Sakura

Once a year, at the turn of spring, the entirety of Japan turns from this...

...to this:

Now before I get into all my words, take a minute and just look at the photos below. Take a good, long look. 

I know I'm no pro photographer but...can you feel it?

Now as stunning as these trees are, equally or even more amazing is how perfect every single petal is. Every one. Every solitary petal on every single one of the uncountable millions of blossoms.

Look.

Sakura (cherry blossoms) inspire so much more than happiness in Japan. They are far more than just the heralds of spring. The experience, to me, can only be described as spiritual.

Let me see if I can do it even some bit of justice with a low-grade camera, questionable photography skills, and mere, mortal words.

Sakura bloom en-masse only once a year: when it becomes warm after a long period of cold. Great resources are expended to predict when exactly this will be, but no one can tell for certain. Because they are tied to the weather patterns, they can be extremely fickle. Sometimes, if you get a warm spell in winter, a tree or two will decide to bloom - treasures, for sure, but very isolated ones. They can also tease you, like they did this year. They'll start, popping out a glorious bloom or two...

...and then decide that it's too cold and wet and hold back their splendor for another week. Though I can't say I blame them, it was aggravating all the same. 

The most iconic sakura is white and has five, full and rounded petals. 

But there are many varieties in shape, number of petals, and of course, color.

One of my favorites (and I'm clearly not alone in this) - the weeping sakura.

These ones grow in adorable little pompoms!

Bonsai sakura.

My personal favorites - the beloved five-petal shape with a mix of blossoms with yellow-green and pink centers, interspersed lightly with the green of leaves. 

All of them are perfection.

Here are some more varied scenes for your enjoyment:

Sakura lead beautiful, brilliant lives.

But the thing about sakura is that their lives are only half the story. Lots of things are beautiful. Roses, waterfalls, a blue sky, these things can take your breath away too. 

What sets sakura apart isn't just their lives, it's equally or more about their deaths.

Bear with me while I try to explain what the sakura mean to me.

Sakura symbolize mortality, and are a reminder of just how quickly life fades. Their lifespans are staggeringly short. In about a week they reach the mankai, or full-bloom, and from there, they have about another week to gradually wane, and sometimes significantly less if there is wind or rain.

As beautiful as it is, it is also incredibly sobering. Rivers run white with fallen petals, and if you stop to think of what that symbolically is, it's heartbreaking.

There is a word in Japanese - setsunai - that has always intrigued me. There is no true English equivalent - though one dictionary defines it simply as "cruel", and another as "melancholy". It was first explained to me as the feeling you get remembering a past love when a song that was special to the both of you comes on, something beautiful and terrible at the same time. It's sadness, but colored with nostalgia - a mixture deeper than sadness alone for the beautiful memories of the past. 

Whether or not I have the true meaning of setsunai right, that's the kind of feeling I get walking alone through the remains of the sakura.

The poet Kobayashi Issa said:

"What a strange thing!

To be alive

beneath cherry blossoms."

If you look up Japanese poems and quotes on sakura, you will find that for every one that is celebratory, there is at least one more that is sober, pensive, or outright sad. This is why I don't like to say that salura are just a "symbol of spring". Yes, they are, but that's only a fraction of the story! I do not think anyone in Japan looks at sakura and feels the same way we in America feel about, say, Easter bunnies and chicks and tulip buds. It's not a giddy, light-and-sparkles happy. From the very first blossom, everyone knows that this will not last. They are, in every sense, a reminder that life is short.

Which brings me to my favorite lesson of all to be learned from the sakura:

Life will not last, so live it. 

Now.

Everything grinds to a halt for the sakura. People travel great lengths to see sakura, or wait for twenty-hours or more to stake out a picnic spot beneath the trees. The teen with her smartphone is trying to preserve on her smartphone as many precious sakura moments as the seventy-year-old man is with his camera, despite how many sakura cycles he has seen. It is a time to be happy, to enjoy, now, while it lasts. It is a time made precious precisely because it is so short. It's a time to forget the future and let go of the past and live in the moment - to literally stop and smell the flowers.

Live now, and live beautifully.

It's a lesson I need every single year. 

Luckily, they will be back to remind me.

Festivals and Street Food

Festivals, called "matsuri" in Japanese, are nothing special in that they happen all the time, everywhere. They are, however, VERY special in that they are extremely awesome.

At my local park, they held a festival today, and it was everything I dreamed it would be and more! It was a blast of fun, culture, and SO. MUCH. TASTY. FOOD.

