This is How to Japanese, a monthly newsletter with something about Japan/Japanese, something about booze, and a dash of いろいろ.
日本・日本語: Self-imposed Obstacles
Google failed me, despite my best efforts to corral an answer using “”.
In the January newsletter I included a tweet that used the phrase 私とズバってください (Watashi to zubatte kudasai). I have to confess I didn’t know what it meant. I did a quick search, couldn’t turn up anything that seemed to fit, but I also didn’t find anything damning or embarrassing and it wasn’t the core part of the tweet I was using, so I decided to go with it and hoped for the best.
I couldn’t get rid of the itch of not knowing what it meant, so I searched a little more before relenting and enlisting the help of a friend who pointed me toward this definition of バズる (bazuru, literally “to buzz” i.e. go viral).
Enka singer Hikawa Kiyoshi apparently transposed the first two characters of the word during a 2019 television appearance, creating a viral moment on the Japanese internet.
演歌歌手の氷川きよしさんによる新しいネット用語「ズバってる」がバズっている。
A new Internet phrase “zubatteru” is buzzing because of enka singer Hikawa Kiyoshi.
(English had an equivalent moment in “hodl,” which has also taken on a life of its own.)
Finding this scratched my itch for a moment.
And then the itch was back.
As I’d been searching for an answer, I came across a lot of different patterns, ones that didn’t square with ズバってください. What I was seeing made ズバって feel more like an adverb than a verb. Phrases like this:
ズバって言う (zubatte iu)
ズバって書く (zubatte kaku)
Which brings me to a classic Mitch Hedberg joke:
People ask me what words mean... they say, "what does 'composition' mean?" Some people would say, "put it in a sentence." But I need a little more. "Put it in a play."
Never before had this felt more true for me. I just didn’t have enough to hold on to with the tweets and one-off lines here and there. I needed something meatier.
Fortunately I found it in this essay 承認欲求が強かった私に天才ダンサーが教えてくれた生き方. (Shōnin yokkyū ga tsuyokatta watashi ni tensai dansā ga oshiete kureta ikikata, literally: “What a talented dancer taught me and my need for social approval about how to live”) I can’t speak for the website itself (and the essay seems taken from some kind of MEXT project?), but I found this to be an engaging read about a dancer desperate for recognition.
The writing is a masterclass in living Japanese grammatical patterns. You’ve got verbs of giving and receiving, 体言止め (taigendome, sentences ending in a noun), complete incomplete sentences, casual instances of 笑 just sitting there on their own. I’d go as far as saying that it deserves a place in any Japanese classroom, given all the ground that you can cover. (It reminds me of why I used to teach “This is Why I’ll Never be an Adult” to freshmen in my intro writing class even though it’s a visual essay; it captures the essence of personal writing far more deftly than many essays do.)
It also happens to contain an example of ズバって that finally helped me get a handle on how it’s working.
In the essay, the narrator makes friends with a really talented dancer. The narrator had put lots of time and money into classes and practice and then into teaching hip hop dance but unfortunately hadn’t had much success, which led to fewer students, earning less commission on the classes, eventually needing to take a part time job to pay the bills, which meant less time to practice dancing. A vicious cycle.
She hears a rumor that her friend was offered a job with an entertainment group and could have gone on tour as a backup dancer. “And I turned it down!” the friend says.
The narrator is livid—the friend could have had everything she herself ever wanted: fame, success, recognition. The friend then asks her if she’s living only to be praised by other people, which kind of shakes the narrator.
The narrator understands conceptually that she shouldn’t be living her life based on what other people think/value, but she can’t quite put it into practice like her dancer friend.
すると、「他者評価を捨てないと、お前ずっと息苦しいぞ?」とズバって言われてしまったんです。
私にとって、「息苦しい」という言葉がぴったりハマった瞬間。
At that point, he straight up told me, “If you don’t ignore what others think of you, are you going to just keep suffocating?”
For me, the word “suffocating” so perfectly fit that moment.
I’m still not totally confident translating the phrase; I rendered it here as “straight up.” It describes the speed with which he says the phrase as well as how directly he says it. But I’m far more confident in my understanding of the phrase.
