The Lagoon

Have you ever seen a badly translated Japanese T-shirt? Something like "Everyday can be refreshed. Believe in hope" or "Just this one chance. Dragons." Well, in Japan, they're everywhere. Despite a culture that is totally mired in English logos and words, the average Japanese person probably can't understand an English T-shirt (from my own personal experience, in my area of Japan. I don't like to make generalizations). Or, if they can understand them, the company that writes and presses them has no ability to write coherently. And really, who writes them? I've seen shirts with up-to-date slang, though totally misused. How can Japanese companies be so clued in, and so clueless? This is my story...

The friends that I've made in the nearby town of Higashimatsuyama all hang out at a bar, that I frequent once every one or two weeks. Lately, I've been hanging out with many of the Japanese locals there, when the other English teachers aren't around. They're all really great people, fixed-gear bicycle enthusiasts and entrepreneurs. There's a bar owner, a norwegian furniture importer and salesman (as well as his staff) and they collectively own a T-shirt company. Can you guess where this is going?
One night, after a few too many drinks, I was giving bad English lessons in exchange for some Japanese tutoring. I taught my friend a "scale of cool" with Awesome, Sweet, Cool, Sucks, Shitty, etc. all on the list. Seperately, because they are all bike enthusiasts, I taught them the phrase "to eat shit," meaning to fall off your bike and hurt yourself. Well, I guess they had a few too many drinks, or I wasn't so good at explaning. In any case, I come back three weeks later, and another friend of mine is wearing a shirt that says "Religion, Eat Shit" with a star of David in mid star-swipe across his chest.

I'll give you a moment to think about this.

Finished? Okay ... so, I immediately complement him on his shirt. Honestly, it does look awesome. So, I ask him what it means, and he launches into a pretty bizarre explanation about how all religions are the same, and help people and they need to recognize their common beliefs and such. Then he mentions something about how Japan was founded by Jews...but, I chose not to probe that comment too far. In any case, I told him what it really means, but I'm not sure that he fully understood. And...now there's a couple crates of these shirts around.

Where do these shirts come from? I'm not sure if I should be pleased or disappointed in myself, but I can say with the utmost certainty that they (sometimes) come from me. I am prepared to take my spot in the Japanese history books.