ARmy Rumour SErvice

Originally Posted by redleg6

Originally Posted by Tawahi-50

Originally Posted by redleg6

Look, the Japs were brutal to all non-Japanese. They see non-Japanese as subhuman. A few years ago, while passing through Narita, I was called a gaijan, the Jap equivalent of the N-word.

I guess by the N-Word you perhaps mean Non-domiciled?
Still I can imagine the humiliation of being referred to as a gaijin, -literally a person from abroad-we all know that even in Narita it's them that are the foreigners, not us!

Today, gaijan is translated to mean "foreigner" however, it has a much, much more negative, racist connotation...more like filthy dog. They Japanese are very ethnocentric, to the point of racist people.

Very few foreigners here are offended by the word 'gaijin' in fact that is how we refer to ourselves not only amongst ourselves but also when speaking with Japanese, even during business meetings.
Gaijin means 'outside person' and therefore refers to anyone who comes from outside of the country. Although some Japanese have used it with overly negative connotations (and how they view and treat foreigners could be the subject of a very lengthy post so I wont go into it here - but suffice to say it is a mixed bag) no one that I know of would put its use on a par with the N word.

As an aside, the word 'Jap' is considered to be offensive and is never used.

Originally Posted by Tawahi-50

I see this in a different way, the Chinese don't write more or less the same as the Japanese.
A Chinese newspaper would be as unintelligible to a Japanese as would a Japanese paper to a Chinese, or indeed as the Frankfurter Algemeine would be to the average British soldier arriving in BFG.

True. The characters might be similar (Japanese writing was an adaptation of Chinese characters after all) but the meaning isn't always the same. For example, I read "二日酔い" as "èr rì zuì " - "No.2 drunk Japanese" or possibly "stupid drunken Japanese". I hope that's not what you meant.

Having said that, one of the Jade Dream's aunts works in Kyoto and found the transition was made slightly easier by the fact that she was already semi-literate before she arrived.

Originally Posted by smartascarrots

Originally Posted by Tawahi-50

I see this in a different way, the Chinese don't write more or less the same as the Japanese.
A Chinese newspaper would be as unintelligible to a Japanese as would a Japanese paper to a Chinese, or indeed as the Frankfurter Algemeine would be to the average British soldier arriving in BFG.

True. The characters might be similar (Japanese writing was an adaptation of Chinese characters after all) but the meaning isn't always the same. For example, I read "二日酔い" as "èr rì zuì " - "No.2 drunk Japanese" or possibly "stupid drunken Japanese". I hope that's not what you meant.

No that's not what I meant; 二日酔い actually means 'Hangover' in Japanese. A literal translation would be 'Two day intoxication'

Why should I refer to the poster, Futsukayoi, by calling him 'Hangover'?
Well the clue is in the romanisation of 二日酔い - 'Futsukayoi' !

The difference between Japanese and Chinese writing is a bit more complex. True, Japan uses Chinese characters but only a much smaller number- a reasonably educated Japanese is only required to learn about 1800 Chinese originated characters compare with the Chinese having to learn (as far as I recall) about 4000 of their own characters. That doesn't give the Chinese person a greater vocabulary, just means he or she has to work a darn sight harder.
But the really hard part only comes next!-learning the compounds of characters, because individual chars don't usually mean much on their own.

Plus lots of the Chinese characters, especially the more complex ones have been simplified by the Japanese over the years so they might not recognise many of the original characters.

But- there's more!
In addition from the characters taken from the Chinese, virtually all Japanese writing will contain another two Japanese only scripts or 'alphabets', the phonetic hiragana and katakana.

Bletchley Park had a hard time with the German codes, imagine the trouble their colleagues in the Far East, and the Americans had in breaking the Japanese codes!

Many thanks, that's most interesting.

I love ARRSE, you can find a subject expert on just about everything!

Channel 4 are doing a back to back "Flags of our fathers, letters from Iwo Jima" on sunday night at 2200

I have been trying to catch those films for some time now...thanks Tropper

An interesting post, my Mother is Japanese, the family name from that side being Furihata...The long departed Grandfather came across on the Merchants before the war and stayed as he didn't like what was happening back there.

Guess which side I had to be on when we played 'Japs and Commando's' as a kid?

Some recent insight into the Jap mentality. Cheerful fellows...

Human bones could reveal truth of Japan's 'Unit 731' experiments

More than 60 years after the end of the Second World War, the name "Unit 731" still has the power to generate shock, revulsion and denial in Japan.
The Imperial Japanese Army's notorious medical research team carried out secret human experiments regarded as some of the worst war crimes in history.

Its scientists subjected more than 10,000 people per year to grotesque Josef Mengele-style torture in the name of science, including captured Russian soldiers and downed American aircrews.

The experiments included hanging people upside down until they choked, burying them alive, injecting air into their veins and placing them in high-pressure chambers.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...periments.html

Yes but the RAF used WMDs(Poison Gas) against civilians in Russia and Iraq in the 1920s it never ceases to amaze me how much of our history is airbrushed out