The Eternal Gaijin

FARK.com: (2831792) Japanese shopping center mascot accidentally named for slang term used to describe gay-themed manga. Since this is Japan, he is now wildly popular with nation's youth A few years ago the Asashi Evening News rolled itself into the International Herald Tribune and got a major boost in quality and quantity. A much better paper was forged out of this. Especially when compared with the typo-heavy Daily Yomiuri . Anyway the Asahi website has the full article: asahi.com : KYOTO: Queer coincidence turns shopping center's mascot into 'otaku' superstar - ENGLISH It appears that there is a local shopping street in the area around a shrine in Kyoto (please, kyo-toe , not Ki-yoh-toe . Write your MP) needed a mascot and a young girl designed one. 801-chan, pronounced "Yaoi-chan," is the mascot for the Misonobashi 801 shopping district, not far from Kyoto's World Heritage Kamigamojinja shrine. And true to its roots, the character was inspired by Ky...

Because I've just started to post at Vox as well as Blogger, I thought I'd cross post this to the other blog . Kansai (関西) -- the region of western Japan including Kyoto, Nara, Osaka and Kobe and environs -- has it's own dialect of Japanese that is significantly different to the (Tokyo) standard. Like all countries, people speak differently from place to place. The differences can be subtle, as in Southern Ontario vs Northern Michigan, or they can be blatant enough to be noticeable to non-native and native speakers alike, as comparing Middlesbrough, Newfoundland and Texas might demonstrate. Kansai-ben is probably closer to the Middlesbrough to London type of comparison, with Kansai being Middlesbrough for our purposes. So here is today's East meets West comparison English: Thank you. Tokyo Dialect: Arigato Gozaimasu (有り難うございますor ありがとうございます) Kansai Dialect: Maido Okini (毎度おきに.) Please feel free to use this with family and friends -- From: The Eternal Gaijin Lost Somewh...