I read once, many years ago, that the Japanese language contains no profanity, so when a Japanese person feels the need to swear, he or she uses profanity from English or another language.
Any truth to this?
What I’ve been told (but IANA Japanese) is that there are some terms of varying degrees of rudeness but the only word that’s really off limits is omanko (though maybe even that is not so taboo at this point). Whether native speakers have recourse to foreign cuss words, I don’t know.
I don’t know Japanese, but this sounds suspiciously like the claim made by a Japanese character in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel You Only Live Twice that Japanese has no obscenities or swear words. According to this character (Tiger Tanaka, IIRC), the only verbal recourse of an exasperated Japanese person who just hit his finger with a hammer or some such is to exclaim “I have made a mistake (shimatta)!”
If you ask me, this claim is probably right up there with the urban legend (from the same novel) about Japanese sumo wrestlers deliberately retracting their testicles. But I defer to the better information of people who, like, actually know Japanese.
It’s a matter of structure. In English, profanities involve references to taboo parts, activities or status: fuck(very rude form of copulate), shit(very rude form of feces), bastard(reference to illegitimacy), cunt)rude reference to vagina), motherfucker(rude reference to incest)…
In Japanese, there is much more in the way that politeness level infuses the language itself. Hence, one may curse in Japanese, but curse words aren’t required, that is, cursing in Japanese is a matter of using an innappropriately high level of rudeness.
Having said that, Japanese borrows words via Katakana, where the imported word is re-expressed as a phonetically similar form. “Fuck you”, for example, becomes “Fakkyuu”.
In short: the Japanese language enables profanity as very rude usage of existing language: specialized words aren’t needed.
In the aforementioned You Only Live Twice, Fleming claims the insult words are konishikiyo, or “bloody fool”, or bakyaro, or “you animal”, which are “deadly insults”. Not sure how accurate this is, although a Japanese I used to train with confirmed that the other words Fleming mentioned as “coarse anatomical references” were accurate.
Regards,
Shodan
Thanks, cerberus. That’s what I was wondering about.
On a related note, I saw a photo a while back over at www.engrish.com that depicted an actual (allegedly) billboard in downtown Tokyo. The billboard was advertising a new CD from a popular Japanese rock band. Each of the four band members was wearing an American football helmet, and on each helmet was one Roman letter. With the four guys in a row, their helmets spelled out F-U-C-K.
My daughter, who spent a year over there, said that yes, there are words which are considered inappropriate and simply aren’t used in polite speaking or writing. She considers kuso to be a quite literal translation for shit. She also said there are certain verb forms which are off-limits – like the English difference between “screw” (with a screwdriver) and “screw yourself.”
Ehhh, sort of, but mostly no. In English we have this odd concept called “bad words”, words which, if used, would indicate disrespect to the audience. Japanese is more of a high-context language that doesn’t really have the concept of “bad words”, but rest assured, when they want to offend, ample techniques are available. They do *not *need to resort to English (unless the target understands English and not Japanese).
An example is the word “kuso”, or “shit.” If you say it to yourself about something you’ve done, you’ve used a swear word, but nobody’s going to get upset. If you say it in a group about something someone else has done, you have “sworn at them” and you risk whatever consequences that entails. So the concept of “swearing at someone” exists, but not really the concept of “swear words.”
Not to be all Japanophile about it, but I think this is one way Japanese is superior to English. Who decided “shit” was a “bad word” anyway? I hear tell that vigilant moms are now telling their kids that “shut up” is a bad word. Where all this is going, I don’t want to know.
That makes sense.
That’s nothing new - I heard the same thing from my mom 30 years ago.
Yes, and 300 years ago you’d have been thrown in the stocks (OK, so I mixing my centuries) for saying “Jesus Christ!” on the street. I think things are getting more permissive, not less.
The other Thanksgiving, I was working on a project (hooking a rug) at the cottage, and showing my little cousin what I was doing. At one point I made a mistake and said “oh, stupid thing.” She ran to her mommy saying “Matt said a bad word!”
We laughed and had a little talk about how it’s okay to call your own things stupid if you’re upset with them, but not other people or their things. Likewise, I was told it was rude to say “shut up,” which it kind of is, but I understood it wasn’t a taboo word like the f-bomb. All these things get worked out eventually.