With this as a foundation, I dug around online a little more and found a definition of すばっと (zubatto), which seems to be a possible linguistic relative. It describes the way an arrow or spear hits something (as well as its sound?) and also can be used to describe doing something quickly and precisely.
An ironic definition given how winding my path to understanding was.
But the path is the point. There’s no straight path to fluency. And you only march onward toward the horizon, past every obstacle you come across; the obstacles are the point. I’d even say you have to set them up yourself only to knock them down.
What kind of obstacles are you setting up for yourself?
My vote is for more random Japanese internet essays and blogs like this.
ビール: Novelty and Beer Packaging
Asahi Super Dry is sold out in Japan.
Yet more proof that novelty rules the beer industry. (Especially in Japan. It’s critical to remember that Super Dry itself was the most successful novelty in Japanese beer history other than the initial introduction of beer into the country.) For more context, Asahi recently released a pop-top can that imitates draft beer, perfect for 生-thirsty consumers who are being encouraged to stay home. This TikTok got some traction, as did Hiroki-san’s remix:
Pop-top cans were a phase in American brewing called the “360 beer can,” and it lasted from 2014 until around 2019 or so. Only a few breweries gave them a try. They were hard to market and sell because they were actually illegal in many states due to litter laws? (Thanks, big government, taking away my right to toss my beer lids wherever the wind will take them.)
But there are more interesting stories to tell about beer packaging. In the United States, we’ve had a major change in the past 10 years. This photo, for example, is ancient history:
We’ve gone from craft beer in bottles (both 12oz and 22oz “bombers”) almost exclusively to 12oz cans, to 16oz “tallboy” cans in four-packs, and more recently to large formats like 12-, 15-,18-, and even 20-packs for money makers like All Day IPA.
Check out the dramatic death of the All Day IPA glass six-pack in this chart from this article:
One other interesting note from this chart is the growth of the “stovepipe” can. Stovepipe cans are 19.2oz, a perfect imperial pint. I was nostalgically drawn to a stovepipe of Arrogant Bastard Ale the other day, which got me thinking about single serving beers sizes.
If the height of the stovepipe hasn’t hit you just yet, take a look at this comparison. Here’s a stovepipe lined up next to a tallboy, a regular can, and one of Off Color Brewing’s 250ml bottles. (For more perspective, 19.2oz is just 3.2oz shy of your Japanese 大瓶, which sits at 633ml/22.4oz.)
A couple years ago, Off Color started selling some of their stronger beers and sour/wild beers in four-packs of 250ml rather than a single 750ml bottle. I remember being confused at first, especially given the $20 price point on many of the four-packs. That is until I brought one of them home. Being able to divide a larger format into several single servings had me enjoying Off Color beer more often because I didn’t have to commit myself to 2+ servings of a more extreme beer. During that same time, larger format bottles have languished in my beer cellar.
According to Off Color, this has taken work.
It will be interesting to see if these stick around or if they go the way of pop-top cans. Unlike pop tops, the 250ml meet a consumer need; they do not, however, have that powerful novelty factor (which Off Color has been harnessing in other areas). I wonder if the even smaller 8oz can might be the perfect solution here that combines the best of both worlds: the convenience of a can, a format smaller than even 250ml (8.45oz), and the novelty of a truly diminutive cylinder compared to the more and more ubiquitous craft in a can.
いろいろ
I was in The Japan Times in late-March with an article about the language of investing. You can find bonus blog coverage here. I forgot to link this really interesting (and English-language) look at 優待 (yūtai, shareholder hospitality), the tax-advantaged gifts like gift cards and bags of rice that corporations give to shareholders.
This article is the clearest explanation of まん延防止等重点措置 (man’en bōshi tō jūten sochi, priority measures to prevent rapid spread), which is absolutely the word of the past month in Japan. I hope everyone there is keeping safe. Things sound pretty dicey.
Related: I asked about what role 等 is playing over on Quora.
YouTube helped me discover another excellent collaboration between harpist Catrin Finch and kora player Seckou Keita: Clychau Dibon. Great music for focused writing and working.
I can thank Spotify for introducing me to The Cactus Blossoms’ debut album You’re Dreaming. I have a weakness for solid country western. And now I’m realizing I had a song from their latest album on my 2020 playlist.
A great thread on the translation (and mistranslations) of 許さない (yurusanai).