Japanese Slang (33 page)

•   
Chotto suk
to makutte mira yo! Furusato sawatte yaru kara sa.
Lift your skirt a bit! I wanna feel your birthplace.

Other powerful and elderly vocabulary is
obake
(ghost),
okame,
a smiling fat-faced woman's mask
used in Kabuki theater, and the strange but popular expression
waraji
(straw sandals).

•   
Na! Oji-chan wa om
no waraji ni shita tsukkomashite kure yo!
C'mon, let uncle lick your straw sandals!

6
Provincial Vaginas

TRAVELING THE whole length of Japan, from northern Hokkaido to southern Okinawa, enquiring tourists are stunned by the variety and vibrancy of the slang words they encounter for the female organ. Although urban acquaintances back in Tokyo might have warned them that the Japanese, especially in the provinces, never refer directly to sexual organs, as the travelers make their way from village to village questioning farmers, field hands, truck drivers, and local housewives, the list of unspeakable words grows and grows.

The two most prominent Japanese words for vagina are
omanko
and
omeko. Omanko,
along with its shorter form
manko,
has its linguistic seat in the Tokyo area and is popular throughout all the northern provinces as far as the port city of Hakodate on Hokkaido.
Omeko'
s domain is the south, from the cities of Nagoya, Osaka, and Kyoto, down to the island of Kyushu.

As one drives from Tokyo to the northern tip of Honshu,
omanko
appears with different lilts. On the street corners of Fujiyoshida, west of Tokyo, one hears the curt
oma;
in nearby K
fu city it is the drawn-out
omanch
,
while in the more isolated regions of
northern Gunma,
omanko
is used alongside
ochanko,
which in its turn has developed in neighboring areas into
chanko, ochako, chako (cho,
for short). In the western province of Ishikawa it even appears as
chancha
and
chacha.

In the south,
omeko
is dominant. Its territory stretches from the Kansai region all the way down to the isolated Pacific fishing villages of Miyazaki on the island of Kyushu. Like
omanko,
its northern rival,
omeko
comes in many regional forms. On the streets of Hiroshima, for instance, it has evolved into
omech
, omench
(sometimes also pronounced
omencho),
and in some districts
omencha, omecha,
and
mencha.
In Kobe, the sharper
ome
is often preferred in rough street speech, while fifty miles down the road, in the seaside province of Tottori,
omeko
is used with deference, while its local variations
omecha, omencho,
and
mencho
spring up in raunchier conversations.

Further down, on the coastal roads of Shimane, the northern
omanko
and the southern
omeko
meet. The result is
omenko,
which, as one drives between the seaside towns of Hamada and Masuda, is transformed into
menko, meme,
and even
memeko.
In K
chi, on the island of Shikoku, both
meko
and
manko
are used interchangeably without the honorific prefix
“o
,” while on the nearby island of Kyushu,
omeko
has evolved into
meicho, meme, meme-jo
(
meme
-woman),
meme-ko
(
meme
-girl),
meme-san
(Ms. Meme), and even
meme sama
(Lady Meme).

•   
Aitsu to wa nagaku tsukiat
kedo, mada ikkai mo omeko mita koto nai tai.
Even though we've been dating for a long time, I've never seen her twat.

•   
Honna kotsu! Aitsu ikkai mo meicho yarashite kuren ken n
!
Man! She never lets me put it in her twat!

•   
Meme-jo kakusan' to minna ni mirareru bai?
Come on, cover your twat! D'you want everyone to see it?

The traveling linguist quickly realizes that Japanese dialectology is full of pitfalls. No sooner has a taboo word been netted in one village than it tends to reappear a few miles down the road with a completely different meaning.
Ikimi
(breathing body) in the northern prefecture of Aomori means “vagina” in Akita, sixty miles away, local hoodlums use it exclusively to discuss anuses. In Miyagi,
bekya
is an ordinary vagina, while a few miles north, in Iwate,
beke
or
beky
is a shaved organ. In southern Japan,
meko
and
menko
are unmentionably crass words for vagina; in the mountains of northern Japan
meko
or
menko
is a pretty and well-behaved pre-teen girl.
Okama,
a word for iron pot that has been nationally appropriated to mean “homosexual,” is used in Tochigi and Gunma for “vagina,” and in other areas further south for “anus.” Then in some areas of Gifu, in central Japan,
okama
turns into a brawny and politically incorrect provincial word for “physically challenged,” while in other areas of Gifu
okama! okama!
means “mommy! mommy!”