YOU GUYS DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT GLORY PASSED MY LIPS THIS DAY.

I tried to catch as many pictures as I could, but of course, nothing beats being there in person! If you find yourself in Japan, especially in the summer months, find a big festival and experience it, and then find the tiniest, dinkiest little festival and experience that too! It's a must on any tourist's list! (And yes, I am aware that I say that about everything I talk about here. It's absolutely true every single time.)

To add an extra layer of special, the sakura were in full splendor this weekend. I'm still polishing up my super-extra special sakura post, but here's a sneak peak of what Japan looks like right now.

Take a look at this magic.

So for several hours, we wandered under tunnels of sakura, looking at booths, watching performances, getting freebies, and eating food. It was pretty much a perfect day with plenty to do and see and eat!

And thanks to the wonders of technology, I can share these things with you!

Any and all criticisms of my photography will be laughed at. In the "flow" of a festival, it's hard to stay still. You have to move with everyone else. Well you don't have to but you become a roadblock and make small children cry. So yes, these shots were extremely hastily snapped for the sake of the small children toddling along behind me.

This is a game I actually see a lot. You take a rifle, load up with a cork pellet, and try to shoot down a prize off the far wall. If it falls, it's yours, and it's as simple (not easy) as that! The prizes are candies and toys and things that are generally for younger audiences although I've never seen anyone of any age turned away. You're never too old for jumbo Pocky sticks!

This is about as Japanese as you get. This is a good, old-fashioned, man-powered mochi maker! Mochi is pulverized rice. There's...really no other way to describe it. But when I say pulverized, I mean pulverized. Pulverized as in mashed with those hammers on the right, swung down from above your head. Repeatedly. If you beat it long and hard enough, it makes a tasty, sticky goo that has been a treat in Japan since practically the invention of rice. I was disappointed that I didn't get to see it in action...maybe another time.

Look a bit familiar? Maybe it's a bit hard to tell from the picture alone. Fishing for toys out of a vat of circulating water! You use a very delicate net made of paper, which makes it much trickier than it looks! Ever caught anything with wet paper?

My favorite variation of this game is kingyo sukui, or scooping for goldfish, which is extremely difficult because the fish are fast and when you finally catch them they thrash and the wet paper net breaks and then you get no fish. If I see this at another festival, I will be sure to document it. There's also an arcade game which simulates the experience. Set me down at one of those and I'll be content for the rest of time.

See a video of the arcade game here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWHXYLXwR08

There were also no shortage of performances from different regions of Japan! A great thing about Japan is that every area has a unique identity with it's own distinct foods and traditions. And the awesome thing about Tokyo is that people come to us to share those things with us!

There were the more traditional dances:

And the more uh...ECCENTRIC dances (and costumes...):

These guys aren't pro dancers. They are credit union employees. ....My guess from their faces is that this was NOT done on a volunteer basis and it didn't make most of them very happy. 

Also of note: they are singing about a festival from their city of Shibukawa, (I am NOT making this up) the Belly Button Festival. Hear it?? Heso matsuri. You can't un-know this: a belly button festival exists. And if you think for a second that that's not number one on my travel wish list right now, you would be dead wrong.

And what would a Japanese festival be without a ninja? How about one that plays awesome-sauce soccer?

So there's lots to see and do. Let's move on to what there is to EAT. Caution: you should probably only continue if you have a full stomach or this might be excruciating.

Japanese street food is a real treat. I get giddy whenever I see those booths go up. Some of it is very familiar. Some if it is entirely new. And some of it is an entirely new twist on a very familiar food.

Take, for example, the super-potato.

That's not what it's called. I don't know what it's called. But I loved it so much that I made my husband take me back to the festival hours after we had left it just to get another one.

This mountain of joy isn't just any baked potato. It's steamed. Which means you get all the goodness of a baked potato with all the moisture of mashed potatoes. And in case you didn't notice, it's as big as your face. Top it with all-you-can-eat butter served with a spatula out of a five-gallon tub, and what could possibly go wrong? (Contrary to popular belief, the Japanese CAN be really unhealthy when they want to be!)

I may or may not have consumed absolutely ungodly amounts of butter today, which is ok, because my butter and cheese intake has been hovering somewhere between "scant" and "naught" since I got here.