When I lived there many years ago, about the worst things you could say about anybody were “bakadari” (or just “baka”) and “aho” which mean fool.
My Japanse wife is amused here in Arizona because there is town called Ajo, which is pronounced “aho.”
Also, the American Indians have the word “aho” too which IIRC means something like “peace” but they have learned to refrain from using it if any Japanese are around. The Indians I know think this is quite funny.
A female co-worker of mine from Japan told me once (over a few beers) that to call a japanese woman a bitch would have no effect because it simply translates as “female dog” and carries no negative connotation with it in japanese. She told me if you wanted to insult a japanese woman just call her a “big cow” and that she would understand your meaning and be insulted. I of course had to try it out in a sentance and asked her later to “Bring me another beer you big cow!”. 
She didn’t slap me, but if looks could kill. :eek: I then pondered out loud if that would be an insult or compliment to a hindu woman.
I do have to add a couple of things I said before…
Taboo words do exist in Japanese although they’re rare. “Omanko” (pussy) gets bleeped on TV; I never heard any other word get bleeped on TV.
Also, many languages have some kind of honorific inflection or tense, but Japanese can be very anal about this. For example, if you use the plain form of the imperative, if you aren’t a policeman or a VIP, the target had better be a child or an obvious inferior, or else you will get a serious eat-shit look. Using the plain declarative form with a superior might earn you a chewing-out for acting familiar to an insubordinate degree. Again, not due to the taboo of the specific word, but saying the wrong thing for the context. Japanese is all about context. Just thought I’d mention that to scare the piss out of anybody thinking about studying Japanese 
but foreigners do get a little leeway on these, at least initially.
Same here-until I was maybe five or six I was convinced that “shut up” was just as much a swear as shit or fuck.
I was going to mention this. A number of anime-themed websites talk about the “name suffixes” that Japanese uses. Basically, when you say some’s name in Japanese, you append an honorific to the end. Like how James Bond is addressed as “Bond-san” in that one film, or how a martial arts master is always adressed as “-sensei.” Using the wrong suffix (or ommiting it entirely) can be quite insulting. For example, the suffix “-chan” is normally used to address close friends or family members, and using it for someone who is neither would be very rude.
So far in this thread, I’ve learned how to be rude (avoid honorific inflections, say aho and “you big cow”) and how to be obscene (say omanko), but I still don’t know what to say when I hit my thumb with a hammer.
There are lots and lots of names for genitalia, both male and female; bodily function words, though those tend to feel much tamer in Japanese; and profane words. There are several slang dictionaries out there that will teach you more rude words and references than you can handle. Word of warning though, the slang changes almost as fast as English slang does, so some of the published stuff is already pretty dated.
One of my favorite crude terms is age-man, which is a compound word combining ageru (to elevate, raise) and manko (cunt), that was referenced above. It could be translated as “the cunt that elevates,” meaning that things are going well because of your current lay; your new pussy brought you good luck. I like it because it’s not only extremely crude – the 10 year old boy in me likes that kind of thing sometimes – but it also sounds a lot like age-pan, which is a fried bread pastry a little bit like a doughnut. Since some people have an annoying habit of using food as terms of endearment, I enjoy the hell out of that pun. I’m extremely lucky that my fiance has a very un-Japanese twisted sense of humor (and possibly the patience of a saint).
As others have already pointed out, the usual way to insult someone is by using inappropriate levels of politeness, or lack thereof. You can be more cutting by using honorifics and ultra-polite speech forms with friends than you can by saying something like anta, inu-no-ketsu wo peropero nametteru otoko da na! (you [crude] are a guy who licks dogs’ assholes). While that sentence is in my best gutter-Japanese slang, and is insulting in its terms of address and grammar, you’d probably never hear a native Japanese speaker saying something so elaborate. It’s not really necessary when something so simple as being overly-polite can be a signal that you want to create social distance between you and the person you’re addressing, and depending on your prior relationship can be far more devastating than the equivalent of cussing that person out.
It’s simply not true that they don’t have rude words, though.
itei – (crude short form of itai) ow
kuso – shit
shimatta – in this context it feels like “dammit” does in English
Can’t really think of other phrases that would normally be used. Somebody else might know more.