Wednesday, February 11, 2009

from: James T.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 3:00 PM
subject: hanzismatter.com submission

Hi, thought you might get a kick out of this. I saw it in my local Asda supermarket (in the UK). I take it to be 女耳魚号日月 (woman, ear, fish, number, day, month) and 雨馬魚耳雲 (rain, horse, fish, ear, cloud), with the middle two 実神 meaning 'true god'. Dunno if thats the same that it is in Chinese, but I have to say that no truly authentic Tokyoite from Shinjuku would wear this shirt, except ironically I guess!

Loved the site for years!
James



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7 comments:

  1. Alan SiegristFebruary 11, 2009 at 5:42 PM

    Hah! If they are going to put Chinese or Japanese on a T-shirt, why not try to make it actually mean something, rather than just random characters?

    By the way, the characters "魚号" on the top are actually the simplified Chinese characters 鱼 (=魚) and 马 (=馬).

    I can't read the ones on the bottom too well, though.

    -Alan

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  2. GlennFebruary 12, 2009 at 2:22 PM

    It's very strange that they would use the simplified version of 鱼 and 马 on the top, and then immediately use the traditional version on the bottom. But I guess it shouldn't be surprising, as whoever "designed" the shirt obviously had no clue what any of these characters mean.

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  3. KanjiFebruary 15, 2009 at 5:04 PM

    I am from Tokyo and know some Chinese too. This T does not make any sense. It looks like a T I saw in Seattle, that says I am a stupid American in Japanese. Watashi wa bakana amerika jin desu, like that.

    Don't take it so seriously.

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  4. DangyFebruary 20, 2009 at 4:24 AM

    There are a bunch of T-Shirts in Sydney that say "Superdry" in English, with 極度乾燥しなさい in Japanese underneath. Machine Translation sucks.

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  5. Qi ChinFebruary 25, 2009 at 10:32 AM

    Actually, I'm thinking that the first character on the bottom reads 爾, which on its own is the literary "you" (sort of like thou, I guess). Not that that helps the T-shirt.

    Qi

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  6. AnonymousMarch 16, 2009 at 3:28 PM

    Yup, I saw someone wear this very t-shirt when I went bowling the other day. When I told my dad what it meant, neither of us could stop sniggering at the guy. He probably thought he had something meaningful on his shirt. I really want to buy this when I next go to ASDA, just for laughs :D

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  7. benApril 21, 2009 at 9:15 AM

    The bottom characters are 爾屬魚耳雲 which is the traditional forms of 尔属鱼耳云. This obviously makes no sense at all!

    実神 is Japanese in origin, and I believe is pronounced mikami. Well, I'm 100% sure of the kami part.

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