Next: Japanese Shaved Ice

A familiar classic that never goes wrong in any country. Pay for a cup of ice, dump on your syrup(s) of choice. The Japanese do it super well, though. The ice is actually flaked, not pebbled, which means that the syrup is absorbed a bit more instead of taking the express route to the bottom. Also, the container is extremely handy. Not edible, but handy. Also also, one of those bottles is sweetened condensed milk....

In the mood for something a bit more savory? Look no further than okonomiyaki.

Okonomi is roughly "whatever you like", and yaki is "to cook or fry". So...take whatever you like, slap it on a griddle, and you have okonomiyaki! This conglomerate of stuff is beloved throughout Japan, with different regions having their own distinct preferences. Here the base is chopped cabbage, with other goodies like "bacon" (it's ham, don't let the Japanese tell you differently) or fish bits, or other veggies, or practically anything else in the cupboard (I like dem noodles!), and held together with something similar to pancake batter - your standard flour, water, and egg type deal. Fry it, top with sauce, bonito flakes, mayo, an egg, and anything else you haven't used in the cupboard yet, and you have a tasty.

The chef of this stall, upon seeing my obvious foreign heritage, gave me a huge grin when he saw me eyeing his creations. Ever a valiant salesman, he chirped "Japanese Pizza!" in thickly accented English. It made my life. Firstly because, come on, that's extremely targeted advertising, in my native language, and right on the spot. I like dat moxie! And secondly because no, in no way, shape, or form is this pizza. The Japanese do have pizza, and this is not it, and we both knew it. I laughed with him and bought one.

Yakisoba and steak.

The latter needs no explanation, I trust. 

Yaki, again, means to cook or fry, and soba are noodles. Yakisoba noodles are a specific type that you can buy for 40 cents a pack here in Japan (...happiness...), but you can actually approximate them at home! Take spaghetti noodles and add a half-tablespoon-ish of baking soda to the water as you boil them (beware, this will create major over-bubbling, don't be caught off guard). Take these noodles and pan fry them with yakisoba sauce and other veggies such as cabbage, onion, and thin carrot slivers and you have, yet again, a tasty.

Chocolate covered bananas or waffles. With sprinkles. On sticks.

Does anything else need to be said?

Hiroshima omusoba, with the omu coming from "omelette". Take yakisoba (noodles, see above) and wrap in omu. Viola! A tasty!

Sweet potato fries, lightly sugared. Sweet potato is a go-to for Japanese sweets, and you can get them just about every way imaginable.

And that is a scant selection of Japanese street foods. There's still so much left to cover - yakitori, taiyaki, takoyaki, dorayaki, yakiudon, lots of yaki...the list goes on and on but the memory on my camera does not.

Summer is festival season, so stay tuned for more magical Japanese street foods! I will be covering as many as I can think of in the coming months!

Japanese 101 - The Non-Speaker's Speaking Guide

I decided that I'm going to teach you to read (romanized) Japanese today. And I'm going to do it in less than 20 minutes. I will present the Japanese script for those interested, but will write the post in such a way that you don't have to know any of it. Bonus points awarded to those who learn the two kana systems.

Ready? GO.

The Japanese language has three writing systems - two kana syllabaries ("alphabets" made of syllables instead of isolated sounds), and kanji, which are the Chinese characters. We won't worry about kanji today mostly because they are hard and pretty much straight-up memorization.

The two syllabaries are Hiragana and Katakana. Both alphabets represent the exact same sounds (for example, the hiragana あ and the katakana ア both make the exact same sound - "a"). Hiragana is more curvy and flowing, katakana is more angular. Why have two separate ones then? Well, in ancient days (fun fact) hiragana was used by women and katakana by men. Nowadays, hiragana is the basic staple of the Japanese language, with katakana used to denote foreign loan words. For instance, can you guess what the following Japanese words mean? (These are 100% legit.)

コンピューター (conpyuta-) Computer
アイスクリーム (aisu kuri-mu) Ice cream
パスタ　(pasuta) Pasta
カレーライス (kare- raisu) Curry rice
ビール (bi-ru) Beer
ピッザ　(pizza) Pizza. Duh.

When you learn how to convert English sounds to Japanese ones, you can say a LOT more than you would think using only accent-ed English words. But that's a lesson for another day.

Hiragana and katakana follow a pattern and are (good news for everybody) STRICTLY phonetic. There is only ONE of the kana ("letters") below that has more than one pronunciation, and it only has two (AND I won't go into it today). This means that reading Japanese is so, so SO EASY. Pronunciation wise, at the very least.

