Japanese Slang. Peter Constantine

razorfine argot. Secrecy is of paramount importance: delicate heists need to be mapped out, strategies analyzed, financial matters discussed, illegitimate meetings set up, and bands of looters returning from a successful stint might want to recap their triumph over a few loud and festive drinks. What, however, if the person who is quietly nursing a drink at the end of the bar is aori–an undercover cop?

      One wrong word can unleash a shower of handcuffs.

      It has been this professional need for utter discretion that has played the most important role in the fast-paced development of Japan's “hidden” languages. A careful criminal will linguistically only trust his or her closest peers, which is why bagsnatcherese is so different from pickpocketese, and why brothel, sex-bathhouse, and massage-parlor talk, although closely related, will veer off and become unintelligible when hot technicalities are broached.

      Another important reason for the heated development of underworld slang has been the day-to-day need for special criminal trade expressions. Japanese looter slang, for instance, stocks its lexicon with long lists of labyrinthine terms, ranging from hundreds of nouns for house doors and alarm systems to verbs covering every conceivable method of breaking and entering. The lock specialists, on the other hand, have a name for every segment of a lock or a bolt, and strings of exotic words for lock-picking needles, master keys, and the top, bottom, or side sections of tumbler pins. Pickpocketing verbs can name every larcenous flick of the wrist, and special nouns specify wallets by their position in a pocket, their size, the visibility of their outline through the trouser material, the degree of their emptiness or fullness, and whether they are brimming over with bills, or merely heavy with small change.

      The other important initiative behind the growth of Japan's secret slang has been the herd instinct, defined in trendy Japanese as uii-izumu (we-ism). Japanese criminals prefer to operate out of an association or gang, in which private language or jargon becomes the invisible club badge. To be one of the boys you first of all have to speak like one of the boys. When teenage roughnecks are initiated into the bottom ranks of a gang they frantically imitate the dashing language of their power-wielding elders, who themselves had imitated the locution of their elders. When youngsters join a criminal association they immediately cleanse their vocabulary of all trendy English words and jingly adolescent expressions, and adopt the gang's tough and mature vernacular. It is this orthodox traditionalism in the Japanese under-world that has led it to conserve long-forgotten medieval and even pre-medieval expressions. A shintabukuro (money sack) is still a wallet on Tokyo's streets, just as it used to be in the good old samurai days, and a shintagamari (from shinta kamari, “the money lunges in”) is still a wallet that is brimming over with cash. Some groups call a snooping policeman Sakubei, the name of some medieval lawman, while a long-forgotten idiot, Kinj

r

, is still invoked in criminal circles as an unpleasant insult.

      When gangs bring up sexual organs, elegant and elaborate ancient words abound. Kintare (golden dangle) and suzuko (bell child) are general synonyms for testicles, while katakin (side gold) is the one testicle that dangles visibly lower than the other. Kenke (pickles) refers to scrota that pull themselves up into stiff small balls during arousal.

      In the West, we expect slang to change with every high school graduation class. What is new is decided in teenage circles, and we turn to the MTV channel to keep up with the seasonal changes. We find out that “Whoops, there it is!” was the summer-of-1993 term for “Nice ass!” or “Gosh, her shorts are short!” For an introduction to American street speech, we tune our sets to the post-L.A.-riot tirades of youthful West Coast gang members. As round after round of unintelligible phrases pour out, we are increasingly convinced that slang is an impenetrable, if transient, mechanism of the young.

      On Japan's streets, however, it is the older criminal generation, the men in power, who decide what words are in and what words are out. New slang must be constantly conjured up, as the streetwise Japanese police eagerly snatch up all the clandestine expressions they can find. The captured words then make their way into the police's own private jargon, with the result that what is fashionable in the under-world one season is bandied about in police boxes the next.

      But where do illegal brothel associations, pickpocketing leagues, bands of looters, drug pushers, and pink-salon masseuses turn to for new words?

      One favorite method is to take existing slang words and revamp them with new associations. Teka (bright), for instance, has been used for generations on Tokyo's streets to mean “fire,” and soon arson came to be known as teka o tsukeru (adding the bright), which then changed into a dialectized deka o tsukeru. The next playful step was tekkari (twinkle): robbing and then torching the building to cover one's tracks. Then tekkari took on the meaning “summer,” then “unseasonably hot,” then just plain “it's hot today, isn't it?” The most irreverent use of tekkari has been for matches:

      • Oi, tekkari motteru ka? Yo, you got matches?

      An even quicker method of creating a neologism is to invert existing words, rendering them incomprehensible in quick speech. This characteristic is also prevalent in French, Argentinian Spanish, Korean, Hindi, Indonesian, and Javanese street slangs. Khii (coffee), and baibai (bye bye), are playfully flipped over into hikk and ibaiba. On a grittier level, chinpo (penis) becomes pochin, shiroi (“white,” i.e. cocaine) becomes roishi, hero (heroin) becomes roha, and keibu (police) becomes bukei. This trend, known as gyakugo (topsy-turvy words) is often taken further than just simple syllabic reversal. Yato, for instance, a malignant street word for razor, sprung from yatoko, which is the inversion of tokoya (barber shop). The case of how the southern Japanese town of Shimonoseki became a popular train station-thief word for luggage involves an even knottier web of word changes. The standard kaban (bag) was first reversed into banka, which then developed into bakan. The station crowd looked at the new word and realized that it could be written with the characters ba (horse) and kan (barrier), the same character used for the noseki portion of the town of Shimonoseki.

      This art of capsizing words, however, had been quickly mastered by the police, and the street crowd set out to marshal new expressions of a more covert nature. The handiest source of impenetrable words turned out to be the ethnic Korean and Chinese gangsters who had poured into the Japanese under-world in the post-World War II years. The abrupt Korean word for dog (k) came to mean “police,” while kujuri was used as a secret Korean word for “money,” hza for “wallet,” and higehachiya for “murder.” No Japanese policeman, the gangsters argued, could possibly guess that tjitari, Korean for “pig's leg,” means gun. The Chinese words, the Japanese gangsters felt, were even more exotic: tsu maimai, Chinese for “going into business,” came to mean “looting,” and ryahiyatan, Chinese for “swatting insects,” was redirected to mean “blasting down walls.”

      Another swift way of replenishing a criminal lingo's lexicon was to bring in provincial dialect words. In Japan, vocabulary, speech patterns, and accents are liable to change from one village to the next, which guarantees that any novel words brought in from distant provinces will nonplus even the most cunning eavesdropper. Eri o tsukeru, for instance, to the untrained Japanese ear means “to wear a collar.” But in Tokyo's breaking-and-entering circles, it came to mean “picking locks,” an expression that trickled down to the big city from northeastern Japan. Sanpira (lock) and geri (widget) are reputed to have been borrowed from Wakayama dialects, while pika (to flick open a switchblade) came from the Yamaguchi dialect.

      The dialect words have made their strongest impact on red-light speech. Sexual organs from every corner of Japan have managed to make their way down into metropolitan sex bars, brothels, bathhouses, and massage parlors. An interesting twist ofJapanese semantics which has brought many a brothel conversation to a screeching halt, is that what is the word for a female organ in one part of a province might turn into a testicle a few miles down the road, and then a few miles further down become a penis.