Japanese Slang (39 page)

Tsukiji has been the driving force behind Tokyo's slang scene since the disastrous 1923 earthquake, when the wholesale fish market fled from Nihonbashi to Shiba, and then in 1932 settled in its present location on the banks of the Sumida river by the port. The nearby freight depot in Shiodome (Japan's first train station, built in 1872), the closeness of the port, and the arrival of the Hibiya subway line in 1964, all gave
Tsukiji its unshakable position as Tokyo's most important linguistic crossroads.

Tsukiji had become even more important when Tokyo's wholesale vegetable market set up nearby, in the area that the old guard still calls
j
gai
(the place outside). A heated linguistic rivalry began between the two sister markets as the fish crowd, their turf invaded, jealously stepped up their slangy
besshari,
while the willful grocers energetically cultivated what they called their
fuch
(the inversion of
ch
fu,
“code language”). lf the fish crowd could give their sardines magnetic names such as
aoko, nagashi, komamono, hirago, tare, koshinaga, gomoku, donpo, karagaki, kigama, shikoro, yasura,
or the Korean
chongori,
then the farm crowd was not about to lag behind. Along with their fruit and vegetables, farmers imported captivating words from faraway provinces. A commonplace squash, for instance
(kabocha
in standard Japanese) could be glamorized with a host of cryptic market words like
aburashime
(oil press),
kinka
(golden melon),
kint
ka
(golden winter melon),
nanka
(southern melon),
y
gao
(gourd), and
satsuma y
gao
(gourd from Satsuma),
satsuma uri
(melon from Satsuma), or just
satsuma
and
osatsu
for short. Squash words from the south became especially popular.
Bonka
came up from the Mie region,
b
bura
from Osaka,
b
ta
from Shimane,
t
gan
from Hiroshima, and
obora
and
onzo
from the province of Kagawa on Shikoku island. The most intriguing batch of squash words, however, are older terms that were the rage in market stalls in the fifties and sixties. They establish a Korean squash connection with jargonistic names like
karauri
(Korean melon),
karay
gao
(Korean gourd),
ch
sen
(the politically' incorrect name for Korea popular during the Japanese occupation), and its
more elegant version
och
sen
(the honorific
“o”
and
Ch
sen,