First, you need to know the pronunciation of the vowels. They only have exactly ONE pronunciation each, always and forever and on into eternity.

A - as in "Ah, this is a snap."

I - as in "Easy!"

U - as in "You can do this!"

E - as in "This is excellent."

O - as in "Oh, no sweat."

Now, behold, my hand-drawn hiragana and katakana chart (because I needed the practice and couldn't find a good one with roman script). You are welcome. Hiragana is in red, katakana in green, and the roman equivalent in blue. Exceptions to the patterns are filled in in orange. Probably should have switched the axis, but hey...

Don't make fun of my handwriting, it's better than yours (unless you are a native and then ok I admit it's not).

The pattern is pretty easy to see, right? Pick your vowel, add a consonant, and magic. The only exceptions are the vowels alone, and the lone "n", which is just tacked on to the end of other kana. Four combinations don't exist (yi, ye, wi, and we) and others are slightly different than you'd expect (si, ti, tu, and hu are actually shi, chi, fu, and tsu respectively).

This is the bulk of the sounds. You can make more by adding "ten-ten" (little hash marks) and "maru" (a small circle) to the upper corner of the character.

"Ten-ten" are also called "softening marks". They take the consonant and change it to its "softer" form. "Maru", or a little circle, changes H to P.

K to G

S to Z

T to D

H to B

Maru: H to P

Put them in a chart and they look like this (exceptions breaking from the general pattern are highlighted in orange):

Notes: if you want to use "Ji" and "Zu", use じ and ず. The alternatives, as marked, are almost never used. But if you're only here for the romanization, it makes no difference anyway.

One last set of sounds and you're a pro.

Ya, yu, and yo can not only be used on their own, but when made smaller, they can be used to blend sounds...and there's probably a more proper, fancier word for it somewhere. You can only do this to the letters that end in "i"  (ki, shi, ji, ni, etc. - row 2 on the main kana chart and their ten-ten and maru counterparts). Ki plus yu, for example, equals kyu. Two syllables becoming one. They're pretty intuitive. Here's the chart:

And that is ALL THE SOUNDS POSSIBLE IN THE ENTIRE LANGUAGE. It looks like a lot, but consider that you already know most, if not all, of these sounds. Also, they don't change. Like, ever. There are no alternative pronunciations (excepting one) and I LOVE IT.

If you want to hear a native pronounce these for you, I recommend this website: Most of the time, what you hear will not surprise you. This will be handy for tackling the /l/ and /r/ controversy though (see advanced points at the end of this article).

http://www.saiga-jp.com/pronunciation_voice.html

So what makes reading Japanese so hard? Why do people not even try to say my last name?

Because you string them together without spaces and they LOOK hard.

Seeyoucanreadthiswithoutanysweat.

Take the name of my district:

HIGASHISHINAGAWA

Stop crying and remember the charts. Japanese syllables are made up of small blocks. So all you have to do, literally, is break it up. Pretend you're back in first grade and take it one syllable at a time:

Hi ga shi shi na ga wa

Now, how hard was that?

Let's try some more:

かめはめは

KAMEHAMEHA

Ka me ha me ha

(If you're not screaming this one, then you don't know what it means. That's OK. Do a google image search on it.)

ふるかわ

FURUKAWA

Fu ru ka wa

(See? That wasn't so bad, was it? I won't believe you if you can say "anesthesiologist" but not my last name.)

ながいぶんをよむことはもんだいない。

NAGAIBUNWOYOMUKOTOWAMONDAINAI

Na ga i bun wo yo mu ko to wa mon dai nai.

You literally just said that long sentences are no problem. Also, congrats for saying you first sentence in Japanese! :D

(As in the case of "dai" and "nai", if there are two vowels in a row they usually belong in the same syllable.)

It takes practice to get it to flow - I get it. I was the same way. But if you learn nothing else from this post, it's DON'T let Japanese scare you. If you speak English, you CAN pronounce it properly (if a bit slowly at first, and that's ok!).

If I have blown your brain, feel free to stop here! You done been edumakated! But if you want more, here are a few more tips to make you a full-blown "pro-amateur" (don't feel bad, that's the level I'm at too).

1) DON'T cheat your vowels

A lot of Japanese words have multiple, repeated vowel sounds (or an o followed by a u). Like the following, for example:

しょうゆ　Shouyu (soy sauce)

おおき　Ooki (big)

おいしい Oishii (delicious)

らいしゅう　Raishuu (next week)

こうえん　Kouen (park)

ええ     Ee  ("yes" or "what?" depending on your inflection)

Each vowel gets its due time (I am told, at least). If you cheat one of them, it has the potential to change the meaning of the word (or, at best, you say something that has no meaning). For example, yuki is "snow", and yuuki is "courage".

