Japanese Slang (26 page)

•   
Om
no hode shabutchatta?
She sucked your cock?

•   
Atashi kare no fukubeb
ni wa sore hodo ky
mi nain da yo ne.
I'm not really that interested in his dong.

•   
Onegai dakara! Motto zundoko aratte hoshii n
.
You know, I wish you'd wash your dick more often.

•   
Atashi sh
ni ikkai wa dekademo yan'nai to, ki ga sumanai.
If I don't get dick at least once a week I go nuts.

•   
Kanojo ore no b
d
massaji suru no ga umain da yo. Ore nifun de itchimau yo.
She's real good at massaging my stick. Two minutes and I shoot my wad.

As the linguists listen, they are convinced that some of the heavy slang words must have ancient roots. After all, they muse, in English we've been using “cock” since the fifteenth century, “staff” since the sixteenth, “sausage” and “stick” since the seventeeth, “dick,” “gherkin,” “banana,” and “shlong” since the nineteeth, and the American favorites “dork” and “dong” since the 1920s.

Obashira
(male pole),
odogu
(male tool),
ohashi
(male edge) and its derivative
ohasse,
definitely smack of the Middle Ages, as do the bellicose
yari
(spear),
suyari
(naked spear),
tsuchi
(sledgehammer),
sakasaboko
(up-side-down sword), and
tsuka
(“handle,” as in knife handle, or “hilt,” as in hilt of a sword).
Nukimi
(drawn sword) and
danbira
(broad sword) must also have been handed down from medieval times, as no one in the bar would have had much occasion to see a sword of any kind.

An even older group of tough words center around the Buddhist expression
mara,
a word of Sanskrit pedigree which is reputed to have arrived in Japan with the first Buddhist doctrines in the mid-sixth
century A.D. In its original guise,
mara
referred to the dangerous demon of worldly cravings that disrupted the priests' serene meditations, thus spoiling their chance of attaining the enlightenment of nirvana and Buddhahood. Most ecclesiastics managed to steer clear of forbidden delicacies, such as the occasional drink or the occasional mouthful of meat, but when it came to the hardest temptation, the stirring of the flesh, many tottered. A single lewd thought, however fleeting, was enough to push the cleric off the narrow path to illumination. As ever-longer lines of priests tried to secure Buddhahood by enrolling for
rasetsu
(cutting off the demon),
mara
entered into monastic slang as one of the many priestly words for penis.

Throughout the nineteenth century
mara
was snatched up nationwide by the bar-and-tavern crowd as modern priests, eager to socialize, spilled out of their monasteries and into the streets.
Konseimara
(golden life penis) became the word for a perfectly proportioned organ, and
dekamara
(hulking penis) was used to describe penises that are particularly large. An excited organ that is neither too hard nor too soft was classed as
fumara,
and a large but flabby organ,
funyamara
(floppy penis).
Furimara
(dangling penis), is a penis that unintentionally plops out of its shorts in public. Bentenmaru Takashi, in his 1932 book
Ishinomakiben,
maintained that in some regions of Miyagi
furimara
(dangling penis) had, surprisingly enough, acquired gender equality. Depending on the context,
Arya furimara dambe
can mean both he or she “is not wearing anything under there.” In modern brothel slang,
sumara
(naked penis) refers to an uncondomed penis, while
sakamara
(alcohol penis),
happamara
(marijuana penis), and
yakumara
(drug penis) are used for organs that are too crapulous to be of use.

Mara
has even been absorbed into the slang speech of the most distant mountain dialects. In the north-eastern Tohoku region, for instance, a rough village word for penis is
marafuguri
(penis testicle), while
marafuri
(penile wag) is used for naked men.

On the other side of Japan, on some of the islands of Okinawa,
marafuri
means “penis dangle,” i.e. “penis and testicles.”
Marafuri
is used when the speaker is discussing the whole sexual organ, as opposed to just the shaft and the glans.

As tourists from the Japanese mainland often realize too late,
mara
on many of the outlying islands exclusively refers to testicles.

When
mara
is scrawled onto bathroom walls today, it is brushed on with the labyrinthine twenty-one-stroke character
ma
(demon) followed by the nine-teen-stroke
ra
(contain). But some graffiti artists pronounce this choice of characters bogus, and compose
mara
with the fifteen-stroke
ma
(rub) and the nineteen-stroke
ra
(contain). A penis, they protest, needs to be rubbed to be contained. Others who cannot manage the complex brush patterns go for the simplest solution of all: five strokes for
ma
(tip) and thirteen strokes for
ra
(naked).

The madam sidles over once more to the group of linguists and confides that even hoarier words will pop up at the bar.

“Take ‘dozen' for example,” she says. “Today a garbage collector will use it as a smutty allusion to a penis. Back in the glamorous days of the samurai,
however, it was a perfectly legitimate word for a man's head.”

“Then there is
mameyakamono,”
she continues. “Today it's a crass organ that bounces up at the slightest provocation, while medieval novelists used it to mean ‘robust chap'.”

She offers some examples:

•   
Atashi kare no dozen ga haitte kuru mae ni, r
shon nuranai to dame na no!
Before he puts his man's head in I always rub some lotion on it.

•   
Kare no dozen no katachi kir
ai! Kimochi warui!
I hate the shape of his man's head! It's gross!