethnicity, is about as likely to be called Théodore as I am Kazuhiro or Shuichi. But the prize for weirdest phrase by far has to go to the single word I saw on the t-shirt of a short middle-aged man with a rucksack and large glasses: “Lubricants”. Nothing else, just “Lubricants”. As far as I could see, it wasn’t an advert or some kind of brand-name – though I was in the vicinity of the Harajuku branch of Condomania (no, I haven’t been inside yet, don’t really intend to go there either), which added enough irony to the chance encounter that I shrieked with laughter (often a traumatic experience for the unprepared) as soon as I saw it. Needless to say, the object of my mirth didn’t have the faintest clue what I was laughing about – unless, of course, it was part of a rather elaborate double-bluff…