You don't necessarily have to double the time you spend on it, but hold it a little longer than you otherwise would. Practice using good old "soy sauce". Say shoyu, then shouyu. You should be able to make a (barely) noticeable difference between the two.

Funny, true story. I tried to tell my husband I went to the biyouin, which is "hair salon". He responded back very worried because I shorted out the first i and said byouin, which is "hospital". Those weren't even doubled sounds and I failed... So yeah. Watch your vowels. They're important.

My favorite of all time is おおおかやま (Oookayama - and yes, that's three "o"s). It's a place. 

Foreigners (...I...) get this wrong ALL THE TIME. And honestly,  I can't notice the difference in natives' speaking 9 out of 10 times. Maybe my ear is still unrefined, but I swear even natives cheat those dang vowels...

But you should not cheat your vowels. You should be proper and better than me.

2) Repeated consonants means a pause

In Japanese kana, this is signaled by a small tsu (つ), but its romanized form looks something like this:

いっしょ　Issho (together)

がっこう　Gakkou (school)

ろっぽんぎ　Roppongi (place name)

にっぽん　　Nippon (Japan)

It's less of a holding out and more of a small pause. Wait just a second and hover over the consonant before you resume. Here's a video so you can hear the difference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVynW7frBig

3) /R/ or /L/? How about NEITHER!

The Japanese get a LOT of flack for mispronouncing, mixing up, and otherwise butchering R and L (think Christmas Story's "Fa Ra Ra" song. That's a Japanese thing, by the way. The Chinese can tell their l's from their r's). The reason why is that neither "r" nor "l" as we know them in English actually exist in Japanese. So really, you can only fault them so much for not being able to make sounds that aren't native to their language. Can you make clicks like in the Khoisan languages?

What the Japanese call "r" is somewhere along the spectrum between the two sounds. Think between /r/ and /l/, but, probably closer to /l/. The best way to mimic this is to listen to natives (use the link provided with the hiragana sounds). In speaking, don't make the /r/ so hard and you'll be fine. I've found that substituting /l/ for /r/ works too. Don't worry too much about it. If all else fails, what else can you do? Whatever comes out of your mouth will have to do. You'll probably sound like you have a terrible accent, but you will (usually) be understood. In my experience at least, the Japanese are fully aware that we crazy English-types keep insisting that "r" actually has two different, distinct sounds.

4) Don't stress anything. Seriously AND literally.

In English, the stress put on certain syllables make a difference. In Japanese, if you stress a syllable you just sound weird. Don't emphasize one syllable over another - keep it smooth and even. If you want to stress a syllable, then stress all of them to match. This is harder, but more amusing too. Let me know how it goes...

I know this one is a beast of a habit to break, and it takes constant, conscious effort. But keep at it!

5) "Tokyo" is TWO syllables. Not three.

"To kyo". Not "to ki yo".

So now you know the basics of Japanese. You can read romanized Japanese like a pro and hopefully have a few tips up your sleeve to speak like a pro too! And all this provided free of charge. You are welcome. :) Happy speaking! Or at the very least, you can now be posh enough to impress your friends by your proper pronunciation of the world's largest city.

English - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

In honor of me starting my English teaching job this week, I'm going to display some of the wrongs that I hope to right in the world.

Now first, let's give the Japanese some credit. Anyone you talk to in Japan has some level of English, because it's mandatory from middle school on. If they can't speak it, they can at least understand a lot more than you think. That alone is a real credit to the nation.

And well...English is cool here. On the streets, it is honestly used as sort of a pop-culture phenomena more than anything else. I like to think that, in the absence of rigid English training, the language has sort of evolved here to take on new characteristics, ones unique to Japan. Remember, it was never meant specifically for our Western eyes, it's another tool that they are using as a culture to communicate. And in that light, it makes it kind of fun instead of just... regrettable (which, yeah, sometimes it just is). Besides, we in America are allowing some pretty awful things to be done to our own language so yeah, we're not ones to talk.

