DJ "pro-Japanese offended" Hadoken has this to say:
So I’ve been trying to see what valuable lessons Japan has taught me.
Other than the fact that I am going insane.. to put it lightly: CALL ME DJ “HANNIBAL” HADOKEN FROM NOW ON.. I have started to like that-engrish-site a lot less.
I never expected it to happen. It makes me laugh, but after being around engrish 24/7 literally, I’ve come to respect it a little more. Whenever I have occasionally pointed out how funny something is to a Japanese person, they don’t laugh, they just say “that’s Japanese-english, we understand it.”
Engrish is a great site. Though I think they are overdoing their original function. Too much engrish. And they sell shirts which I guess are cool to an extent, but they are not the “real thing”, so it’s more like purposely making grammatical errors which first, aren’t as impacting as the real thing and second, disrespectful towards countries that don’t use English as a primary language.
Though the shirts are funny and most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, just like most die-hard anime fans can’t stand “mainstream” people, I must take the view of a die-hard engrish fan who only respects the “real thing”. It’s odd, I have changed my point of view from laughing uncontrollably at that-engrish-site to slightly being offended when I reach the website.
English is our present-day Latin. Japanese people who are able to speak even a little English are very well-respected. A store boosts it’s reputation if it has a detailed explanation of their products in English. Japanese people are trying to grasp the language, and for that they deserve respect. They cannot be expected to speak perfect English. Just as I don’t speak perfect Japanese, they don’t laugh at me for trying and surely do not point out all of my mistakes.
I was first offended by that-engrish-site when I saw their post of Odaiba Cheese Story. I saw it around the time I first started getting a good grasp of kanji. The name of the product is in fact “odaiba cheese story”, odd as it may be. It’s funny, though it is not engrish. It’s an action that’s hard to describe; I guess it’s like “overkill”- instead of intelligently seeking out engrish, anything that sounds remotely amusing is submitted. In that matter, it is being very disrespectful.
That-engrish-site has fallen into the hands of commercialism. Instead of being presented once a week or month with a quality engrish slogan, they take any remotely erroneous English word and post it every day. Trying to gain popularity, gain hits on their website, get people to buy their imitation products.
How about taking any random American high school student’s homework and posting the stupid spelling errors they make? That’s at about the same level. And it would be more funny, since the student is expected to know English, right? So a mistake should be less forgivable.
The students in the Japanese high school I am attending now write essays in English, and I’ve read them and have come across many errors that would be amusing to the “engrish crowd”. However, the students are trying very hard to learn English, and it is not an easy language. Japanese is a lot easier to learn than English, in my opinion.
It may not be much longer before more people start crying inappropriate associationism. I checked that-engrish-site’s message board once, and I read one post regarding inappropriate associationism. At that time, though, I did not agree, but now I’m starting to change my views.
There will be others.
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