That being said, it is very easy for our Western eyes to be offended. Because I want to run a family-friendly blog, I'll spare you the worst examples I've seen, but let's just say that if I didn't know better, I would think WAAAAYYYY less of some companies. Sometimes I have been stopped in my tracks by terrible, terrible travesties, not just to the English language, but to the human race at large. Just remember...chances are like 99.9999% that they had no idea what they were talking about. And most people in Japan would die before they offended a stranger. So really, they have no idea what they're saying. Give them the benefit of the doubt. It can be...difficult...at times.

So let's look at how pop-English has evolved over here. I have compiled, for your pleasure, a small sampling, and I anticipate that I will be able to put together another post of these soon.

Bring out the specimens.

VARIETY #1: The "Awwwwwwwwww" 

Like the cute mistakes a toddler makes, sometimes you just have to smile at these adorable mishaps.

 Yes, it's incorrect. But look me in the eye and tell me it's not ADORABLE. You can't do it, can you?

This just creates a wellspring of happiness in me. It doesn't make any sense, but...D'AAAWWW!!!!

VARIETY #2: The Drama Queen (also - they Hyper-hyperbole 6.5)

These are some of my favorites. Like, I don't know why your shampoo has to wish you and all your posterity a thousand years of happiness, but it does anyway. Even when the English on these is all or mostly grammatically correct, it's just WAY over the top type English. These products read like Hallmark specials, which are all very well and good, but maybe just a tad bit misplaced.

Also, you can totally sometimes tell that they're using words just for the sake of using words. The more flowery, the better. With sparkles. And hearts. So. Many. Hearts.

A.K.A. My wishes are never coming true. Thanks for reminding me, purerose satchet.

Notebooks at a stationary store.

Text reads: "SECTION to your heart's content", "COMFORT to your heart's content", and "PLAIN to your heart's content".

Ok, I'll let the "comfort" one slide because it kind of makes sense, but the other two...no. Sorry. You know, it's not Kingdom Hearts, not everything HAS to have a heart on it.

Text reads: "Charming black cat with golden eyes dressed in heart, coming across gracefully like stepping a minuet. Good luck!"

Ok...pick either the "good luck" or the "black cat" theme. You can't have both. Sorry. Also, you can't step a minuet. Also sorry. Also also, more hearts.

...Look, I have the utmost faith that these wipes are really nice, really, but...really?

Oh wow! Much better than the plain 'ol ones.

This was written by a middle-aged father trying to impress his teenage kids, I just know it. It's a universal problem, and I feel for him.

*sigh* (This is an air-freshener.)

This pencil case spurs me on in my darkest moments. But why "lovely boy" across the top? The world may never know...

VARIETY #3 - The "There IS a better way to say that, I promise"

These gems leave you thinking: "There were so many other ways you could have said that. Better ways. Good ways. But you had to go get creative instead." Nothing wrong with the classics, buddy. Sometimes, you can tell the poor soul hired to write them just had a bad day and wanted to go home early. Most times, they are only barely even amusing - more grunt-worthy than anything. Go home and sleep, translator guy, and try again tomorrow.

OOOHHHH! So the house didn't burn down, it was just modified.

So...are there "many kinds to fit uses" or should I "not use for any other purposes"? I'm confused as to whether I have creative license here or not.

Also, I like that they pointed out that "It is a card ring." Needed that one.

VARIETY #4: The "Ok...but WHY??"

Not much else to say. These are the epitome of functional-deadness.

...Was there some confusion?

Ok look, it's cute, maybe even philosophical, but this is a laundry bag. 

VARIETY #5: The "Oh my, that's unfortunate"

These could have been avoided with just a SMIDGEN more English research. Like...THAT much more research. From somewhere that isn't Google Translate.

If you don't already get it, this is a can of propane. And whether you're referring to an explosive or the french, bowl-shaped dessert, it's just morbid.

You usually don't want to outright admit that you have no soul.

VARIETY #6: The "...............WHAT??"

These just...I don't even know. You just kind of have to accept that they exist and move on with life.

Words truly fall short.

Text reads: "Studio clip has always thought: happy your mind, you always (can't tell if it's "snuggle" or "smuggle")." But either way, it makes no sense.

Sounds...great?

This organ doesn't just want to kill you, it's out for the whole human race. Also, I would like to place a bet that it's a liver. (SCARY UPDATE: Turns out that this is a correct translation. The question of "....WHAT?!?!" still does not go away so it's staying on this list.)

.......

(It's ok, Mom, I don't need a cookie anymore.)

So there you have it! Hope that made your day a little brighter. I'm gathering more of these all the time, so stay tuned until next time.